Oddbean new post about login | logout Also, as an irony, you have virtually unlimited, almost free electricity. In a purely selfish way, you have oil wealth and now cobalt wealth, making you pretty much the richest country on the planet. If you as a country started seriously mining Bitcoin, you'd be the ultimate triple threat and the rest of us would all be doomed to a life of poverty and servitude. But, despite this, you are correct, Norway leads the world on almost every moral and sovereign front. If Norway bans mining, either directly or by stealth that would send incredibly bad signals to the rest of the world. I wish you freedom and self sovereignty, from the UK. Also, I want to move to Norway, seriously......
Perhaps our electricity is unlimited and almost free in theory, but in practice households pay a lot more than we used to since we started exporting a lot more of it. Without much more investment into energy production, we are poised to run into shortages as we dedicate a larger portion of our electricity to our "green transition". Most of our new energy production has been on-shore wind farms, which is very unpopular due to its devastation on our nature. So we have the electricity we have, and it's not enough - for the first time in Norwegian history. Bitcoin is already very unpopular in Norway. I don't see how this mining ban can be stopped, unfortunately. At this point I just hope they don't accidentally forbid using the SHA-256 algorithm. They're not tech savvy.