[muglug]

> Terrible things on the internet don't make all things built on the internet guilty by association.

OK, but it's not like TCP requires fantastically large amounts of energy for each request. While I'm sure there are particular companies working on a solution for those problems, I've seen enough of the cryptocurrency world to understand that the big players won't shift their money into theoretical environmentally-sound currencies, because they simply don't care about global warming as long as they can be very rich.

The thing I keep coming back to is that blockchain databases don't allow me to do anything, as a developer, that I couldn't do with traditional databases and with much less power consumption. People have been buying in-game digital good for decades without needing the blockchain. Services like Venmo and Paypal make it easy to send (small amounts of) money across continents in an instant.

Blockchain databases are fundamentally unnecessary to the average person.

Edit: and it occurs to me that this is the main reason these technologies get such short shrift on HN: to most of us they seem like solutions in search of problems, and sometimes even just solutions in search of money.