People on here get worked up about it because they all know someone who made a lot of money in it that they see as unearned -- it comes down to jealousy or scha

People on here get worked up about it because they all know someone who made a lot of money in it that they see as unearned -- it comes down to jealousy or schadenfreude, I suppose. The guise of caring about the externalities or the grandmas is always a front, if we're being totally honest with ourselves. Because to your point, it's completely voluntary to get involved, and if someone is pretending to care about all the (relatively few) grandmas who put money in, well, they're losing money so this person shouldn't be so happy about it. And as for the energy externality, the vast majority of crypto hashpower has hook ups to power plants where during certain times of the day/year, there is excess power and nowhere to put it, so they sell it dirt cheap to miners. I know someone who worked for a US solar power provider that had such an arrangement. Sure, some people are mining from their college campus and stealing power to do so, but the cumulative real effect of this relatively low profit activity is dwarfed by the out of context numbers you see in articles. So at the end of the day, the crypto hating is just people playing zero sum status games, hoping they somehow benefit relative to the decline of others (just as the crypto people are playing zero sum wealth games). It would be nice if everyone could just be honest about it.