Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire

Why does that even matter, a rich guy travelling in a private jet uses more energy compared to you travelling in commercial jet, does that mean we should ban private jets?

So “be calm bro, why so angry?” no longer seems like a legitimate criticism. If you want people to not be angry don’t build technologies that are highly destructive and cause immense harm.

Other arguments seem to be of the form “sure the last 35 cryptocurrencies didn’t do anything meaningful but number 36 and 37 are different I swear”. At some point even radical skepticism is a reasoned reaction.

Bitcoin is literally destroying the world and it’s main proven applications are facilitating illegal transactions. I wouldn’t be opposed to governments banning the thing on account of the fact it intentionally makes it impossible to adequately regulate digital transactions for fraud. This seems like it would be a reasonable response to the excessive firestorm of ransom ware that seems to be the only transaction that can reasonably pay the Bitcoin fees.

I have to disagree with you here. Algorand requires relay nodes for consensus (and high throughput), and those relay nodes are permissioned and largely centralized.

It’s not accurate to call Algorand a “decentralized blockchain” or assets on it “decentralized assets”.

This is a big issue in the blockchain world - the details of the implementation matter so little to the participants trying to profit, that we have multiple chains in existence with centralized controls and people still think those are better than using an obviously-centralized platform. These platforms tend to have the disadvantages of centralized platforms without the protections they provide, it just isn’t obvious until that centralized control is eventually exercised.

This is pretty shallow thinking. I’m sure the traditional banking system uses orders of magnitude more energy than crypto, but you don’t hear about that cause the “studies” about crypto energy use are funded by people who benefit from maintaining the status quo. In fact, you will notice most of the studies critical of Bitcoin focus on how much ENERGY it uses as opposed to its fossil fuel usage and greenhouse gas emissions. This is likely intentional.

Big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter probably use more energy than Bitcoin too, and it is debatable how much of what they do actually creates value in the world.

The U.S. military is one of the largest polluters in the world, and Congress nearly unanimously gives them hundreds of billions of dollars every year with very little debate or scrutiny or oversight.

The waste of natural resources and energy will not disappear just because crypto goes away. If anything, crypto will actually help SOLVE the problem sooner by creating real economic incentives to use cheaper and cleaner energy. Some estimates say that over 60% of Bitcoin mining now uses renewable energy, and it is trending in the right direction [1].

> So far no-one has been able to point me at a single thing that public public blockchains do that either is worth doing and is only possible using blockchain tech

“Worth doing” is subjective so that’s a non sequitur, but I will give you something blockchains do that is only possible using blockchain tech: they allow control over the supply of money without a central authority. Separation of money and state, if you will. Some may scoff at this idea, but currency debasement has contributed to the collapse of many empires and governments in history [2] so the importance of this invention should not be understated.

[1] https://bitcoinminingcouncil.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/... I’m aware this study may also be biased in a similar way as the ones mentioned earlier, but it at least includes the methodology and sources.

[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/currency-and-the-collapse-o...