Either cryptocurrency is extremely useful and the energy spent will turn out not to be wasted at all or it is a big useless energy draining scam and the whole thing will soon collapse.
I really don't see a scenario were it will still be useless or only moderately useful and consuming so much energy that the human species will slowly die off.
Who the fuck invests in bitcoin? People with too much money and the habit of gambling.
No one can tell me that there is a logical argument without flaw and a ton of assumptions that the bitcoin market is in its current state anything than gambling.
Because bitcoin is so active and new makes it so interesting for gambling :(
It's a sacrfice but of something we can easily sacrifice, excess of solar energy we have no means to store but we still need to produce if we want to go 100% renewables.
Nope. “Free” PoW undermines the whole system. Mining has to be a sacrifice, otherwise it won’t work anymore. There is no “and I can use the resulting infrastructure for X”. Every joule of energy that goes into proof of work is a joule wasted by design. There is no free lunch.
I’m starting to think that maybe cryptocurrency is the great filter. It’s actually pretty terrifying.
Edit: we should probably have termed it proof of valueless work to make that clear. There is also nothing to stop a speculative bubble crowding out all other energy uses. Our low-growth world is very vulnerable to these schemes.