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[ask fedi] Why do people hate crytocurrency? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Considering recent incidents on Mozilla and Ubisoft, why do people hate cryptocurrency so much?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

Because we're in a middle of a climate disaster and crypto wastes astounding amounts of energy. Bitcoin mining in particular consumes more energy than is used by entire countries. So, while there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of digital currency, current implementations are an environmental disaster.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Ubisoft uses Tezos, which is not energy-hungry, so they may have other reasons to hate.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 years ago

I don't really have an issue with crypto solutions that are energy efficient. I do think the benefits of cryptocurrencies are largely overstated, but if people want to play with this stuff then who am I to judge. However, stuff like Bitcoin is causing real and serious harm in the real world, and that's a problem.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Here is the actual source for that article, and its a lot more nuanced than "Bitcoin uses more energy than some countries". You have to keep in mind that it is only an estimate. And according to their estimate, gold mining uses more energy than Bitcoin mining. And the global banking system surely uses much more, considering how many millions of people it employs.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Yeah for sure, but I think the overall picture is that bitcoin is needlessly energy expensive. A proof of stake system would work much better in terms of efficiency.

I was thinking it would be great to base a cryptocurrency onsomething like folding@home. Instead of just doing meaningless computation, you'd find something like new protein folds which is actually useful. And this kind of work can't be automated easily, so the work to actually mine things would be a human effort. And if this led to somebody figuring out how to do this automatically that would be great too cause we'd be advancing science that way. Having a science coin would be really cool. :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

Was it not that a few years ago, a BOINC team had tried to fake results, to get more BOINC points (and reach higher in the performance charts)? And that (IIRC) was not even about earning Gridcoins as incentive to fold/crunch one such example. Although Gridcoin pools have misused BOINC project as well: example.

So the main goals of distributed scientific computing would certainly get into some kind of danger there, if people fake WU results already without extra incentive (from the actual BOINC projects) to do so.