Instead, crypto advocates brandish an apparent technological solution that is at amost a very leaky abstraction. I can’t even stop screaming at how offensive is “wireless energy transport technology”. In doing so, you ignore that the scales in play are absurd: securing dozens of transactions should not have a larger environmental footprint than taking a billion people out of poverty. That you think this is even an argument is horrifying.
So what is your solution to this? There are ways to generate energy purely from ocean waves, this is being used near shore for the reasons stated above (you must transport the produced energy to shore) but we could install these way further and just rely on a sattelite connection for internet.
How else would you utilize these yet untapped potential energy producing areas? Handwaving and using strong negative words aren't an argument.
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> There are many ways to implement fair financial systems
Depends on what you mean by fair but please do list those other more efficient ways
Even if we assume (which is definitely not a safe assumption) that burning all that oil in the first place to mine the coins produces less carbon than the overall reduction caused by the increase in demand for solar panels and subsequent increase in their production and deployment (because just buying solar panels that were already being produced and going to be deployed by someone does not reduce the overall carbon load of the planet)...
That requires the miners to sink all their profits into buying solar panels, rather than, y'know, making money for themselves, which is the reason they're mining cryptocurrency in the first place.
I did not check this but Michael Saylor claims that over 40% of mining is done using renewable energy. Considering solar power by itself is a good investment last time I checked ( around 13% ROI depending on your local energy price) then that number will probably increase as it just makes business sense to do it.
I could use money I earned from selling power generated by a coal plant to buy solar panels. That doesn't make the coal plant produce twice the energy.
Complaining that crypto uses a lot of power is like complaining India is trying to burn fossil fuels which will harm the planet. India wants to boost its economy the same way the west has done. Crypto activists want a democratised / uncontrollable financial system and so far mining and burning energy is the only way we know how to achieve it.