Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

There's a paper that talked about this quite a bit and is very interesting: https://www.accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis

Accelerando is great btw

Cryptocurrencies are here to stay, environmentally unsound ones, probably not. Play your part and stop using/investing in cryptos that have a high carbon footprint.

I mined BURST for a while, another PoS coin. It's been around for 7 years, works great, and solves the PoW power problem. It's got a lot of functionality built in for the nodes, like messaging and marketplace functions.

And nobody cares. If I had to guess, I'd say the attractiveness of mining the PoW coins is that it's very expensive, but accordingly very rewarding.

When the coins are cheap and easy to secure as a node, people seem to not be as interested, which means the coin doesn't get used.

Chia, Sia, Filecoin all are trying to do similar, but have added in a "distributed Dropbox". There are some interesting challenges there, like quintuple redundancy and having your files stored across multiple nodes in shards for privacy. But in the end, they seem to suffer from the same issue as BURST: their feature set struggles to create popularity because they're not Bitcoin.

So since bitcoin is up right now, we're just going to see nonstop attacks on the fact that it's not climate friendly with its energy usage? Feels like this is the sixth article I've seen on Hacker News in the last month.

From a quick skim this article seems like it might have some good data, but it also has a bunch of loaded language in it that turns me off from wanting to read the article.

"Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare"

"This paper looks at the energy consumption of seven proof-of-work-based anarchic (public) blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum." (You know how anarchy is bad right, well we're going to say these are like anarchy, so they're bad too.)

"Many Bitcoin promoters conjure a future world...[where Bitcoin is king and leads to renewable energy]" (they're like spellcasters, this future doesn't really exist, they're trying to pretend they will create it out of nothing but they never will!)

"Putting aside the continual greenwashing that many advocates are guilty of" (You know how whitewashing is bad? Well so is greenwashing! I'm saying these people do that and that means they're bad!)

"The container ship fetish is a slight-of-hand[sic] trick..." (These guys have fetishes and fetishes are bad, also they're using slight-of-hand and tricking you, and tricking people is bad!) Also the writer misspelled 'sleight'.

If they wanted to change minds the writer should have used more neutral language in their sentences. You can be persuasive without resorting to this. I'll sit down and read it a bit later, but not feeling like trudging through all this loaded language.

The locked up energy used for mining was never available to populated area's in the first place, it is exces energy. It's a bit like if you compare taking a shower in the middle of the desert with standing under a water fall and telling someone not to waste water while standing there because you consume as much water as 10000 people.