As long as you can run your own crypto algorithms and freely run a peer-to-peer protocol over the internet, you can mine cryptocurrency. I am curious which of these freedoms you would sacrifice.
Back in the 1990’s, hackers fought for—and won—the right to do whatever cryptographic computation they wanted to do on their own computers while the US government was trying to prohibit strong cryptography and require all secured communications to use a secret algorithm designed by the NSA with keys held and managed by the federal government. The failure of the Clipper Chip and the proliferation of cryptography has been a victory for privacy and a thorn in the side of the FBI for decades. And the entire time hackers and privacy activists have been fighting this fight, the feds and their enablers have smeared them with accusations of enabling drug dealers and pedophiles. So unless you can convince people that crypto mining is even worse than child rape, I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere on that front. Besides, all of the cryptographic algorithms are too well known at this point. I don’t think you can stop people from doing math on their own damn computers.
And that leaves peer to peer networking. While cryptography was smeared for enabling pedophilia, peer to peer networking was smeared for something even worse, at least in the hearts of our government and corporate overlords—downloading music! Now that we have the opportunity to pay our corporate overlords for the privilege of “streaming”, they don’t seem to care so much and this fight has also faded into the background. But what’s at stake here was much bigger: whether or not your home internet connection allowed to be anything other than a passive one-way pipe to receive content from our corporate overlords. And in reality, this question also reduces to the other, because if you use cryptography, no one will be the wiser regarding what, exactly, you are doing with your internet connection.
But maybe this was all just a relic of a forgotten time, when hackers were people who scoffed at the idea that the internet should be locked down to stop people from depriving poor Lars Ulrich of album royalties or whatever. Clearly the moral panics of today are much more pressing than those of the 1990’s, and there is simply no need to just allow people to do math on their own computers. Just one of those silly, optimistic ideas we old fools still hold onto, like freedom of speech. Maybe China had the right idea when they built the Great Firewall.
That's not how the law works. It can specifically ban cryptocurrency mining -- after defining what that is -- without impacting other uses.
Not sure I agree with the idea to ban this, though. I think it's a huge waste of time, money, and electricity, but people should be able to do that if they want.
But they should have to pay their fair share for it: penalties for these noise complaints should meaningfully cut into their profit to the point that it would be more cost-effective for them to build proper noise isolation. Electricity prices should be set higher for commercial activity of that kind so local communities aren't harmed, and in places where they aren't mining off renewable energy, the carbon impact of the mining should be accounted for somehow. And we should ensure that these companies are paying their fair share of taxes. I expect the low taxes in Texas is a reason why mining companies like it there, though.
And if paying for these externalities makes mining no longer profitable, that's just the system working as it should.
> That's not how the law works. It can specifically ban cryptocurrency mining -- after defining what that is -- without impacting other uses.
Politicians pass laws and the internet laughs. The law also supposedly made it illegal to share the hexadecimal number 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 but everyone did it anyway. I’m not a huge fan of cryptocurrency but I am of the old-fashioned opinion that doing math on your own damn computer is a human right, and that fundamentally unenforceable laws are silly.
Back in the 1990’s, hackers fought for—and won—the right to do whatever cryptographic computation they wanted to do on their own computers while the US government was trying to prohibit strong cryptography and require all secured communications to use a secret algorithm designed by the NSA with keys held and managed by the federal government. The failure of the Clipper Chip and the proliferation of cryptography has been a victory for privacy and a thorn in the side of the FBI for decades. And the entire time hackers and privacy activists have been fighting this fight, the feds and their enablers have smeared them with accusations of enabling drug dealers and pedophiles. So unless you can convince people that crypto mining is even worse than child rape, I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere on that front. Besides, all of the cryptographic algorithms are too well known at this point. I don’t think you can stop people from doing math on their own damn computers.
And that leaves peer to peer networking. While cryptography was smeared for enabling pedophilia, peer to peer networking was smeared for something even worse, at least in the hearts of our government and corporate overlords—downloading music! Now that we have the opportunity to pay our corporate overlords for the privilege of “streaming”, they don’t seem to care so much and this fight has also faded into the background. But what’s at stake here was much bigger: whether or not your home internet connection allowed to be anything other than a passive one-way pipe to receive content from our corporate overlords. And in reality, this question also reduces to the other, because if you use cryptography, no one will be the wiser regarding what, exactly, you are doing with your internet connection.
But maybe this was all just a relic of a forgotten time, when hackers were people who scoffed at the idea that the internet should be locked down to stop people from depriving poor Lars Ulrich of album royalties or whatever. Clearly the moral panics of today are much more pressing than those of the 1990’s, and there is simply no need to just allow people to do math on their own computers. Just one of those silly, optimistic ideas we old fools still hold onto, like freedom of speech. Maybe China had the right idea when they built the Great Firewall.