Surely there is a better argument to be made here. Speculative "mining" on consumer purchased hardware is hardly near the top of global wasted resources.
- Facebook ad spending is a waste; do companies actually get a ROI on all the money they give to Facebook? They don't actually know! In the grand scheme of things it's a complete waste. If Facebook didn't exist, then companies wouldn't be forced to pay it money just to stay relevant; they could focus their funds on actually improving their products instead. Not to mention the enormous amount of otherwise productive human hours that Facebook is responsible for wasting every day. That's not even counting all the other social networks.
- Gambling; $240 billion per year; the money does nothing for society. The amount of money spent on gambling every year is MORE than the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies added up together. So even if you think that buying a cryptocurrency is gambling, your odds are much better (and improve as you do more research). If people stopped gambling on horses and lottery and started gambling with cryptocurrencies instead, the total market cap for cryptocurrencies would be much higher than it is now.
- Sports; the sport industry makes $75 billion per year. Yes it's entertainment. So is trading cryptocurrencies.
- Tobacco industry makes $35 billion in PROFITS per year. Doesn't add anything positive to society. I think that if you were to add up all fees (profits) ever charged for transferring cryptocurrencies, you wouldn't get anything close to $35 billion.
Gambling pays for many social services through (heavy) taxation and government-run lotteries.
Sports promote fitness.
Cigarettes make me look cool (kidding).
It doesn't. That's the myth that keeps you supporting the system.
The truth is the other way around. https://medium.com/modern-money-matters/the-magic-money-tree...
Also which system are we referring to, there are an infinite number.
Yes they do, and yes they know. Facebook is very effective at reaching qualified leads, it's not "likes" or "engagement" what advertisers are buying.
I don't have a link for you, but just yesterday I read a headline saying bitcoin mining accounts for 5% of the UK's energy expenditure. That's not peanuts.
Now, even if that headline is wrong, here's a site that offers a Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index Chart (https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption) and they say that bitcoin accounts for 0.08% of the world's electricity consumption. That seems absurdly high.
Sometimes this argumentation is totally valid. For example, it's utterly stupid reasoning when one uses less water at home "to save fresh water and environment", because households use half of the fresh water used by industry, and agriculture uses twice as much as the two combined. Whatever inconvenience the person trying to save the environment this way puts themselves into, the effect is capped at about 10% of total fresh water consumption. It's an effort applied in the wrong place.
More philosophically speaking, if there's an equation of life with all the variables and we apply it here by taking all the "saved effort thanks to not promoting water consciousness in regular households" and dumping it into whichever area we'd think is ideally efficient, it wouldn't be _too_ surprising if holistically, the result comes out less favorable of this approach vs just telling regular folks to save water. For example, consider that it might take tenfold the effort to convince an agricultural company CEO to change approach; if ninefold the effort doesn't reach the activation energy to convince such person then you're better off telling nine people to stop the waste.
In general, I have the feeling that many decisions can wrongly be made to look stupid if we recalculate it using the select few variables we care about.
Ah yes, "let's show them not to be wasteful". Ever heard of the activities of making industries not to use child labour or improve working conditions of factory workers? If they didn't work, why do you think this one would?
> Where would the change be coming from?
Certainly not from social movements. They rarely have enough power to make a single company change, much less a whole industry.
I remember a couple of friends wanting to buy some powerful machines to mine bitcoins a few years ago, and they had to actually calculate their electricity bill to make sure they weren't losing money. That's quite a ways from storing Instagram pics.
Imagine the power consumption in a place like this: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkvxk3/chinas-big...