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I don't agree with the author and wouldn't boycott Firefox because of this. But I don't think the author was wrong to do it either. If a company said "Sure you

by D13Fd 5y ago

I don't agree with the author and wouldn't boycott Firefox because of this. But I don't think the author was wrong to do it either. If a company said "Sure you can pay dollars, or you can pay us funny money if you also fully combust 628 lbs of coal for no reason," I think it would be right to boycott them. To my knowledge, the biggest cryptocurrencies still use proof-of-work. A recent study said that Bitcoin emits the equivalent of 369.49 kg CO2 per transaction (regardless of size). Google tells me that coal emits CO2 at a rate of around 2.86x its mass when fully combusted. That means just paying someone with bitcoin is similar to burning 628 lbs of coal while we're in a climate crisis. No thanks. And that doesn't even account for the fact that Mozilla is not going to hold on to the bitcoin, and the outgoing transaction will cost another 628 lbs of coal...

ipaddr 5y ago
Thankfully most transaction happen off the chain. It seems like this person wanted a browser for identity reasons instead the utility of browsing. Firefox isn't being sold and when you donate you donate to the foundation which doesn't fund firefox. Whatever impact on the environment she imagined doesn't exist in reality because she was never going to donate cryto and even if she did it would happen on a big exchange off the chain.
ashwagary 5y ago
You are detailing the cost to defend the whole blockchain and every transaction that has occurred. Classifying it as just the cost of a single transaction is misguided. Layer 2 bitcoin solutions like lightning with infinite theoretical TPS (transactions per second) make this kind of math seem even more idiotic. When lightning was implemented, you could no longer definitely say each Layer 1 Bitcoin TX is 1 transaction. In reality, any single bitcoin tx could actually be a batch of 10,000+ transactions settling on Layer 1.

by D13Fd 5y ago

ipaddr 5y ago

Thankfully most transaction happen off the chain. It seems like this person wanted a browser for identity reasons instead the utility of browsing. Firefox isn't being sold and when you donate you donate to the foundation which doesn't fund firefox. Whatever impact on the environment she imagined doesn't exist in reality because she was never going to donate cryto and even if she did it would happen on a big exchange off the chain.

ashwagary 5y ago

You are detailing the cost to defend the whole blockchain and every transaction that has occurred. Classifying it as just the cost of a single transaction is misguided. Layer 2 bitcoin solutions like lightning with infinite theoretical TPS (transactions per second) make this kind of math seem even more idiotic. When lightning was implemented, you could no longer definitely say each Layer 1 Bitcoin TX is 1 transaction. In reality, any single bitcoin tx could actually be a batch of 10,000+ transactions settling on Layer 1.