Stripe Crypto

Do you mind giving more information? I've mostly heard good things about Stripe about things like their documentation and APIs. I'd love to hear stuff contrary to that. I personally don't use Stripe either but I'm interested in hearing your reasons so we don't go through a lengthy migration that ends up biting us in the back.

On the bright side, Ethereum devs have just launched the final testnet before the switch to Proof-of-Stake.

It would be great for Stripe to continue investing the same amount of money into carbon recapture even after Ethereum’s carbon emissions drop over 99%.

I can hypothesize those...and then also hypothesize a counter as to why it won't help, for long at least. Maybe you'd like to counter with an actual example of how it's enabled them, and why increased regulation of the crypto space won't prevent that (i.e., "I was able to buy a Domino's pizza with donated crypto" - additional regulation that would prevent you from traditional banking could also make such crypto, with its traceable history, be unspendable. They can't take it from you, but they can levy the same threats they do for people who ignore sanctions, which would mean crypto you've touched is now effectively untradeable amongst regulated businesses).

It's hardly a rounding error, but I'm sympathetic to the fact that there are a lot more important concerns with respect to climate change than PoW, however, there is still a valid ecological critique of PoW due to it's inherent wastefulness relative to every other technology.

The amount of waste necessary to support the network must always grow since any new efficiencies are immediately obviated by the incentive to bring on more miners, the total utility provided by the network (i.e. the rate of transactions it securely processes) has no relationship to the amount of energy that the network burns. With every other technology, new effeincies make the technology able to do more useful work while burning less energy, in this way anything based on PoW is fundamentally flawed. You could hook up a fusion reactor of the future to the bitcoin network and it would not provide any more utility, yet the network would eventually consume all the energy produced by the reactor given enough time to increase mining capacity.

I know the typical response to this is PoS, and I think a switch to PoS would be great since its impact on the environment is within the realm of normal software. Whether or not PoS can actually work for a large network is a different discussion.

While the energy usage of Proof-of-Stake systems like Bitcoin does seem embarrassingly excessive at first glance, I think there's more nuance here than it first may appear.

One of the problems with renewables is that they are spike-y and there's a limit to how much you can control the spike. When renewable sources peak, they can put more energy into the grid than the grid can safely handle (too much power can cause damage). Battery storage tech is currently lacking for dealing with this (though https://www.energyvault.com/ has an interesting take on this) and power degrades quickly when sent over power-lines, so that limits distribution over long distances.

In some scenarios, when energy becomes too plentiful, power companies may actually start charging negative costs - ie, they pay people to take more power out of the grid. When you combine these two factors, power producers have an economic incentive not to use renewables.

Enter Bitcoin - paying for power consumption is a huge component of operating costs. Mining rigs that are positioned near renewable power sources have an advantage in that they can just stop mining when energy prices get too high and start mining when energy prices are low enough. This provides a profitable way for miners and renewable power suppliers to operate together.

Deployed properly, Bitcoin mining actually improves the economics of renewables. Because doing so improves the profitability of mining, there is an economic incentive for miners to move toward renewables and build infrastructure that only mines when it is most profitable - ie, the times when not mining actually hurts renewable efforts.

NOTE: in theory non-cryptocurrency applications could serve this same role to make renewables more economical, but many applications have an always-on requirement; you can't run a data center only when the sun shines, but you can mine crypto only then.