Comment by mlinsey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlinsey | Hacker News Reader

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doing just a quick search in the public directory, I found 24 out of 394 companies are in crypto. That's a lot lower fraction than you'd expect given how much mindshare, hype, and attention crypto has now vs. other sectors.

I am a crypto-skeptic, and consciously chose not to work on it myself, but I still wouldn't want any investor, especially one as early stage as YC, to categorically rule out a sector based on the impact of its current technology, the state of the technology will be different when these companies have grown.

Eg with respect to the carbon impact of crypto specifically, the current chains are very unscalable for the exact same reason that they consume lots of carbon; while the per-user stats look bad now, any world in which these companies are used at the scale of web 2.0 platforms is necessarily a world where the carbon footprint per user is many orders of magnitude lower.

I agree with your first point: 24 out of 394 is too many for my taste, but, given how hyped the sector is, it’s not a huge amount.

Per the second point, I actually completely disagree. I think there’s huge social dynamics in play that make it harder to move away from proof of work because miners have massive amounts invested into mining equipment. We might see Ethereum move to PoS eventually (maybe) - but - that will be in spite of social dynamics and because some of the leaders are stubbornly trying to do the right thing.

I think in the scenario where miners block the move to PoS (or any other much-more-scalable technology) is a scenario where nobody ever actually uses crypto for anything, and almost all coins go to $0 after the speculative bubble pops. To be clear, I think that's certainly a possible world, maybe even the modal outcome.

The alternative world, where we're using crypto to pay for everything, and we're no longer logging into twitter, but instead using our keys to log into a client for a globally distributed twitter where we own all our data on a blockchain - that's impossible without not just Eth2 but a several orders of magnitude of improvements beyond that.

Basically, I think taking the current per-transaction carbon impacts, multiplying it by eg. Visa's transaction volume, and forecasting a world where crypto is burning 1,000X as much carbon as the whole transportation sector or whatever - is a fallacy. Crypto will either solve the scalability problem (and therefore consume a much more moderate amount of energy), or it won't be used at all.

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