The strength of the reaction is, I think, mostly due to its being situated among artist communities, who tend have a very strong, swift moral consensus formation process and a fairly strong voice.
Artists see themselves as adepts in the plane of narrative, anthems, banners. Ethereum’s power consumption is funded, primarily not by transaction fees from real commerce, but by speculation and the minting of mining rewards. These things only have force because a narrative has been constructed where the network has value. Artists are aware that their participation would be constructing a large portion of the value attributed to the ethereum network, far out of proportion with the costs of the transactions involved, they would be selling the network legitimacy and narrative force. The consequences of their actions would be very real.
I’m not sure that many people who propose this evaluation would support its inverse implication—that there are uses of fossil fuels to generate mains-grid electricity that are non-problematic and worth the environmental damage, given the option of renewables.
I think they’d mostly say that the sustenance of human lives under modernity (running hospitals, etc) is necessary and that the side effects of living normal lives (transport emissions, food production emissions, whatever ya gotta do to pay rent) is at least understandable and forgivable, while inventing this new category of emission is something very different.
The ones standing at the epicenter of the reaction do all know that there is a lighter alternative to Proof of Work, they know that it really is unnecessary, that most of this is all a consequence of running fast and breaking things and that there is yet little else to show for it.
They know about Proof of Stake, but you wont ever hear those people singing enthusiastically about Proof of Stake, because they have no enthusiasm for anything in the space. I think you’re right about “Many people have soundly placed cryptocurrency within the “bad thing” box”. When genuinely good applications start to emerge, these folks will be slow to notice, but I find that totally understandable: So far, despite all of the innovation and all of the investment, I’m not aware of a single application (other than remittance) as of early 2021, that’s doing any material good for the world, I only see speculation, experimentation and foundation-laying, so far. I’m not saying there really aren’t any good applications, it’s noteworthy just to say that not a single one has found its way to me. Very soon I think some genuinely good things will start to emerge in the Cardano ecosystem, and although they are very real plans (banking the unbanked, building identity/credit score systems in the developing world), and I have complete faith that they’ll come to fruition, they’re still just plans, there isn’t anything I could show to one who was angry about what has passed so far, that would calm them.
Thanks very much for your thoughtful reply MakoYass, I agree with everything you’ve said here. It’s certainly a strange line to straddle personally, where I’m totally on-board the crypto train but also a radical environmentalist. But I also look forward to speculation being ripped out of the crypto ecosystem as much as possible and replaced with functional value. One day soon, we can hope.
The strength of the reaction is, I think, mostly due to its being situated among artist communities, who tend have a very strong, swift moral consensus formation process and a fairly strong voice.
Artists see themselves as adepts in the plane of narrative, anthems, banners. Ethereum’s power consumption is funded, primarily not by transaction fees from real commerce, but by speculation and the minting of mining rewards. These things only have force because a narrative has been constructed where the network has value. Artists are aware that their participation would be constructing a large portion of the value attributed to the ethereum network, far out of proportion with the costs of the transactions involved, they would be selling the network legitimacy and narrative force. The consequences of their actions would be very real.
I think they’d mostly say that the sustenance of human lives under modernity (running hospitals, etc) is necessary and that the side effects of living normal lives (transport emissions, food production emissions, whatever ya gotta do to pay rent) is at least understandable and forgivable, while inventing this new category of emission is something very different.
The ones standing at the epicenter of the reaction do all know that there is a lighter alternative to Proof of Work, they know that it really is unnecessary, that most of this is all a consequence of running fast and breaking things and that there is yet little else to show for it.
They know about Proof of Stake, but you wont ever hear those people singing enthusiastically about Proof of Stake, because they have no enthusiasm for anything in the space. I think you’re right about “Many people have soundly placed cryptocurrency within the “bad thing” box”. When genuinely good applications start to emerge, these folks will be slow to notice, but I find that totally understandable: So far, despite all of the innovation and all of the investment, I’m not aware of a single application (other than remittance) as of early 2021, that’s doing any material good for the world, I only see speculation, experimentation and foundation-laying, so far. I’m not saying there really aren’t any good applications, it’s noteworthy just to say that not a single one has found its way to me. Very soon I think some genuinely good things will start to emerge in the Cardano ecosystem, and although they are very real plans (banking the unbanked, building identity/credit score systems in the developing world), and I have complete faith that they’ll come to fruition, they’re still just plans, there isn’t anything I could show to one who was angry about what has passed so far, that would calm them.
Thanks very much for your thoughtful reply MakoYass, I agree with everything you’ve said here. It’s certainly a strange line to straddle personally, where I’m totally on-board the crypto train but also a radical environmentalist. But I also look forward to speculation being ripped out of the crypto ecosystem as much as possible and replaced with functional value. One day soon, we can hope.