> Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody.
I'd rather have this than the status quo, which is...Patreon, basically, which is an utterly terrible micropayments platform from both a company-ethics standpoint and a user-experience standpoint.
If you're concerned about carbon emissions, then tax energy enough to provide carbon capture to offset those carbon emissions, plus a little on top. Then I don't care what you use the power for, as long as I can get some, too.
The problem isn't PoW, the problem is uncaptured externalities.
I don't think that a distributed ledger is the right way to solve this, but flawed attacks on a solution being proposed to a terrible current state of affairs, without presenting any other solution whatsoever, is irksome, and doesn't help anybody.
The problem with PoW is that it creates a system where any jurisdiction with uncaptured externalities dominates.
If you have a USA-bitcoin that only accepted blocks by miners verified to be paying real costs for energy, then it would be different. But nobody wants that
If making it "OK" requires global consensus on tax/externality policy, then it isn't ever going to be ok.
Escaping regulation is the point of cryptocurrency.
This is based off a biased and incorrect assumption that "any jurisdiction with uncaptured externalities dominates". It ignores miner advantages bred from more efficient governance where externalities are covered by clear regulations and proper enforcement. Any venture can be made to have negative externalities and Proof of Work doesn't lend itself to either more or less of those than most other industries.
Yep. You are entirely correct but you miss the point.
That "regulatory efficiency" doesn't and can't exist in our current flavor of capitalism. Yes, it is the same as any other industry. But pointing it out about Bitcoin doesn't scare the population as much as pointing it out for their entire economy.
>Patreon, basically, which is an utterly terrible micropayments platform
What if, hear me out, micropayments are a bad solution in total? I have not seen anyone actually demonstrate that a micropayment based system will result in better production/creation than the patronage system that is working today. Instead it always seems to be driven by hyper-free market woo and ideology, as if that has worked out so far.
> What if, hear me out, micropayments are a bad solution in total?
Micropayments are clearly theoretically better than a patronage model, and there's very little evidence to suggest that they're either bad or good, so no, there's no reason to believe that they're a bad solution.
> I have not seen anyone actually demonstrate that a micropayment based system
This is a fallacious argument. It simply makes no sense - there's a metric ton of historical evidence that good ideas can fail to materialize either because the technology doesn't exist yet, or because of cultural factors immaterial to the validity of the idea.
> Instead it always seems to be driven by hyper-free market woo and ideology, as if that has worked out so far.
This statement is anti-capitalist drivel without any substance or intelligence behind it, meant to manipulate, with very little truth behind even the implication that micropayments are "hyper-free market" constructs, and a repetition of the earlier fallacy that "not currently successful = bad idea".
Micropayments are a pretty clearly better system than patronage. It scales better (smaller creators are more accurately rewarded for what they produce, instead of the largest creators getting a disproportionately large fraction of revenue), it's fairer to the creators (as their work gets directly rewarded, instead of them effectively having to beg for patronage), it's more sustainable (as creators are rewarded for all of the content that they've produced, instead of just the most recent), it's less guilt-inducing for consumers (who don't need to worry about whether or not their $1/month donation is "fair"), it naturally rate-limits consumers and helps them quantify and/or limit their entertainment time and/or spending, and it allows consumers to "own" their media more.
Carbon capture hasn't been shown to scale. "Carbon credits" and such schemes are blatant greenwashing. We already use an inordinate amount of energy on bullshit, with a hard enough time convincing people that there will be consequences for it. I don't want to move fast and break things when the thing in question is the biosphere that keeps me alive.
I'd rather have this than the status quo, which is...Patreon, basically, which is an utterly terrible micropayments platform from both a company-ethics standpoint and a user-experience standpoint.
If you're concerned about carbon emissions, then tax energy enough to provide carbon capture to offset those carbon emissions, plus a little on top. Then I don't care what you use the power for, as long as I can get some, too.
The problem isn't PoW, the problem is uncaptured externalities.
I don't think that a distributed ledger is the right way to solve this, but flawed attacks on a solution being proposed to a terrible current state of affairs, without presenting any other solution whatsoever, is irksome, and doesn't help anybody.