Is it possible Bitcoin mining could help incentivize green energy? Bitcoin miners will pay for almost unlimited energy as long as it is cheap. Miners can turn on and off almost instantly. The grid can be improved by having lots of extra power that can be shifted to different needs at any moment. There is also stranded energy, like solar not yet connected to the grid or flared methane gas (at wells or landfills).
I don't think Ethereum uses excessive amounts of energy unless you also think data centers are bad in general. The consensus algorithms are more complicated than Bitcoin. Ethereum validators will lose part of their stake if caught cheating.
I disagree, I think crypto is extremely important, much more important than social media for example, which has been shown to be toxic and to destroy people's health, on top of also requiring a lot of data center resources and thus being bad for the climate.
Is this still an issue? I thought crypto is pretty much dead now and the speculators have moved onto AI?
Also, didn't the big coins (ethereum) move to proof of stake anyway?
Research PoA and PoS and you'll see what you have suggested has been done.
>Don't get me wrong, block chain has some wonderful applications
Like what?
I used to work in crypto. The only use case I found was an extremely easy way to create and trade unregistered securities and trade them in unregulated exchanges.
There's a slight chance that the blockchain trend represents a global underlying open networked computation for the whole planet. Another point is that the greed seems to make people invest into energy research (unless it's rumors). Otherwise yeah it's an expensive casino.
This is like arguing over the thermostat setting while your house is on fire. Crypto is a pittance of the global energy demand. The fundamental problem is that we are using fossil fuels to generate heat and electricity. Efforts to reduce demand for energy are not even worth talking about in my opinion, we need to stop the energy production that we know is killing the planet at the source.
Proof of stake uses a lot less energy.
And if you're worried about the energy usage of crypto, wait until you hear about this AI thing...
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There was a comment here years ago that if an alien civilization wanted to wipe us out, there was perhaps no easier way for them to accomplish it than to send a crypto-currency whitepaper with anonymous authorship. I have to say it stuck with me.