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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

It makes a lot of sense for a country that has significant portions of its territory below sea level. But, I wonder. For years I was absolutely baffled by how the world decided to ignore crypto environmental footprint. Then, out of the blue, a few months ago, it looks like EVERYBODY is talking about it. Then, the G-7 wants to impose the beginning of a global tax regime upon the developed nations (that's what it is basically). Doesn't it smell funny?

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He cites: "citing fraud, criminal use, and financial instability" - not environmentalism.

Also, that argument only applies to PoW coins, not PoS coins.

PoW - proof of work (computationally intensive), https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_work

PoS - proof of stake, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake

The "nobody visibly cared, then some people cared more loudly, then everyone cared" pattern exists in essentially everything.

Climate change, opioid addiction, police murders, genocide in China, microplastics, childhood obesity, #metoo, whatever other thing.

That's just how society works. There are a billion different things happening every day, at any given moment some are gaining attention and some are losing attention. Everybody will care about the most popular one for a while, some laws might get passed or someone might go to jail or get elected or give a speech, and then it'll fade from the mainstream news and daily conversation will move on to the next issue.

This isn't some coordinated conspiracy, this is the pattern of how literally every issue ebbs and flows in attention.

The reason this pattern is so common is that most people take their cues for what to care about from the media, and the media take their cues from a presumably small and difficult-to-identify group of thought leaders (some combination of editors, PR firms and people with extremely respectable positions).

It is basically a self organising system around a very small pool of original thoughts. It is pretty remarkable how stuff can completely slip the general discourse because it never catches on in the in-group.

That describes what I think about current public discourse exactly. I wonder if that's how it's always been with human societies?

The misallocation of resources into crypto mining also now has real-world implications. GPUs and other chips being unavailable, for example.

apparently ripple (xrp) is behind the fud campaign against POW, which is why we've seen such an uptick in negative news against it recently

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