Bit of an aside, but it's so wild that we label people as "environmentalists" and that anyone would place themselves NOT in that group.
It seems like 100% of people should want air which is non-toxic, water which is non-toxic and food which is non-toxic.
But of course, being an "abolitionist" was a political group in the 1800s but now it's just assumed that 100% of people are anti-slavery, so maybe the optimistic take is that "environmentalist" will undergo the same transformation as "abolitionist".
This black-and-white thinking ignores the spectrum of what constitutes non-toxic. There are those that accept nothing short of perfect purity in air, water and food, a condition which has never existed in a million years of human history. Others are less concerned about humans and more about ecology. Still others value the morals of human-animal relations above issues of nature.
So no, we are not all 'ecologists', not in the same sense anyway. And not to the same degree.
I'm not so sure. No water systems at all. Lack of covered drains. Firewood for heat in any population center. Tuberculosis and cholera. Unrefrigerated meat.
Sure, but on the other hand no large-scale industrial by-products, no islands of plastic in the sea, the mountains of trash were less durable and closer to being biodegradable.
The spectrum lies in what the proposed solution to any man-made ecological problem should be. Typically solutions to these proposed problems require increased cost burden on either individuals or businesses, sacrifices in lifestyle, increased regulation, etc. With anything like this politics comes into play almost immediately.
The way I see it, your 'environmentalist' label generally applies to those who thing we should spend/sacrifice a lot. And the 'climate denier'/'anti-environmentalist' label applies to those at the opposite end of the spectrum who don't think we should sacrifice or spend anything.
Also re: slavery, more people are enslaved now in the world than at any point in history. More black men are enslaved by the prison system in the USA than there were at the height of North American slavery. So things are never so boolean.
This is akin to saying that socialism is about promoting justice, and who isn't for justice? So how can there be people who say they aren't socialists?
People may agree in principle on what the end goal is, but disagree about the method to get there. Today the "environmentalist" is a political label like "liberal", "feminist" etc. It has a simple surface meaning but also comes with a lot of connotations and baggage, so that not everyone is comfortable pinning it on themselves.
I misunderstood what you meant, but this argument still seems specious.
The people currently employed by the financial industry would not cease to exist if the financial industry did not need as many employees, they would find jobs elsewhere. The downstream effects of what people spend their wages on isn't part of the the actual impact of the industry they work for.
I'm on the fence about whether this is correct or not. The question in my mind is: do you include military spending in the cost of maintaining a fiat currency and if so to what extent?
Fiat currencies are backed in part by the power of the governments that issue them, so is defense spending a form of "proof of work" for them? If the US government disbanded its military would the USD hold any value for very long? Same goes for any other fiat... e.g. if the PRC disbanded the Chinese military would the Yuan retain much value?
If fiat currencies require a constant demonstration of credible military (and police) capability, that's a rather enormous cost and brings with it quite a bit of resource use and pollution.
(I would guesstimate that Bitcoin would still be less efficient than USD but that the margin would be smaller.)
We're talking about the relative efficiency of Bitcoin vs. conventional finance in an energy or other cost per transaction sense. I'm asking whether some amount of military spending should be counted in the cost of maintaining a fiat monetary system.
If people were using Bitcoin as currency directly its value would remain equal to whatever people were willing to trade for it. Obviously if all people were willing to trade it for was USD it would become worthless, but that's not the point in this thread.
Bitcoin has other problems as a currency but that's not the topic of discussion here. Some other cryptocurrencies try to solve these, such as it being too deflationary or lacking functionality.
They will be super angry and look at all the details, including the past profits, then calmly decide to look the other way because they need a retirement account after all :)
The counterargument is always that at some point in future the energy consumption problem will be solved, but isn't the rate of computation a or the main factor against 50%+ attacks? Else the solutions proposed seemed to relay on centralized services that don't actually play on the blockchain to reduce the actual amount of transactions and load, also then avoiding the delays - but then re-adding the supposed main issue of having a "trustless" blockchain.
Makes me wonder if someone can create a cryptocurrency where the mining is for distributed computing research for achieving nuclear fusion power. Crypto-mining that does SETI@home/BOINC work.
This has been wondered for years, usually by people who don't know the purpose of hashing functions. If nuclear fusion models + protein folding were easily verifiable, then there would be no point in leveraging distributed computing for them - we'd have the same level of understanding for them as we do for contrived hashing functions. If they somehow also ended up with the difficulty directionality intentionally designed for in cryptography, then that would be fine. But that is pretty unlikely, and in that event your currency is totally hacked and useless.
Or PoS Ethereum or other PoS crypto currencies can take the place of exponentially energy-hungry PoW. They explicitly deal with the 50%+ attacks in their governance too.
For certain cases of attacks, yes with minority forks, and by destroying the attackers stake in other cases, see the section titled "Attacks are much easier to recover from in proof of stake" here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
So why not just have a trusted centralized authority(ies), arguably democratically elected who control the system(s), and where there isn't a transfer of wealth weighted from late adopters towards earlier adopters?
That's another alternative, which doesn't exist yet. Ethereum PoS could be here sooner and doesn't use energy like PoW does, along with other helpful features.
The counterargument has been the same for years: the present financial system consumes for more energy, to the point where people complaining about it look like they're either trying to deceive others, or they've just put so little thought into it that they should be ignored.
It seems like 100% of people should want air which is non-toxic, water which is non-toxic and food which is non-toxic.
But of course, being an "abolitionist" was a political group in the 1800s but now it's just assumed that 100% of people are anti-slavery, so maybe the optimistic take is that "environmentalist" will undergo the same transformation as "abolitionist".