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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

I mean. It's like making an argument against cars, by attacking cars running on petrol and then generalising towards every single car having the same characteristics and environmental disadvantages as petrol cars.

I would have agreed if Bitcoin was THE only cryptocurrency. It is not, and there are many alternatives that are not Proof-of-Work; at least the top 10 cryptocurrencies even.

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So how come the energy consumption is still bigger than all but 22 countries on the planet? Saying that other coins don’t have the problem doesn’t make it ok, no?

> So how come the energy consumption is still bigger than all but 22 countries on the planet?

Maybe that is the reason why China [0], Kazakhstan [1], Kosovo [2] and now Russia [3] are taking action to discourage or 'ban' it and the use of PoW cryptocurrencies. We'll see how that goes, but it seems that they know about 'the problems', PoW cryptocurrencies are creating, hence the incentives to stop cryptocurrency mining via the law or taxation.

> Saying that other coins don’t have the problem doesn’t make it ok, no?

So having environmentally friendly cryptocurrencies is not 'ok' either?

What 'harm' is a cryptocurrency like for example, XRP, Stellar, Solana or Algorand doing to the environment? How exactly are they damaging the environment?

[0] https://fortune.com/2021/11/17/china-bitcoin-mining-ban-cryp...

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/06/kazakhstan-bitcoin-mining-sh...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59879760

[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/1/20/russias-central-...

Fair point on the criticism of lumping all cryptocurrency into the same pot as bitcoin. Will add an edit later. Thanks for the feedback!

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