I think it's a mistake to single out crypto as a unique actor in this growing issue, and that we should look for solutions that will generalize across all industries. Because all industries are contributing to the modern ecological crisis.
And I'll add, crypto does not care if energy becomes more scarce. What crypto cares about is that energy is equally scarce for attackers and defenders. If, due to regulation of production, the cost of energy goes up, crypto will use proportionally less energy and keep chugging away quite happily.
The idea that cryptocurrency is beyond government control is fundamentally wrong. Most people don't want to be criminals.
The energy consumed to power cryptocurrencies contributes nothing to society. It's literally destroying the environment in order to run as many SHA256 hashes as possible per second.
> The energy consumed to power cryptocurrencies contributes nothing to society.
This is simply false. The energy spent guarantees the integrity of the decentralized ledgers that power cryptocurrencies. Perhaps there are better solutions out there but it's wrong to say that the energy consumption produces no value.
> Of course even these figures — and anything an individual does — are a drop in the ocean of global emissions (~50 billion tonnes CO2e).
There are much higher priority targets for carbon footprint reduction. Eventually cryptocurrencies will use different less expensive algorithms and electricity generation and storage will be a lot friendlier to the environment.
This is not of anywhere near sufficient value to society to justify the obscene amount of resources consumed for it. Personally, I would say that it, in fact, contributes nothing to society.
You could say that the system is inefficient. I agree with that. It's not just energy consumption and carbon emissions either. Users literally pay the cost in the form of ridiculously expensive transaction processing fees. It must change in order to be more efficient and less expensive to use.
I don't agree that it doesn't offer sufficient value to society. It's extremely valuable technology that is currently being limited by high costs. We need to drive the costs down.
> there is no way to tax them
You put a heavy tax on power consumption. Done.
> just move to somewhere with less environmental controls
Crypto isn't the first industry to take advantage of tax arbitrage. By this logic, few businesses should run in the US.. and yet the only ones commonly taking advantage of havens and tax arb are larger orgs with the resources to structure.
Business and money are fluid, but not that fluid.
Manufacturing and moving physical goods is not fluid, but creating and transferring a fungible, pseudonymous asset is. It would be possible for a country to block or put a tariff on imported goods from a country that didn’t do enough to curb carbon emissions, but it wouldn’t be possible to block imports of crypto without overstepping.
The only reason anyone cares about this stuff is that you can sell it to the next sucker for real money. Make that unappealingly expensive, and the retail investors will go away.
In theory, if the world had a high energy PoW blockchain solely powered by solar energy, that would be ecologically harmless.
Solar panels that could otherwise be used to replace fossil fuels.
Yes, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that, because supply isn't constrained.
For any good (or service) for which there is sufficient supply elasticity, when demand increases prices increase temporarily, but that's then followed by an increase in supply to meet that demand.
The inflation adjusted price of high-end GPUs has been basically flat since 2000 -> https://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/103399-inflation-adjust.... Insofar as there has been variation, it has largely been due to other confounding variables.
In other words, solar panels will be used to replace fossil fuels no matter what. As long as there's a carbon tax, all crypto mining does is stimulate the demand for solar panels. Right now, I stand to gain a lot of money by starting a solar panel manufacturing company (because of crypto), but the net result (fully developed solar panel supply chains) is still good for humanity no matter what. That only happens if we have targeted environmental policy that magnifies that incentive.