I still think war and oil are dirtier and don't see a way to wean ourselves off that consumption and impact. I do see that cryptocurrencies are moving toward energy reduction through things like proof of stake and L2s.
I’m not really sure what your point is. Basically everything pales in comparison to war and oil - by that logic, burning trash in a barrel in my yard is fine. It’s not like if we all switched to Bitcoin tomorrow that war and oil would cease to exist.
Well, a war typically costs trillions. Which is usually just printed out of thin air. On a truly global Bitcoin standard, you could not afford that war. Because even a government would have a limited supply of Bitcoin, and they can't just create new ones.
So the only way to pay for such a war, is to do extremely heavy taxation on your citizen's Bitcoins.
And I do not see how PS is greenwashing, since it is fundamentally changing the business. This is like going from burning brown coal to solar power, and then you would say solar power is just greenwashing.
The exact same way proof of purchase of massive bespoke mining rigs doesn't cause the rich to grow richer.
The people making significant money from mining cryptocurrencies are the ones with multiple warehouse-scale operations filled with custom hardware. These people aren't getting rich, they were already rich. Moving to PoS just removes some middlemen, not changes the fundamental economics.
Real estate is a pyramid scheme. So are stocks. And even money itself. Anything of value is ultimately hoarded and concentrated in the hands of a few. It's not an issue unique to crypto.
The behavior of these cryptocurrency folk is indicative that they don't care about the environment at all. If they did, there would be something like a carbon tax set up to pay for the externalities that are currently being caused until these underlying environmental issues are solved by some future technology. Since no one has any interest in cutting into their profits for that right now, motives are clearly not aligned to fix the environmental issues. This is where regulation comes in to incentivize good behavior and make bad behavior too costly to make any fiscal sense to continue.
Nobody cares about the environment at all. There's zero outrage on energy wasting consumer behavior, say ACs, giant TVs, high-end gaming PCs, dryers, and leaving chargers plugged in. Likewise, there's barely any outrage on eating meat or air travel.
Whilst I would agree that some types of crypto don't help in this regard as they add to the problem, it's truly very hypocritical to believe to be morally superior or to care about the environment, whilst hardly anybody does, crypto or not.
Consumer behavior is the wrong animal to fight when its these massive industries that are polluting the world, wasting our water, and things like cryptocurrencies that consume as much electricity as a nation of consumers. Unplug your chargers, stop eating meat, stop flying, and its not going to change much when factories are still polluting the air with fossil fuels and industrial agriculture is selecting the most profitable and water intensive crops they can because they aren't paying what they should for their water rights. I want significant change to happen and it means going after these signficant targets like industry and cryptocurrency and not me forgetting I left my phone charger plugged into the wall.
Got it, you take zero responsibility for your own behavior, it should remain unchanged and unchallenged, whilst you externalize blame to everything else.
Said unsustainable industry you despise so much is the very thing making your luxury goods so cheap.
Phone chargers waste more energy than the entire crypto industry, yet you're not outraged by it at all. You're not even willing to take the incredibly tiny action of unplugging them, for a better world.
Oh come on dude. Whats easier, what is even realistic, practically speaking: convincing the entire world to engage in a behavioral shift and hoping thats enough, or just taxing the heaviest polluters accordingly? There is a reason why politicians are looking into carbon taxes and not hiring gestapo to raid your home for unused chargers plugged into the walls.
The thing is that major currencies switching to proof-of-stake just creates a pool of cheap hardware for shitcoins to bootstrap themselves past the threshold of 51% attacks with. So even if every crypto agreed to go proof-of-work tomorrow, it wouldn't change anything - all you've done is "destroy the demand" that is supporting GPU prices, making them paradoxically cheap and creating a paradoxical demand for something else to utilize that capacity. It's another form of Jevon's Paradox in action. The availability of a large supply of a resource "cheaply" will create a demand, someone will find something to do with it.
Also, due to the existence of proof-of-stake it becomes impossible to shut down trading of proof-of-work coins, because while you can outlaw trading them on conventional exchanges, it's realistically impossible to stop them from being traded on decentralized exchanges. So if you want to get rid of the carbon emissions from proof-of-work, you have to kill proof-of-stake as well. Just make it entirely illegal to convert any crypto to USD or vice versa, and illegal to interact with any entity who doesn't respect said sanctions.
Works pretty well for other financial laws in the US, but it needs to have a sufficiently wide scope. It's not possible to retain "the good crypto" because the good crypto is an enabler for the bad crypto.
In Ethereum's case, it's not green washing, they're already halfway to implementation. The proof of stake chain is live. The proof of work chain will be merged into the proof of stake chain in the next six months: https://ethmerge.com/
Clearly with hundreds of billions in economic activity on the POW chain they have to take this very carefully.
There's a lot of issues with that article but to pick on one as you pulled it out specifically:
PoS is here, has been for years and is extremely successful; Polygon side-chain for instance already has surpassed main net in terms of active addresses. Then there's L2 and PoS L1s like Tezos...
This is a terrible article written by someone who doesn't know anything. Plenty of proof of stake coins are currently active, such as Binance Chain, Ripple, Avalanche, Cosmos, Polkadot, and on and on. Ethereum will get there but they are being very careful.
This article isn't claiming that PoW is the dirtiest activity. However, its impact is very significant and we need to get rid of it ASAP.
As far as i know there are no plans to move Bitcoin away from PoW, a project that would be very likely to fail due to the hopelessly quarrelling Bitcoin community.
Huh? Nano is here right now; has been for years. It's near instant, feeless, and uses less energy than a credit card transaction; all using delegated POS tending toward decentralisation.
https://susanfsu.medium.com/think-btc-is-a-dirty-business-co...