1) this is amazing and will save humanity
2) this is dumb no one will ever use it
3) this is confusing
That ratio doesn’t seem that much different than recent posts.
I think you’re right that most people at least on HN have decided what they believe when it comes to bitcoin.
Ultimately money is a belief and not just any belief but one so central to our identities that we often organize our lives around how we can get enough money.
Strong beliefs get tied into our identities so that threats to those beliefs will be viewed as many as attacks on their identities.
I'm pretty dubious of Twitter as a platform though. There's so much other stuff, and Twitter injects its own crapola into the feeds too. I've bookmarked his profile instead, look forward to checking it out.
These interesting things are about how to do privacy, build second layers, make other smart functionality, etc. In general there are actual cryptographic innovations coming out of these systems. Zcash was truly positive to research into Zero Knowledge Proofs.
At the same time, discussions often get muddied by a few vocal people who are trying to hype up their investments. I imagine some of these people are just hyping, and others have bought into the believe, and cannot handle the cognitive dissonance of 'maybe there is something wrong with this'.
I just fail to see how it is better than so many other alternatives on a case-by-case basis... mostly on efficiency...
And just because I don't believe in the idea itself, I acknowledge that some good can come of it..
See for example wars, where most cutting edge innovation happens. I think wars are bad (but sometimes necessary), but we are reaping the benefits of generals wanting to throw more cannonballs further (If you are unsure I mean our computers where developed mostly because of that), also microwaves, the internet (a cold war though) and lots and lots of other stuff...
I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance), in a purely theoretical sense - but they just kept making disgusted faces and saying bitcoin is a scam (?). I'm not sure there's any rational energy behind any of it, it seems to me like any other political "issue" since 2016, like the Rittenhouse trial.
There's another trend with crypto discussions which relates to this idea you said. I see a lot of discussions on applications that follow the template: X has not been done, and X can be done with crypto, so now that crypto is available X will be done. It is very hard to discuss that maybe X wasn't done before not because of technology, but because of other issues.
For example, the problem of transparency and enforcement in governance is not that we lack the technology: it's that we lack the initiative and the detailed procedures. I also see a lot of discussions around NFTs being used to sell used digital games: again, it hasn't been done not because tracking ownership is difficult but because allowing that would take a large bite of game sellers/developers profits. 99% of the applications I see discussed can be done without blockchain, but people never seriously ask themselves why is that and instead say that crypto will solve it.
Blockchains simply add verifiability of claims. Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority. Breaking the rules digitally shouldn't be possible in a properly designed system, which is what some blockchains can provide.
Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed.
Obviously this has more applications than scammers/cheaters, which is why blockchain tech is so heavily experimented with and being integrated in so many other areas of tech.
You can't solve non-tech problems with technical solutions. If the government doesn't bother to have accessible documentation about how to do X thing, why would they bother to make a blockchain about it? If the knowledge about how to do X thing is not written down but depends on how a bunch people end up implementing it and never cared about it, how are they going to put those procedures into code?
> Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority.
Given that we rely on the central authority to enforce rules, it doesn't seem too weird to expect them to cooperate.
> Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed.
That's a naive way to look at it. We don't live in the blockchain. You'd still need cooperative investigation to ensure that what ended up in the blockchain is what the parties agreed to. Unless you move absolutely everything to the blockchain, including personal understandings and expectations of contracts, you will still need out-of-chain investigations.
Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable because there's a constant red blinking light re-assuring people that, in fact, he doesn't have any clothes on. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for a more realistic example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates due to it clearly and verifiably not being respected.
Yep, and we have seen some government bodies using Github or other platforms to publish open data, or to be more transparent on procedures, and yet most of them still don't do it. Which is my point: the problem is not lack of technology, but lack of motivation/human capability/initiative to do it.
> Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates.
I'm sorry but this looks incredibly naive. I can tell you a very real example: in my country, Spain, we have papers proving that, among others, a certain M. Rajoy, of the PP party, received money that came from illegal donations. The prime minister at the time, Mariano Rajoy from the PP party, denied that it was him on the papers. He didn't face any legal consequence.
There have been so many times that a central authority has clearly gone against the protocols of the system without it disintegrating... You can't apply tech solutions to a problem that's not at all about tech.
That's why you get papers "proving" someone's guilt, but no action taken because the handling of such situations lies outside of the common understanding of the system. I'm sure most people think to themselves "I'm sure if the papers were legitimate then that person would be in jail, there must be something else going on". When you codify the system entirely, and people buy into it, then someone submits papers recognized by the system to be authentic that prove someone is guilty of a crime, it's much more likely there will be enough pressure to take action in that case, because then people are thinking more along the lines of "those legitimate papers proved they're guilty, why are they still not in jail?"
Obviously one major problem is how to build a system which handles all of the edge-cases that crop up? One possible answer is to use a DAO which can modify itself through whatever means (usually democratic).
Or people think to themselves "well, the papers are authentic but the meaning is open to interpretation" or "well, it's not such a bad thing" or "well, but the others are doing worse", or a myriad of things. All of those are real arguments I've seen made.
It is naive to think that you can codify everything into a system in a way where there's no open interpretation possible. It is naive to think that people will trust the system instead of what they heard the system says, or that people will trust the system over leaders, or the the people responsible for enforcing the system decisions and feeding the system information won't find a way to elude responsibility.
In general, it is naive to think that the problem of corruption, which is a problem about trust (if the person I like says he didn't do it or did it for a good reason, then I trust him above all else), enforcement (the ones responsible for enforcing the rules are the ones breaking them) and tolerance (people don't care that much about corruption if it doesn't harm them) will be fixed by a solution that at most will help a little bit in the enforcement part.
In any well designed online game (please don't use shitty ones against me), cheaters aren't able to hijack the entire system or ruin an economy. Their exploits break the game temporarily and most of the time it doesn't affect that many people. In bad cases, the state gets rolled back, the exploit patched, and the game continues. Sometimes things are just unavoidable, and everyone counts their losses.
I think blockchain has the potential to make fairer and more resilient systems, and with new incentives as well. We can use game theory to try wildly different societal structures, and quickly switch to another one if one doesn't work well.
On some level, trust always has to be present. If we make the rules trustless, enforcement becomes the bottleneck (until Robocop?), but it's still potentially better than what we have now where we simply have to trust millions of other people not to fuck with anything too much.
This is useless and unconstructive generalizaton. AFAIK many non-tech problems were solved with technical solutions.
Technology is not a field. Technology is what humans apply to improve their lives.
Not at all. I mean, to take your example:
> Not enough food? Invent agriculture.
Agriculture is invented and pretty advanced and yet there are a lot of humans suffering from hunger.
Technology is what humans apply to improve their lives when they don't have a way to do something. Sometimes the problem isn't knowing how to do something, but getting people to do it, to give you money for it, to use it in a responsible way, teaching them, logistical issues... Having the technology is far from enough in most cases.
The idea that "technology solves everything" permeates HN and you'll see it all over the place in threads about education, politics, corruption, music, math... Funnily enough, when the people who actually know about the topic show up in those threads, most of the time they end up explaining why the problem at hand is not at all technology related.
Perhaps we could invent a new thing to solve that too? Improvements to crop technology, breeding, farming methods continue to happen every year. Inventions like the Internet bring information to people in rural areas who might not otherwise have had access to it. Why can't we solve all these things with technology?
> Sometimes the problem isn't knowing how to do something, but getting people to do it, to give you money for it, to use it in a responsible way, teaching them, logistical issues...
But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that?
It seems anything humans invent is just one more tool we accumulate as a society. Once it was language, then writing, then mass communication, now perhaps it'll be a secure economy.
Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can.
> But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that?
No, I don't think you can. You can't fix people not wanting to do things by tech (unless you want to create a slaving machine, and I don't think that's the idea), you can't make tech that magically eliminates energy requirements to transport or build things, or that eliminates costs. I think we need to be at least a little bit realistic when evaluating the problems.
I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology. It's like someone saying that you only need a hammer for woodworking.
At some point, people were afraid of any technology. Now, they live online, eating highly processed food delivered by planes. Yes, you can ‘fix’ people. Just give them convenience.
> I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology.
Who said that all problems can be solved by technology?
> Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can.
Technological progress often goes against the will of governments. See Twitter-triggered revolutions.
Most of the crypto related posts feels like advertising/preaching. Issues with their proposed solutions are rarely focused on and when they're brought up, hand waving begins.
I think this is a consequence of crypto proponents using mostly same talking points, usually decentralization/some libertarian dream. Technical discussions are rarely initiated. I've been following this since early days of BTC and I'm so tired of it. I don't see anything in it that would help our society. Maybe due to your political leanings you do.
Crypto has a lot of real problems like the current markets which seem to just be re-enforcing the worst aspects of capitalism; and other issues like: costs, scalability, lack of connection to physical objects/systems (the NFT problem), dispute resolution, etc.
These problems are huge, especially if blockchain tech ever becomes mainstream. The problem is that discussion of these topics - in casual discussions at least - gets derailed by ideological flag waving. To me it's like Occupy Wall Street being derailed by wokeists; they weren't able to mobilize anything meaningful because they were bogged down by delusional anxieties.
> Amazon Alexas burn more energy in a year by sitting idle in people's homes than the entire Bitcoin network does
From googling and "This Machine Greens" docu:
> American always on devices: 1375 TWh per year
> Cruise ships: 250 TWh per year
> Bitcoin: 116 TWh per year
> Online advertising: 106 TWh per year
> American Alexas: 1.52 TWh per year
As a north european techie spending power on quite a few always on things (respberry pis, a nas, a router, wifi, ps5 etc)- but also freezer, fridge, cooking - and lightning for half the year and a little extra heating, I have used around 2500 kWh year to date, which is roughly 320 watts in total (or half that stated figure for always on devices alone...)
EDIT: I remembered the american population size wrong, the right figure is 475 watts @330 Mln people, but my point stands..
I'd also say cruise ships are more egregious, which no one seems to care about despite them definitely not using clean energy or being remotely useful, using 2.5x the amount of energy as Bitcoin - or as much as Spain!
Even if you completely agree with the political aims of crypto, if there are technical flaws it catastrophically ruins everything crypto hopes to achieve.
Even if you completely agree with the technical side of crypto, if the intended end-game horrifies you, you're not gonna want to see it proliferate.
But that could also be done just by putting all law on somewhere public like github...
Or by having a block chain with a hard limit of 10 khashes/second per country (detecting cheaters is easy as far as I understand) and you can have a network of 200 raspberrypi zeros running it for around a single kilowatt..
For example Finland already have laws online accessible for free: https://finlex.fi/en/
And Finland probably isn't only country doing this.
Well, it is the same in my country (Denmark), we have retsinformation.dk (litterally "information of the law"), but that does not hinder a corrupt state from altering "history" as they see fit.
Also, my mother was a german teacher and her ex-DDR speakers (many who were quite some time in prison) told us that, that basically all of them where enprisoned with due process. Their problems were, that the laws where constructed so you were a criminal if you did X, but also (due to a different law) if you did not do X.
It is the basic catch-22, that you cannot escape.
You are intimately dependent on the benevolence of your state/society, and if your state/society is not benevolent you can only throw your life at trying to change it (for everybody else)... You will the most likely fail (and be dead) unless a lot of (by definition) uncoordinated action happens at once.
Even in my country that boast of being a free and civil society we have problems once in a while.
In the 1990 we had a police chief should (sadly for him on camera), "shoot at their legs" (police shooting at citizens is very uncommon in Denmark) at a somewhat violent demonstration.
And we have what is called the Tibetian case where our police mislead protesters so that the visiting Chinese gov people did not have to look at the (otherwise legal) demonstration...
Would 51% attacks spoil the party with that? The incentives would be enormous to do such a thing, it might even become a polarized political imperative to try to do these attacks.
It might also be like replacing the one citizen, one vote system with a one gpu (or future hardware item), one vote system. Would that remove political power from citizens?
Vitalik Buterin is involved in a lot of the theory in handicapping plutocrats, and enabling fair representation/voting in the blockchain space. Check out his blog.
Some kind of novel things could be done with it, like that distributed storage thing is sort of interesting. There's a peer to peer betting thing based on (somewhow the outcomes are available to the program?) it I saw on HN a while ago which is sort of interesting.
I'm confident there's lifetimes worth of signal, even in crypto developments in the last year. But there is an ungodly amount of noise over price, outrage, etc.
I asked in a new thread about where to go for curious conversations about cryptocurrencies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297611
For anyone else who reads that thread -- the good links and suggestions are near the bottom of the thread.
The whole thing that makes cryptocurrencies work now is the un-cloneability of the amount of work done (which is why the 51% problem exists in the first place).
The only good way of doing it would be through a cartel with strict enforcement of hashrates etc.. And welcome to the financial banking system...
IMHO cloneablitiy IS the problem, PoW is just a (very, very unfortunate) solution to that. PoS (stake as in possession, not pledging) is IMHO inherently impossible, so PoW is all we got, now and for ever...
Can you elaborate more on what "uncloneability of digital assets" means exactly and why it's a pre-requisite of proof-of-stake? Happy to take some links if there are any that explains this well.
In the real world cloning money (historically precious metals) is really really hard (and btw. much easier with paper money that the metals that have a basket of physical attributes that cannot be emulated at once).
Digital bits on the other hand are indefenately cloneable (by design, that is one of the base properties of "digital").
Just for you to see my text here, along the way somewhere around 20 perfect copies were made by various routers (i.e. computers)..
If you look at the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, maybe bitcoin and 1 are 2 others are proof of stake. There are a bunch of 'tokens' cryptocurrencies which exist on top of another blockchain, but the remainder of the layer 1 blockchains and all of the layer 2s that use a consensus mechanism are using proof of stake now.
Arguing against crypto because of proof of work is like arguing that computers won't see mass adoption because vacuum tubes make them impractical to fit inside of a typical home.
When I say proof of stake, I mean it in the way of "proof of possession"
I believe I use it in the original meaning from around 2010, but I might be mistaken.
I do fail to see how the current use of the term PoS guarantees anything against a cartel of bad actors...
My understanding is "slashing" may be one such mechanism. This is where staked funds are taken away from bad actors. ie if you propose a block with bad transactions, the 32 ETH you have staked will be reduced by some fraction as punishment. When your stake is slashed down to 16 ETH you are booted from the system. So that us a clear punishment against a bad actor, though I'm not sure what a cartel means i this case. Perhaps you know about this already however.
As an example with bitcoin specifically, it would probably be cheaper to buy enough mining hardware to constitute 51% of the bitcoin network than it would be to buy 51% of all bitcoin.
Of course, both would be very expensive endeavors.
Most notably, Solana, Cardano, Polkadot, Avalanche, Terra, Algorand, Polygon, Elrond, and Fantom are all using permissionless networks where nodes which have some amount of the native token of those blockchains staked produce blocks and validate transactions
They still do not prove that they have something in possession, they stake their own coin on being honest... BIG difference.
Do they allow you to prove that you (and you alone) have possession/control of the coin itself, and if so, how? (That is the part that I consider impossible).
The whole problem is that proof-of-stake has been redefined by the new PoS networks and does have the original meaning of "stake" (i.e. sole possessor) anymore.
I can prove to you that I have access to a gold coin by taking it out of my purse and showing it to you. You can do three simple tests (weight, volume and ringing) that ensures that it cannot be any other material than pure gold (due to any material that is both cheaper and heavier than gold is tungsten and that does not ring). You can also be sure that it is not a clone of another coin so that it "just disappears" or gets double spent.
There is also no witness/validator that can break your trust and betray you.
Every POS network I have ever looked into (and I admit that it has been a while) relies on witnesses. And that removes my way of knowing whether the witnesses lie or not.
Is there any of the socalled PoS networks that actually allow you to prove that you have exclusive possession/control of the digital coin in question without any witnesses ('validators')?
If so, their founders can already book their ticket to the Nobel Gala next year, as that would AFAIK be a feat in the same scale as disproving gravity...
As I regularly post whenever it comes up, SPL USDC is a dramatically better payment experience than wire transfers or debit cards or whatever, and I wish I could accept all payments this way and pay all bills this way.
Although the US has been as good a steward as can be hoped for no entity should have that much control over international finance.
I agree with the hope for a better stewardship, but as all people end up moving cryptocurrencies in and out of the "old" financial system (creditcards, swift etc). I fail to see how crypto would help me..
I for one cannot pay for my rent, food, heat, water, power, internet with crypto, can you?
Although, to be fair, I did pay a security deposit in bitcoin 6 years ago.
Actually, in El Salvador, Bitcoin is now the national currency, so I suspect a lot of people are paying their rent in bitcoin
The whole discussion basically mirrors real life politics. One camp want's more collective action to help the unfortunate, the other wants absolute freedom for the individual.
This is a genuine difference of ideology, authentically held. To insist on absolute freedom for the individual, including any penalty or consequence for any lack on any level (and any degree of reward for any superiority no matter how it's arrived at) means you do not care about the unfortunate any more than you'd care about the pile of chips produced whilst making a great sculpture. Not only is the sculpture the point, but it's actively harmful to insist on leaving the superfluous chips stuck on: some waste has to be disposed or you're just poisoning yourself/harming your sculpture.
This is a position often held by sculptures and people not often thought of as waste. People who get thought of as waste, frequently would like this assumption re-examined.
People who are garbage but occupy categories way beyond their inherent value really REALLY don't want that assumption re-examined…
That might disprove my "nothing interesting to discus.
That is my point. If your country is "sufficiently bad" bitcoin will not (and cannot) help you in the long run.
Sadly there exists no sure way to secure you belongings if the other party is sufficiently motivated to strip you of them (or your life)..
You can also be killed/robbed outside of your country by intelligence officers of your country...
It is much easier for the government to confiscate your money from your bank account than to go after your Bitcoin. And it is impossible for the government to stop you from accepting payments in Bitcoin and to cut you off from financial system.
I live in an old and free democracy in Scandinavia (in the EU) and actually believe in my government's mostly pure motives. Our laws are solid and confiscation is unheard of outside of criminal activity.
If that changes drastically, I am screwed either way...
And it might be impossible for my government to stop me taking bitcoin but they could surely hinder me in converting them back to regular currency. And in my country nothing can be bought by any cryptocurrency.
But would said unfortunate person have access to a passport and are they allowed to leave their authoritarian country?
Do they have anywhere to legally go, where they have the right to residence and can get into the new countries banking system? In the EU at least that is NOT easy unless you already have citizenship in another EU country....
I.e. say you are that person in that country, could you just decide to leave with your twelve word password, your passport and a backpack. And could you setup life in another country?
I do also see the value of storing your money in bitcoin due to inflation, if you believe bitcoin is here to stay (I don't believe that), and you can manage to buy it without too much suspicion from your state and convert it back at a later day if you decide to stay in your own country.
There are always edge cases, where nothing helps. Fortunately, most countries are not like North Korea and you have some freedom, often enough to use crypto.
your network seem to be opposite of general population, where less technically apt less believe (economists, news people, etc.)
i suspect it has more to do with political leaning, i.e. more center-conformist less believe, outside center more believe
The only theory I'm aware of, which the "proof-of-stake" approach is based on, is some form of "game theory", my translation - "people won't do evil stuff since it's against their interest", which generally aligns with people being rational and basing economic theories on top of this thesis.
My understanding is every POS blockchain is centralized and not secure.
Can you name a POS blockchain that you think has achieved sufficient decentralization and security so we can test your claim?
PS: How about answering the question instead of preemptively downvoting and attempting to shutting down the conversation. If POS truly works, you should be happy to provide an example or even multiple examples. Any reluctance is a red flag...
ETH POS has many of the bad characteristics current central banks have...
This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database, rather than really understanding the problems Bitcoin solves and why Satoshi made the choices they did. There are important trade-offs between efficiency, redundancy, decentralisation, and robustness in an adversarial environment.
The other aspect is that they just look at Bitcoin through a technological lens and judge it inferior to other networking & data storage technologies. They don't have a deep grasp of the concept of money and what properties makes for a sound form of money. Vijay Boyapati (ex-Google engineer) does a pretty good job explaining it from that perspective [1].
It's a shame that so many, otherwise smart, people are sleeping on such a revolutionary change in the world. The idea of Bitcoin has been thought about and predicted for many years by people held in high-regard among HN readers, such as Buckminster Fuller [2], Henry Ford [3], and Friedrich Hayek [4], and they'll still dismiss it out of hand.
Such a massive lost opportunity for great skills, knowledge, and talent to be applied to what I think is one of the most important innovations of our civilisation.
[1] https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...
[2] https://news.bitcoin.com/look-at-how-buckminster-fuller-pred...
[3] https://news.bitcoin.com/how-henry-ford-envisaged-bitcoin-10...
[4] https://twitter.com/janpaul_f/status/1461596623038038017?s=2...
> This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database
I think it's crazy that you feel this way, I can only speak for myself and a few others, but we do in fact fully understand it and why it works this way.
Satoshi is not some god that has come to save us. He saw something that fraction of people in society consider to be a problem and attempted to solve it. He did not consider complex ways that his solution would interact with the society. A lot of us think that crypto causes more problems than it solves.
That's because I strongly believe in its ability to have positive change on our civilisation... environmentally, economically, politically, and sociologically.
Any belief held strongly enough appears cultish. Ultimately, I don't really care how it appears.
But hey, I could be wrong about Bitcoin, I just hope I'm not.
If I'm wrong I look foolish and have lost thousands of dollars saved in Bitcoin. If I'm right... well, I guess we'll see.
If crypto was mined only on renewables there is no environmental argument. Ergo, not related to crypto technology itself.
Not to mention that even with renewables, energy usage would be still a concern. Renewables will still have issues around distribution, power peaks, energy storage, price, and crypto wouldn't be helping any of them. A discussion of how would crypto affect the rest of the people compared to the benefit it brings would still be relevant.
Cobalt mining for batteries?
Energy consumption for processed metals?
Oil refining from rocketry (largely used by military in practice scenarios)
This list goes on. It seems crypto is the only technology evaluated in relation to the whole environment. For all the others we shrug and ignore externalities.
It's not like those 56 are free either, we could use that energy to run more important things instead that crypto is taking away from.
I don't want money to be separated from the state, and especially not at a cost.
One man's crypto-anarchocapitalist utopia is another man's dystopian capitalist nightmare that we sacrificed our environment for.
The utopia would be post-money imo and moving money away from the state would make that harder to achieve.
But that isn't the reality we live in.
The environmental aspect is manifestly a part of how crypto phenomenon, and attempts to separate the underlying technology from the manner in which it is (and for the foreseeable future, will continue to be) used, are disingenuous at best.
To continue human civilization we need to stop fossil burning as much as possible, crypto is unnecessary and should therefore be stopped.
How do you argue that something is unnecessary? Aluminum uses heaps of energy… we haven’t needed in for 1000s of years, is it neccersary?
What about the non-recycable waste after "renewable" energy. Windmills have steel coated by epoxy wings, those cannot be recycled.
Solar panels is also ready for the trash-heap after 20 years, due to being a complex composite..
The only real energy source that would help would be nuclear, but even if we get that where have more efficient room-heaters and better use of the computing.. (protein folding could be one for example)
No matter how you cut it, that delta is waste if the additional functionality is useless.
Regardless, energy is a market and even if crypto used purely renewable energy, that’s energy that wasn’t used for replacing fossil fuels in some other use case. Literally any technology that massively boosts energy consumption has the same problem.
Any other industry including financial one will try to minimise the waste if it becomes unreasonable. Not so with proof of work crypto.
One camp (where I am in) basically believes it is an environmental disaster, unsuitable for its stated purpose and most likely as scam by the "whales" manipulating the price, and with a potential 51%-disaster.
The other camp believes that it is the future of money, untraceable wealth storage and inflation/"confiscation proof" and that all the environmental impact is just a temporary problem, that is solved when proof-of-stake is ready (which IMHO will never happen).
The tech itself is quite simple in concept with a few novel key insights in the old days (which by now are generally accepted).
So all in all, it is back to good old politics and do you believe in "it" nor not.
I think that I see in my network of people that the more technically apt they are, the less they believe in it - but I am not sure whether I just project my own skepticism ...
EDIT: typo proof-of-state -> proof-of-stake