This is just anecdotal, but some people run their GPU for mining during Winter since its 'free heat'. This basically renders the GPU into a space heater, which is 3x-4x less efficient than a heat pump.
Additionally, some individuals steal electricity (eg. from their workplace, or if they have electricity included in their rental contract). Cryptocurrencies have thus conveniently enabled a form of electricity theft and fraud previously impossible for the individual.
Only PoW cryptos need extensive electricity and hardware. Its completely absurd to ban crypto. Thats like if you would ban all motorized vehicles to get rid of coal blasting diesel trucks without catalytic converter.
Needless to say that its also technically impossible to ban crypto. Its like banning torrents or even harder and we all know torrent was attacked heavily in the past but it did not go away.
You misses the point. There is no reason to ban anything.
You can also buy Pokemon cards and sell or trade them. Call them funny money cards if you want, but there is no legitimate reason why people should not be able to buy/sell them.
Also plenty places have already put cryptos in the laws declared them as alternative currency so they cant really prevent financial institution form handling it.
If they really would globally cut crypto form fiat. You wouldn't need to pay taxes with anything you do with crypt anymore since its just "funny money" this would boost crypto and devalue fiat and cause all kind of horrible side effects. You have in incentive to get paid in funny money if you dont have to tax it.
Drugs are the thing people have a strong incentive to accept crypto for, not pizzas.
All black markets have an incentive to use it - including state actors (e.g. weapons deals). Getting caught laundering Monero is preferable to getting caught selling missiles to the Saudis.
Drugs are addictive which is why people continue to use them even when illegal. Why would people use illegal crypto? It was hard enough to use them as a currency when legal, them being illegal would make them mostly worthless to most people.
Oddly enough besides the hard-core aficionados and techies that would mostly leave the criminals, who would operate street level informal exchange systems.
For them, that would be back to square one in terms of money laundering.
Odds are that, given fiat to launder, or crypto that needs to be converted to fiat that still needs to be laundered, they would cut the useless step.
The only illegal industry that would still see the use for it is maybe ransomware, but ransomware is not a cyclic business, so it would be surprising that they'd find enough individuals on the street to convert their millions easily.
The whole point for criminals is that it allows pseudonymous (or anonymous, in the case of monero), and remote dealing of illegal goods and services. Especially across international borders.
Another use is tax evasion and money laundering.
Why is crypto any better than cash if users are forced to deal in person? I understand the argument of not having to carry around a duffel bag that could be seized. But nations can disrupt crypto markets on a global scale.
At the very least, they can make it difficult to exchange for actual, usable, local currency. Which appears to be what China is poised to do.
Well, for the energy consumption part yes. There the need for banning crypto concerns those "currencies" which do use PoW. Like Bitcoin what the article was about.
Banning crypto in a practical sense is actually quite easy. Prohibit any business and any bank in dealing with them. If you cannot do legal transactions with e.g. Bitcoins any more, the market mostly dries up. It is not necessary to ban any single coin in existance, but its wide-scale usage in the normal economy.
By the way, there was never an attempt to ban torrents itself. That would have been reasonably easy on a protocol level. It was about banning illegal torrents. As in the content, not the protocol.
Performing 51% attacks in the hope of discrediting an asset would be a waste of resources. Such an attack on the Bitcoin ecosystem would nowadays cost several billion in hardware and electricity, and all the community has to do in order to repair the damage would be a hark fork. 51% attacks happened in the past and most of them had little to no impact on major assets.
It would not. Hardly anyone mines in Europe. Ironically power shortages are due to ESG initiatives that phased out power stations using fossil fuels and left unreliable power sources of wind and solar
Steel manufacturing requires tons of electricity, and it is already impossible in EU without enormous subsidies. It's an industry surviving entirely on life support.
Governments want a healthy steelmaking industry so when the time comes to defend your country you can make guns and tanks. When your country is being invaded how useful is your bitcoin going to be?
> When your country is being invaded how useful is your bitcoin going to be?
You can bribe enemy army staff with it.
But seriously, just how much is too much when it comes to steel subsidies, and just how much EU can tolerate its steel industry failing so hard to upgrade?
Rather than subsidising, say, buying new, more efficient blast furnaces EU countries basically just spend few hundred dollars extra of taxpayer money per ton of steel.
