[aoeusnth1]

Two quibbles I have with this argument:

1. PoW based on waste which has massive negative externalities is abusive. Power generation generally has large negative externalities. Bitcoin kills.

2. PoS is just another type of PoW - people will compete to earn the PoS rewards up until they are "burning" 0.99 worth of potential ETH they could have earned (with stocks or bonds for example) for every 1 ETH they earn through PoW. The difference is, PoS has nearly 0 negative externalities and is funded entirely through capital which was created out of thin air, namely, ETH. The capital required to fund BTC's PoW comes externally. So switching to PoW is a capital-creating act and naturally increases the value of the currency & network.

[thinkloop]

Abusive is not a fair word. The system allows for something that was never before possible. Waste is how it works. Everything takes energy to accomplish, every input to a process is waste in the end. The total cost vs. benefit is what matters. We could each name many things in society that produce much more carbon, that are much less useful than a decentralized ledger - and no-one would call them abusive.

[aoeusnth1]

Call it what you want, but the language of "negative externality" is too clinical in my opinion when it refers to killing people and putting the stability of the entire planet at risk, especially when perfectly adequate non-destructive PoW systems exist, namely, PoS.

[thinkloop]

I am a fan of PoS, but it is still different from PoW, with its own set of risks and benefits. Decentralized databases are important and society should have redundancy in their implementations. PoW is still the gold standard.

There are many things that cost the environment much more than Bitcoin, that are much less useful (almost everything?), where is the resistance to those.

Basically if you use resources to build a machine that does something, or just burn the equivalent amount of resources to achieve the same thing, it's about the same.

Cruise ships probably harm the environment significantly more than Bitcoin, are you mad at them?

[wlievens]

Would cruise ships still harm the environment more than an entire world economy based on PoW cryptocurrency?

[rhaps0dy]

Typo, I believe: switching to PoS is a capital-creating act, not PoW!

PoW is disgusting.

[aoeusnth1]

Yeah, I meant switching to PoS (damn tired parent brain)