I agree that crypto should be discouraged, unless/until it's made to be power efficient. It's sad to see tech bros and academics evangelize wasteful technology like this, and Mozilla buying in to the hype. We're better than this.
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What other things in your life do you apply this rule (that they should be discouraged until they are made even more efficient) too?
If something takes a significant amount of electricity to do well, should we not do it? No one should drive a Tesla?
I think the tesla analogy is flawed. People want to get between places and the most current methods of transportation emit co2. So, a tesla driver, depending on how the local grid where they charged it is built, will likely emit less co2 getting around than someone driving a combustion powered car. The owner of an electric vehicle is going to want to go places regardless what kind of car they have.
What is the added value that cryptocurrencies have over traditional currencies/speculative investments?
Or what does it mean to 'do cryptocurrencies well'? What is it that we want to do? Their are other mechanisms to invest or to exchange value why are we using all these resources to create 'value' in this way?
> What is the added value that cryptocurrencies have over traditional currencies/speculative investments?
What is wrong with using cryptocurrencies for this? [0] Is there a problem using a stablecoin sitting on a blockchain technology designed for facilitating global cross-border payments? Maybe one of the use-cases is that they can send money to others even when users find out that their own banks have shutdown their own bank accounts [1] for no explanation.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct...
[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/uniswap-founder-s-bank-accoun...
If the local grid for the bitcoin miner is green then they're not emitting much CO2 either...
Is removing control from gatekeepers not valuable to some people? Is the argument that a transparent ledger is no more useful than an invisible one?
The biggest issue with proof of work crypto currencies is the "inefficiency" is the goal in and of itself. If someone makes a plane 10x more efficient tomorrow every airline is going to switch. If someone makes a bitcoin miner that is 10x more efficient they will need to 10x the difficulty to mine or it will become too cheap to attack the network.
Proof of work, unlikely almost anything else, is fundamentally opposed to efficiency gains.
Teslas are way more efficient than 90% of all cars - I guess you'd discourage them last.
Honestly nothing comes to my mind which is not already discouraged, such as inefficient light bulbs, devices with high stand by consumption, ...
How about air travel or meat consumption? Those have big environmental footprints, but it doesn't seem like society generally discourages going on flights or eating meat.
it does through CO2 taxation or similar models, however I think the current levels aren't sufficient.
Crypto tech has already been made power efficient. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the only relevant ones that haven't adopted the new technology yet, and Ethereum is about three quarters of the way through rolling it out.
The subtext I'm reading in your comment is that most cryptocurrencies are power inefficient, which just isn't true.
I'm curious whether Bitcoin and Ethereum might actually constitute "most cryptocurrencies" by USD transaction value per day. They are certainly the only non-meme ones that most people hear about.
What is wrong with cryptocurrencies like Stellar or Algorand?