Satoshi would be first in line?
Virtually all of the current conditions were in motion before bitcoin and AI were even a thing.
Not exactly background noise but totally incomparable to the normal CO2 outputs of major nations like the US or China. I.e. ~20 Million Tons CO2 vs 4 Trillion and 13 Trillion Tons respectively.
And I would argue the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society.
AI is to a certain degree a different story, but also there it depends what you're doing.
We live in a thin atmospheric skin around the planet, and that skin has a finite volume. If earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere is thinner than the Apple's skin in proportion.
Pretending we can do whatever we like for infinitly long inside an finite volume is completely unhinged. The financial and political elites, who some frame as the true geniuses point to technological solutions that are always "just around the corner" for the past decades with some of them even eying to leave the planet behind entirely.
All of that while we know how to address the issue.
if you mean PoW mining instead of crypto in general then maybe. ethereum uses about as much power as a small village in europe so it should never be a target for climate action.
the public benefit of blockchains is real and it comes from the fact that no one controls them and they let users ignore the law. thats the part governments dont like. corporations also dont like it even if they work in the industry, coinbase and binance started their own chains so they would have full control over the way they evolve.
crypto is a cypherpunk/anarchist technology that got hijacked by investors to sell their scam coins and fake decentralized web services. without it your only option for buying things that are illegal in your country (weed, abortion pills, guns, hacking tools) is sending cash in paper mail or using some complicated scheme where you have to trust third parties. i think thats worth some tax evasion.
I know the original idea. In 2009 I bought coffee using Bitcoin. I had to wait 30 minutes till it went through despite using a fee that back then mirrored what PayPal would take. Then I knew: OK this is not going to be used as a cash replacement.
Then it became clear that it was used as a way to pay for illegal shit on the internet, be it drugs, botnets or services of questionable ethical value. Of course also to speculate, to launder money, to blackmail, to extract ransom, to run ponzi schemes or rug pulls, which became a big driver by people who wanted to get the wealth without having to put in the legwork.
And these are still the main drivers behind crypto currencies today by a wide margin. So yes: Net-negative. Prove me wrong.
Lots of manufacturing projects, lots of related industries boosted, a renewed investment in nuclear engineering bringing a lot of nuclear job experience, and a way to potentially dig deeper into the backbone of global trade again.
Imagine if even one of the tankers hit in the strait of Hormuz was nuclear.
Either way, "loss of nuclear material" is the real concern isn't it, instead of just the nature of how that loss happened?
The question still stands. If a country knows they're potentially going to cause a nuclear disaster by hitting one of these ships on their shoreline, are they as likely to shoot at them?
And even among the non-hardliners mistakes are rampant in war. It's not about what they're likely to rationally do, it's about what some local, demoralized missile officer who graduated in the bottom 20% of his class does when he's cut off from command and drinking too much.
If Iran wants to make their country a nuclear wasteland, they don't need to blow up ships to do it. I'd imagine they probably don't want that outcome, but hey I'm not an Iranian so I can't speak for them.
I kind of figured that'd just be a "logical" thing and not necessarily a "cultural" thing, but I agree I don't know all cultures.
Plus there are the security concerns. Every civilian nuclear power plant has armed guards on duty around the clock. Those guards have to also be trained and paid. Many foreign countries have laws against bringing weapons into their ports.
If we want to reduce CO2 emissions from merchant ships then use nuclear or renewable power on shore to manufacture carbon neutral synthetic liquid fuel. Use that to run the ship engines.
In transport emissions, passenger vehicles dominate by far (with around 12% of global GHG emissions), even more so in developed countries. Then freight by road with 7.5% of total emissions.
Maritime shipping is actually the least carbon intensive way to transport goods over long distances by at least two orders of magnitude [2].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport
[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/transport/06_figure_8-6/
Followed by agriculture & manufacturing.