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Bitcoin Mining Needs Regulatory Legislation

posted by janrinok on Saturday November 29, @09:16PM   
from the electric-tulips dept.

canopic jug writes:

The excellent student run newspaper, The Michigan Daily, has an article about the necessity of regulating Bitcoin. "Mining" even a single Bitcoin now burns as much electricity as a family would use during about 50 days.

Local grids physically cannot withstand this outrageous consumption of electricity. In foreign countries — where mining farm clustering is more severe — local governments suspect Bitcoin mining farms as the cause of power outages and complete blackouts. Entire neighborhoods are facing power shortages or complete outages as a result of energy grid strain. So far, the reliance on domestic energy has not had adverse effects, but it is only a matter of time before these blackouts begin to take place in the United States, too. 

Despite the fatal externality flaws in Bitcoin mining, the industry is left unchecked in the absence of federal or international regulation on its use. Unfortunately, without restrictions on the amount of mining that can occur, there is no clear plateau to the electricity consumption of these constantly updating hardware systems. 

Previously:
(2025) Bitcoin Mining is Making People Sick
(2025) The Guy Who Accidentally Threw Away $700 Million in Bitcoin Wants to Buy the Landfill to Find It
(2024) How A 27-Year-Old Busted The Myth Of Bitcoin's Anonymity

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Original Submission

• Re:Or a wealth tax(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 04, @02:20AM

  by khallow (3766) on Thursday December 04, @02:20AM (#1425761) Journal

  There aren't conflicts because Musk has hundreds of billions in wealth rather than $100 million. And implementing the policy would just create conflict since now we arbitrarily created winners and losers where there weren't before - with the policy set to rachet down even further.

  Policies like this do not create winners and losers. They only limit the size and influence of the so called winners.

  If you have more than $100 million in taxable assets right now, you would be a loser.

  Society elects representatives that then decide who's the decider for what. So yes, proxies decide. What's wrong with that?

  They aren't the only way nor should be.

  So ... most of the funding of SpaceX is *NASA* directly or via other government launch contracts. It has always been *NASA*. Which makes your statement not quite what you wrote. Putting in 10% of the funds, is not self-funding it. Also, there were others in this race, like Armadillo Aerospace but well...

  Three things to note. This was a snap shot at a particular time. It doesn't accurately reflect the early development of Falcon 1 (which didn't get a lot of government funding) nor the much later efforts with a large private sector customer base where private sources ended up somewhat larger funding contributors than government sources. It's basically a point of maximal government involvement.
  
  Nor does it distinguish between funding for services rendered and funding for development. The Space Launch System is pure funding for development, not a single service or serious expectation delivered. While most of SpaceX's funding was for launching NASA (and other US government) spacecraft - often cheaper than anyone else in the world.
  
  Finally, NASA spends something like $20 billion a year over a 10 year period. Here, it managed to spend only $300-400 million on the game changing Falcon 9? Imagine if it could have spent the rest of the roughly $200 billion as well!

  If you can have laws that prevent pranksters yelling "bomb" in a theater or whatever, you can have laws that limit campaign advertisements. And blocking a movie for few months because of such laws is tiny price to pay for sanity. But you know, each their own.

  Or have laws that ban speech I don't like. The field is wide open now that we've found a completely irrelevant loophole!

  Parent