What a lot of people forget to realize when they talk about how much energy crypto uses is how much energy the systems that are currently in place are already using, which crypto has the potential to replace.
One such example might be property ownership and title companies. Title companies are big business. They have large buildings, they have many employees. The sum total of the resources being used by title companies have a huge carbon footprint.
Crypto could eliminate title companies. A blockchain is the perfect solution for storing records of property ownership in a way that is incredibly well-suited for the mostly digital age we find ourselves in, and would be vastly more efficient than the way we currently manage property ownership and transfer.
If blockchain tech becomes relevant to the point where we should be concerned about its carbon footprint, that means it's replacing things which currently exist which already have a huge carbon footprint.
Ah yes, nothing like losing the title to your house because you can't remember the password to decrypt your private key.
The more relevant aspect of blockchain in this example is the hashed distributed ledger, not the transactional nature of it. In fact, there is no reason you'd need to use PKC type transactions at all.
All the banks in the world expend far, far more energy than any small country, probably any medium country as well. And banking is only one of the many things that could be changed by blockchain tech.
There are thousands upon thousands of banks around the world. Each one of these banks is going to have at least one branch. Some have tens of branches. Some have hundreds. A few might have thousands. Each of these branches is going to have at least a handful of employees. Some will have more like 10-50. Then there are the corporate structures to the banks, entirely outside of retail locations. Thousands upon thousands of corporate employees for the big banks, hundreds as you go down.
The result is hundreds of thousands of retail bank branches (if not millions), and definitely millions of bank employees.
That is just relevant to the people and building upkeep (air condition, lighting, etc) for retail locations.
Then you have the fact that big banks will have their own datacenters. Any bank with online banking will need to be consuming a lot of electricity to host those services. Any bank with telephone banking needs to consume energy in order to keep those phone lines available. A lot of these banks will then either be integrating with each other or integrating with a 3rd party for more modern settlement. Either way, this process consumes electricity.
Then there is the amount of paper / other supplies that these countless banks are consuming. It's a lot. All of these things have an associated energy cost.
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But you think there is the slightest chance that bitcoin/ethereum/etc are consuming an equivalent amount of energy and resources? Really?
Throw in the fact that a lot of mining operations are utilizing waste energy and you have yourself a consumption comparison that is laughable considering how tiny blockchain is compared to banking.
The additional energy draw is using renewable sources for most of the mining hashrate
Early adopters benefit because they incur more risk than later adopters.
I don't understand this reasoning: is "X is bad but Y is worse" supposed to convince people that X is actually good?
I think everybody with sufficient information would agree that we should limit both harmful mineral extraction and the runaway energy usage of cryptocurrencies.
Maybe don't read things that are not written or said? My point is that you think cryptocurrencies have a negative impact on global warming so I think you probably feel the same way about mineral extraction.
Most people will fight any new information that contradicts their held beliefs so I won't suggest you look at the use of renewable energy in cryptocurrency mining or try to convince you that most miners optimise their costs by using solar and hydro power.
Phrased as such, it sounds like you're calling me or the GP a hypocrite. But to be clear, I do care about mineral extraction, and I try to make choices as a consumer that limit my (relatively small) effect on the overall market.
I have quite a few friends who work in the cryptocurrency space (either at ICO'd firms or as professional auditors), so I'm familiar with the economics of choosing clean energy sources. But that neither factors in the net increase in grid demand nor the double-bind of hydro power in places like China. So I don't think we're off the hook, morally speaking.