> Or lets go on and on ad nauseum about the carbon burn of BTC and PoW mining (despite many of you working in tech fields where insane amounts of electrical energy and carbon are burned just maintaining billions of people's generally utterly pointless social media posts or cat videos).
I hate to say this, because I find accusations of "whataboutism" to be frequently annoying and pedantic, but this is textbook whataboutism. No one is saying that the energy we're currently spending communicating via some HN backend, our coal-powered ISPs or offices, or any other element of the current state of technology is somehow clean of waste or C02 pollution or morally right. It's not justified merely by its existence. But the "what about?" here is that you can make sound arguments for the existence of social media. I might use it to plan events, to talk with friends, to keep in touch with old relatives or colleagues, to sell old furniture, to promote my new album or art show. Some people use social media to discuss politics, physics, current events, critical theory, to review consumer products, to question authority. Critics say that it can be used to stalk and harass people, to spread propaganda, to malevolently perform psychological experiments on people without their knowledge, to track and isolate them, to shorten their attention spans, to keep them addicted. In actuality, I tend toward the latter - I think that both the kWh and psychic energy people spend on social media is likely to their own detriment, that it should be regulated, that it should be government owned as a public infrastructure product: I think that there are many things that can be improved.
One can be critical of energy waste in general, but find it particularly egregious for certain applications. I don't think it's a waste of electricity to keep the lights on at car factories, to fuel research in alternative energies, to develop and administer medical treatments, to help transport and grow food. I make these assessments in light of what would happen should they not exist. What if Bitcoin didn't exist? Well, I personally can't think of a reason why it would or wouldn't affect me. I do not know how Bitcoin is used other than to speculate on its price movement.
In the case of Bitcoin... no such arguments exist. Bitcoin isn't used, it is held. It is passive, amoral, algorithmic. I cannot buy coffee with it. I cannot trust in it to hold its value or act as an investment vehicle. I cannot change it, only spin off the fundamentals into a new experiment. The experiments done with Bitcoin in the past have not resulted in a market for it. I do not need it. It does not solve a problem for me. So, the argument goes, why should the fans be spinning? Why spend the energy? At least with social media I can understand why it exists and why people pour energy (both kWh and psychic energy) into it. But with Bitcoin, I simply don't see the value proposition. This isn't "hate" or "emotional" - it's a dispassionate conclusion that I've come to from observing the world around me. You can say I'm incorrect, sure, but I'm happy to have that discussion with real world data.
What about my social media? What about my cat videos? What about your HN post? What about fraud and transaction fees? What about "hackers"? Isn't the hacker ethos to dispassionately analyze, to experiment (and recognize failures), to improve upon, to dream big, and to recognize when a risk is too great? Isn't blind acceptance just as bad as stubbornness to accept the "new"?
> Frankly, it's a shame to the very most basic idea of the word "hacker" that these negative arguments should be used to totally condemn something like considering how interestingly it's being explored in the wider world.
How exactly is crypto/blockchain being explored in the wider world? JPEG sales? Pump and dumps? Risky experiments being labeled as "stable" and then crashing in less than 24h? It's certainly interesting. But do I think it's good? Do I want to own it? No, and I don't. It's not shit-slinging or burying my head in the sand. I've been following crypto for 10 years and find it interesting in the utmost. But I find lots of things interesting that I don't really think are good: serial killers, super-viruses, philosophical zombies, research chemicals, smartphones, automatic cars, the "metaverse". Increasingly, I'm seeing reasons to believe crypto should be ranked more among the latter than the real technological improvements that are being made right now.