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I guess you could argue it's ironic or hypocritical in some way to squander electricity in the era of climate change, but it's completely wrong to identify cryp

I guess you could argue it's ironic or hypocritical in some way to squander electricity in the era of climate change, but it's completely wrong to identify cryptocurrency as a serious contributor to climate change. We can even set aside the fact that renewable sources of electricity can be and are used to mine cryptocurrency (e.g. the vast bitcoin mines co-located with Chinese hydro dams). The real problem with this argument is it represents the same fallacy you see with "violent video games are driving kids to be more violent" Even if it were true, it tackles the social problem in question backwards. Instead of asking "do video games make kids more violent" we should be asking "what are the main drivers of violence in our society?" Climate change is caused by fossil-fuel power generation, trucking, personal automobiles, greenhouse gas emitting industry, and agriculture. It's not caused by bitcoin, even if bitcoin mining contributes to it in some minuscule way by comparison to the real drivers.

grzm 9y ago
It is very much relevant. In the oft-recited "Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.", they're ranked in order of descending effectiveness: it's most effective to look for ways to reduce energy consumption. Yes, we need to look at which sources we're getting energy from, but just like the most bug-free code is the code that's never written, not needing the energy in the first place makes the first question moot. Of course, this is important across all energy consumption, but that doesn't make it irrelevant or hypocritical to discuss in the context of cryptocurrency mining.