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Comment by theK | Hacker News Reader

I have the Mozilla foundation in high regard but this decision is nowhere near the quality standards I’d expect from a technology foundation/company. Saying Crypto has a bad eco footprint is outright wrong, sure Bitcoin and ETH and a number of other cryptocurrencies are PoW and therefore energy intensive, but on the other side you have platforms like Cardano and Algorand showing how you can do it much much better!

That Mozilla statement is unjustly labelling a whole sector, they should know better than doing that!

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You should reevaluate your opinion of Mozilla then. They did not say crypto has a bad eco footprint. They said they are going to pause accepting cryptos to investigate that question.

I was about to post a similar sentiment but I figured I'd see if someone else is posting about Cardano first. If I understand correctly, the Proof of Stake that Cardano (ADA) uses roughly 1% of the energy that a Proof of Work system does, and can still be secure and cool.

IIRC, didn't Ethereum say about a year ago that they're planning on moving to a Proof of Stake at some point?

The Ethereum PoS beacon chain is already active, and you can participate in staking. The full transition will happen soon™.

Can they actually do it ? I would like to buy a new GPU at a decent price before I die.

The transition has been successfully tested on the testnet, afaik.

It should be said though, that while crypto mining surely contributes to the GPU shortage, it is only one of many factors.

Somehow Facebook and Twitter never get a pass on HN using similar reasoning:

"Sure social media can be harmful, but on the other hand there's Mastodon and Jane's Wholesome Baking Forum showing you can do better, so there's nothing to worry about."

Scale matters. Probably 99% of crypto trading takes place on destructive PoW platforms.

Eth's plan to move to PoS is pretty concrete, and then your claim holds no value anymore.

We'll see. It's been 6-12 months away for how many years now?

PoS has a political problem, as it's plainly a plutocracy. It makes it harder to pretend that magic cryptomath has solved society's issues.

Who says crypto is going to solve "society's issues"? Maybe that is what you like to think that crypto enthusiasts think, but that is not what we actually think.

But I guess such narrative makes it easier for you to defend your position in your own mind.

“Bitcoin fixes capitalism” is the essential claim made by people like Saifedean Ammous and Michael Saylor.

Almost all my discussions with crypto-enthusiasts invariably lead to a "what about the 2 billion [?] unbanked you're screwing over". Proposals to try to improve existing systems result in an aggressive refusal because "capitalism is a scam".

These theories are completely lacking in nuance and, frankly, aren't at all convincing. Further, it's incredibly jarring when a discussion that is premised on the merits of a technology derails into an almost _purely_ political argument of which I'm apparently on the wrong side of, despite never once saying I think that the unbanked don't deserve better, for instance.

It is utterly ubiquitous. If you don't approach the subject like this then good, but if you don't see these people crawling out of the woodworks on HN lately, you aren't looking.

99% of crypto trading takes place on centralised exchanges like Binance

Besides paying for your drugs with it, what did crypto brought to this world that is effectively good? As I see it now it's only more fodder for speculators.

A couple of things you and gen pop are missing:

web3 solves the identity and privacy problems web2 created

dApps are actually a boon to open source by offering monetary incentives to create working open source solutions

NFTs are doing the same for art and expression by separating ownership of a piece and access to it

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