> > All things that could be alleviated if "Crypto" and it's so-far intangible benefits were to dissapear.
> 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.
The people who benefit from the status quo (ie. regular banks) are pretty much everyone in the world who has a bank account and does transactions. That's a lot of people.
Bitcoin (ignoring eth and others for the moment here) might use half (not orders of magnitude) as much energy as the regular banking system (eg. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/research%3A-bitcoin-consumes...), but it services far far more people than bitcoin does.
Bitcoin handles (I'm googling these) 4.6 transactions per second, Visa somewhere between 1700 and 65k per second (https://www.visa.co.uk/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/vis...), depending on where you look, and that's just Visa, that's ignoring all the other banking systems out there.
You could roll those BTC transactions into the current banking system and the power usage of the regular banking system would hardly budge. You could save one half of the banking systems entire power usage by transacting using the banking system instead of bitcoin.
> 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.
Yes, because right now we are struggling to migrate off fossil fuel. This is a zero sum game, there is a limited amount of electricity we can generate right now, if you use some of the green energy to bitcoin it means you use fossil fuel for other things. If you use fossil fuel for bitcoin you can use the green energy for other things.
Removing the power usage of bitcoin means you can scale down the energy required by the system, and you can choose where that scaled down energy comes from. I suggest it should be taken from the slice of fossil fuel energy that is being generated.
> 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.
It depends what you mean by value, but lots of things use energy create "value". Some things (facebook for example) can't be done without the web, servers etc. Some things (for example financial transactinos) can be done using existing technologies OR vastly wasteful tech such as bitcoin. There's a choice there.
> 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.
Look at that bad thing, because that bad thing is allowed to exist so should the bad thing I care about!
> 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].
See the previous reply about energy generation being zero sum.
The fact remains, that wherever the electricity for Bitcoin et. al. comes from, it's using about one countries worth of electricity, and if it wasn't, if the things that were being done using bitcoin were being done in a more efficient way using existing tech, that renewably electricity could be used to offset the fossil fuel generated energy.
> > 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.
Why is that bad though? There's good reasons why it makes sense to control what a countries money is worth, for instance controlling inflation.
> 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.
Why is Separation of money and state something we want to aim for? It's certainly not going to stop currency debasement given that you still have to transfer bitcoin into something else to spend it (for most normal people/regular transactions), and at 4.6 transactions per second (at a cost of one half of a ragular banking systems power) you certainly can't use it to buy a loaf of bread directly (ignoring gas fees entirely).