[DINKDINK]

>I can't stand the proliferation of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies in a world where people don't have to pay for the externalities of the energy they use.

Not a fare comparison; all of visa/mc's servers have externalities, all of the money trucks driving around physically collecting cash have carbon externalities, building ATMs and printing plastic credit cards have carbon externalities, building banks and running them have carbon externalities.

You have to compare the relative carbon impact. Cryptocurrency miners obviate all of those things.

[rspeer]

Have you compared the relative carbon impact? You're making it sound like the things you're "obviating" are on at all the same scale.

Visa et al. are incredibly efficient compared to Bitcoin. I heard a Bitcoin advocate point out that all it would take to make Bitcoin have enough throughput that everyone could use it is 1% of the power in the entire world.

[nickik]

That is the case for Bitcoin but not for all blockchains, particularly prove of stake systems. BitShares for example has an extremely efficient system.

The tradeoff is that the 'peer' need to be relatively high performance servers (just normal commodity servers, nothing special).

Its impossible to achieve with the concept of everybody running their own nodes on a laptop.

In BitShares the Shareholders (people who own BitShares) can vote on either improving the performance and decreasing the distribution or the other way around.

So you are still gone be somewhat less efficient compared to Mastercard but you can achieve the same the scalability with a reasonable amount of extra power usage.