If the owners of the miners are actually able to turn their coins into wealth that increases their lifestyle, then the mining did improve someone's life. Just because it affects a very small number of people isn't much different than most other "traditional" financial products in exsistence.
On net, was it welfare enhancing for our species though? If I make $1 off of emissions that cause external harm worth $2 distributed among the 7 billion people on this planet, I'm basically just laundering money through a loophole in what the law today considers to be harming someone else.
You just keep moving the goalposts by using the most extreme argument you can muster.
To be honest the sports industry uses tons of energy in lighting stadiums, streaming them, training players, it goes on and on. Entertainment could be done much more cheaply and effectively. I think society should outlaw sport - so many people are hurt in injuries, and the climate is just utterly demolished through all the energy waste. I can’t see a reason why society would allow sports. It’s ultimately beneficial to a very small amount of owners and their players (who are exploited!) that take all the cream off the top. Completely immoral honestly. The fact society wastes so much thought, effort, energy, focus, when we could instead be going to Mars or training STEM graduates is just criminal.
> You just keep moving the goalposts by using the most extreme argument you can muster.
The most extreme arguments I can muster? There are tons of industries that produce negative net value when accounting for externalities. $1 in profit for $2 in external harm is not at all that ridiculous.
> I think society should outlaw sport - so many people are hurt in injuries
My argument is that we should price carbon usage to account for externalities. I highly doubt sports turns out to be net unprofitable, even once accounting for those externalities.
Okay, lets say we agree that the sports industry causes externalities. The sports industry recognizes this and installs LEDs and other efficient electronics and cuts their energy consumption by 50%. If the sports industry and Bitcoin were equivalently bad the sports industry would immediately respond to the efficiency increase by doubling the number of stadiums and consume the same amount of energy in the end. Worse, they also had to construct new stadiums with concrete and therefore emitted CO2 during the construction process.
Bitcoin is not advertised as entertainment, though. And if it was, gambling industries are heavily regulated. If you argue that bitcoin is essentially a new entrant in gambling, would you support similar regulation? Otherwise, there is not much besides whataboutism here.
> If the owners of the miners are actually able to turn their coins into wealth that increases their lifestyle, then the mining did improve someone's life
Bitcoin is between high finance and casinos. Both are highly regulated.
It is wealth redistribution, though, not wealth creation. These people essentially take money from newcomers to the btc ecosystem, but btcs themselves are not tied to any tangible asset or value.
More importantly, creating new bitcoins is not tied to the creation of new counterparts. Essentially, when someone mines bitcoins, they are not involved in a productive act.
