Humanity will continue to require energy as it advances and banning anything "because it uses too much energy" is a ridiculous advice. How about we ban gold mining, or set quotas on the number of children people may have, that will surely contribute to our CO2 reduction goals. It's also Orwellian and reminiscent of how the world looked like for citizens of the USSR back in 1960-1990

i find views that want to ban anything for energy consumption ridiculous. also what the people advocating for this kind of thing are missing is that it’s all fun and games until something you rely gets banned because of reasons.

here are my proposals:

the entire banking system is obviously using a lot of power. how about we ban banks and go back to using paper money. that’s def more environmental friendly. /s

electric cars run on energy that’s generated with coal. that’s not cool. let’s ban electric cars and keep driving gas cars. they have been around for a long time and the technology is so good that we actually pollute less with a gas car /s

the internet in general and datacenters in particular are using a lot of power. let’s ban datacenters. guaranteed between environment afterwards /s

Also "until something you rely gets banned", what do you rely on bitcoin for besides being a store of value?

my point is that you don’t get to decide what i consume. and banning bitcoin == banning any type of computing that you don’t like. do you understand how much power a modern datacenter sucks? do you also understand that some things that run in a datacenter are straight up dangerous to the fabric of our society?

I am not making any decisions about your consumption. Our democratically elected government is responsible for making the best choices that balance our societal needs. Our government already regulates a lot of things around computing: Child porn/CSAM, export controls around cryptography, data privacy, the computer fraud and abuse act. This isn't novel stuff, having a computer doesn't mean you can do literally anything on it with zero consequences.

democracy? data privacy? thanks for the good laugh

By optimizing around energy conservation at all costs, we have homes that cost 3x, held together with glue, susceptible to mold, and filled with toxic crap like vinyl.

VS

An estimate of Bitcoin power consumption by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

I know which one I’m more prepared to believe.

Even if this were true. I go on YouTube and can learn things: recipes, FreeCad tutorials, coffee nerdery, harmonica lessons.

Bitcoin literally does nothing.

Except make those little pieces of green paper in your wallet look foolish.

Electricity is a commodity and a utility. Who are you or I to subjectively decide that a use is valuable or virtuous?

Is YouPorn worthy? Is MLB.tv valuable? What are the criteria that you use to determine worth?

Yes because people like porn and baseball.

Bitcoin is like gold. It’s valuable because other people say it’s valuable. But nothing useful happens when you mine crypto. Was I entertained? Did I learn something? Are they producing a widget? Even gold can be made into jewellery or used in electronics. Crypto literally just uses power.

As far as I can tell PoW is the most proven consensus mechanism so far. PoS may be promising though. ETH2 successfully switching will be telling.

By enabling ransom ware attacks? Creating GPU shortages?

https://sustainability.google/commitments/

"the internet uses 10% of the total electricity consumption worldwide. How much of that is consumed by Youtube? After Netflix and embedded videos, Youtube is the third biggest global internet bandwidth eater. About 11.4% of global internet traffic is consumed by Youtube"

That figure assumes that the electricity usage of the internet is exactly related to the amount of bandwidth - so if YouTube uses 11.4% of the internet's total bandwidth, that means that YouTube uses 11.4% of the internet's total electricity consumption.

That is a highly dubious assumption.

That you only use it to watch videos that bring zero gain to your life is a You problem.

Oh give over, this is ridiculous too.

When other people are causing harm that affects everyone it's perfectly reasonable to look at legislation to kerb the behaviours.

And no, that's not violence. No.

Not right now it's not. Not when we have constraints on how much CO2 we can pump into our atmosphere.

Right now, and I mean right now, when we're having huge problems de-carbonising the planet's energy supplies and are risking making life very uncomfortable for ourselves for decades or centuries to come, limiting energy use is actually one of the few levers we have to try to make a difference.

In this current situation, bringing online a whole new mid-sized country's worth of energy consumption for a financial instrument is ridiculous, and a huge own-goal for humanity.

Where do you see the problem in using less energy for a crypto currency? Why not make a cryptocurrency that uses even more energy?

Why not?

>or set quotas on the number of children people may have

Some people consume 10x less energy than others, so blindly capping the number of children does not seem a good idea. What about capping the carbon footprint per person instead?

We track and tax revenues (not perfectly but as well as we can). We could definitely track and cap carbon emissions. Sounds good to me!

it’s all fun and games until I ban something you rely on for your livelihood

And to do so for speculative fun is ridiculous.

Also, how do you decide which computing is good and which computing is bad?

Kill the value of POW as a store of money and see how much of that computing still happens. Then you’ll know how useful it is.

now, the question is: who decides what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable for energy use?

I mean, the whole transacting without borders, and providing a transaction medium that is somewhat immune to geopolitical power projection by any one nation state looks great on paper; but it's also the type of idealistic tool frequuently used to get someone to part with their money.

As much of a raging contrarian as I am when it comes to Federal regulation a d interference in markets; the type of market activity surrounding crypto is a spot on copy paste of the types of scammy behavior the SEC was meant to rein in, even if the rulemaking (whether I like how it's done or not) hasn't caught up. It's also market activity that's producing no net positive societal value as far as I've heard of measuring being done to account for it. Businesses popped up to facilitate movement of coins, and conversion to fiat; but the externalities (regulatory escape, lost funds by people when scam exchanges walk off with everyone's assets, greased anti-money laundering mechanisms, environmental costs, brain drain)...

I know my viewpoint on it probably means about as much in the long run as a gnat fart, but it's just one of those things that seems like a solution looking for a problem, picking whatever problem looks most likely to gain momentum this week, and to hell with the problems caused as a result.

Heh I'll probably get downvoted for saying this, but that's not brave, that's just plain irresponsible and stupid, she's literally trading more risk(and that risk concerns her family too) for no gain whatsoever (it costs nothing to delete a tweet, but the loss of her job could potentially cost her everything).

Be smarter and pick your battles wisely.

I have to disagree with both of these points, but am not downvoting you.

Even if you lose your job, you are still eligible for COBRA. She, and her family, would not immediately lose their health insurance. It might cost them a bit out of pocket, but they're not going to die. Further, I doubt someone who works in social media, in the tech space, and with 50k followers on twitter these days would not be able to find their way into another job.

Second, "costs nothing to delete a tweet", while financially true, is not true across the board. People do not like to be censored, especially needlessly so.

this assumes placing no value on principles or pride, which is probably not true of most people and varies by individual. you can’t reasonably price this for a person you don’t know.

>but the loss of her job could potentially cost her everything

again, you can’t answer this for somebody you don’t know. she’s in a better position to estimate the probability of being fired and how much it would cost her.

clearly she thought a 100% probability of giving in was more downside than an x% chance of losing her job. the preference is individual even if we know all of the variables, which we don’t.

One thing about living in the 21st century is this constant understanding that you're tiny and these huge corporations can swing their balls and knock you out in the process. Being able to stick it to a billion-dollar corp, to the point of them threatening a lawsuit against you, is hilarious.

Now, I have a high-paying job and enough in savings to hold out for a few years with no income, so I'm not saying everyone should do this. But yeah, I would gladly go down if it meant I could flip the bird to these narcissistic assholes who think everyone in the world should bow down to them because they're rich.

Crypto was always about freedom, you're liberated from the dependence on your country, bank, or whatever else it may be. Your fate is in your own hands, your wallet, your funds.

I don't think that's quite clear cut. The right politically makes more hay about freedoms these days, but they have equally strong positions that are anti-freedom (pro-life, voting restrictions, immigration policies, drug policies, religion) and the left has pretty strong advocacy areas for freedom (religion, drug policies, "gay marriage" ) etc.

Crypto has always been about a number of things.

immigration, religious tolerance, lgbt rights.

Not being forbidden from practicing ones religion is also a freedom to do something.

Being free from being discriminated against on the basis of religion is a different kind of freedom, I think.

There is a similar way to split the third kind.

I suppose the boundary between “the freedom to do x” and “freedom from being treated badly for doing x” is kind of fuzzy. It would be absurd to say that “we have freedom of immigration, it’s just that basically anyone who comes in we happen to shoot.”, in such a situation, people are clearly being forbidden from immigrating.

But if someone is endlessly harassed by people, and treated with extra suspicion by the police, in response to their practicing their religion, yeah, that is kind of going against freedom of religion kind of in the first sense, or perhaps somewhere between the two senses, even if officially by law there is nothing forbidding it, and another law says that no law can be made which does forbid it.

But, even if things like this show that the distinction between the two senses is kind of fuzzy, I still think that the distinction is still somewhat relevant and somewhat reasonable.

A self-consistent rightist could very well support nearly-open borders, and legal protection of the practice of other religions, and oppose attempts to criminalize or otherwise legislate against LGBT things, on the basis of freedom, while at the same time also being somewhat discriminatory on a personal level against one or more of those groups.

They probably could. The large bulk of right wing legislators and media personalities aren't like this, though.

You got that backwards: The left is advocating for freedom more than the right (freedom from gun violence, freedom from hate speech, freedom from preventable/treatable medical conditions).

the gun issue is a city vs rural thing. you don't want them in a city, but you might in the rural context.

> freedom from hate speech

but reframing censorship as freedom is blatantly Orwellian. also, the left is not a monolith.

the liberal left advocates for free speech and liberty. aligned with freedom.

the illiberal left advocates for censorship and control. the opposite of freedom.

Why? People largely agree that things like false advertising and fraud regulations increase freedom, despite being literally censorship.

I completely disagree. That goes against the very free speech principles that readers of Scott's blog advocate so strongly. I think it was the wrong decision to publish his name, but it shouldn't be illegal. Like it or not, Scott has become a fairly important intellectual given who his readers are (and may I say, completely deservedly so).

Not really. Doxxing someone mostly leads to harm. Anyone that was on the internet in the early days knows this, these days it's worse because the mobs that attack you aren't just doing mindless trolling, they're seeking something more intrinsic.

I look at it as in defense of free speech. That said, I don't generally believe in total anonymity. I believe in PGP style pseudo anonymity. With someone's real name you can attack their friends, family, and the place they live. With an online identity you can attack their ideas and if you're one of these people that enjoys grey areas you can attack their platform. That, to me, seems more fair.

As the saying goes, journalism means printing things that certain people don't want published, and everything else is PR. Journalists are supposed to reveal things against the subject's wishes.

As the

I’m probably missing part of the background here, I’m new to the controversy. Did some kind of mystery arise around the true identity of the author? Your comment implies that NYT obtained the true identity of the author through legal means — how exactly did they do that?

I don’t think finding out the identity of someone who wishes to remain anonymous is, in itself, sufficiently newsworthy to overcome the privacy interests of the individual. I also wonder if this story has a more interesting angle buried in it about the complexities of identity in the internet age: the author of the blog achieved notoriety, but in some ways that character is distinct from the physical person living their life and doing their job. The NYT wanted to publish a link between those two personas over their objection. Why should they be able to if the story can be written in a way that doesn’t?

Consider someone like... Satoshi, of bitcoin. The character has achieved this powerful notoriety and managed to remain anonymous. Do people want to know which person on the planet created that persona? Sure; do they need to know, is the identity alone newsworthy without some reason to need to publish it?

Honestly I tend to say no. That’s just... gossip, isn’t it? How is knowing a different name to associate with the character going to enrich and inform me in any way?

Examples where I think revealing the identity might be of substance: - suppose someone committed crimes to keep their identity secret - suppose government officials intervened to help them remain anonymous - suppose the person turns out to BE a powerful government official

[edit: to add last example]

Not really.

Originally, the blog was pseudonymous. It was the first and middle name of the author, which he did because he's a psychiatrist who didn't want someone Googling his real name and finding his blog (for various professional and personal reasons).

But it wasn't exactly hidden super well - I found out his full name kind of by accident while googling for some random info about him, it would take most people a few minutes to find his name I imagine. This was ok by him because he mostly wanted to protect the reverse direction - someone googling his full name and finding his blog, not the other direction of someone finding his blog and discovering his full name (mostly - not exclusively).

In any case, after a year of "arranging his life" to allow him to do so, as he puts it, he is now publishing under his full name.

I don't really get why the NYT wanted to publish his name against his wishes. At first I thought it was sensationalism but I read elsewhere that the regular readership of the blog was estimated at around 8.5 thousand. No idea if that's right but if it's within an order of magnitude then I rather think the NYT should have more pressing stories to develop.

The NYT initially said they wanted to publish his name because of editorial policy. The reported said it was kind of being forced on him because "them's the rules" or something like that.

If a journalist were to learn the identity of Satoshi of course that would be newsworthy. Is this a serious question?

On the other hand, I'd never visit NYT again, and I think most of the population would do likewise.

This isn't as extreme, but events like this should cause the general public to adjust their views of NYT. This shouldn't be a cancel-culture style slander, but simply starting to treat NYT as a random tabloid which makes stuff up for clicks.

NYT ran a hit piece on Larry Lessig too.

Unless you believe the recent edits on wikipedia.

I'm not so certain, however, that the previous failures can be directly attributed to central planning? It seems officials were too afraid to come forward about issues regarding food production, due to repercussions of admitting failure. But this might not be inherent to central planning: the authoritarian nature of the state, punishments for admitting failure and perverse incentives causing officials to report success likely were more direct precursors of this outcome.

I would love to hear other opinions on this.

Secondly, when you are making a decision like this which impacts the course of other people’s lives, I personally believe that you should use a level of structured decision making rather than a gut feeling of who ‘fits into the team’ best.

Overengineered? Probably, but at least it showed a clear thought process. Also he stated he considered team dynamics once he had some candidate options.

And I also think that people simply deserve some equity (large portion of total economic assets in our society was created by our ancestors), just by virtue of being part of the society. UBI is just a dividend from that equity.