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Comment by olefoo | Hacker News Reader

There is also the viewpoint that bitcoin was a crime from beginning to end. That the goals of it's creation were to provide an unpreventable vector for money laundering. That it's current function of undermining the dollar order is also an intended result.

And let us not; in this age of ecological collapse, forget the emissions impact of cryptocurrencies.

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These energy/CO2 costs existed before crypto. The carbon footprint of something like Bank of America or VISA are not zero, it's just that we are more comfortable accepting these as "productive" because they're way less direct. For example, the CO2 cost of heating the Bank of America tower in Manhattan during the winter or cooling it in the summer feels different than the energy consumed by various mining rigs.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if crypto was actually way more efficient energy-wise than the centralized institutions that are needed to support the current system.

I googled some orders of magnitudes. Bank of America total scope 1 and scope 2 emissions (all buildings + travel + other stuff) were about 1 million tons co2 per year [1].

A lower bound on Bitcoin mining emissions was 20 million tons in 2018. [2]

Of course there are more than one bank, banks perform a lot of functions that crypto doesn't, etc.

[1] https://about.bankofamerica.com/assets/pdf/Bank-of-America-2... [2] http://ceepr.mit.edu/files/papers/2018-018.pdf

That's interesting, thanks for the calculation!

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