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Comment by Taek | Hacker News Reader

That's not a problem unique to crypto, it's true of all manufacturing. And honestly I think the solution is to declare war (whether via sanctions, violence, or some other means) on regions that are refusing to be responsible with the global ecosystem.

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.

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The difference between manufacturing and crypto is that manufacturing actually, you know, manufactures stuff. It makes stuff that is useful to people. It contributes to human society.

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.

This problem is specific to proof of work systems. Alternative solutions are already being designed and implemented. Whether existing coins like bitcoin, ethereum and monero will implement these new systems is unknown.

> 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.

> The energy spent guarantees the integrity of the decentralized ledgers that power cryptocurrencies.

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.

How is it not? With these systems people can transact with anyone else on the planet with near complete privacy and with no need to trust any third party. This is world-changing technology.

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.

Whether or not other systems are possible is not really relevant: cryptocurrencies as they exist today work like this. The fact that one day potentially we will have proof-of-stake doesn't change the fact that today we are destroying the earth for no reason at all.

Destroying the planet? Don't exaggerate. Even the submitted article has the following disclaimer:

> 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.

It's important to undersrand that the EU and the US account for ~25% of the world economy each. They could push reforms unilaterally if they so desired. They just don't, because it's convenient to their business interests.

I agree with you. And the irony is that the western wealthiest countries have the highest carbon footprint per capita. So the biggest impact would be made by changing our own lifestyles, but it's easier to rip on crypto art than give up your laundry dryer or SUV.

It might make NFT fans feel better to imagine their detractors getting around in an SUV, but I think you’d find that a lot of us are anti-SUV (both aesthetically and in favor of different incentives around fuel consumption) as well.

Not an NFT fan but point taken. We need to go at this from all directions, but picking energy use cases one by one will make a mess of it. We need incentives at the base layers (energy production, fuels etc.)

Well said, though jumping to violence so quickly is.. concerning. It does appear that there's a coordination / commons problem here that might not be easy to resolve without force

Again though, sanctions work for manufacturing but not for cryptocurrencies. Iran is sanctioned from banking from the US and EU but is still a major Bitcoin mining center.

All it takes is for the US and EU to ban cryptocurrency itself and the problem goes away. It doesn't matter if mining is done in countries beyond their borders because the demand will go through the floor and those countries will have no incentive to keep wasting energy on it.

The idea that cryptocurrency is beyond government control is fundamentally wrong. Most people don't want to be criminals.

Yes, they could block the fiat pipes out instead of the crypto pipes in. Even if it wasn’t a perfect plug, it would devastate the prices and might cause the whole industry to unravel.

Rather than declaring war which is impractical, you can work out a fine based on tons of CO2 or whatever and put it as a tariff on their exports.

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