US congress set to consider legislation to BAN proof of work

[The Sceptical Chymist]

I was wondering if the US will also consider banning:

Obviously not; the government considers all of those activities to be economically productive but crypto mining...not even close.  Their goal isn't to completely eliminate greenhouse gasses and whatever else, which they couldn't do even if they took every automobile off the road and unplugged the power grids.  They think they're trying to eliminate what they perceive as unnecessary energy consumption--and bitcoin/altcoin mining certainly does use up a lot of electricity, no doubt.

But fuck them anyway.  Utilities are offering electricity for sale and have for decades, and without questioning what people are using that electricity for.  The government should keep their grubby little hands off the law book and let the market be free. 

Where's a republican president when you need one?

[darkangel11]

Yes, there are really stupid things that burn a ton more energy than PoS, I would love to see some numbers comparing how much energy GPU mining for ETH burns compared to the GPU editing clips for youtube and TikTok, but for god's sake, don't compare with stuff without which the world would collapse in a month.Those comparisons are just as stupid as the whole idea of banning crypto mining.

Or PC and console gaming. I think there's already research in this field.
https://eta.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/downloads/Taming-the-Energy-Use-of-Gaming-Computers.pdf

This is a typical shortsightedness and lack of understanding of the subject by politicians. They're trying to ban a specific action made on a widely available hardware.

You can have 2 computers at home, one of which is your streaming pc and the other one edits videos for youtube, which would require more power than a single miner, but owning a miner is not allowed because it's not "eco friendly"? If anybody in congress has a working brain it's not going to pass.

[KingsDen]

Whenever I see posts as this, I don't panic if it's about US. If this was about China, Russia, Korea etc, I would shiver because they can outrightly ban PoW at their discretion. The above mentioned countries are not so democratic and their leaders influence the national decisions to a great extent. Unlike the US who has listening ears for her citizens, they believe in liberty. Liberty of thoughts, liberty of religion, liberty of action etc. Since I discovered the liberty ideology of US, I always feel ease with them.

I am not from the States, but I heard they have the right to handle arms, they have the right to decide their gender, they have the right to marry same sex, they have the right to worship whatever they like. This is liberty. Actually, if US rises to ban PoW and the citizens reject it with a poll, they may not be able to proceed. This is the reason I love US.
I could however have exaggerated or misreported things here, please pardon me I am not from US and haven't been there.