As soon as I hear something like “planet destroying” within the crypto context, I stop reading because that tells me the person knows nothing about the current state of crypto.
I'm curious about this, I try to stay up on what's going on in the crypto world and it's my understanding that the vast majority of crypto blockchains are still using proof-of-work, which is what I imagine "planet destroying" is in reference to.
The biggest proof-of-stake blockchains by market capitalization in 2021 were Cardano, Avalanche, Polkadot and Solana. Other prominent PoS platforms include Tron, EOS, Algorand, and Tezos.
There have been repeated proposals for Ethereum to switch from a PoW to PoS mechanism. In April 2021, the Ethereum Foundation announced that it planned to switch to a PoS system by the end of 2021. This has since been pushed back to the second quarter of 2022.
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So if most of crypto transactions are conducted on proof-of-work chains, which do require burning large amounts of electricity, why would this make you think someone doesn't know about the current state of crypto. What exactly about the current state of crypto is incompatible with this critique?
>>What exactly about the current state of crypto is incompatible with this critique?
Ethereum is by far the most widely used cryptocurrency network, and while it consumes a lot of energy relative to the number of transactions in processes, and a lot of energy in absolute terms, it consumes on the order of a thousandths (0.1%) of the world's energy output.
It will have switched to Proof of Stake long before it grows large enough for it to account for a materially significant portion of global energy consumption. So the rhetoric used above, which makes the generalization that "Crypto is a planet-destroying ponzi-scheme", is entirely hyperbolic with respect to the environmental criticism (and a blatant mischaracterization with respect to the ponzi-scheme allegation).
Ethereum is now estimated to consume energy equivalent to or greater than mid-sized countries like Greece[1]. You can paint it as tiny, but 0.1% of world energy output is still enormous, for providing what is for the most part a highly speculative set of financial instruments to a limited audience.
It's been "about to go PoS" for several years now. The fact is it hasn't. When it does, you can tell people their concerns are out of date. About Ethereum. Bitcoin isn't even going there and its consumption is as bad or worse.
I don't disagree with most of your comment, but I do want to point out that the code to power Ethereum's switch to PoS is actually built out now and is in its final stages of testing. The latest Kiln test network is effectively a release candidate. At no point in the past several years has that been true, so it's comparing apples to oranges to say it's been "about to go" for that long.
I will welcome it when it does, don't get me wrong. That honestly removes a major issue I have with cryptocurrency (at least with Ether, anyway). There are a host of more theoretical reasons I'm not buying into the ecosystem, but remove that negative externality and hey - you do you, not my bag but you aren't hurting others.
I'm sure it is closer than ever, if it wasn't then there's something wrong with the development process! I sincerely wish the various people involved good luck in this venture and a speedy success in moving it to production. In the mean time I'm still going to get pissed off at people saying that energy concerns are outdated, especially when they're referring to the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Don't forget that traditional banks consume lots of energy as well. Their armies of employees and tellers are required to drive an hour or so every day, they maintain tons of physical buildings, truck around piles of physical currency etc. Traditional fiat is given legitimacy based on government's monopoly on violence inside their borders which often result in wars. Nothing is free and I'm fairly certain that crypto will end in less energy consumption, not more.
0.1% is huge, but in no reasonable terms can it be called "planet destroying", when it's slated to be mostly eliminated within 6 months with the transition to Proof of Stake. The characterization is hyperbole.
As for the transition to PoS, the first phase of the transition was implemented on December 1st, 2020, with the launch of the Proof of Stake Beacon Chain. The Beacon Chain has been running without problems for over a year now.
The testnet for the second phase of ETH2 - which is when the execution chain is merged into the Beacon Chain so that Ethereum can fully switch from PoW to PoS and reduce its energy consumption by 99.95% - was launched on December 20th, 2021:
The difference between now and then is that now Ethereum has had the Proof of Stake Beacon in operation for over a year, and the next phase, which merges the execution chain into the PoS chain already, has a running testnet.
The projections on the completion date of the switch to PoS is now far less speculative / more reliable.
Emissions on a par with Greece. And just for one coin. Ethereum is still going to PoS any day now, totally, just a few months off. Like it has been for several years.
So what is it about "the current state of crypto" that you think you know better than these?
The ETH PoS chain is already in beta with the expectation of transition (the merge) later this year.
BTC mining is creating new business models for renewable energy [0][1], BTC uses less energy than many other activities that don't get the same flack- AC usage, Data Centers, etc [1]
> Finally, if energy is one of your biggest expenses, you're economically incentivized to reduce those costs as much as possible.
Unfortunately, with Bitcoin (and other Proof-of-Work blockchains), the economic incentive is the opposite: to use as much energy as possible, until the return from the block rewards and transaction fees is smaller than the price you pay for that energy. Reducing the energy costs only allows you to use even more energy before reaching that limit, increasing the total costs again.
Pointing desperately at other things doesn't change the argument at all.
> Finally, if energy is one of your biggest expenses, you're economically incentivized to reduce those costs as much as possible.
So? This doesn't make bitcoin clean?
There is already huge demand for clean power in this world, adding to it with PoW systems doesn't actually help, and as we can see by the power plant and by the article linked above about a fall in renewable use in BTC, we're not in the "Bitcoin has incentivised green energy and helped the world get cleaner" stage, we're in the "Bitcoin is adding pressure to an already over-pressurised system and is making the problem worse at a critical time" phase.
Even your own linked article is sub-headed "Cryptocurrency mining has the potential to address the obstacles to more widely adopting renewable energy" - not that it has or is, but that it could.
These pseudo-intellectual economic arguments about "helping the world move to renewables" are tripe.
Per wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake
The biggest proof-of-stake blockchains by market capitalization in 2021 were Cardano, Avalanche, Polkadot and Solana. Other prominent PoS platforms include Tron, EOS, Algorand, and Tezos.
There have been repeated proposals for Ethereum to switch from a PoW to PoS mechanism. In April 2021, the Ethereum Foundation announced that it planned to switch to a PoS system by the end of 2021. This has since been pushed back to the second quarter of 2022.
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So if most of crypto transactions are conducted on proof-of-work chains, which do require burning large amounts of electricity, why would this make you think someone doesn't know about the current state of crypto. What exactly about the current state of crypto is incompatible with this critique?