The largest and easiest argument against crypto is the environmental impact. It’s completely ignored in that piece.
When the web was growing the electrical demands were similarly criticised:
“The current fuel-economy rating: about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is very energy-intensive. The Internet may someday save us bricks, mortar and catalog paper, but it is burning up an awful lot of fossil fuel in the process.”
https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=5db...
You need to compare solutions at scale, not just say that a process that serves billions of people is wasteful because it uses as much energy that a process that is serving dozens of people.
Finally, most of the internet is powered from warehouses that are purposely built in areas with carbon-neutral electricity. The operators are actively optimising their consumption and investing in carbon-neutral energy generation that match their needs.
Crypto avocates likes to say they _could_ do it with imaginary wealth, but that are very far from being able to afford it; if they could, it would break their business model. In the mean time, they are settled in the countries with the worst carbon footprint possible. They tried to hide it but you can’t really hide that amount of waste. They have distrupted the energy market of China, Kazakstan so much that thousands of people died in energy shortages. For now, all we have from those people is mountains of unrecycled electronic waste.
So, no, those two are not the same thing.
This is exactly the same case as with bitcoin miners.
Estimates I’ve seen put renewables as 40-66% of bitcoins energy mix, with this figure rising over time.
The incentive is towards cheaper renewable sources that would otherwise not be viable.
Every 10 minutes, a new coin is minted. That coin is given to the person who solved the correct hash. The chances of being the correct hash is 1/n where n is the number of miners active.
So if I fire up a miner and I'm the only one, I get a coin every 10 minutes. Life is good. Now, if you want bitcoins as well, you can fire up your own miner. Now we'll both get a coin every 20 minutes. But I was making 6 coins an hour, now I'm making 3. My production is halved. That sucks. But. I can spin up another miner. Now I have 2 to your 1. I get a coin roughly every 15 minutes, you get a coin roughly every 30.
You see where this is going, right? More miners, more coins. And the only way to get value out of these coins is to sell each coin for more than electricity used for all of your miners.
So you're incentivized to not only use every available unit of electricity to mine, you are also incentivized to sell at exorbitant prices. Bitcoin will not switch us over to renewables. It will also use renewables if and when they become available. Bitcoin has also caused long dormant fossil fuel generators to come online again.
No: both types of organisation are looking at areas with cheap electricity and free cooling, but large internet companies are looking at area with stable polical regime and low carbon footprint. Bitcoin miners _could_ value that; they certainly loudly claim that they do. In reality, they don’t. They set-up shops in countries with cheap coal like China and Kazakstan. It sounds like areas known for their corrupt officials and no rules around dumping electronic waste have some appeal.
They don’t go where electricity is carbon neutral. You know how I know that? Because I live near a lot of hydro power, Arctic cold, where all the big players have their European data centers——and there’s no crypto operation here.
Bitcoin advocates are delusional and loves confusing their claims (like they could operate a trust-less financial network) with reality. But reality is still easy to see: crypto a collection of wasteful, polluting, short-term scams.
Complaining that crypto uses a lot of power is like complaining India is trying to burn fossil fuels which will harm the planet. India wants to boost its economy the same way the west has done. Crypto activists want a democratised / uncontrollable financial system and so far mining and burning energy is the only way we know how to achieve it.
Instead, crypto advocates brandish an apparent technological solution that is at amost a very leaky abstraction. I can’t even stop screaming at how offensive is “wireless energy transport technology”. In doing so, you ignore that the scales in play are absurd: securing dozens of transactions should not have a larger environmental footprint than taking a billion people out of poverty. That you think this is even an argument is horrifying.
So what is your solution to this? There are ways to generate energy purely from ocean waves, this is being used near shore for the reasons stated above (you must transport the produced energy to shore) but we could install these way further and just rely on a sattelite connection for internet.
How else would you utilize these yet untapped potential energy producing areas? Handwaving and using strong negative words aren't an argument.
----------
> There are many ways to implement fair financial systems
Depends on what you mean by fair but please do list those other more efficient ways
Even if we assume (which is definitely not a safe assumption) that burning all that oil in the first place to mine the coins produces less carbon than the overall reduction caused by the increase in demand for solar panels and subsequent increase in their production and deployment (because just buying solar panels that were already being produced and going to be deployed by someone does not reduce the overall carbon load of the planet)...
That requires the miners to sink all their profits into buying solar panels, rather than, y'know, making money for themselves, which is the reason they're mining cryptocurrency in the first place.
I did not check this but Michael Saylor claims that over 40% of mining is done using renewable energy. Considering solar power by itself is a good investment last time I checked ( around 13% ROI depending on your local energy price) then that number will probably increase as it just makes business sense to do it.
I could use money I earned from selling power generated by a coal plant to buy solar panels. That doesn't make the coal plant produce twice the energy.
That is still a million times less efficient than existing solution and still horrifyingly wasteful. Blockchain principle is that if you have as many people as possible waste an astounding amount of computation and energy, you make over-ruling most of them too wasteful to be possible. You are not solving anything that way, just showing off that you have never heard of Kwakiutl.
There are blockchains now that are designed to be optimal for what they provide.
The bigger issue is that there are applications running on chains that clearly don’t need the features of the chain.
You are advocating for the end of the world as we know it within ten years.
Google might build some of their data centers up in Iceland, but that’s not the full picture.
Then you would not know what you are talking about.
> Google might build some of their data centers up in Iceland, but that’s not the full picture.
No, they have dozens of data centers, on every continent, and all of them are in areas with cheap, carbon-neutral supply. You think that you are being smart by being dismissive about their effort, and the effort of dozens of companies who host their own infrastructure, but that condescension and lack of expertise is just one more example of why Crypto advocates are so unconvincing.
Unsure about the former point.
More centralization (AFAIR you need 32 ETH to get started, so ~$100000, not to mention possible issues where you loose full 32 ETH) vs a single GPU with only lose is your electricity cost.
Furthermore, Bitcoin can lower the hidden costs of the petrodollar. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-...
And Bitcoin incentivises having a low time preference. This leads to a much more sustainable consumer behaviour. Bitcoin helps us move away from the mentality of a throw-away society.
Pop quiz: What will happen first, Ethereum PoS or the year of linux on the desktop?
I’m willing to bet any amount you want up to $30,000 that Ethereum main net is running PoS by Dec 31 of this year.
Like, if we are using the second metric we could even create 1000s of irrelevant PoS coins to pump that baby up.