Mozilla Foundation pausing cryptocurrency donations | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla Foundation pausing cryptocurrency donations

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459 pointscpeterso679 comments

Between this and Tesla citing climate change as a reason for dropping crypto, this is actually a very interesting shift, and one that might be very bad for crypto.

The amount of money people actually donated or spent with crypto has always been minimal. (Wish I had harder numbers to back this up, but you can see second-order effects from e.g. Steam adding Bitcoin support but then taking it away. Or how Bitpay has stagnated heavily, while a purely investment/speculation platform like Coinbase is worth billions.) However, for a long time, the benefit of accepting Bitcoin as payment was the marketing. Accepting crypto signaled that you were a cool company, you could put out a press release and the news media would run articles about how X service is now accepting cryptocurrency for payments.

The same thing happened again years later with "blockchain." Remember Kodakcoin? Remember Long Island Blockchain? Nothing ever really surfaced from these initiatives, but again, it was all about that big marketing hype that came from saying your company was going to use blockchain for... something.

Where it gets interesting is... what if crypto becomes anathema? What if accepting crypto or holding crypto starts become so closely associated with directly causing climate change, that no company is going to want to be openly associated with crypto, NFTs, etc due to the negative association?

You have one side hyping up Web3 as the next evolution as the web, but if the perception of crypto continues to be that it's a significant contributor to climate change -- regardless of how true that may be -- we could see a major decline in mainstream support.

I wonder how those who work from a third world country like Argentina with a hard fiat currency control from our government will achieve to get paid without being robbed by it.

I'll explain: today our government forbids us from buying foreign currency such as the US dollar (200 tops for a really REALLY small portion of the population) so a black market has been at place since the prohibition started many years ago. In this market each dollar corresponds to 200 pesos while the government states each one costs around 100 pesos.

So, if you work for a company outside, and the pay you 1000 usd, you get 100,000 pesos when you could get 200,000 in reality. Not only that, you also are forbid from buying dollars, so if you want to get them to avoid our rampant inflation (50% average, around 100% for groceries) you only have the black market which is around 200 pesos.

I know about the damages to the cliamte of crypto mining but consider also that there are some beneficial uses of these currencies for people like me who don't live in the first world.

People have always used dollars on countries that prohibit it. On Brazil we used to have even official black market prices, that were announced nationwide on TV every day.

Anyway, yes, non-discriminating electronic money movement is a great product that improves the lives of many people. Blockchains are a very bad implementation of that concept and remove a lot of its potential value. If we are able to get some other one working, it's for the better.

Blockchains are just starting. There are major innovations under development right now that will massively reduce the energy consumption, and increase the scalability, of blockchains, like zk-Rollups.

Even if what you are saying is true, that will not solve anything for Bitcoin, which is the majority consumer of electricity for the crypto world

This is basically a verbatim quote from 2016/2017 when Microsoft, IBM and other tech giants were starting blockchain research divisions, all of which were dissolved by last year lol

13 years is not just starting.

Crypto won’t fix political and economic problems but only worsen them.

The debt that was imposed on you is inhumane and you shouldn’t have to pay it. The resulting attempts to solve it by selling public infrastructure only makes it worse.

Throwing crypto into the mix is pure insanity. It’s just gambling at a crippling ecological cost.

> Crypto won’t fix political and economic problems but only worsen them.

Let me guess... have you mostly experienced life in developed countries with relatively stable financial system, non-fluctuating consumer goods prices? There are a ton of people living under extremely corrupt and dysfunctional financial systems, whose #1 concern in life is to make sure their purchasing power does not disappear the next day. For them, land, gold, and bitcoin solve a problem. Americans with simplistic "I <3 Bernanke" opinions sure assume that will "worsen" stuff; true or not, it is irrelevant to the individual in such countries who will keep on trying hard to accumulate every non-cash asset they can get their hands on.

> There are a ton of people living under extremely corrupt and dysfunctional financial systems

Those aren't the people using crypto, though. And to the extent that people are using crypto as alternative to their local currency, they're almost all using it for some form of laundering (e.g. wealth extraction from the PRC).

Objectively, crypto has been far more volatile than fiat currencies as a whole, not less. BTC is literally down 16% over the last three weeks! If you want stability just buy a bunch of diverse money market or national bond securities; that strategy survived the great depression and WW2, it can surely handle a pandemic recovery.

And what happens when the internet goes out?

https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/bitcoin-network-power...

I have the impression this shittyness is inevitably coming towards the U.S., so Americans won't stay in ignorance for too long.

Do you have anything to back up your point?

Prices and the financial market all boil down to communication systems. Inflation alone is extremely costly and keeps the poor poorer all around the world. I won't get into the carnage of how bankers live and their consequences to society.

Blockchain is costly to run, but I'd day it's way, WAY cheaper than what we have today.

There's the extreme example of Argentina and many others. Even the U.S. is starting to see the burden of this system.

And for how long do the Chinese people will work for pennies of a dollar to keep the American dream while the U.S. print fictitious money at will?

Talk about sustainability, but how sustainable this is? I don't think this system will evolve to something decent. Something new has got to rise and replace it.

OK so you have a economic problem where capital controls on dollars are untenable to you and you can't move them through the traditional banking system without some mandatory and seriously depreciating exchanges. Instead you switch to crypto and hold the USD funds for safe keeping until transferring back out the country. That may not fix structural issues but if it fixes things for you personally it sounds like some sort of win and better than nothing.

Why shouldn't they pay it? Who should?

In the end it is Argentinians who vote or not vote, protest or not protest. I was born in Italy after decades of extreme debt that we pay to this date to our creditors. It is the responsibility of the previous generations in the end and it falls on us.

Crippling ecological cost? Think of the crippling cost of printing actual money from cut trees. Pressing daily newspapers can be considered insanity.

Cryto is fixing economic structural problems for the parent poster.

If you're forbidden to do that, what happens when your government forbids you to use crypto for the reasons you just stated?

China already did, what's to stop yours?

Cryptos are being used as a way of payment and then via a series of conversions and exchanges (to the point that it is ridiculous what we have to do to avoid being robbed by our government) we get our national currency for our daily groceries, bitcoin acceptance is still extremely rare here afaik.

And it's mainly freelancers, IT workers, designers, etc. But the number of people who work this way is increasing every year since we are running out of options as well (no jobs besides delivery apps, working for the state doing basically nothing, etc.).

Kinda related: IT companies from our country are already complaining that there is an "unfair" competition because we get paid, for example 2000 USD, which is a very low sum for IT workers abroad but is a huge number for us while these companies can't even compete with that number for the same employee.

So I believe sooner or later the government will take advantage of their complains to try, somehow, to control the money inflow from people who work for companies abroad.

This is exactly what would happen if Argentinians started using cryptocurrency in large numbers, and the government found out about it.

A government that wants tight control over currency exchange will treat crypto the same way it treats other foreign currency: limit exchange, or ban it, etc.

The commenter already says that there’s a black market for converting pesos to USD, which is forbidden . I’m guessing a lot of that happens in person with cash? I can’t imagine the government could enforce a ban on cryptocurrencies any more effectively than it currently can with cash.

China may have banned crypto 'publicly' but by design they would have a hard time truly banning it given that wallet addresses aren't associated with personal identity and blockchains which don't make transactions easily browsable exist too.

Their ban has the effect of preventing centralized exchanges from providing services in China. But there's no practical way for them to crack down on decentralized exchanges and/or people trading them in-person.

In the above hypothetical case, if his government were to ban use of crypto, he'd still be better off in the sense that the government isn't going to be able to just find the coins hidden in a mattress the way they might with physical money. It'd be illegal either way, but one way would be much harder to trace.

This is of course ignoring the volatility involved in holding crypto, which somewhat weakens the stated benefit given that the goal seems to be to avoid volatility of the local currency.

Many governments forbid getting paid cash under the table, especially without a visa.

I believe history will show cryptocurrency to be even more resilient than cash as an international, sometimes private, means of transferring value between individuals.

People will do what it takes to survive. Regulations can slow but never stop “illegal” workers.

Does anyone local actually accept BTC? That is, do you need to sell your BTC for either USD or pesos before using your money for rent / groceries / phone bill / etc?

Incidentally, your defense of BTC is pretty much "it makes it possible to skirt laws and taxes" which seems to be the elephant in the crypto living room.

In Argentina taxes total taxes on employee income if you pay all taxes can be above 100%. This is not hyperbole, I spoke with an accountant at a construction company there. They basically had to put 70% of their labor off the books.

Skirting the law is required in Argentina. I can see the appeal for Argentinians.

The Argentinian govt. could just as easily put the same restrictions as it does on USD today. They can (if they want to) also ensure that no commercial establishment accepts BTC.

We have wallet apps for payments, some give you a debit card to automatically sell crypto for pesos.

I sympathize, but your problems won't be solved by cryptocurrencies. Sure, those might patch things over, but systemic change is needed, or it'll be a never-ending series of such patches.

I completely agree. Just wanted to point out our situation (which may be repeated across the globe in some other countries with corrupt governments as ours). I get the feeling that sometimes people from the first world believe bitcoin & ethereum and other currencies are only used for financial speculation but we've found a pragmatic use for them due to our conditions.

Cryto is that systemic change.

Systemic changes take decades, and that's if you have the power, which in most of those cases people don't. But they have to keep on living in the meantime.

This is a governance problem, not a technology problem. Your government could just add easily forbid you from buying or using crypto. What then?

The government could ban drugs. What then? Guess you won't find them anymore. Definitely no illegal drugs in Argentina.

Breaking the law is a requirement for survival there. Basically all the big employers have to do it, no one seriously pays all their taxes as they can be non-hyperbolically over 100%.

I don’t understand your point. The government already forbids buying USD and there is already a black market for that.

Well, you will get the full value of your pay, but you'll also be screwed by the collapse of the local currency until the local economy rebuilds itself using crypto.

Governments do such things to try and paper over economy shortfalls, keeping everything running kinda-less-bad-ish than if they just let it fail and start over.

When you are in this situation where a USD only gets half as many pesos as the free market dictates, that means a peso is only worth half as much as the government is trying to pretend it is, and (this is the point of the currency controls) they are trying to allow only the 50% of most productive usages of USD to go ahead, possibly in the hopes of getting enough USD back into the country that they can get the free market value back up to where they think it should be, and then stop pretending.

The solution to Argentinas trouble is not to turn digital gambling tokens into a working currency.

Damage to the climate is highly exaggerated. People waste insane amounts of energy washing their clothes every day, keeping their tropical homes at 60 degrees, commuting hours each day, maintaining incredibly polluting industry such as the military, etc.

Not to mention the energy currently used by traditional financial services and banks.

We are talking about a small small fraction of the worlds energy use. Its virtue signaling by wealthy 1st world people who simply dont get it.

That's a good reason to vote better and political activism. Crypto currencies are in no way a solution to the scenario you describe.

It's the activists that are causing the problems in Argentina.

Argentinians who want to avoid their own currency would be 10x better served by USD than BTC.

The USD inflated 6% over the last year, and getting it into the country is often difficult, but it is indeed very popular here.

This is true but you van only buy a few dollars from official sources, after that you need to go black market where thry will screw you over with fake bills.

Why does it have to be US dollar? What about Canadian, Australian dollars, or Euros?

Tradition.

I'm also from Aegentina and a climate doomer. I will keep burning resources for personal profit, my own personal contribution will not move the needle that much anyway.

Might sound mean but not supporting pow crypto helps you more than supporting it doe to climate change.

Also pos is being worked on. It will be an option soon.

> what if crypto becomes anathema?

From your lips to God’s ears.

I’ve often wished there were a way to organize against crypto, since the incentives are so high for true believers to organize for it and find more people to buy into the ecosystem.

To me they're destroying themselves. NFTs are the worst so far and seemed to be prepped for a huge backlash.

https://twitter.com/carsonturner/status/1477520574620606465

And I just saw this article on Barron's today which compared BTC to a tech stock rather than a store of value like gold.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/coinbase-marathon-digital-m...

NFTs have provoked a huge backlash amongst artists. I think often it is a little underinformed (though the conclusion is usually pretty sound) but you're not going to win hearts and minds when the first most of them hear about the tech is other people making lots of money off stolen or mass-produced art.

Yeah the incentive system is stacked for people to invest in crypto - everyone in the ecosystem is pulling for it to make money off their investments - and thats what this is at this point. There are for sure some cool projects but the lions share is to make money (hence the big push from VCs - see A16z investments) and they are taking a lot of talent to if Chris Dixon's comment's are accurate.

What better way to make something stick then make peoples livelihoods depend on it?

We all worship the thing that feeds us.

> I’ve often wished there were a way to organize against crypto

How about we rally to completely ban crypto. Talking about this isn't going to solve anything.

Since when has banning new technology been a good idea? I can't believe how many "technologists" want to take the same policy stance as the CCP on decentralization.

While certain implementations of crypto are certainly a problem, rallying to ban it seems to imply there are no redeeming qualities and no path forward that addresses the downsides.

Is that your position on this, or am I missing something?

I love how the tech bros who are so fast to consider banning cryptography absurd for being math, are frothing at the mouth to ban cryptocurrency.

you could only drive it into the underground where it sprouted from in the first place, it would inevitably return. the only way to stop this form of crypto is to invent a better one

> I’ve often wished there were a way to organize against crypto,

From my perspective, it's a peaceful revolution against a corrupt global status quo.

The only people hurt by this false perception (bitcoin makes renewables more profitable by acting as a buyer when nobody else will) are people who don't buy bitcoin. And it's their loss.

What would you say to someone in el salvador who's happy accepting bitcoin because they no longer have to trek to ATM's and risk getting mugged?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVVZXUFItZY

> The only people hurt by this false perception (bitcoin makes renewables more profitable by acting as a buyer when nobody else will) are people who don't buy bitcoin. And it's their loss.

And everyone harmed by the rather sizable ecosystem of outright crime that takes advantage of cryptocurrency.

> What would you say to someone in el salvador who's happy accepting bitcoin

They aren't:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/some-salvadorans-claim-funds-...

Thank you for this response. I think this whole issue is always addressed from the point of view of people from well developed first world countries, such as aynthing related to climate change. Sometimes I wished they lived just one year in my country with 50% of inflation and see how they deal with that...

> bitcoin makes renewables more profitable by acting as a buyer when nobody else will

Yes, and landmines make blood donation more profitable, but that doesn't make them a net moral good.

> From my perspective, it's a peaceful revolution against a corrupt global status quo.

It's not though. It's broadly a combination of ignorance of how the present system actually works, tinfoil hat economics and anarcocapitalist libertarian ideology.

It replaces one set of corruption (accountable to the people) with a whole new set of corruption. Money laundering, crime, wash trading, tape painting, spoof orders - an Inspector Gadget run shadow bank in the Bahamas printing ersatz dollars - the whole shebang. Out with the old criminals technically accountable, in with new criminals definitely unaccountable. This is strictly worse by all metrics. And that's before we even broach how terrible deflationary money actually is in practice.

> The only people hurt by this false perception (bitcoin incentives clean energy production and makes renewables more profitable) are people who don't buy bitcoin. And it's their loss.

If you build a bunch of green energy then waste it all, you haven't incentivized anything. You've just wasted a bunch of green energy - without that benefit accruing to the actual grid. Any time the price goes up so does the budget for waste. It's everyone's loss.

> What would you say to someone in el salvador who's happy accepting bitcoin because they no longer have to trek to ATM's and risk getting mugged?

I would say if they're happy with digital money they can open a Wise Multicurrency account.

But they're not happy accepting bitcoin. [1, 2] They're being forced by an authoritarian dictator to accept it, at gunpoint.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/majority-salvadorans-do-n...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-58579415

Is “ making renewables profitable” the new talking point? I’m glad for the change because I got tired reading about all these dams China had apparently built in areas not connected to their grid.

The crypto status quo is no different from the global status quo. The only difference is the set of people at the top is somewhat permuted by the set of people who were lucky enough to be interested in magic internet money back in 2009.

> makes renewables more profitable

In other words - increases energy prices for everyone.

In what way is crypto not anathema already? HN has basically been dumpstering it for over a decade now at every opportunity, the general public considers it some imaginary money ponzi scheme scam, over the last year people are laughing at the stupidity of things like NFTs and meme altcoins. It was only very recently that anyone in finance has even begun to consider it anything but a complete joke. Of the people that don't consider it an outright scam, probably 90% of those people are insufferable cryptobros or scammers who latch onto the buzzword, who make hating cryptocurrencies very easy.

I wouldn't be surprised if all of the media attention it gets is mostly because of how much most everyone hates it. It is the thing that tech inclined people love to hate watch.

It’s not that simple: the very large amount of money VCs and other speculators have pumped into it has ensured a steady stream of favorable coverage for years. The stories tend to get a hostile reaction from people who understand technology or economics but each round finds new people who think there might be a pony somewhere since they’ve been hearing about it for years.

It's currently being propped up by big, legitimate corporations: everything from sports organizations like the NBA, UFC, and WWE to food brands like Taco Bell and McDonalds are pumping out NFTs. The Lakers are now playing in the Crypto.com arena, even.

On HN it certainly gets a lot of hate, but there's not so much in the mainstream right now. I don't think the Lakers would have agreed to a sponsorship where they play in the BP Oil Fracking Arena, for instance.

How about the Sneaker Brand Sweat Shop Arena though? Where do people draw their line with ethics and caring about the impact of what they support?

HN are out of date boomers

> Or how Bitpay has stagnated heavily...

Bitpay publishes their merchant mix and it's literally all money laundering and crime havens. 45% (!!) Gift Cards. 15% "Internet." 12.25% "VPN." 9% "Computer games." [1]

That's 81.25% the darkest shadiest industries out there.

[1] https://bitpay.com/stats/

I wonder in which category OnlyFans, Chaturbate, etc. fall? Normally porn is quick with adopting new tech. (or don't they accept crypto?)

That's utter bullshit. APMEX (precious metals) for instance allows BitPay, and that's actually how I buy bullion from them because it's the fastest way to clear payment without paying credit card fees. All the money I spent was legal income reported on a W-2.

Precious metals is 3.77% of Bitpay volume. Which part exactly is bullshit? I'm quoting their site.

There are crypto currencies by actual computer scientists, like Algorand by Silvio Micali, that seem to be much further ahead than others when it comes to low-emissions proof-of-stake implementations. In Algorand's case, they even offset the carbon emissions of the network and as such their blockchain is effectively carbon neutral. Or as carbon neutral you can be when you use offsetting.

At least to me, they look more intriguing than all the older crypto currencies. I always wondered why you would bother with all these inefficiencies for some lofty idea of 'decentralisation' when we have run of the mill consensus algorithms and distributed systems that just work.

When people don't adopt superior tech that's a sign that crypto is about something else.

Or, it could be just the usual first mover advantage.

Algorand relies completely on centralized relay nodes. You might as well just use a centralized service which will be more efficient and cheaper.

Afaik not for the consensus mechanism itself, which is done by permissionless participation nodes. I think they plan to move the relay nodes to a permissionless model as well.

I've always tried to state the problems with crypto here every time it comes up, but there is such a huge incentive for the people invested in crypto to pump it, that every year the number of crypto pumpers grows more numerous than people like me.

There really is a place for a decentralized currency to replace paypal, but none of the cryptos live up to it. In fact I just tried using crypto again a few days ago and it was a terrible experience just like it was 10 years ago. My bitcoin transaction took over 30 minutes to verify so I tried changing to ethereum, and the transaction fee there is $8...

BTW, PayPal is absolutely terrible. That's a very low bar for crypto to clear. SEPA (=normal bank) money transfers or direct debit within Europe, TransferWise, etc. are much better options than PayPal (or crypto) for most purposes.

My email transfers regularly take 30-45 minutes and cost 1.00

My lightning transfers take 1 second and cost less than 1 penny.

How can the cost of the transfer be less than the cost of the energy it is claimed it uses? I could never figure thst out.

A BTC transaction (on chain) brings the miner about $100, but most of that is from the coinbase mining reward, and a small part only from transaction fees (though that proportion will grow, presumably, as coinbase halves to zero). A good chunk of that will be energy costs, so an on-chain transaction will have significant energy costs (and probably way more than the current average fee of $2.65/tx, which, btw, is more than your "email transfer").

Off-chain transactions (like lightning, or from one exchange account to another at the same exchange, or from one account to another at the Salvadorean "wallet") can of course be quick and cheap, like any centralised banking.

You're not going to get cheap transactions using Bitcoin or Ethereum directly.

There are two wallets that are using newer tech to make cheap + fast transactions happen (while still being decentralized + secure):

- Argent - Uses zkSync which is an L2 that compresses transactions and writes them to Ethereum - costs about 25c per transaction right now.

- Dharma - Uses Polygon which is it's own chain that posts a hash of everything that happened to Ethereum at regular intervals - costs < 1c per transaction right now .

Tell me about it.

USDC would make for a suitable candidate but of course, it's got $25 transaction fees on ETH. USDC-SPL maybe. The last time I tried to move some USDC-ETH, it was cheaper and more convenient to just have FTX wire me the money ($0) then wire it from my bank account to the recipient ($0).

In reality though, a CBDC is probably the best way forward.

To be fair neither Bitcoin nor Eth are aimed toward being a day-to-day currency. Regardless of the original intent Bitcoin is only really useful for hoarding like gold, and Eth in its current state is more about smart contracts than transactions.

If you're truly interested in a decentralized currency there are other projects focused on that.

I'd argue that a lot of the value priced into these currencies are based on the assumption that they'd be usable as a day-to-day currency someday.

1. Start accepting crypto, get a PR bump

2. Stop accepting crypto because you're green, get another PR bump

Mozilla has been accepting it for years, 2017 at least. I imagine nobody donated anything of palpable value because they had to re-announce that they do in fact accept crypto. That's what kicked off the controversy.

Also, I haven't seen Mozilla associated with positive PR for a long time. Much as I love Firefox, it's dead on mobile.

> Much as I love Firefox, it's dead on mobile.

It's my primary browser on mobile and always has been. What am I missing?

> Much as I love Firefox, it's dead on mobile.

What's wrong with Firefox for Android?

(Firefox for iOS is just reskinned WebKit, like all other iOS browsers, but hopefully Apple has to open this up soon)

And simultaneously flush what little good will remained with their users and existing donors. Patience is wearing thin for many when it comes to Firefox.

>Where it gets interesting is... what if crypto becomes anathema? What if accepting crypto or holding crypto starts become so closely associated with directly causing climate change, that no company is going to want to be openly associated with crypto, NFTs, etc due to the negative association?

I think this is going to increasingly become true, and I think it may lead to an interesting and divisive future. I suspect that if Ethereum actually does fully transition to Proof of Stake and the network doesn't suffer any serious issues for a year or two afterwards, its price may surpass Bitcoin's in a few years, and decisions to use/trade/hold Bitcoin vs. Ethereum will become exponentially more ethically, politically, culturally, and tribally charged than they are now.

If that turns out to be the case, I also predict Bitcoin will one day move to a different consensus system that consumes less energy - but it may take a decade, several hard forks, and the (metaphorically) bloodiest internet flamewars and in-fights ever seen before it actually happens.

Isn't it interesting that people who own Ethereum/crypto, are suddenly very ethical and concerned about Bitcoin's energy use? Everything else can consume energy ethically in this world, but using energy to run a decentralized monetary system? No, that must be very bad.

Actually, people wouldn't choose something that doesn't work, just to signal their irrational ethics. Ethereum is not designed to be money, and it has huge array of problems in addition to using weak PoS consensus in the future. It is not properly decentralized, and therefore it can't deliver the promise of money that is equal for all people in the world. In my opinion, it's highly unethical to push Ethereum or other corruptible systems using this environmental narrative.

Most people in Bitcoin, especially big investors, know the difference between these systems, and wouldn't use a PoS currency for any price.

Mark my words, when Ethereum switches to PoS, its price will crash.

The energy usage is mere propaganda spouted from individuals with A/C and heat cranked to 68-72 room temperature, way way inside the survival temperature band of their climate. They don't give a fuck about wasting some energy. Or they give a fuck and they do it anyway, prioritizing their own comforts while considering yours immoral.

Case in point. I think comments like this are going to dominate online discussions much more than they already do over the next few years.

It’s all moot. ETH 2.0 is coming June and it uses proof of stake which uses a tiny fraction of what proof of work uses. All things like this article should do is make you invest in proof of stake coins because they are the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake

Why is it taking so long for proof of stake to happen? They've been talking about it for many years and the fact that none of the mainstream coins have moved to proof of stake and there is no rising new coin that uses it, make me think there's a fundamental issue with it.

It's comically complicated once you get into the details of moving an existing chain over from PoW; the Ethereum developers have really been working on it for years and only now have it in a shape that works for multiple Ethereum clients on a shared test network.

If PoW weren't a climate disaster it would have very obvious appeal due to its orders of magnitude simpler implementation.

Edit: You can learn more here -- https://consensys.net/blog/news/the-state-of-the-merge-an-up...

Doing it in a truly decentralized way with consensus from the community on how to do that on a chain already in motion is no easy task I guess. Vitalik has showed a slide from many years ago with his way too optimistic dates for when proof of stake would be here.

> and the fact that none of the mainstream coins have moved to proof of stake

Three of the top 10 by market cap are already on proof-of-stake.

Even when or if this switch eventually finally happens, if the current inertia keeps going and the idea that "cryptocurrency causes climate change" continues to gain mainstream traction, it's going to be very hard to make people change their beliefs without a huge, concerted marketing campaign.

Geez give humans some credit. A grade school child can understand what 99.95% less energy consumption means.

Hasn't that been a few months from launch since 2019?

People were a bit eager with the announcements, but the real progress is there. A few steps big steps were finished last year and now the big merge is scheduled for 22. https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/

It's actually running on a testnet now. Just ironing out bugs before release.

I'm hearing about eth moving to PoS since years now. It won't happen.

It's been slow, but progress is happening. There's already ~$28 billion worth of ETH staked on the beacon chain. Most of the engineering work for the merge has already happened. A post-merge testnet (Kintsugi) was launched a few weeks ago. If you look at the mainnet readiness checklist [1], the remaining work is largely testing and documentation. Hard to imagine how it could not happen at this point.

[1] https://github.com/ethereum/pm/blob/master/Merge/mainnet-rea...

You'd think so, but it seems that people who have a problem with cryptocurrency in general are already laying the groundwork for the next assault. This is one of the tweets in the linked thread:

https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1478017698676228099

It basically claims that cryptocoins are "sound money", and that "sound money" is inherently racist. I tried to follow the logic in that thread, and, so far as I can tell, it boils down to something akin to "Hitler was a vegetarian, ergo, vegetarianism is bad".

Why June? Isn't that just the difficulty bomb date? I haven't heard anything about the merge happening in June.

https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/merge/

The difficulty bomb will effectively be the end of proof of work as far as I know. I apologize if that is wrong. I used to be an Ethereum miner long ago but haven’t done it for some time.

Why not June? He didn't specify the year after all. :)

You can still use cryptos to pay for unmentionables on the web, extract anonymous payments from crime victims, and most importantly gamble in a wholly unregulated casino.

I'd also note that the unregulated casinos can be (but aren't always) verifiable in how they function, so if you want high assurance that the odds and such are as stated, you can (in some cases) obtain such assurance, despite the lack of regulation.

(but, you'd have to be careful to check the claims and such, and, if you can't or don't have time to check the software yourself, you might have to trust a 3rd party evaluating the system, and possibly there wouldn't be any such organization that you would trust who has done such a check.)

> what if crypto becomes anathema? What if accepting crypto or holding crypto starts become so closely associated with directly causing climate change, that no company is going to want to be openly associated with crypto, NFTs, etc due to the negative association?

This is how the current wave of “web3” marketing started: everyone in cryptocurrency saw the bad reputation building and, being keenly aware that the only value was what you could find a buyer for, started hawking “web3 and pumping up things like NFTs trying to find new reasons for people to put real money into the system.

Do you have any evidence or even anecdotes indicating this is the case? From everything I’ve seen, Web3 hype is from the same people who are still excited about all crypto stuff.

Just here to point out, once again, that there's lots of "crypto" stuff that doesn't use proof of work.

The non-proof-of-work schemes are all either small experiments or World of Warcraft gold with signatures.

I genuinely hope for the environment that other schemes work out, but we’re not there yet.

Denigrate how you will, but they work to transfer value securely, which is what's needed here.

Solana had over 2 billion dollars of volume transacted today. Pretty big experiment.

Proof of stake chains already secure over 50 Billion dollars in value - https://defillama.com/chains. Everything but Ethereum in the top 20 is proof of stake, Ethereum will be transitioning to it this year.

Where? Can you share a link / description?

Iota, nano, algorand kinda cardano.

Only Bitcoin and Eth1 (going away this year) could possibly have that association. You can't just discard an entire technology on this basis. The energy FUD won't stick beyond Bitcoin. Even that will go away when >90% of BTC mining is backed by clean energy. IIRC it's around 50% now.

A single Google Search: 1,080 J

A single Solana transaction: 1,837 J

One eth2 transaction: 126,000 J

Watching an hour of television on a 40 inch+ LCD TV: 540,000 J

https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...

> Only Bitcoin and Eth1 (going away this year) could possibly have that association. You can't just discard an entire technology on this basis.

Are you sure? It's easy to send your message anonymously on the Hand, but I (and many others I've met out there in the real world) have zero interest in acquiring cryptocurrency, regardless of price or potential payoff. It seems more like the biggest tulip trading ponzi scheme in history.

I do enjoy the entertainment it's provided me since I first encountered it in 2008.

I'm not even rich... just disinterested in accumulating wealth in such a stupid manner which contributes no tangible benefit back to society.

> when >90% of BTC mining is backed by clean energy. IIRC it's around 50% now

What? There is no fucking way mining is using anywhere near 50% clean energy.

And using any energy for proof-of-waste is awful. That clean energy could've been used for something productive rather than a hashing lottery.

> on this basis

That's far from the only problem. The bigger problem is that this "technology" only works for crime and does not work as an actual regular currency.

One Bitcoin transaction: 6,995,592,000 J

DuckDuckGo claims to be carbon negative, btw:

https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-goes-carbon-negative/

Solana is an unstable centralised blockchain, majority owned by insiders, the same insiders hyping Solana for the NFT / Web3 garbage by the usual venture capitalists [0]

Not good at all and looks mostly a pump and dump scam to me.

The question is when will the party be over for most late comers to the Solana ponzi scheme.

[0] https://cryptobriefing.com/how-decentralized-is-solana/

If this ends the Eternal September we have in crypto it would be awesome. Crypto has too much marketing and eyes on it nowadays. It wouldn't hurt to turn in down a notch and keep working on it.

> we could see a major decline in mainstream support.

Depends on the definition of mainstream support.

I think that almost everyone that is vested/pro crypto hasc an interest in showing it here.

Normally opinions here are similar to what tweakers ( a popular dutch site for tech enthusiasts) has.

But with crypto there's a huge difference, eg. https://tweakers.net/nieuws/181606/tesla-stopt-met-bitcoin-a... people dislike crypto there, with mentioned reasons.

Even while the "investing" in crypto topic is pretty active: https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/2056096

https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_topics/129

Note: main site for tech enthusiasts in Belgium+Netherlands. So for 28 million people.

> holding crypto starts become so closely associated with directly causing climate change

If that happens, I will be 100% sure what's in peoples heads!

The blocks use the same energy whether they are full of transactions or not.

So it has nothing to do with any organization encouraging transactions or not.

It wouldn’t stop demand when considering a competing theory that all the transactions are speculation, so nobody is missing anything if one place wont accept donations, or that place using their platform to reverse policy on accepting crypto.

> if the perception of crypto continues to be that it's a significant contributor to climate change -- regardless of how true that may be --

Therein lies a huge part of our societies problems : people base their beliefs on perceptions rather than digging into the truth of the claims they choose to follow. This creates division, strife, and carries huge social costs.

And, if their claim is objectively wrong---i.e., if bitcoin is less harmful to the climate that the legacy monetary system (with its unbridled government spending and profligate international wars---what's the petrodollar system's true cost if we include all the oil tankers, office buildings, Brinks trucks and The US 7th fleet sitting in the Indian Ocean?), then choosing to ignore the truth could actively harm the climate more than choosing the better money.

If you are banking on activism to stop/start anything, you are in for a huge disappointment.

Profits / Self benefits are the most powerful, natural forces of the world. If you want any positive changes, you should harness them rather than fight it.

It's crazy that it's 2022 and so many people on HN still think crypto is majority Proof of Work... Ethereum is transitioning to Proof of Stake this year and after that Bitcoin will be the ONLY major cryptocurrency still on PoW.

Bitpay stagnated because it is a known bad service.

You also have the rise of BTCPay Server and lightning.

Crypto is such a unique and compelling idea that it's not going anywhere. There will definitely be bumps along the way, but those are because of implementation issues.

The only thing that can kill it is legislation.

> The only thing that can kill it is legislation.

And even that ain't a silver bullet.

Then somebody should make crypto coin which is exclusively run on renewable energy so it would be considered moral accepting it as donation.

That doesn't make it moral. Using all the available renewable energy to do useless computations, so that a very tiny minority of folks can use a "currency", means that energy isn't available for other uses. The prevalence of mining is causing energy providers to postpone the decommissioning of dirty plants to be able to meet peak load.

There is no ethical use of proof of work cryptocurrency.

Never underestimate the will of the masses to gamble their money on crypto. If anything we'll see a push to PoS blockchains or eth will actually switch to PoS.

For context, here's the original tweet (still up): https://twitter.com/mozilla/status/1476951030638260225

> Dabble in @dogecoin? HODLing some #Bitcoin & #Ethereum?

> We’re using @BitPay to accept donations in #cryptocurrency

The tweet prompted a strong reaction from Mozilla founder jwz: https://twitter.com/jwz/status/1478022085737803776

> Hi, I'm sure that whoever runs this account has no idea who I am, but I founded @mozilla and I'm here to say fuck you and fuck this. Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters.

If someone wants to give you money, take it. They can mandate more environmentally conscious PoS cryptocurrencies if they want.

If I call Mozilla and offer to donate a million shares of the dirtiest Earth-polluting company, they should take them. Exit the position. Their mission is not to be picky about how legal money arrives.

The Mozilla Foundation's "mission," as a 501(c)3, is whatever they decide.

They're not beholden to any obligations to maximize donations (already a dubious claim, absent evidence that people were actually donating with cryptocurrencies) in manners they consider unacceptable.

Put another way: you wouldn't be surprised if the ASPCA refused donations in the form of shares in PuppyKicker Inc. Mozilla's decision here warrants a similar response.

Their mission is entirely to be picky about the impact of their decisions. You can’t sell Bitcoin without encouraging its use, which is exactly why people donate it trying to improve the reputation of their goods for sale. Remember when a few companies accepted it and the Bitcoin salespeople were crowing about how that proved it was the future of finance and you had to buy in now to avoid being left behind? Using Mozilla’s reputation for their marketing is an ethical choice and has consequences.

If I give you a million shares of a company, that act and your ensuing sale of the shares are not (particularly) polluting. But if I send you bitcoin and you then sell them, those transactions occur via a polluting process.

Not surprisingly, “the ends justify the means” isn’t a widely held tenant of humanistic non-profits.

That's an awfully broad statement.

If Phillip Morris wanted to become a big donator to the Cochrane collaboration, they would refuse by policy.

Do you think they're wrong, and they should take the money?

Perfect response from @jwz. "Planet-incinerating Ponzi grifter" is an excellent phrase. I suggest we turn "PIPG" into an acronym.

edit: For example: "Tesla used to accept Bitcoin as payment, but once Elon Musk realized that it was making him look like a PIPG, he had to reverse course."

The only catch is it doesn't have intuitive pronunciation. "Pip gee?"

Why not just "Planet-Incinerating Grifter," or PIG. Then it also applies to Big Oil executives :)

>but once Elon Musk realized that it was making him look like a PIPG, he had to reverse course

It has nothing to do with having enough impact (twitter lol) and market analysts to buy very low, announce owning millions of BTC and accepting BTC for Tesla, then selling a month later around peaks. And then doing exactly the same with Doge. Then doing it again in 2021. Oh, yes, the first sentence was about the trading value peak in 2017-2018. Nope, must be a coincidence.

I don't love the characterization of it being a "ponzi scheme"; trying to be catchy is no excuse for being disingenuous and inaccurate.

At their core, Ponzi Schemes are investment funds which pay existing investors with funds collected from new investors [1]. There's really no way of looking at cryptocurrency where this is an accurate analysis.

Generally, existing cryptocurrency investors are not "paid" by the "fund" (currency) in any capacity. This is true for BTC & ETH, which represent the bulk of the crypto market.

The more common argument is that anyone can create a new currency, hype it up, drive market value higher, then exit at the expense of new investors. That's a totally legitimate concern, and it happens far too often; but its not a ponzi scheme. The accurate term would be "pump & dump".

There are many shades of gray between a pure pump & dump and something more legitimate. "Hype" (also known as "Marketing") is something every investment vehicle partakes in; from BTC (far beyond the "hype" phase) to DOGE (I'd label that one as "mass insanity") to TSLA (a fraction the revenue of many other auto manufacturers, but significantly higher value? how'd they get there?) to even PFE (this comment is Sponsored by Pfizer [2]). There are obvious examples of this behavior in the crypto community, but its simply not happening among major currencies; taking a pump & dump "scheme" to a billion dollar valuation is exceedingly rare, and there are currently ~90 coins with a market capitalization above $1B.

Where one does see it happening, in my opinion, is with (most) NFTs. Many holders won't admit this, but there's no reality where 99% of them will be worth anything after the initial purchase; their goal is to shill and liquidate. However, I'm cautious in extrapolating this concern to the "technology" of NFTs, and even further to all of crypto; its similar to asserting all of emerging med-tech is a scam because Theranos was. Ultimately, investment vehicles don't need to "make sense" to have marketable value; but that doesn't mean critical thinking is unnecessary when evaluating it.

There are some currencies, including ETH2, which stake and return an APY on investment. This could adequately, though somewhat inaccurately, be interpreted as being "paid out by the fund"; but the reward doesn't come from new investors. Where it comes from depends on the currency, but with ETH2 it is effectively minted from thin air. This is an inflationary action, which could (again, adequately but inaccurately) be interpreted as "taking money from new investors" (by lowering the value of each ETH they purchased). However, this concern is mitigated by the inflationary effect impacting all ETH holders, not just new investors, and the deflationary counter-effect from london hard-fork transaction fee burning.

ETH is currently still inflationary, but only through a delicate balance of PoW-style minting, PoS-style reward issuance, and london fee burning. The zeitgeist in the ETH community right now is to achieve deflation, for better or worse.

The statement that proof-of-stake APY represents "being paid out by the fund" in the context of evaluating cryptocurrency as a ponzi scheme, is very tenuous. Crypto is, at least in the US, not a currency; its a USD denominated investment vehicle. Being given more crypto does not "pay out" your USD investment, any more than a stock DRIP would be a "payout", because there is no "out". It does not allow you to exit the investment; on the contrary, it increases your investment.

Its totally fair to dislike crypto; I'm certainly in that camp. But its critically important to understand the mechanics, engineering, and economics of why its such a harm to society before one begins levying blind criticism.

[1] https://www.investor.gov/protect-your-investments/fraud/type...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uexqgkyFmo

How drunk was he when he posted this? I’m thinking like a 9.

He should be ashamed of displaying such a combination of ignorance and arrogance. Having alternative currencies is incredibly important for those living under corrupt regimes and/or hyperinflation and/or unbanked, and most cryptocurrencies don't use proof of work. They could just not accept Bitcoin and Eth1 then.

A single Google Search: 1,080 J

A single Solana transaction: 1,837 J

One eth2 transaction: 126,000 J

Watching an hour of television on a 40 inch+ LCD TV: 540,000 J

https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...

I notice you are avoiding listing Bitcoin and PoW Eth here. If https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co... is to be believed

1779.11 kWh per single Bitcoin transaction would be

One Bitcoin Edit: Block Mined: 6,404,796,000 J

One Bitcoin Transaction on a Block: 2,287,427 J

One Credit Card Transaction: 5,351 J

Edit: Since the source isn't exactly clear if one transaction is a reference to one block mined or one transaction on that block, I'm going to assume it is for one block mined. I'm going to estimate one block contains 2800 transactions.

And what could be better for "those living under corrupt regimes" than a system widely used for money laundering?

I really do sympathize with people living under corrupt regimes. And I sympathize with them having to use a metal pipe to whack someone in the head to survive. Does that mean that non-profits should start embracing head-whacking?

Dude must have an ego the size of a planet to say something like that

Thought I recognized the name, check out what his website shows when linked from HN: https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2016/hn.png

Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not a fan of cryptocurrency, but I'm also less than impressed with jwz's maturity. If I didn't know he founded Mozilla, I would've taken him for an angry teenage kid trying to be edgy on the internet.

He's one of the more entertaining figures of that generation. IIRC there were some huge flamewars between him and rms during the Xemacs fork.

He still maintains XScreensaver, but now his day job is the ownership of a bar/pizza/venue establishment.

One of the most histrionic characters in the tech scene, and that's a lot to say.

Brave is on track to destroy his legacy.

https://brave.com/transparency/

> Ponzi grifters

You want to talk about Ponzi? Crypto has nothing on the Fed. The global financial structure is a planet-incinerating Ponzi scheme, so the point of targeting one minuscule subset of it is suspect.

I mean, sure, but replacing it with another ponzi scheme with even less checks and balances isn't really gonna solve anything, but make things worse.

Ironcially backed by an ungodly amount of violence and emissions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

jwz, for context, is Jamie Zawinski.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

Seeing the other replies here, kids these days got no respect for their elders.

Hey, let me check if he still checks the HN referer and insults us if we follow links from HN to his blog:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/today-on-sick-sad-world-how...

Edit: Aw, nope, looks like he got rid of it

When I was a kid poking around around the early web and trying to learn how to code, I idolized him. It's sad to see he's turned into a bitter old pizza shop owner.

Even more context:

Project Code Rush - The Beginnings of Netscape / Mozilla Documentary [1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

> The tweet prompted a strong reaction from Mozilla founder jwz

wrong,

the tweet prompted a strong reaction from people, founder jwz then reacted too few days later

Yikes, well that eliminates any respect I had for the "founder of Mozilla."

It elevates mine.

Anything to avoid working on the browser itself. Very sad to see the decline of Mozilla and Firefox.

I wonder if someone could fork it and take all the people from Mozilla who are actually contributing to the technical mission (a small group these days!). Brendan Eich would've been perfect for this, but he's got his own browser now and wisely chose to use chromium as the base.

If there was a serious financial effort that went into a fork of Firefox, I'd be all on board with it. The problem is these knockoffs that you know aren't going to keep up with development and will be relatively short-lived.

Say what you want about Brendon Eich, but I wish he forked Firefox for Brave. That's the kind of effort that Firefox deserves, because it's by no means a bad browser. Putting aside some relatively minor performance issues (that don't manifest with average use), it's a great browser and I hope it sticks around for the sake of still allowing a good level of ad-blocking and such.

And yes, Firefox pretty much still exists in this form because of Google. That relationship has also accelerated the decline of Mozilla.

>effort that went into a fork of Firefox, I'd be all on board with it.

Chrome was designed to be "forkable" and put in different wrapper UI. Firefox was at that time battling to get rid of XUL and add a basic sandbox. Then pwn2own decided not to include Firefox in another year hacks because Firefox made no improvements at all in previous 2 years. This hurt me to hear as a long time Firefox user, had to be hurtful to Firefox management and developers too, but that was the fact. Mozilla lost their way in 2010-2017 and can't recover from that, the gap was too wide. Mozilla thought that after defeating IE and Safari they can't lose the market.

Mozilla had an opportunity to make Firefox modular but burnt it with Servo.

https://www.eweek.com/security/pwn2own-hacking-contest-retur...

Which browser developers do you propose paused these donations in order to "avoid working on the browser itself"? In what way would that even accomplish that end, given that those donations weren't even going to browser development in the first place?

Yes, I am aware that these donations don't fund browser development, and that hucksters laundered the reputation of Firefox to take donations to advance their social causes instead of the browser.

Donations to the foundation don’t pay for Fx development. That’s under the Mozilla Corporation.

I was completely not aware of this didn't even imagine something like that, but apparently it's so https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships-a...

we are working on a fork for Handshake: https://github.com/imperviousinc/beacon-ios

join us!

What exactly are you forking here? Your README implies that it's for iOS, where every browser is just a skin over Apple's WebKit engine.

(More generally, forking a browser is generally a doomed prospect: even Mozilla and Google struggle to keep up with vulnerabilities and standards churn. Most other forks of Firefox are laughably/irresponsibly stale, and most "forks" of Chrome are really just reskinned Chromium builds.)

Personally, I believe in Crypto, but I'm entirely against Bitcoin. I think Proof of Work is a massive waste of energy, and I would be happy if Bitcoin went to 0, quite frankly.

But nowadays, not all cryptos are proof of work based. Plenty of major crypto projects are based on proof of stake and offer fully fledged smart contract features to support Web 3 apps. I don't think proof of stake crypto is more energy intensive than the hundreds of thousands of servers and data centers needed for the traditional financial system.

I think a smarter move would be to only accept crypto currency donations from these greener chains.

Bitcoin's energy consumption is a feature, not a bug. The amount of energy consumed by the network will continue to increase, as it should, as it secures more wealth.

A currency that's based on energy has been speculated about for decades, such as by Buckminster Fuller, which he called the Kilowatt Dollar: http://roperld.com/science/CurrencySystems.htm

Bitcoin is the first attempt at such a money that might actually work. https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-1053/

If you're curious about the connection between Bitcoin and the energy sector these are worth looking at.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvtGQ-7O1Tw

* https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-energy-use-comp...

* https://youtu.be/b-7dMVcVWgc

* https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-is-humanitarian-...

For what its worth, this is a difficult concept for most people to understand. I've held crypto since the early days, went to ethereum believing in POS, then crypto "3.0", and only now have I returned realizing what it all meant. Granted most people barely understand how the economy today works, many times out of denial.

Same. I've only recently (mid-2021) deeply understood the implications of Bitcoin, despite hearing about it in 2009, buying some in 2013, and losing some in the MtGox hack. Clearly I'm a slow learner.

I think people are vastly underestimating the impact of Bitcoin embedding itself within the energy sector, and providing an accessible and permissionless escape hatch to millions (billions?) of people whose currencies are hyper-inflating.

> The amount of energy consumed by the network will continue to increase, as it should, as it secures more wealth.

this is very apt. after exhausting the worlds resources guarding our money from each other maybe we'll reflect that it was money that was the bad idea and bitcoin was just an implementation detail

Money is just a psychological-technology that vastly improves efficiency of trade.

It's not exactly feasible to return to a barter system, unless you have some other way of solving the "double coincidence of wants" problem?

One of the innovations of Bitcoin is that it serves purely as a monetary good, so there's no other demand for it outside of it serving its role as money. Counter that with gold which has many other applications.

To be fair, fiat achieved this too, but it came with disastrous trade-offs...

Bitcoin consumes far less energy than gold or banking at full adoption, Overall this is an environmental improvement.

But is the Kilowatt dollar idea based on irrevocably wasting the energy, i.e. on useless hash puzzles?

"Wasted" is a value judgement. Miners put the effort in to procure the energy and then choose to spend it on hashes. It is by definition not wasted.

You know Christmas lights in the USA use up more energy than the Bitcoin network does for the same period? Is that "wasted"? Ultimately that's up to the spenders of that energy to decide.

There are significant political and economic tradeoffs between POW and POS... I highly recommend this article for an analysis of these.

https://www.lynalden.com/proof-of-stake/

I suggest this analysis because folks tend to state their preference for POS while only mentioning the energy costs as the only factor in their calculation. I do think it worth considering these other tradeoffs as well.

Besides the energy costs, what's the answer to PoW miners' effects on the GPU market? Especially as the supply chain is already strained by COVID-related increases in consumer demand. While I'm still concerned by mining energy costs, the optimal equipment needed should be separate from consumer-grade, e.g., how datacenters won't be hoarding Core i9 processors or RTX 3080s.

Any decentralized distributed ledger is by definition more energy intensive and wasteful.

All of the financial systems today may keep a dozen or so copies of a financial transaction for a limited time span. They do so using as cost-effective means as possible (they’re a for-profit business). They also do it under extremely well coordinated economies of scale.

From the get-go any reasonable distributed ledger application (regardless of PoW, PoS, etc) keeps many thousands of copies of that consensus ledger. In the case of Bitcoin it’s roughly 13,000 nodes so at least 1000x as many resources as the centralized financial systems we have today. Oh yeah - and it grows forever. As I’ve noted before if you buy a beer for $3 with Bitcoin there will end up being 13,000 or more records of that transaction FOREVER.

With 10 years since inception and an absolutely tiny transaction volume (compared to say, Visa) a full Ethereum node requires at least 6TB of storage space. Bitcoin is the big one and it has roughly 500K transactions/day. Visa alone has a billion. With any real traction these ledgers will end up at petabyte and exabyte size very quickly. Oh yeah - and you’ll still need tens of thousands of copies. Each of these nodes still needs gigabytes of RAM, fast CPUs, bandwidth, etc in addition to the insane storage requirements.

Note that I’m talking about the distribution and storage of the ledger itself. Mining and PoS have nothing to do with that - these 1000x inefficiencies persist even with PoS.

The nodes themselves are the massive resource and energy issue that are just hiding behind PoW right now.

Kind of silly to vehemently argue against the redundant storage of important financial information

The lack of a lifecycle on data in blockchain, especially one that is supposed to serve people on a planet scale, is actually a pretty serious issue.

Learning how critical it is for everything to have a lifecycle was one of the turning points of my career (and I learned it over a decade into it). I’m guessing from your comment you haven’t learned it yet, so I’d invite you to keep an eye on all the lifecycles you deal with in the near future.

Governments across the world have debased the currency over the past decade which has especially accelerated since Covid. The inflation has finally started to take off. Most people in HN who are among the wealthy end of spectrum have no idea how inflation is affecting most people lives. Most are desperately looking for opportunities to make enough returns. They don't give much thought about climate change when they can't pay for education or medical bills.

While most shitcoins and NFTs will tumble, the topcoin rallies are not going to stop until the economy gets roaring back and inflation is controlled.

People on HN probably understand inflation very well but have portfolios that are not impacted by it. If anything, the past 2 years have shown great stock gains.

It's hard for a person to understand a solution when its fortune depends on not understanding it. The Fed just mentioned they might raise rates for a blip on the stock market. Imagine what they do if they actually raise them. Oh, noes, the USD might actually hold some value! How will the economy recover if people's savings aren't stolen?!

Non-inflationary currencies cannot work as currencies. Period. People will buy them and hold them just because of their non-inflationary nature, distorting and destabilizing their value, making them useless for short-term holding and payments which are the point of a currency.

US history prior to World War 2 says otherwise. The gold-backed dollar was slowly deflationary for multiple periods, precisely because a hard money standard enables entrepreneurs' economic calculation and real growth.

HN readers generally understand inflation, but when I see questioning bitcoin's energy cost, I wonder if those questioning it really understand the high costs of manipulating the price system through inflation: that manipulation causes the boom and bust cycles due to malinvestments.

People will spend them as they need to spend them. Nobody is going to forgo buying groceries and go hungry because of a deflationary currency.

> Most people in HN who are among the wealthy end of spectrum have no idea how inflation is affecting most people lives.

There are numerous articles every week about the “great resignation” and staffing shortages in foodservice and other industries as everyone leaves for higher paying jobs.

Wages are going up. It’s not the end of the world.

> Most are desperately looking for opportunities to make enough returns.

Stock market has been outpacing inflation just fine. Classic investment advice still holds.

Those “returns” in crypto can only come from selling coins to someone else in the future. It relies on a constant stream of convincing new people to turn over their real money in exchange for virtual money.

> While most shitcoins and NFTs will tumble, the topcoin rallies are not going to stop until the economy gets roaring back

What a weird thing to say when the economy is roaring, unemployment is low, and top cryptos are steadily declining.

I feel like you shouldn't complain about bitcoin if you drive a car or have been on an airplane in the last year. Or if you have received goods manufactured overseas. Or live / work in a building that uses concrete. Or consume beef. Or consume factory farmed food. Or eat fish. Or...

Just to add some numbers: bitcoin is responsible for 0.1% of global carbon emissions, and will decrease (as a %) as CO2 emissions of other sectors grow: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/bitcoin-...

Announcing that your tire-burning scheme produces "only" 0.1% of global carbon emissions is not the win that you seem to think it is.

I’m not pro Bitcoin. I’m just pointing out that your tire burning scheme is the other 99.9%. You like those tires, but not these ones.

For some reason, I always thought that people (well, mostly jwz) were exaggerating when they said that cryptocurrencies contributed to climate change. But 0.1% of global emissions is an insanely large amount for the value that cryptocurrencies provide.

What are you comparing against when you call it insanely large?

Do you know what is the carbon footprint of choosing an SUV when a compact car would suffice summed over everyone who did that? Frankly, I do not know, but I suspect it is more than 0.1%

Gold & banking contribute more

"You wish to improve society, and yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent."

I don't wish to improve society. I'm just highlighting people's hypocrisy. No one in the west can complain about climate change. Our entire lifestyle is so wasteful in every way.

> Just to add some numbers: bitcoin is responsible for 0.1% of global carbon emissions, and will decrease (as a %) as CO2 emissions of other sectors grow:

Just so you're aware, the link you've posted is pointing out that Bitcoin could grow from 0.1% to 0.9% of total CO₂ emissions.

Bitcoin may be one of the very few sectors that doesn't have any sort of plan for decreasing CO₂ emissions in the future.

My house protects me. Food feeds me. My iPhone from China does many many things that I find useful. Bitcoin hopefully allows me to accumulate wealth but otherwise adds no value to my life.

Doesn’t seem like an appropriate comparison.

Food feeds you, but many people choose to eat food that is wasteful. Your home protects you, but many people live in large homes in climates that require heating and cooling. Your iPhone from China does things you like, which really is what this comes down to. You like iPhones. You don't like Bitcoin. There is nothing more to this argument other than preferences.

Permission-less transactions and wealth storage are an unprecedented technology, people living outside of authoritarian regimes struggle with this concept.

No you don't get it, they use those things, so they're OK! They don't use crypto, so it must have no usecases, and must be banned!!

lets do a bad thing because other things are bad and we do them isn't wisdom.

In this case, I'm not trying to impart wisdom. I'm just trying to show what a hypocritical position it is to criticize Bitcoin for being a waste of resources when the entire western lifestyle is predicated on waste. In many ways, it's a form of armchair activism. Like, "Hmm, how could we solve global warming? I know, let's start by banning this thing that doesn't impact me at all, even though my wasteful lifestyle is a much larger contributor to the problem by many orders of magnitude."

Digital money is still a good idea. I don't want to throw it out because current implementations are bad. No doubt, someone will invent a way to make it work. edit: in a sustainable way.

Alternate consensus algorithms have been invented, implemented, and proven in practice for almost a decade.

Proof of Stake (PoS) is the most popular, but there are others.

All that's left to do then is ruin Bitcoin with a 51% attack by the combined forces of nation states who are working on climate change

I have the Mozilla foundation in high regard but this decision is nowhere near the quality standards I’d expect from a technology foundation/company. Saying Crypto has a bad eco footprint is outright wrong, sure Bitcoin and ETH and a number of other cryptocurrencies are PoW and therefore energy intensive, but on the other side you have platforms like Cardano and Algorand showing how you can do it much much better!

That Mozilla statement is unjustly labelling a whole sector, they should know better than doing that!

You should reevaluate your opinion of Mozilla then. They did not say crypto has a bad eco footprint. They said they are going to pause accepting cryptos to investigate that question.

I was about to post a similar sentiment but I figured I'd see if someone else is posting about Cardano first. If I understand correctly, the Proof of Stake that Cardano (ADA) uses roughly 1% of the energy that a Proof of Work system does, and can still be secure and cool.

IIRC, didn't Ethereum say about a year ago that they're planning on moving to a Proof of Stake at some point?

The Ethereum PoS beacon chain is already active, and you can participate in staking. The full transition will happen soon™.

Somehow Facebook and Twitter never get a pass on HN using similar reasoning:

"Sure social media can be harmful, but on the other hand there's Mastodon and Jane's Wholesome Baking Forum showing you can do better, so there's nothing to worry about."

Scale matters. Probably 99% of crypto trading takes place on destructive PoW platforms.

Eth's plan to move to PoS is pretty concrete, and then your claim holds no value anymore.

99% of crypto trading takes place on centralised exchanges like Binance

Besides paying for your drugs with it, what did crypto brought to this world that is effectively good? As I see it now it's only more fodder for speculators.

A couple of things you and gen pop are missing:

web3 solves the identity and privacy problems web2 created

dApps are actually a boon to open source by offering monetary incentives to create working open source solutions

NFTs are doing the same for art and expression by separating ownership of a piece and access to it

The USD derives it's value from the US's military's ability to exercise force over oil.

If Mozilla was concerned with energy consumption they'd stop USD donations.

In a backwards way this validates the general decentralization movement crypto is a part of even more in that a mob attack on social media can get an organization like Mozilla to limit their own capacity to accept donations.

I wish they would have kept taking crypto. I personally dislike the concept of crypto and hope that it ultimately falls flat on its face, however money is money and mozilla does good things. All those snowflakes trying to end everything they don't like. Just don't send them donations in crypto and move on with your life.

By the same logic, doesn't accepting USD amount to supporting the US government and its actions around the world?

I don't even care about the crypto currencies that much. Please just stop ruining everything.

Ruining... nothing?

I think the Mozilla Foundation people just want to kill Firefox. One bad decision, after another.

And the response from jwz: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/mozilla-blinked/

Lol, folks will want to copy-paste this link themselves into their browser, I get a certain image when clicking it directly, compared to the blog post.

There are a lot of people around the world who cannot buy and sell from each other; either they are in different regulatory regimes, or they are completely unbanked. There's also a lot of concentration of wealth to publishing houses - who aggregate the work of many artists and then simplify billing. Because money is so hard to deal with it tends to make it hard for artists to have creative sovereignty. They're always beholden to somebody else. We all suffer for this.

Effectively money is a form of communication; and when Mozilla bows to social pressure and social anti-crypto hysteria - they're continuing what they've always done - which is focus on insulating users, protecting users from risks, while also failing to foster a healthy ecosystem. Why do we have an arms race between people who want to violate privacy and people who want privacy? Why do we have so much sound bite media, with hugely emotional banner headlines and warped narratives? Why are the walled gardens so much more successful than the web (in the sense of much of the creative work and creative community moving to native apps?). We have these phenomena because there is no legitimate way for people to have direct transactional and healthy relationships on the web with respect to money. Mozilla is not "helping the web" they are hurting the web. Their fixation on the wrong things injures the ecosystem. They shouldn't waste their time begging for crypto, but what they should do is enable people to pay each other.

Does anyone else practically get RSI from rolling their eyes so hard when they see a corporate account tweet something like "We're listening, and taking action."

Human beings don't speak like that. Just say what you're doing. It will be enough for people, and not enough for others. But for the love of god knock it off with the super-polished robotic corporate PR nonsense.

I’ve heard a couple people speak like this, face to face, to me. When they get utterly disconnected from reality they start behaving like the robotic PR they output at work.

We live in a world that is transitioning from harmful CO2 producing, carbon-based energy sources to one using carbon-free energy. At this point in time we all use some amount of "dirty" energy. All our energy consuming activities are "guilty" in proportion to their share of the total CO2 production. Air conditioning, aluminum smelting, gold mining,and holiday lights included. And at some point the future when energy sources are carbon-free this will not be true. We will be able to consume energy without blame.

The question is, in this future, will Bitcoin be celebrated or hated by those who hate it now? I think the later. Because ultimately all hate for it is politically driven by those who fear a loss of power that it could cause for them(or their political leaders, or thought leaders, or shepherds).

Finally an impartial institution goes after the crypto/climate question and will disclose the results in an open source fashion. That will be a milestone.

Perhaps the question is: do banks / fiat money institutions cause more damage to climate, or crypto mines. My gut feeling is a close tie.

Regardless of the crypto/fiat question, gold consumes incredibly more energy, which is what bitcoin stands to replace

And when you talk about PoS, it's not even a contest.

It's OK - tech nonprofits that rely more heavily on individual donations, like the EFF, Internet Archive, or Wikipedia, will still take your dirty crypto.

Less than 2% of Mozilla's revenues are from contributions, so it's cheap for them to symbolically thumb-their-noses at something.

Dumb PR move from dying company

I'm sure now everyone that was so ethically repulsed by the crimes of crypto will donate twice as much.

That’s implying that half of Mozilla’s donations were via crypto which I doubt.

Reading it literally no I don't think it implies that. GP may just be suggesting (sarcastically) that people will be so appreciative that they will donate twice as much in appreciation.

Only if you assume what you are implying: That everyone who donated in fiat disliked the crypto option.

Seems one more reason why Mozilla is failing? hard to get anything done without someone internally raising political.concerns. Imagine the meeting time wasted on this. Better ways to spend ccrporate time.

Just buy some.

I know you don't really think climate change is a problem. You drive a car, fly, the whole thing. So just buy crypto and be done with it, please.

We're early, but it's getting kinda late, just do it.

It's a good political move.

And Mozilla doesn't live on donations anyway (they are used to finance "initiatives" of various sorts).

I think you’ll start seeing more and more mining operations move over into renewable energy, similar to what Tera Wulf (WULF) has done.

The climate change argument will hopefully be moot within a couple years as we trend towards proof of stake based networks.

IMO the public backlash against anyone accepting cryptocurrency donations speaks to the fact that people today - despite VC insistence that “Gen Z gets Web3” and it’s only Baby Boomers that don’t - views climate change as a more significant issue than centralized financial institutions. (Please don’t respond talking about some “$ECO coin” or such business.)

Even if it had nothing to do with climate change I find the entire space to be deplorable. I see it as a heavy negative in terms of things it enables (mostly scams and crime), it creates other issues (like significantly contributing to GPU shortages), people involved in it are like some cult similar to other MLM schemes.

I've been interested in it around the time ETH came into picture, smart contracts sounded interesting. Seeing how it played out in practice convinces me the tech is fundamentally inferior to status quo for the things they propose it solves, and at this point I think it's been long enough to judge.

The only people I know using crypto in personal circles use it to dodge income taxes, order drugs or gamble (not particularly judgemental towards either, just super annoyed how it keeps polluting public discourse).

Agreed. Making money off crypto is a lot like making money from running a casino or offering payday loans...there's plenty of demand, and you can get rich doing it, but the societal costs seem to outweigh the potential benefits.

> the tech is fundamentally inferior to status quo for the things they propose it solves, and at this point I think it's been long enough to judge.

What do you know about bitcoin's lightning network?

How would you respond to people in el salvador who are very happy with it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVVZXUFItZY

When one observes technological solutions failing to address societal problems time and time again, one has to wonder if societal solutions might be better suited.

also may be an indicator that the average person doesn’t realize crypto need not be tied to high energy use. it is like saying trains are a bad idea because they burn coal - but now years later, we have far more energy efficient trains.

Bad analogue.

When trains ran on coal there was pretty much no alternative. Also more economical trains generally were in preference.

There is alternative to crypto _today_ which does not require unreasonable amounts of energy. Cryptobros don't care just like they don't care that crypto energy consumption only seems to go up.

and in so far as gen-z is 'pro-crypto' at least from my experience it's large nihilistic attitude towards economic progress and having adopted a casino-capitalism style mentality where gambling on the newest crypto-asset is just a means to get rich quick. Which to be fair isn't much different from the general attitude towards it in any other generation.

> IMO the public backlash against anyone accepting cryptocurrency donations speaks to the fact that people today - despite VC insistence that “Gen Z gets Web3” and it’s only Baby Boomers that don’t - views climate change as a more significant issue than centralized financial institutions.

That seems...consistent with VC insistence that “Gen Z gets Web3”.

It's not consistent with what Web3-invested VCs want people to take from that, though.

> That seems...consistent with VC insistence that “Gen Z gets Web3”.

In an ironic sense, definitely. It shows that they have better sense of the real value of web3 than the people pushing it

Gen Z hates crypto and web3[1]. They are also partaking in the backlash.

[1]: From my experience a lot of the crypto “community” online is Gen Z, but most of Gen Z is not pro-crypto. All thumbs are fingers sort of logic.

Cost/benefit and proof of stake. Pull your head out of the sand.

Good! Nice to see they’ve done the right thing even if it was a little late. I’m sure they got a lot of pressure both from users and from their own employees.

Wow! Mozilla just jumped the shark.

It is a shame Mozilla is bullied to back off. They should accept donation is Bitcoin.

Sad to hear this. I hope that decision gets reversed.

Reason that I give donations in BTC is that it's impossible to do so in regular ways, like with bank transfers. In the european country where I live, I'm excluded from banking services all over the country. Why isn't that a common life feature for other humans here? Well, a majority of the country chose to implement laws that restrict my access to everyday needs. In short, I'm categorized by law as an african immigrant without residency status. It's been like this for 5 years since I landed in Europe.

So, I have capital in the form of cash (earned by doing menial jobs and developing my own software projects) but I can't spend it online because I don't have the allowed ID !? I clean and do gardening in the homes of people who later choose to implement laws that forbids me to have a have my own home, my car, medical treatment... Then after those daytime gigs that pay shit money, I go back to my "home office" then open my laptop to start coding or learning. The next day: rinse and repeat.

A donation is like a financial thank-you note! Accept it or not, it's your choice. As, a user of various Mozilla products, I'm grateful of their work and all that they build and make freely accessible. Thanks to them, I'm able to earn a living (food, transport and housing), to gain capital that is 10x of what I'd bring in without Internet-related work.

Crypto is a tool that's beneficial to whomever can make use of it. BTC is not under control of a single human or a small team. Its decentralized nature makes me a truckload of hope to live day after day in a racist country. Those priviledged citizens complaining about crypto's climate impact are similar to those who want to ban nuclear reactors. They have fantasies in their mind larger than their collective egos and technological ignorance. They have houses full of household robots (which I compete with nowadays while cleaning houses) where they daydream about some naive version of the future. Instead of screaming illogical facts in public discourse, why don't you pick up all your belongings and go live in civilizations with much less basic infrastructure and tech prowess? What's stopping you? When will you give up your comfort? Let's stop with the hypocrisy.

As a donor, I will give in BTC to others. The habit is in my DNA. In the real world, I'm an undocumented immigrant. In the online world, I'm myself and free to make use of my full potential. Mozilla's browser is one of the gateway to the worldwide web. Firefox doesn't ask me my ID to start having fun or working online. Firefox and Bitcoin are tools that I enjoy and will always cherish for their great utility in my digital projects. I will not trust the opinion of anticrypto people because they have countless choices in their lifespan and mine are limited by default.

Meh, yet another PR-laden series of tweets. Gotta love that "we were mocked and insults were hurled at us" in PR-English is "this led to an important discussion", and "we wanted to jump on the bandwagon and thought no one would criticize us" turns to "a lot has changed since we started accepting crypto donations"...

At this point, Mozilla is basically irrelevant anyway

Hot take: rise of crypto not too dissimilar from the rise of Trump in that there's clearly something there but it isn't what everyone thinks and it also will have more staying power than expected (already showing this).

I recognize that use Trump is risky as he is very polarizing - however there is something uncannily similar on the rise of both of these events. Both in that neither had an agenda but caught on like wildfire - I hope that crypto somehow ends up benefiting the world. I don't see it at this point but remain open to seeing successful projects.

There is a lot of cryptocurrency out there to be spent, and Mozilla needs it. The pragmatic solution would be to take the money and use X% to offset the environmental damage the donation created.

Just accept Nano, guys. You are welcome.

> So, starting today we are reviewing if and how our current policy on crypto donations fits with our climate goals. And as we conduct our review, we will pause the ability to donate cryptocurrency

You mean Bitcoin, Ethereum? Since they are the biggest ones currently 'destroying' the planet? I'm sure there exist eco-friendly cryptocurrencies that are suitable for donations?

But never-mind though, Bitcoin and Ethereum = ALL cryptocurrencies somehow.

So back to receiving Google's money.

Just a friendly remainder that donations to the Foundation don't pay for Firefox development. Google's money pays for Corporation stuff (Firefox), donations pay for other things they do around the world [1].

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/

Wow, I didn't know that. This is perverse in several ways:

Funding for Firefox development comes from Google, which is pushing Chrome in such a way that is destroying the web.

Funding for Mozilla's non-Firefox projects probably comes mostly from Firefox users.

I want to donate to Mozilla exclusively for Firefox development - yet the only thing that my money will not be used for is Firefox, and I strongly disapprove of many of their other projects that my money would actually go to.

This is just a mess.

That is even worse then. No wonder Mozilla is in decline and perhaps that is why several developers were let go two years ago when Google threatened to take away their lunch money. So Mozilla had to quickly relinquish their 'mission statement' and submit to the mercy of Google.

So as long as Google is funding Mozilla, and Firefox, their mission statement is beyond destroyed.

Mission failed successfully.

The current crypto donation policy is not "we accept any crypto directly including eco friendly ones" it is "we do crypto donations via BitPay" which doesn't support said eco-friendly crypto options so it has been paused.

The announcement also does not say no better crypto policy could be put in place it just says they are reviewing the policy. In all likelyhood though yes, they aren't going to accept crypto as hardly anyone uses eco-friendly forms of crypto to the point it's worthwhile to try to push for donations via that means.

1. The crypto market is moving to Poof of Stake, rather than Proof of Work. It is already rapidly getting more energy efficient because of this. Most new solutions like Polkadot and Ada are PoS, ETH will be there soon. BTC is energy inefficient because it’s old.

2. Retail payments are an abstraction above currency. When I pay with a Visa card, I may be spending cash, “credit”, crypto, etc… Visa/MC is probably the most pervasive non-Fiat/cash retail payment method in the world and it currently works with crypto thanks to Coinbase and others. Then you have Venmo, PayPal and the many others that work well in retail. There are / will be lots of great retail solutions that are abstracted from the base value store.

3. Crypto is very useful for P2P and B2B payments without approval from gov, banks, etc.

4. I lived in Argentina for a while and it’s true about the taxes and corruption. When I lived there I had to pay rent in cash but often the banks would just close or stop withdrawals. Crypto is better for this application (P2P payment, not super time sensitive).

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