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Comment by casi18 | Hacker News Reader

If we want to bring climate change under control then coordination and communication tools that cross national borders are necessary. That is what many of us working in crypto are focused on, you might not yet value it, but we do.

How do we collectively, as a planet, decide what is acceptable usage of energy and what isn't? Who gets to use machines and who doesn't? And how do we do that in a way that isn't authoritarian, and held together with violence?

Is it wrong to use my gpu playing video games all day, or is the moral panic only applying to certain uses of computers?

When you say it should be stopped instantly you should clarify what you mean by that, what action do you see being taken?

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If every person on the planet were using their GPU to play a few hours every day, they would probably not reach the amount of energy used by the Bitcoin blockchain alone.

All of the things you are citing require cooperation and discussion and democratic discourse. An algorithmically driven opaque protocol controlled by a handful of technocrats (the people developing the major clients and the ones running the major mining pools) is part of the problem, not a model for the solution.

Not to mention, money as a means of exchange is simply not one of the problems standing in the way of stopping global warming. The biggest problems are caused by rich people who have calculated that they will not be personally impacted, who couldn't care less about the poor 90+% of the planet who will, and who have thus decided to prioritize increasing their wealth today over any sort of urgent changes. It is also perpetuated by organizational systems put in place a long time ago (mainly for profit corporations with lobbying power) that have the same goals - short term profit over any other consideration.

Another thing that was put in place for corporations with lobbying power and wealthy people is the current US monetary policy of quantitative easing to infinity. This makes the rich richer and decimates the purchasing power of those who have few assets (poor and/or working class), and the government which you seem to have so much trust in does this knowingly. Note that even outside of the US, this does matter, since the USD is the de facto global reserve currency.

I do not have that much trust in the government. However, the government, unlike corporations or algorithms, is the one thing I have some minute amount of democratic control over, corrupt though it is. Moving things like monetary policy away from corrupt government control directly into private hands, or moving it into completely inflexible algorithmic control (with the algorithm in turn controlled by private individuals) can only make things worse.

And note that, while QE is useful to the rich, it also permits things like giant infrastructure bills that help everyone. We've seen in Greece what can happen when money supply is constrained (in that case, by EU policy preventing one country from just printing euros), and it's definitely not the rich who lost. QE is being used to serve the rich not because it's inherently in their benefit, but because almost everything in our society is being used to help the rich.

>Is it wrong to use my gpu playing video games all day, or is the moral panic only applying to certain uses of computers?

Is it wrong for you to leave a warehouse full of computers idling to play a computer game? Yes. This is one of the more outrageous false equivalences I've seen.

It stops being a moral panic when crypto consumes more electricity than the entire nation of Argentina.

“crypto consumes more electricity than country X” is such a tired and low-effort talking point. There are things more useless than crypto that consume more energy than certain countries.

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