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Comment by Uehreka | Hacker News Reader

The environmental impact. And yes, I know, 0.5%, but my issue was always that if PoW currencies went from being a niche subculture to a point where it was used for everyday exchange (many people were arguing that this would and should happen) that 0.5% would surely go up by a great deal. To a point where crypto had to clear a super high bar of usefulness to counterbalance the harm it would do.

To be fair, AI training also has a big carbon footprint, but I feel like the utility provided by AI makes it easier to argue that its usefulness counterbalances its ecological harm.

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There is no "environmental impact". Environmental impact comes from energy production, not energy usage. It's incoherent to argue others should tamper down their energy usage because most folks producing energy aren't doing it in an ethical way.

Ultimately any proof-of-work system has to burn joules rather than clock cycles (because any race on cycles-per-joule is rapidly caught up), and that makes it clearer where the waste is: to be economically stable, in the face of adversarial actions by other nation states who sometimes have a vested interest in undermining your currency so actively seek the chaos and loss of trust in a double-spend event, your currency has to be backed by more electricity than any hostile power can spend on breaking it.

It seems you've come up with a proof that there's no such thing as wasting electricity. When you prove an extraordinary claim like that, it's time to go back and figure out how you got it wrong.

> It's incoherent to argue others should tamper down their energy usage because most folks producing energy aren't doing it in an ethical way.

There's a general consensus that paying someone else to do your dirty work doesn't free you of the moral (or, usually, legal) culpability for the damage done. If you knowingly direct your money towards unethical providers, you are directly increasing the demand for unethical behavior.

(That's assuming that the producers themselves are responsible for the ethics. If a producer is doing its best to convert to clean energy as fast as possible, they may be entirely in the clear but POW would still be unethical. In that scenario POW is placing strain on the limited clean energy supplies, forcing the producer to use more fossil fuels than they'd otherwise need to.)

Officer I merely stabbed the man. What he died from was blood loss.

This is greenwashing. You're still positively valuing the past harms from proof of work.

Solving the past harms means starting from scratch, not giving value to people who previously wasted electricity.

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