Cryptocurrency mining consumes the same amount of power as Argentina or whatever the figure is, for no benefit.
If wrapping a rainbow flag around it and studiously noting everyone's pronouns made that "ok", it'd frankly be even more perverse.
If wrapping a rainbow flag around it and studiously noting everyone's pronouns made that "ok", it'd frankly be even more perverse.
IMO the environmental impact of crypto is also completely overstated. There are issues so much bigger than crypto's energy consumption that it's basically just a rounding error.
I'm massively excited for the potential of cryptocurrency, but there's a reason ETH is moving to PoS, and newer PoW projects aren't getting the same kind of traction.
- Decentralized payment infrastructure that can't be taken down.
- Currency that isn't issued by a government
- Open financial applications
- Pseudonymous payments (depending on the crypto)
- Infrastructure for fully transparent payments and analysis of value flows (governments and institutions should be using these)
- applications whose source can be verified. Even if a web application you use promises they handle your data securely and publish source code, there's no guarantee what they're running is actually what they've published. Decentralized applications can be interacted with and viewed by anyone (even if compiled to bytecode, you can verify the contracts they've published are accurate)
- Decentralized governance (the potential of this is massive, even moreso when coupled with decentralized identity)
- Access to financial instruments typically only accessible to institutions.
- A global, border-agnostic payment network
What about the fact that china is pumping out something like 1/3rd of the world's emissions?
What about excess livestock?
FWIW - I do agree that PoW is not ideal and will largely be phased out, but there are lower hanging fruit with regards to our climate change crisis than cryptocurrencies.
Livestock also lead to excessive greenhouse gas emissions, so I don't buy it either, even if it could lead to juicy steak.
Lots of lower cap proof of stake cryptos (and Ethereum, which is moving to Proof of Stake) are likely to outperform bitcoin in terms of percentage gains anyway.
Try to think of it in tons of coal. You proud of that?
The 'costs' of proof of work are indeed high though. The amount of energy consumed for one bitcoin transaction to happen is astounding. My point above is that there are numerous alternatives (which in my opinion are poised to topple bitcoin), which don't have these costs.
I disagree with 'no benefit to the species' (even bitcoin has many benefits). But the costs of bitcoin are also high, and the benefits can come without those costs.
The government, tax, justice systems and regulatory bodies are made out of people, you can't fool them with some "haha it's not USD" technicality like a sovereign citizen. It's all the same at the end except for a bunch of wasted energy.
Even though there are a fair share of 'sovereign citizens' among cryptocurrency types, there are many who just see the potential for integration with existing infrastructure. Personally I'm more socialist-leaning, and want governments to embrace technology that will also empower them to provide sweeping social benefits for their citizens in a transparent way.
At the same time, the leading crypto platforms enable an amount of transparency that isn't possible with traditional financial institutions.
The wasted energy argument has already been addressed, and is specific to proof of work platforms which are the minority of the top 50. After the ETH2 transition is complete, it's likely proof of stake crypto will have a larger market cap than proof of work crypto.