Increasing the energy usage of our species is not "irresponsible" or "malicious". Every technological improvement increases the energy usage of our species. I think that is the point they are making, that it is wrong to say that using energy is strictly a bad thing.
If you want to decrease fossil fuel consumption then you should be crusading for worldwide carbon taxes, not bans on new technologies.
> Increasing the energy usage of our species is not "irresponsible" or "malicious".
Right now, yes it is. we do not have unlimited clean energy.
> Every technological improvement increases the energy usage of our species.
This is a huge assertion.
> If you want to decrease fossil fuel consumption then you should be crusading for worldwide carbon taxes, not bans on new technologies.
Great, and in the mean time, until we get there, spinning up a new financial instrument that uses more power than the Netherlands is massively irresponsible if not outright malicious.
Where is exactly is the line? I don't know and I'm not convinced that that's an interesting question. I'd say that it's significantly below bringing entire new country's worth of energy consumption online for a financial scheme.
Your argument is effectively that we can never call anything an irresponsible use of energy. With the background of global climate change, I very much disagree.
I'm not saying we can never call anything an irresponsible use of energy.
What I am saying is that we can't by default call all new technologies an irresponsible use of energy either.
The fact that it uses energy is not justification alone that it is bad. We use energy to achieve utility for our species. The only way we could stop all our energy consumption would be to cease to exist.
So, why is Bitcoin an irresponsible use and other technologies are a responsible use? THAT is the interesting question. Volume alone can't be enough to justify it because many important technologies use way more energy than Bitcoin at only 0.6% of global use.
So it must come down to an opinion that cryptocurrencies aren't useful: that is the real disagreement here. It isn't about energy usage, but usefulness (per unit of energy usage), which is a highly subjective judgement. That is what I am trying to point out.
I never claimed you did. I am just saying that you haven't justified why Bitcoin is actually an irresponsible use of energy. What makes its usage level irresponsible? Why is it more irresponsible than other technologies which use more energy than it?
New financial instrument using more power than most countries. Thought you might have got that by now.
> Why is it more irresponsible than other technologies which use more energy than it?
Nobody is making that argument. This is just whataboutery. But in general, the fact that it's a new financial instrument using more power than most countries, at a time when we have a global climate crisis brought on largely by our energy usage.
> But you haven't justified why that is an irresponsible use.
Because it's just a financial instrument, and it uses more power than the Netherlands, and we have a climate crisis going on. I'm not sure what it is you don't see here.
Any new financial instrument that added a whole country to the energy map like that would be a bad thing.
You are implying that's an obvious judgement but the wide ranges of opinions in the daily cryptocurrency threads on here should clearly show you that it is NOT an obvious judgement. Why are financial instruments not important enough to warrant a measly 0.6% of worldwide consumption?
Such opinions on the cryptocurrency threads tend to come from biased/invested sources who want to either whitewash or ignore it, very few even try to justify it, just dismiss concerns.
It's not measly, it's enough for entire countries of many millions of people. Most countries in fact. That you seek to cast it as "measly" shows that you also are simply seeking to dismiss or whitewash, rather than take the issue seriously.
> Increasing the energy usage of our species is not "irresponsible" or "malicious".
Right now, yes it is. we do not have unlimited clean energy.
I think you would drop this opinion very quick if the energy we where talking about was being used for your life support. We live in a capitalist world our financial systems are everyones life support.
If you want to decrease fossil fuel consumption then you should be crusading for worldwide carbon taxes, not bans on new technologies.