I agree to OP that Bitcoin's electricity consumption could be easily solved by appropriate regulations,
not a ban.
Introducing a special
large-scale mining license required to operate a certain number of MW should be quite effective to solve the problem of dirty mining.
If a big miner is mining without license, he will get his plant shut down until he has a license and pay for his wrongdoing for mining without license.
Small hobby / private miners should be excluded because it would be pointless and build up too much paperwork.
It's important to get the big fishes.
Just a suggestion how I would do it.
Banning would be completely pointless as miners would move somewhere else, where electricity is cheap and dirty.
Every Bitcoin mined off renewable energy is an important step to make Bitcoin more renewable and it should be our goal to make as many Bitcoins mined off renewable energy.
Have we observed the same attitude towards the banking system, which is far more environmentally damaging? No. They're ignorant when it comes to JPMorgan, CITI, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and 32 others ...
I wouldn't engage in whataboutism, it's quite pointless because using whataboutism could suggest we have no real arguments. But we surely have.
I don't need to list all arguments here because it should be clear.
Our focus should be: improve Bitcoin's carbon footprint.
But instead of banning or restricting PoW currencies like Bitcoin, there is actually a much more promising alternative: Large-scale miners should have to demonstrate real carbon neutrality.
This could mean miners could have two alternatives:
1) Mine disconnected from the grid with exclusively own renewable electricity. (For example they could use a solar park or wind turbines, and store the energy accordingly).
2) Mine connected to the grid with a "100% renewable energy tariff", but ensuring they don't rely on fossil electricity in cases of scarcity of renewable electricity.
Let me tell you how this will end.
It will kill all bitcoin mining in Europe and North America and Australia and it will move all of it back to some country that doesn't give a damn about the environment as long as coal-produced electricity is 3 times cheaper.
This whole thing is doomed to fail just as how every single thing eco terrorists have tried to do in the past has come back to haunt us and hurt us ten times more. Let's cut the polluting industry in Europe, let's move it all to China and India, let's not give a crap how things are working there as it's no longer our problem, and let's also pay three times more for the stuff while creating more pollution by just shipping the damn products back and forth.
If that would "kill" mining in Europe, it would mean that renewable mining is not profitable at all. I'm in doubt if that is true. Renewable energy can be quite cheap when it's available in large numbers and that's where it's especially available in a surplus.
In addition, using wasted energy for mining could also make renewables more competitive in some cases.
Even if my consideration above is 100% wrong, if mining in Europe would be "killed" from such regulations it would mean that the US and Canada would do nothing similar like Europe, which should be quite unlikely. There will be similar mandates and we should add them as part of the Paris climate deal or similar. Ok, maybe if Trump should get elected again, he would do his own thing because it's benefitting him at cost of the planet.
But renewable mining in Texas is already a large (and obviously competitive) electricity source for mining.
And I'm sure there will be some (appropriate) mandates for mining in a Paris climate deal.
I don't deny that we should put pressure on China and India to do more to prevent climate change but doing nothing and just pointing at China and India etc. won't solve anything.
All this "environmental-friendly regulation of Bitcoin mining" is a big pile of s*it.
LMFTFY!
All this "environmental-friendly regulation of everything" is going to kill us all before we manage to destroy the Earth.
I don't know on which facts this opinion is based on but climate change
could make large parts of our planet uninhabitable end of the current century, no doubt here if we are lazy.
If not our part of the planet will get uninhabitable, a big chunk of people will be forced to leave their country and cause a mass-scale refugee crisis, including civil wars and unrest of all sorts.
But that's off-topic here I guess.
Our option to make Bitcoin renewable are quite big, there are already solutions and there will be even more. Renewable mining has a chance to be very beneficial overall, also for renewable energy itself.
Perhaps this study is not good enough for European bureaucrats who are so intelligent as to advocate a ban on Bitcoin mining while at the same time making statements like this:
European regulators have two tools at their disposal to curb Bitcoin’s hunger for electricity. One is to ban EU-wide mining of cryptocurrencies that use proof-of-work. However, the effect would be limited: Since hardly any mining happens in EU countries, this would have „almost no direct effect on the global mining industry – and thus the energy consumption“ of Bitcoin, says Michel Rauchs, who is a researcher at Cambridge University.
That's true but there's another part referencing this and it's total a total BS claim (Alex de Vries has very low understanding of the issue):
The economist agrees that mining bans in Europe have little impact on Bitcoin’s energy footprint because mining is virtually location-independent. As long as Bitcoin’s price continues to rise, the same holds true for the cryptocurrency’s energy consumption, he says. „This is also why targeting the Bitcoin price is the only thing likely to work.“
De Vries argues that for this to happen, policymakers would have to tax transactions or restrict the trading of certain cryptocurrencies.
The argument from de Vries goes like this: if the rice of BTC is lower, less mining would be done because it's less profitable and therefore, there would be less pollution.
It's technically somehown true: Yes, if the price of BTC would be lower, in theory, less mining would be done as miners need to be profitable to pay for electricity bills, staff, equipment.
However, his argument is pointless because it doesn't make mining more ecological.
And very likely, the price wouldn't even go down, nobody can guarantee that, maybe it will even go up as people are forced to HODL because selling is restricted and mining isn't based in EU.
Maybe miners wouldn't decrease mining power for whatever reason; maybe because fiat gets inflated even more, so miners take a fiat loan and start mining? Nobody knows!
It's a pointless BS argument from des Vries because it's based on pure speculation and doesn't make
even one Hash more ecological.
In my opinion it's very important to debunk that argument because it's completely BS and very damaging for Bitcoin. If de Vries continues his wrong talking points and gets some endorsements from politicians, Bitcoin will have a very hard time in Europe and innovation would go somewhere else. I don't even know how he wants to implement it and at what cost.
He has a lack of knowledge and seems even proud of it.
tl;dr
Yes, we need to target miners by appropriate regulation and encourage or mandate to use renewable energy. Bans are not a solution because bans don't solve anything; the problem is just getting banned until it comes back or arises elsewhere.