Exploitation of the town's resources was banned via banning bitcoin mining. They could have just raised the prices on heavy commercial use, but they did not. There's another commercial entity here that bribed the city mayor/council to ban bitcoin mining instead and keep the prices low for them.
CryptoPonzi BTFO
Oliver Ward
Blake Powell
If they want to they effectively can. They can get any big mining operation, small ones don't make a difference.
They may want industry to settle in. Bitcoin isn't a good industry, it employs nearly nobody and generates little no taxes.
Henry Taylor
that's a good point. i wonder how much this really affects personal mining though. the article mentions commercial zoning permits, I imagine warehouses filled with miners being banned, but I can also see them coming down on anyone with a massive power bill on their house and declaring it not zoned for that.
solar would make it irrelevant but if solar was cost effective miners would already be doing it. more proof solar is a meme in it's current state.
Wyatt Thomas
It was illegal to have certain programs on your hard drive while traveling out of USA, because cryptography was considered military tool and export of military tools was forbidden or something.
Charles Johnson
Back then debian had "non-us" mirrors (obviously outside the US) where you could download those dangerous codes.
Matthew Miller
...
Thomas Campbell
I thought it was backwards where the US had encryption, but couldn't include encryption in software it exported to other countries.
Daniel Hall
Encryption was classified as munition for historical reasons (way back, only the military had crypto, and before cheap computers it made sense average people wouldn't need it). That t-shirt contained RSA, making it legally a munition. The point wasn't to travel overseas with it (the code isn't that hard and the algorithm was public), I think, but show how ridiculous the whole situation was.
Yes, that's how it was. The problem for distros is they wanted anyone, anywhere, to be able to download, so they couldn't host crypto packages in the US or they'd be breaking the law when someone downloaded from elsewhere. I don't know how others handled it, but debian simply hosted these specific packages outside the US (which was perfectly legal if the teams behind them weren't working in the US, but I don't know how legal it was for a US dev to contribute code).
Brandon Sanchez
literally means nothing
Jonathan Cox
Would you be genuinely surprised by getting detained by Homeland Security and your shit thoroughly searched and/or confiscated because of you wearing a "this shirt is a munition" shirt at an airport? Conversely, would you be surprised by getting bit by a dog after poking him with a stick?