> then your mining rig is powered by coal,

And my emissions are offset for the fee that I pay.

Carbon credits, more planted trees, whatever. My net impact is likely lower than anyone that doesn't pay for renewables, even with mining.

> And crypto needs to be banned because it's all a gigantic scam that has a gigantic environmental cost attached to it

For PoW, it's the purest form of currency - the value of energy itself.

For other currencies, it's no different than precious metals.

Trust HN to call decentralized technologies enabling pseudonymity/anonymity scams on one hand while advocating for decentralized technologies enabling pseudonymity/anonymity on the other hand.

Also, from my perspective, you should stop eating meat. Your eating of meat provides you nothing but selfish pleasure while causing a ton of carbon emissions - and actual tangible suffering on scales never before seen on this planet. The magnitude of suffering caused is tens billions of times worse than crypto. Let's ban meat first.

> Your eating of meat provides you nothing but selfish pleasure while causing a ton of carbon emissions

You might want to revise your argument if you're not going to acknowledge the fact that meat has a good number of calories per kg.

That is how it works though. If my money is only allowed to be used to generate renewable energy, then it doesn't matter how the power that comes to my house was generated. Energy is energy. If everyone does what I do, then no one will be left to fund nonrenewable energy. But the only way that would happen is if the cost of nonrenewable energy went up proportional to the damage it causes via a carbon tax.

And banning crypto mining is impossible. It's arbitrary math. You can't ban a computer from doing arbitrary math. At best you could discourage businesses taking crypto as payment, but even then people can operate 100% in crypto and avoid any regulations.

> And crypto needs to be banned because it's all a gigantic scam that has a gigantic environmental cost attached to it.

Is it worse than, let's say, Christmas in this regard?

Yes

How so? Christmas lights, plastic trash, food waste and transportation combined?

Those do something useful and there's a cap on how much people use: if I put up lights and then my neighbors put up lights, I don't put up twice as many lights so I can out-compete them for carolers and I certainly don't buy another house to put up even more lights. Proof-of-waste effectively requires that of all participants.

People (and cities) absolutely try to out-compete each other with christmas lights. Even countries with negligible Christian populations are taking part nowadays. Don't forget all the other wasteful elements of christmas. And all the christmas-related scams and crime. And the yearly spikes in domestic violence. The growth of the christmas price index seems to go to the moon. How is celebrating some guy's birthday 2000 years later useful and how does it justify all of this? And does it at least really have a lower environmental impact than crypto?

There's some competition, yes, but it's bounded — even the most extravagant Christmas display is nowhere near the maximum amount of lights which could be placed in the space, not to mention only operating for a few weeks a year.

The design of Bitcoin ensures that does _not_ happen there, and it's currently using a massive amount of power to process a tiny fraction of the total economy, especially after you account for the transactions which are not linked to real economic value (money laundering, wash trading, etc.). The design ensures that if someone did find a useful application which saw popular adoption, usage would need to be many orders of magnitude higher than it is now.