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Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

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Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#71

Post by Freestyler_3 »

NoGravitas wrote: post #48
Freestyler_3 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All crypto bad because PW bad. And I do not see how PS is greenwashing, since it is fundamentally changing the business. This is like going from burning brown coal to solar power, and then you would say solar power is just greenwashing. I do not mind criticism, so give some.

How long has Etherium been "planning" to move to PoS? How widely used are other PoS systems? Even beyond that, a PoS system is still, like all cryptocurrencies, functionally, a pyramid scheme.

Don't deal in etherium because they plan to move to PoS, go to cardano which is the big PoS player right now. You vote with your wallet.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#72

Post by endisneigh »

dogman144 wrote: post #69
endisneigh wrote: post #3

There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One wa…

The creation of a new gilded class is definitely a valid side effect in the event cryptocurrencies really do extend into a mainstream form of transaction/economic activity. what's doubly interesting is that group, especially as the early adopters are the ones with massive holdings, tend to have fairly intensely libertarian views. a potent combo of "i put my money where my mouth is" and "i was right" and "none of you…

> - inflation hits the poorest classes the hardest re: devaluing their largely all-cash savings, and they have no accountability measures to change that. who will they call, the fed? their senators who approved the fed chair?

Inflation generally hurts the middle-class the most. Poor people generally don't have savings and are debtors. Debtors benefit from inflation.

Cryptocurrency being open source isn't really relevant to my point.

To your first point, the current views of holders isn't relevant as personalities are certainly not immutable, and as well all know, power corrupts.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#74

Post by agumonkey »

endisneigh wrote: post #3

There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One wa…

good luck trying to instill that in the mind of people in crypto

a lot of them are naively thinking "crypto will become the new world, i believe in it, it's obvious, we have to do it, we have to free the people from "

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#75

Post by yladiz »

bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #28
endisneigh wrote: post #3

There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One wa…

The benefits are that the government isn’t in control of the monetary supply. Period. If that doesn’t seem like a benefit, then of course cryptocurrency seems useless.

Why is that a benefit?

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#76

Post by rblion »

The carbon footprint is the bottleneck for crypto. How can it scale without accelerating further ecological collapse?

New coins will come along with greenwash in their rhetoric but ultimately you have to trust the science.

It's funny how everyone trusts the science when it supports their worldview and ignore it when it doesn't.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#77

Post by nolantait »

endisneigh wrote: post #9
nolantait wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the idea that it acts as a balancing weight to the perverse incentives for countries to debase their currency? Radically if the relationship to taxation was more of a voluntary customer relationship it could lead to better outcomes, ignoring how many more problems it might bring. Thoughts?

Focusing on democratic nations specifically for a moment - I don't see how it could be a balancing weight. Presumably all issues with a country and its handling of their own currency could be resolved solely through democratic political means. No technical solution - cryptocurrency or otherwise - necessary. I don't really understand your second point. Taxation by definition is involuntary. I won't discuss the merits…

For example, Keynsian economics requires everyone to be forced to save through a central banking system. Otherwise the whole thing collapses. Keynsian economics has dominated the last 100 years of politics. Crypto gives you an escape which puts a check politicians who would be forced to be less spendy. The only other way of enforcing this would attack the ways in which politicians trade favor which seems impossible.

I can't see a single reason to stop spending as a politician if you can print money. Your political time horizon is shorter than the detrimental effects of your spending so the voting population is unable to de-obfuscate the cause of their purchasing power falling rapidly. I usually hear people blame the rich as a knee-jerk reaction instead.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#78

Post by anonporridge »

mathgenius wrote: post #63
endisneigh wrote: post #3

There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One wa…

> whose power cannot be really removed Yes. It may not be too worrisome right now, but what if the cryptocurrency phenomena became several orders of magnitude bigger? Couple that with climate wars, failed states, and malignant corporations. I can imagine some very grim outcomes indeed.

Depends on your perspective, no?

If you're the unwilling vassal of the centralized superpower that controls all the money and financial flows, then the malignant entity is the state that keeps you under boot.

We might hope in theory that the democratic state that controls things has the people's best interest at heart, but an honest study of history shows that's never really been true. The state only cares about the well being on the people (and the environment) in so far as it feeds back into their own power on the global stage.

And it almost necessarily has to be this way. Any democratic state that honestly cared about it's people at the expense of it's power would eventually be destroyed or overpowered by an external (or internal) organization that was more ruthless.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#80

Post by joe_the_user »

MildlySerious wrote: post #61
endisneigh wrote: post #3

There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One wa…

I would generally agree, and have brought up my concerns in regards to accountability before. (not in the context of crypto) And while this is true in theory, the reality as far as I can tell is that we already have a system of no accountability - for a certain privileged sub-group of society. All crypto does is to level the field, and that's a big net win in my book. Now if panama and paradise papers had lead to any…

"...for a certain privileged sub-group of society. All crypto does is to level the field, and that's a big net win in my book."

Is the thinking of some people that problem today is that some very wealthy/powerful have a vast, unfair, advantage over ... other very wealthy people? Or something.

The concept is bizarre. Have you not thought that a process that facilitates unlimited, unbridled competition tends to produce a few winners, the wealthy and powerful, and those winners, having more power, squash the competition following the rules of this unbridled competition, which isn't going to prevent them from using their wealth and power for competition.

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