[Nursie]

How so?

Because it looks to me like the current state of crypto is worse than ever - https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-less-green-than-ever-before...

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?

[olegious]

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]

[0] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/10/11/bitcoin-mining-is...

[1] https://blockworks.co/mining-mutualism-renewable-energy-and-....

Finally, if energy is one of your biggest expenses, you're economically incentivized to reduce those costs as much as possible.

[cesarb]

> 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.

[Nursie]

Yes, it's in beta. The expectation of moving later this year has held for several years.

> BTC mining is creating new business models for renewable energy

It's also helping bring fossil-fuel power plants back online in the US, purely to service cryptocurrency - https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-58020010

AFAICT there are others in the works too.

> BTC uses less energy than many other activities

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.