Cryptocurrencies isn't the only space to have a poor environmental footprint, Machine Learning as well has a horrible record and contributes to harming the environment.
Imagine if you could attach a number to a resource, like energy, that accounts for its various possible usages. If the resource becomes more available, this number will go down and if it becomes more scarce, the number would go up.
If you wanted to use the resource, you would have to pay this number. So naturally, you wouldn't pay to use the resource for something silly. Similarly, if it's important, you'd pay as much as you had to to use the resource. This would discourage people from using the resource foolishly.
The beautiful thing about this system is that you don't have to have moral judgements about what is or isn't worthy. It wouldn't be up to any one individual to say you should use resource for X and not Y. The number would be self adjusting as more or less resources become made available or more or less uses for the resources are discovered. And as the number went up, it would incentivize people to create more of that resource or create a resource to replace it.
If only such a number existed...
This is some praise the market reductive lunacy. Obviously energy production, pricing and consumption needs to be heavily regulated in any sensible society.
If that were the case, we'd have optimal formulas to allocate goods throughout the economy and market economics would be completely obsolete. Whatever your position on markets, the reason they exist is because we don't know how to most efficiently allocate goods a priori. Markets and prices offer us a mechanism, however imperfect and prone to externalities, to allocate resources efficiently. You'd also probably be able to solve the Knapsack problem and the Multi-Armed Bandit problem. I'd love something like this also, but I'm not holding my breath.
We could do a whole lot better with our energy usage across the whole industry.
I don't see any 'whataboutism' with my statement.
Also get tired of the aspirational rants of how it is going to fix supply chains and offer banking to the underserved communities. And yes, I understand banking, supply chains, and crypto enough to know that that will never happen.
agreed. have you heard of hREA [1] and http://valueflo.ws, led by Bob and Lynn from http://mikorizal.org, and others? it's sort of an open source SAP alternative designed as local-first networked software. "Radically distributed supply chain systems". it uses the REA accounting method [2] to implement LETS and mutual credit type economic networks for cooperatives / small business ecosystems / commons based peer production / any transitional/solidarity economies.
Bonfire is also implementing the Valueflows vocabulary on ActivityPub [3].
[1] https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea
I think that there are many valid ways to improve business systems software, but that the current leaders are entrenched to a level that they won’t be replaced, similar to libre office not taking off regardless of its rich set of features. I am glad that open source databases have done well though.
I recall working at a large manufacturing warehouse that switched systems, 2 years into the schedule they had to continue to push out the changeover for a variety of issues.