Well, Cryptocurrencies are part of said new era. They aren't strictly a problem that made things worse: they're a technology that comes with tradeoffs. The cat is out of the bag and we have to design around technologies that are here to stay in whatever capacity. Distributed, cryptography-based currencies/tokens are one of those technologies.

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amarant 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, on the one hand, they enable a lot of shady illegal business, but in the other hand, they also destroy the environment while doing it, so it's really a toss up whether cryptocurrency is good or bad overall!

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soulofmischief 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Equating the concept of cryptographic currency with specific implementations such as proof-of-work just shows that you have no idea what you are talking about.

The importance of financial sovereignty can not be understated, whether you understand that or not.

	▲	Eisenstein 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What problems are solved by financial sovereignty? How does crypto solve those problems?

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winddude 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

bitcoin is forecast to uses about 150 TWh of electricity this year vs all other datacenter operations foretasted to use 1000 TWh. Bitcoin is esitimated to be about 52.4% sustainable energy (renewables plus nuclear) where datacenters are 42% sustainable energy.

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Dylan16807 2 days ago | parent [-]

And those other datacenters are mostly doing useful things, while bitcoin is somewhere between pure waste and the least efficient way of doing security ever conceptualized. (A few dozen centralized nodes, set up right, would likely be more secure than the current mining pools.)

	▲	winddude a day ago \| parent [-]
		are they? or are they running, spam, ecommerce throw away culture? overreaching government data collection? lots of porn as well.

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sippeangelo 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Crypto has been an awful development in many ways, but I happily welcome it when it has made malware so much more benign to me. The last malware that affected me personally was a crypto miner worm, and the one before that was a crypto wallet stealer, neither of which affects me at all as I don't meddle with crypto.

I don't know the statistics, but it seems like it's way more profitable for the grifters to target other grifters instead of taking over my machines and extorting me. Or maybe I just got lucky.

	▲	GJim 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> when it has has made malware so much more benign to me. Eh? Cryptocurrencies have enabled ransomware. Possibly the most nasty malware to hit the internet in terms of damage caused... This damage has affected services you use (including hospitals, schools, research institutions and local government) even if it hasn't infected one of your boxen directly.