AI and bitcoin, regardless of what one thinks of them, have made negligible contributions to climate change. It is below the noise floor relative to other major industrial and commercial sources of atmospheric CO2.

Virtually all of the current conditions were in motion before bitcoin and AI were even a thing.

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atoav 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sure. But you have to weigh any application relative to (1) how useful it is and (2) how easy it would be to rely on a carbon-neutral alternative.

And I would argue the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society.

AI is to a certain degree a different story, but also there it depends what you're doing.

We live in a thin atmospheric skin around the planet, and that skin has a finite volume. If earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere is thinner than the Apple's skin in proportion.

Pretending we can do whatever we like for infinitly long inside an finite volume is completely unhinged. The financial and political elites, who some frame as the true geniuses point to technological solutions that are always "just around the corner" for the past decades with some of them even eying to leave the planet behind entirely.

All of that while we know how to address the issue.

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tancop 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society

if you mean PoW mining instead of crypto in general then maybe. ethereum uses about as much power as a small village in europe so it should never be a target for climate action.

the public benefit of blockchains is real and it comes from the fact that no one controls them and they let users ignore the law. thats the part governments dont like. corporations also dont like it even if they work in the industry, coinbase and binance started their own chains so they would have full control over the way they evolve.

crypto is a cypherpunk/anarchist technology that got hijacked by investors to sell their scam coins and fake decentralized web services. without it your only option for buying things that are illegal in your country (weed, abortion pills, guns, hacking tools) is sending cash in paper mail or using some complicated scheme where you have to trust third parties. i think thats worth some tax evasion.

	▲	atoav 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No. The societal impact of crypto currencies is net-negative. I know the original idea. In 2009 I bought coffee using Bitcoin. I had to wait 30 minutes till it went through despite using a fee that back then mirrored what PayPal would take. Then I knew: OK this is not going to be used as a cash replacement. Then it became clear that it was used as a way to pay for illegal shit on the internet, be it drugs, botnets or services of questionable ethical value. Of course also to speculate, to launder money, to blackmail, to extract ransom, to run ponzi schemes or rug pulls, which became a big driver by people who wanted to get the wealth without having to put in the legwork. And these are still the main drivers behind crypto currencies today by a wide margin. So yes: Net-negative. Prove me wrong.

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nprateem 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Opinion stated as fact

	▲	vonneumannstan 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Its a well trod problem: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511... Not exactly background noise but totally incomparable to the normal CO2 outputs of major nations like the US or China. I.e. ~20 Million Tons CO2 vs 4 Trillion and 13 Trillion Tons respectively.