Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US

As European citizen I don't really trust the Euros or Dollars. Just think about the loss in value If you own money. Even if the official 2% inflation, its still 2% lost of value. And now with Corona they printing billions of Euros and the inlfation will stay at 2% ... sure.

While this is sad, this is a self correcting problem. Miners and other people using bitcoins are going to get tired at some point of the loss from buying all this energy to keep their bitcoin assets going.

The most scary part of cryptocoins is the deflationary cycle that makes these crypto asset potentially displace productive investment on an economy wide scale.

This is not self correcting. This is Moloch, it's a prisoner's dilemma, a bad Nash equilibrium where the incentives are to keep the vicious cycle going as long as possible because the first to leave the cycle are disadvantaged.

This is mostly a worry if many companies do like Tesla and jump on the band wagon. They may be tempted at an economy wide scale to reduce investment in production in order to hoard cryptocoins instead. This dynamic caused the great depression in the 1930s when businesses switched to hoarding gold tied currency instead of producing.

Now I'm not sure that crypto coins without being jacked up by central banks (like gold was during the great depression) are a powerful enough force to cause the type of havoc that gold did.

Then again, the potentially stronger network/memetic effects of cryptocoins, along with the amplification factor from markets being synchronized through instant global communications nowadays might make them dangerous to the economy even without central bank involvement. We saw how much people got hypnotized during the Gamestop episode. I don't think unsophisticated investors' hoarding is enough to cause problems but it is a bit unsettling that Tesla and other companies are starting to hoard. If enough businesses follow suit, you get into scary territory (It would also be worrisome if companies widely moved to add billions in gold to their balance sheet but the lesson has been learned in the 1930s with gold).

In theory, if central banks stay stimulative enough through all this, you can maintain growth in both productive businesses and crypto. As long as these central banks don't flinch at the sight of what may look like crypto bubbles.

> Most of this electricity comes from the cheapest source of power, which is hydro.

This is not actually true. And even if it were, it is irrelevant. If crypto uses green energy, it displaces other users to use more dirty energy.

The environmental cost of crypto is not that of the energy it uses, it is that of the dirtiest energy it displaces other users onto.

(Crypto also uses massive amounts of dirty energy directly. The idea that crypto uses green energy is basically a lie.)

This is not just some article, it's a peer-reviewed study from the University of Arizona. Surely it has fault, but honestly I don't think a "cursory glance at wikipedia" provides a compelling counterargument