Bitcoin Forum

When it comes to PoW and altcoins, very few of them decide to use SHA256 because of the enormous hashing power amassed by Bitcoin, so even a fraction of it could easily 51% attack an altcoin. For this reason alts have turned to GPU, CPU mining, and now even things like SSD mining.

But there's a problem, this mining has created a huge demand for computer parts, the prices for them have skyrocketed to 2-4 times of the recommended price. Millions of people around the world can't get their hands on hardware for more than a year, and it's not only gamers but also professionals and researchers, while these altcoins don't create anything useful for society, only speculation as a zero sum game. Should the government step in and do something about it? The simplest thing would be do ban mining on PC parts, and order exchanges to delist all the PoW altcoins. If the US and EU would do this, PoW altcoins would be effectively dead.

While I agree that the vast majority of altcoins are not generating anything useful at all and are either scams, bad projects and a waste of resources at the same time we need to wonder if this is actually illegal? And the answer is no, a greater demand for computer parts is without a doubt going to inconvenience a lot of people but since this is not illegal in itself I do not see the point to try to regulate this.

Also government intervention is not my preferred method to solve anything as governments have the tendency to completely distort markets by giving preference to their friends and other powerful actors, so I think it is better to let the market fix itself, whether this comes from a decrease in the demand as people realize they are investing in hardware that will not give them the profits they are looking for, or because the supply increases or both since this will not last forever.

I doubt the government will step in just because some guy can't buy any gpus. If anything, that's how the free market works. If they want something immediately then they can pay more. And those professionals are not upgrading their devices every year, so I doubt they will complain that much. Just because it's rare and demand can't keep up doesn't mean you should ban everything.

It's the retailers of the GPUs I think should be regulated by the government not ban mining. When there is demand for GPUs normally the retailers will also be selling them for higher prices.

I think it will be just like what happened to the government of China banning BTC mining which didn't stop the miners, they just move somewhere like Kazaksthan or in Texas. Altcoin miners probably will just sell their GPUs to someone from other countries that mines altcoins.

There's no way we can regulate or ban altcoins mining as the coins or network can't be controlled or blocked by ISP. They may block IPs from some popular app but that won't stop the options miners have.
And about the hardware crisis, the hardware makers have benefited the most with crypto boom. The only sector really affected is gaming as they want the latest hardware. Video editing and other task could be performed in any good GPU and you could easily get them with a price. And for research, most of the large research institute use different forms of hardware which are custom built. And the chip shortage has affected everyone and it's not entirely the blame of crypto miners.

LOL.. the same argument is being whipped up again and again by the PoS fanboys. But be assured of one thing. PoW is here to stay. What users need is a system that is secure and PoS can't provide that. You have mentioned about the 51% attack, but how many such attacks on the Bitcoin blockchain are you aware of, ever since the first coins were mined in 2009? PoW is needed to provide security for the Blockchain. And there is no point in arguing that PoW mining has created a shortage of computer parts. The solution is not to regulate PoW mining, but to scale up the production of these parts.

I do personally postponed upgrading my PC, and I'd wish all the parts came back to their MSRP price. But making governments to step up for that is completely not in my favour. After all, what should governments bother to "fixed" it? I mean they can completely ban cryptocurrencies at all instead of just stepping up to fix PC components parts.

Anyway letting governments to dictate what should we do in terms of personal computational power that we did to mine cryptocurrencies is a hell of a dystopian.

I think it's very hard to regulate retailers realistically. If they will want to sell to miners, they will find a way.


Governments have power to make things illegal.

It can take many years for the market to fix itself. Nvidia and AMD didn't believe that the mining boom of 2017 could be repeated (and you can't blame them), so they didn't increase their production capacities. They are still not betting on their mining products.

Or take Chia coin for example. Came out of nowhere, screwed up the whole SSD market, countless read/write cycles were wasted and nothing productive was achieved.


All the mainstream fields of economy are quite heavily regulated even in western world that is often viewed as the part of the world with the most freedom. So sooner or later when crypto will join mainstream, the government will regulate it. They will never care what people do on their computers, they will simply tell exchanges and other services which coins are acceptable and which are not. Of course you could still use any blacklisted coin, but such coins will have no popularity without access to legal markets.

Didn't the gaming industry also influenced the price increase of computer parts before altcoin mining became popular? Maybe not as high as today but it's still significant. Was there an attempt by the government to regulate the price hike before? It would look unfair to miners if there was none.

It seems to me that PoW mechanisms are not really the future of the cryptospace, no matter if its PoW with dedicated mining hardware, GPU's, CPU's or SSD's. The reason for that is pretty simple: unnecessary energy consumption. We are in a time where the climate change is probably the most discussed topic in most of the countries in the world right now, at least in the western world and it would not be to smart for crypto projects to choose PoW as their consensus mechanism because that would be very unpopular in the current political environment. Consensus mechanism like PoS are way more light in terms of hardware requirements and energy consumption.

There is no doubt that regulation is inevitable.

Still, I doubt that will likely to happen. Banning all of PoW altcoins would be devastating, IMO.

Governments regulation main concern currently focused because they having a lack of control over terrorism financing, money laundering, and illegal activity. Not because the miner massively penetrated the computer parts markets. I don't see they will specifically regulate PoW altcoins. At the very least even if they would to do so, the causal wouldn't be because of the gamers couldn't get their PC parts, or professional/researchers having lack of access to the desired computational/hardware power.

Energy consumption is not really a problem there's plenty of energy around. Bitcoin is consuming only 0.1% of global electricity, so it's responsible for even smaller fraction of global emissions. But the impact on consumer electronics prices is far more noticeable.


Yes, governments usually don't act until they have an interest in it.

I have read somewhere that nvidea started to enginner their GPUs to output less hashrate making them less efficient in mining. so thats a good step towards decreasing the huge demand on  graphic cards right now.

I dont think you can really ban or regulate mining because people will always find a way to hide their mining farms, a  good solution will be to start mass producing those antminers  so miners can switch from GPUs to  specialized mining hardware althought i dont think this will possible in the near future considering the  selicon shortage the world is facing right now,or maybe goverments can start forcing mining rigs operators to use clean energy to run their farms (again its hard  for this one to work because of the reason mentioned earlier)

I don't think so.

Altcoins can run whatever algorithm they want. And I'd say that most of them have very little hashpower compared to bitcoin anyway.

How would you enforce a ban on PoW alts anyway? There is simply no feasible way of doing so if you think about it - unless you are an authoritarian government.

Why ban PoW? Just produce and sell more equipment :) This will also increase GDP, create some work places and let people spend their money the way they want to.

Buying equipment is not illegal. Mining or minting coins that have no value to you might not be a good defense in a democratic country where people wish to mine them. So in that sense, governments cannot ban such coins from being mined, moreover it only creates more tension in the already edgy bitcoin economy where everyone dreads getting persecuted.

However I do agree that equipment manufacturers are going to be in a lot of profit from these sales. Trying to stop them from buying would be bad for their own business so they would not do that. However they may put in specific counter measures to prevent people from mining on their devices which in turn also turns their revenue against them.

This situation is pretty sticky indeed. But I am sure some middle ground will be achieved in due course between the governments stopping shitcoins and chip manufacturers.

In any case, neither governments nor any other state or public authorities should interfere with the current situation with the mining of the PoW algorithm. There are arguments for and against their use, but this issue should be resolved by the cryptocurrency market, and not administratively.
States can resolve issues related to the release of video cards and, in general, any technical issues related to cryptocurrency. However, no one has the right to decide for citizens what types of activities they should be engaged in, if this activity is not prohibited by law.

Do you want to live in a free society or do you want to live in a totalitarian society?

A free society will give you the coiche, and you decide if you want PoW in your live or not.

A totalitarian society will make all decisions for you and the henchmen will always appoint to a higher purpose - like banning PoW because of the environment...

I'm partially agree with you. But i don't think government should interfere. There are bigger problems than useless coins and gamers which can't buy GPU or buying it for triple price.

Which It came to my conclusions. Governments should not handle, specifically to control the Pow Altcoins. Not for now and also I believe in the foreseeable future. Do governments have the power to ban it? of course, but I believe there will be public pressure. Even if for whatever sake the governments mandating to ban Pow altcoin, on the other hand, it will be disastrous for cryptocurrencies especially Bitcoin, because let's say they have an interest in banning PoW altcoins, I'm sure they will also want to limitate bitcoin mining activity since they have a reason to specifically ban Pow altcoins.

POW is outdated technology and it should only exist on top of Bitcoin. Most POW-mined cryptocurrencies are at high risk of being hacked. History has shown that ETC has been hacked regularly.
I support the government mechanism to regulate these cryptocurrencies. The balance between mining pools to avoid 51% attacks on cryptos mined with POW. That avoids financial risks for investors when trading. It is necessary to remove them from derivatives such as margin, future.

Well, it is true that it is spending insane amount of electricity and energy consumption we should be careful about. I agree that regulation would be great, and something like "you need to have energy created as much as you consume" for people with 10 gh+ hashrates. However, I do not understand how others are allowed and for some reason miners are seen as terrible? Like oil companies have been ruining the whole world and dragging us to a level where there will be drought and tsunamis at the same time, that is as horrible as it gets and oil companies gets tax cuts instead of regulations.

So, do not tell me miners should be regulated or banned for green reasons, if mining world starts to bribe politicians tomorrow, not only will miners make more money but they will also be allowed to tax cuts on everything and will pay as little tax as possible, just because they bribed the right people.

In my opinion, Proof-of-Work is the most decentralized and fair mining algorithm because anyone can start expending electricity to support the network at any time without the need of upfront investments. Proof-of-Stake and Delegated PoS are intended rather for wealthy people who want to become even richer.

In 2009-2010, Bitcoin enthusiasts mined BTC coins using their own CPU processors that were available at reasonable prices. Nowadays, smart engineers have built ASICs that have an edge over general-purpose processors, so this computer part is no longer used in mining.

However, some well-known altcoins are mined using ASIC-resistant algorithms. For example, the anonymous cryptocurrency Monero currently uses the RandomX algorithm because its team values decentralization highly.

Thus, computer parts (CPUs, GPUs, SSDs) will remain in demand in the future. My guess is that these types of computing power will be concentrated in a small number of top-rated coins.

I understand the concerns of gamers, researchers and others who are unable to buy modern graphics cards due to the high prices, but I think that delisting all the PoW-based alternative currencies would be a harsh, tough and anti-democratic government decision.

There should not be any regulations. Once people buy a product it should be theirs to use however they want. Playing video games with your GPU is also harmful for the environment and nobody would agree that it is a good idea to ban people from playing video games. It is just as ridiculous to ban crypto mining. If you really want to help the environment then they need to go after the big polluters like the fossil fuel industry. They should also focus on increasing access to renewable energy.

The thing is that some video card manufacturers have already blocked the function of mining on their products. It means that such kinds of cards will surely be available for people who are not involved in mining. What comes to ban from authorities,I do not want to interfere with this government. But of course it will be better if only such currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum can be mined.

If they block such features, then their sales would go down. And I don't think that the governments would be stupid enough to ban PoW mining. There is simply no justification. Miners are paying for their own equipment and are already under the burden of heavy taxes. If some country bans PoW mining, then they will simply migrate to some other country, where it is still legal. And we already have many examples, with the latest one coming from China. The miners there are moving to Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia, due to relentless harassment by the authorities. 

The mining restriction was immediately bypassed, and even when it was enabled, it only slowed down mining and it was still economically profitable to mine. It's very hard for GPU manufacturers to block mining, it would very likely cause unpredictable behavior in their devices that will harm other uses.

Governments regulate many things. In many countries you can't drive without seatbelt, even though it's not harming other people. Alcohol or tobacco advertisement is prohibited, even though it's just advertising. There's no country on Earth that lives by libertarian ideology that allows anything that isn't aggression.

As it is very doubtful that governments will be able to go to such regulatory measures due to problems with a shortage of computer components. Is there anything illegal in this?  In ordinary market relations, demand gives rise to supply. Wouldn't it be better to increase the production of the necessary equipment, extra jobs have always been welcomed.

In my opinion when it comes to PoW, then BTC is the only one using it to level where it creates scarcity of electricity for other usage. PoW based Alt coins that are of no use are not consuming too much power. Two noticeable case of BTC mining ban are in Chine and Iran. While Iran ban was to overcome power shortage, I dont know the exact reason of China ban on BTC mining.


China's ban forces some bitcoin miners to flee overseas, others sell out (source (https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-ban-forces-some-bitcoin-miners-flee-overseas-others-sell-out-2021-06-25/))
Iran has announced a four-month ban on the energy-consuming mining of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin after cities suffered unplanned blackouts (source (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-57260829)).

I think that the moment we start accepting bans and stuff is the same moment crypto decentralization/freedom dies. You can't have decentralization and freedom in a world where an authority has a certain control over you. If you aren't allowed to mine, you aren't allowed to sustain most of the coins out there that are truly decentralized and open-source. I'm against authority in general, and I think banning mining algos, components or just mining itself is a very bad idea that opens up the space for new regulations that are anything but freedom-supportive.

This is kind of odd, it is their product and their brand so they can do whatever they want to do with it, however I would suppose that the purpose of a company which sells graphic cards is to want to sell more of them and not less.

Also I do not understand why they care about what people end up using their graphic cards, as long as they pay for it then they should be happy to sell them to whoever wants to buy them, so if this is true then there is something else at play we are not seeing.