Topic: What if crypto mining is outlawed ? - page 3. (Read 679 times)

If mining would be banned in those countries then for sure another great country will rise and miners will flock to that country. But the reality is just, whatever happens, ban here and there.

Hashrates might drop but eventually, they will increase again. That's been happening before when they keep on putting on the news about mining in ban, about the consumption of energy, etc.

As for the ban on cryptocurrency mining, one must proceed from the fact that mining consumes a lot of energy, and energy is currently expensive and prices continue to rise. So I think that those countries that have an excellent resource base for the production of inexpensive energy will become those countries where mining will be allowed. Take Russia for example. Contrary to all the fake news about the ban on mining and cryptocurrencies in Russia, all of a sudden, the President of Russia made a statement that no one was going to ban anything. On the other hand, you are talking about green energy. So, everything is bad here, since this energy comes out even more expensive, which can make cryptocurrency mining not profitable at all. What do we have left? Either the transition to POS and then mining and maintaining the network does not require the expenditure of a large amount of energy, or those whom I wrote about above will become monopolists in this industry.

Smallest miner that actually makes sense to run if you have under 10 cents power is an S9, let's assume you have only one of them.
1400W burning 33kwh a day, 900kwh a month.
Everyone who is not from the US or Canada go and look at your electrical bill and check how much you have used in one month.  

Second, miners run 24/7 it's so easy to track individual miners as no normal household would have such a huge and flat consumption all night,  even heaters or air conditioning systems do go through speeds and power left on automatic, they are not continuously using the same power.
And that's for an s9, doing the numbers for an s19 you would consume more energy in one month than the average household in France in 6.

So, pretty easy to spot individual home miners.
And the second is the noise, imagine living in one of those commie blocks of flats where you can hear farts at night and your neighbor runs a miner that makes more noise than a standard vacuum cleaner, again, 24/7.

The answer to this question you asked is pretty simple there can be many governments that start to ban bitcoin and bitcoin mining or they can even suspend all the cryptocurrency-related transactions for their people but the main question is why should people obey this rule, there are many illegal activities such as drug dealing and drinking alcohol while driving but many people don't really care about these rules but the rules are created not be broken by people, in the other if this happens we will see fewer people mining bitcoin and in my own ide the price will grow due to decrease of the supply.

It is definitely a potential threat, with an energy crisis going on in almost every country around the world it is possible that cryptocurrency could become the target of future laws to clamp down on waste. One of two things might happen and potentially both. It might reach the point where mining becomes prohibitively expensive and not worth the cost. Which might also tie into more media attention which attracts the ire of politicians and the general public, that large amounts of energy is being consumed by what some might see is unproductive "mining" that is purely benefiting the few at the cost of the many. Besides forcing tech companies to potentially optimize hardware, mining does not do much for most people.

How is it even possible to enforce that?

How would gov know "hey... somone somewhere is mining"

I mean I get the big warehouses are easy to spot but people in their homes?

Because China is struggling with power shortages and is an authoritarian regime where you can be executed in public, while in most other countries capital punishment no longer exists.

The EU is not thinking of doing the same.
It's just a an opinion of some guy from European Securities and Markets Authority, which can't enforce anything. It can only recommend and threaten with fines. To ban mining they'd have to propose a bill first.

The latter.

It is difficult to carry out mining illegally, especially if it is carried out on a large scale, because many cases have occurred both in China, Malaysia and Russia where mining cases have been uncovered due to the large supply of electricity at the mining operation site, so the government can track them down easily and that's why we can see in the news that many miners are caught, now many countries have indeed made rules in the use of crypto as an investment asset and forbid using it as a tool for transactions, so that is why crypto can still exist even with strict rules from the government.

Yeah right, how much of the hashrate can Salvador host?

OP, you've asked the question on the wrong forum, problems that might arise from a ban are simply incomprehensible here, people throw away reasons because there must be no weakness in bitcoin, so doesn't matter what happens, even if we have a nuclear war, even if the planet is wiped out bitcoin will note affected.

Just for fun, when we look at the topics about how secure the network is poeple immediately start crunching numbers, it takes 2 million brand new miners and a whole amount of power to attack the network, it's simply not possible to produce the miners or buy them.. but..The latest ban just solved those problems from an attacker point of view, not only did the hashrate drop to half, so you needed less than half of the miners needed but also there was an influx of used gear doesn't the market at cheaper prices, solving the problem of having a factory ready to assemble this for an attack.

USA banning mining? It would be terrible, just think who is going to host all that hash rate, and with what power? Salvador with its 6Twh of power and with 20% of that coming from imports? The reality is that at this point any outright ban will have terrible consequences. But you can't speak of that here or you're going to get pitchforked.


Then I'm pretty sure you have a simple explanation why would the hashrate dropped after the China ban to ~ 97.87 EH/s with the prices still at ~30k while in the previous October we had 142.94 EH/s with an average price of ~10k.
How does this make sense to you?

It's not a problem when one country bans Bitcoin, even if it has a large share of miners, like China did, because miners can just relocate to other countries. But if this became a global trend and most of the countries with large power capacities banned mining, then hashrate would permanently drop. Countries with smaller power grid just can't host many miners, especially at times of an energy crisis. Recent example is Kosovo and other countries that had to ban mining because they don't have enough energy to sustain it. It's unclear by how much the hashrate would need to decrease before it starts seriously impacting the security of the network, but there's probably a lot of room for decrease. Bitcoin wasn't attacked years ago, when the hashrate was a fraction of what we have today.

There is no stopping this, if we were in 2012 I could still believe it, but if countries start to ban Bitcoin mining, there will always be other countries willing to mine. Take El Salvador, for example, and others to come. There is a lot of money at stake, a lot of institutions involved and it has been regulated in most countries in the world.

Surely we will hear news of more countries banning Bitcoin mining and FUDs like that, but Bitcoin will continue to be strong, and getting stronger in the long run.

Do India, Europe and Canada in your example even have any considerable hashrate? I don't think they have more than 20% combined and I'm being super generous! Last I checked Canada had the biggest and it was 3 or 4%! India had virtually no hashrate and Europe was struggling to keep the lights on with soaring gas prices.

In any case, when China supposedly banned bitcoin mining a lot of people FUDed about a massive hashrate drop but we only saw a very small drop, most of which was because of the price dropped that had happened before that news!
I think that should answer your question.

This "What if?" question has been asked a gazillion times on the forum.
There's a possibility of all major countries banning cryptocurrency mining,but there's no reason for this to happen everywhere.
The crypto miners aren't currently going anything illegal(except the miners,who are stealing electricity).
They aren't going any harm or damage to anyone.All the environmentalist bullshit about crypto mining polluting the environment is complete bullshit.
If the hashrate drops tremendously,the mining difficulty might drop back to the 2009-2012 levels and we all could start mining Bitcoins on our personal computers.Always try to see the positive side of every negative event.

Not really far fetch, remember that China already did it. My country is not very different from China which is why most of the countries today prefer to have CBDC than using cryptocurrency. It's the nature of government to want to have their grips on their citizen than allowing them to have thier own wealth that the government could not hold of.

Mining being outlawed means Bitcoin will cost low or cost high, what do you think?

We have 7 billion people in the world, so it's practically impossible to ban bitcoin mining through law. Now if I take a closer look at the law book, one of the fundamental rights is,


Exactly on this point, our Indian exchanges have defeated the central bank of India in Supreme court when RBI arbitrarily banned cryptos few years back. So it's definitely not a piece of cake. China is a country where rule of law doesn't exist. Same goes with North Korea. So you can't compare the rest of the world with an example of China.

Probably just in your head OP? I mean yes, some countries are banning it, but I don't think it's something necessarily other countries would also follow? That is unless crypto mining was seen as a universal evil or something. Additionally, you'd see people still doing it on their home computers or something, just like how it was initially. Hardly doubt countries banning them would actually do anything to people who still want to mine. Plus, mining groups could easily migrate to other countries if they needed to imo.

This is a far-fetched scenario, even if all countries ban Bitcoin mining, people will continue to mine illegally, what will governments gain then? Nothing, of course, except that it will lose an important economic resource. In any case, there are many alternatives that can be used, such as clean energy and others. There are always solutions to every problem. If such a problem occurs, it is sure that a suitable solution will be found because people will not give up Bitcoin. Easily, governments have tried many times before but failed to get people to give up Bitcoin.

If one country does this, it does not necessarily mean other countries are going to do it. Governments need money to run their country and this money comes from taxpayers. Instead of banning bitcoin mining, look at what India has done today, put on a 30% tax on bitcoin trades, which essentially ends up being the only way for users to transact in bitcoin.

Governments see this as an opportunity to make money and when they see it they will seize the chance and if this happens more countries will follow suit. So it will not get banned but rather may get taxed in future.

Again it is also correct that if majority of miners get stopped by their governments to mine (which firstly is absurd) - the rest of the miners get a bigger proportion of rewards. Naturally they will turn to their governments and complain about the situation at which stage again governments have to allow mining but with some restrictions, likely taxation again.

The hashrate would drop but since nobody will be mining bitcoin other than the home users in those countries I don't expect a network attack. In fact, I think it is best to ban mining completely and let only the home users mine it. When bitcoin first came out, there was a saying "1 CPU 1 VOTE". Obviously satoshi thought everybody will be mining on their personal computers at first but then things changed quickly. CPU > GPU > FPGA > ASIC

Yes, there is a big possibility that there can be some countries that will follow China in banning crypto mining due to concern on the high demand for power but they will never do it on a synchronized matter...and just like what happened in China when a door closes there will be another one that will open so long as there is a big money that can be made in Bitcoin mining. And that is the point...we should be concerned more if there is money that can still be made because if miners are incurring losses that is the prime reason they will stop doing it. I am sure that there will be an explosion in mining investment in El Salvador once other countries will be banning Bitcoin mining. As long as there is a money opportunity in mining, there will always be countries that will allow it.