Swedish regulators want Europe to Ban "Energy Intensive" Cryptocurrency Mining

I'm sure GPU manufacturers wouldn't like this, but gamers would.


But that waste. Wow. I thought mining bitcoin was a complete waste anyway, given how much energy is consumed to mine one coin.


Or does it sound like central banks being scared of currencies they have zero control over?
 
I'm sure GPU manufacturers wouldn't like this, but gamers would.


But that waste. Wow. I thought mining bitcoin was a complete waste anyway, given how much energy is consumed to mine one coin.


Or does it sound like central banks being scared of currencies they have zero control over?


No it isnt just banks having a panic, the energy consumption is just to high, and in the end we as consumers pay more for our bills just so people can get "rich" with a very highly unstable currency.
 
Bitcoin uses less than half the energy usage banks consume around the world all while being more secure and decentralized. Bitcoin is already adopting tech to reduce consumption significantly without going to a proof of stake model(not that it would be possible to change to mid chain) and while it will consume more than Etherum still, will dramatically be less than now while still maintaining its security and resilience to chain modification.

Its more of banks being scared than anything. Most of the mining is taking place in select regions of the world. That's the only reason it is an issue. Scare people into what it does to the earth, try to regulate it to appear as the good guys, world governments have another source of income. Seems about right. Its just being used as a gateway for all crypto is bad lets govern it when in reality if we all adopted Etherum in that case they no longer have any valid arguments against crypto.
 
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looking at the math

Swedish regulators have claimed that an electric car can travel 1.8 million miles, or 44 laps around the world, using the same energy that is consumed to create a single Bitcoin.
I had a Nissan Leaf, and I could manage 5 miles per KW hour.
How many KWh per bitcoin?


As of mid-July, a single bitcoin transaction required 1719.51 kilowatt hours (kWh)
Source: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/08/18/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-use/


so that's a simple 1719, let's call is 1720KWh multiplied by 5 miles
1270 * 5 = 8,600 miles


Even if you assume a kilohash rate from CPU mining, it's closer to the 1.8 million miles, but still a LONG way off. The power consumption is halved (at least for GPU mining vs CPU mining). Plus who the hell would mine on a CPU? 150w for 2,000+ hashes, vs GPU 350W and you get millions of hashes.


So yes it seems to me to be either utter tosh or scaremongering.
 
Swedish regulators have claimed that an electric car can travel 1.8 million miles, or 44 laps around the world, using the same energy that is consumed to create a single Bitcoin. Every day, around 900 bitcoins are mined/created.

Damn!
 
I had a Nissan Leaf, and I could manage 5 miles per KW hour.
How many KWh per bitcoin?


As of mid-July, a single bitcoin transaction required 1719.51 kilowatt hours (kWh)
Source: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/08/18/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-use/


so that's a simple 1719, let's call is 1720KWh multiplied by 5 miles
1270 * 5 = 8,600 miles


Even if you assume a kilohash rate from CPU mining, it's closer to the 1.8 million miles, but still a LONG way off. The power consumption is halved (at least for GPU mining vs CPU mining). Plus who the hell would mine on a CPU? 150w for 2,000+ hashes, vs GPU 350W and you get millions of hashes.


So yes it seems to me to be either utter tosh or scaremongering.

Not to mention refrigerators take up A LOT of power. Ever try to run a house off a generator? You need at least 2000 watts per fridge. Not counting anything else. So to say Bitcoin mining is the sole problem is a joke. We have many appliances and household items that use a ton of power every day. Nobody complains about that...
 
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Almost all big farms in the World work with renewables or are thinking of installing them to be self suficient.

This move is not related to energy, you have to be like really dumb to not see it. It's related TO THE FINANCE AND THE WAY BTC and other coins are changing the world. You may think: well they are only refering to MINEABLE coins.
Well guess what? If you destroy BTC , you destroy the rest, because noone would trust anything that can get destroyed by politicians.

You think you are doing the right thing critizising miners. You are actually watching a new way of handling money without central banks destroying you printing money.
 
Thank god about bloody time, if we can get all of the G20 economies to ban crypto it will be the best thing since slice bread. Waste of resources, a threat to economies and their governance as well as a danger to the environment.
 
Agree about banning PoW cryptocurrency mining in nations with constrained supplies, it's a major energy sink and if it is to continue should be done in places like Iceland that have a large over abundance of renewable energy (Thanks to geothermal). But on the whole should be deprecated for alternative consensus mechanisms, of which many green alternatives have since appeared.

Ultimately this issue speaks to the problems caused by governments refusing to properly adopt and regulate cryptocurrency technology. Cryptocurrencies do not have to be deregulated, decentralised, or "free market", it's perfectly possible for nation states to create responsible cryptocurrencies that are centrally regulated, giving a sovereign nation with their own central bank (Eg UK, US) all the power they would previously have over their ability to create new supply, control interest rates, ect. Combined with the transparency of a blockchain, this could be used to completely wipe out the possibility of the money laundering and financial corruption that can currently occur through cash, banks, and unregulated crypto.

Crypto's evolution into the monster it is today is one born out of neglect for the technology by those with good intentions. This powerful potential anti-corruption technology has been left in the hands of people just wanting to make quick profit, attempting to ban it rather than use it properly will temporarily solve problems for individual nations, but won't tackle the root issues.
 
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Almost all big farms in the World work with renewables or are thinking of installing them to be self suficient.

This move is not related to energy, you have to be like really dumb to not see it. It's related TO THE FINANCE AND THE WAY BTC and other coins are changing the world. You may think: well they are only refering to MINEABLE coins.
Well guess what? If you destroy BTC , you destroy the rest, because noone would trust anything that can get destroyed by politicians.

You think you are doing the right thing critizising miners. You are actually watching a new way of handling money without central banks destroying you printing money.

Then I guess I am really dumb...

I couldn't give a damn about the financial side of it. I care about product availability, and exponentially rising costs of power as well as the fact many countries are in crisis. Shortages were far less of a problem pre crypto boom. I would gladly see it disappear. China did great to ban it, and for all those crypto loving sensitive people taking offense to the world wanting to act on it... suck it up buttercup.

And if you look at other reports. Sweden want to impact all crypto not just BTC. So they probably know that taking out one will hopefully take them all out. Fingers crossed!
 
Then I guess I am really dumb...

I couldn't give a damn about the financial side of it. I care about product availability, and exponentially rising costs of power as well as the fact many countries are in crisis. Shortages were far less of a problem pre crypto boom. I would gladly see it disappear. China did great to ban it, and for all those crypto loving sensitive people taking offense to the world wanting to act on it... suck it up buttercup.

And if you look at other reports. Sweden want to impact all crypto not just BTC. So they probably know that taking out one will hopefully take them all out. Fingers crossed!

I thought technically Sweden only want to ban all cryptocurrency mining, this effectively means they want to ban only Proof of Work cryptocurrencies, as mining only occurs on those.

Energy shortages so far however have been predominantly caused by the rise in wholesale gas prices. This is mainly due to the increase in energy consumption caused by climate change, the heating needs in Europe last winter are considered one of the two key factors for natural gasses current shortage/high price, along with Chinese demand for liquified gas as a cleaner alternative to coal power, as well as the need for AC rising in many southern European nations summers.

In the UK, we have a unique factor for our more severe shortages, a good portion of our undersea cable link with France set on fire last September, and so our ability to balance and regulate and national grid has been severely hampered, as has our ability to rely on France's excess of nuclear power.
 
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On the face of it, the question about energy use is a fair one. According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year — 0.55% of global electricity production, or roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden......
In December 2019, one report suggested that 73% of Bitcoin’s energy consumption was carbon neutral, largely due to the abundance of hydro power in major mining hubs such as Southwest China and Scandinavia. On the other hand, the CCAF estimated in September 2020 that the figure is closer to 39%


Iran is not known for it´s renewable energy.


Nearly 5% of all newly mined Bitcoins originate from Iran

According to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, about 4.5% of all Bitcoin mined globally was created in Iran between January and April this year. This puts the country in the top 10 in the world, while China ranked first with nearly 70% before the government crackdown.
 
Iran is not known for it´s renewable energy.
To be fair, since Western nations removed Iran's ability to make use of clean Nuclear power (for better or worse), they have actually heavily invested in hydropower, with a significant portion of their energy coming from hydro in some recent years, however recent droughts caused by climate change stifled them somewhat in 2018 and 2020 of other recent years, which is why the Iranian government are now heavily investing in solar power, still a few years away from full deployment though.
 
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To be fair, since Western nations destroyed Iran's ability to make use of clean Nuclear power, they have actually heavily invested in hydropower, with a significant portion of their energy coming from hydro in some recent years, however recent droughts caused by climate change stifled them somewhat in 2018 and 2020 of recent years, which is why the Iranian government are now heavily investing in solar power, still a few years away from full deployment though.



A Review on Energy and Renewable Energy Policies in Iran:


The current Iran development plan (Sixth Economic, Social and Cultural Development Plan, 2017–2021) aims to increase the share of renewable energy sources in the electricity generation mix to 5%. However, the evidence and data from the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Organization indicate a severe lag in the goal of this program.

...
Department of Economics, Faculty of Administration and Economics, Arak University, Arak 38156879, Iran;


don´t kid yourself.
it´s natural gas and oil that produces the vast majority of energy in iran.

solar energy production is a joke compared to european nations.
0.4% (2019) of total consumption.

compare that to 9.7% in germany or 8.9% in netherlands.
 
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I thought technically Sweden only want to ban all cryptocurrency mining, this effectively means they want to ban only Proof of Work cryptocurrencies, as mining only occurs on those.

Energy shortages so far however have been predominantly caused by the rise in wholesale gas prices. This is mainly due to the increase in energy consumption caused by climate change, the heating needs in Europe last winter are considered one of the two key factors for natural gasses current shortage/high price, along with Chinese demand for liquified gas as a cleaner alternative to coal power, as well as the need for AC rising in many southern European nations summers.

In the UK, we have a unique factor for our more severe shortages, a good portion of our undersea cable link with France set on fire last September, and so our ability to balance and regulate and national grid has been severely hampered, as has our ability to rely on France's excess of nuclear power.

Not forgetting to mention our current governments incredibly idiotic handling of quite literally everything over the last 10 years, Every year it gets worse and worse.

Pre-pandemic I was working in mainland Europe and upon my return to the UK it was genuinely like going backwards 50 years, The UK keeps going from bad to worse every year because our politicians are Eton morons, Quite annoys me as there are a lot of good people in the UK but the government is utterly inept.
 
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