Proof-of-work coin mining is a scourge on the environment and the PC component market.
I mean, maybe you think their choice to deploy as an ERC20 was a bad choice; fine. But they're not adding any additional computation to the environment.
I don't understand how it's possible to think that LivePeer is bad for the environment without thinking the same thing about, for example, Elastic Transcoder. Your comment reads like a non-sequitur to me.
I'm not familiar with the nitty-gritty, but video transcoding seems to me to be something that can be verified much, much more cheaply than performed.
FWIW, I think they're already launched, so do feel free to break it.
Livepeer uses cryptographic signatures to prove authenticity of the video transcoding results, and that signature can be used as proof to punish cheaters (if you signed the result, you are responsible for the correctness - and since it's easy to validate whether the transcoding is done correctly, anyone can use that signature to punish you by taking away your stake). If no one cheats, no one gets punished. Since the cheater doesn't know how many people are monitoring the results, their best strategy is to be honest.
>Iceland, which is another hot spot for Bitcoin miners, makes use of 100 percent renewable geothermal and hydropower energy sources. The clean energy researcher explains that in this case, the energy demand for miners is almost irrelevant to the health of the environment.