The environmental arguments are hilarious to me as a diehard crypto guy. The ultimate answer to “waste” of electricity arguments is that energy is a free market and people pay the price if it’s useful for them. As long as the activity isn’t illegal then training LLMs or mining bitcoins, it doesn’t matter. I pay for the electricity I use.
One argument against that line of thinking is that energy production has negative externalities. If you use a lot of electricity, its price goes up, which incentivizes more electricity production, which generates more negative externalities. It will also raise the costs for other consumers of electricity.
Now that alone is not yet an argument against crypto currencies, and one person's frivolous squandering of resources is another person's essential service. But you can't simply point to the free market to absolve yourself of any responsibility for your consumption.
Unintentionally, the energy demands of cryptocurrencies, and data centers in general, have finally motivated utilities (and their regulators) to finally start building out the massive new grid capacity needed for our glorious renewable energy future.
Acknowledging that facilitating scams (eg pig butchering) are cryptocurrency's primary (sole?) use case, I'm willing to look the other way if we end up with the grid we need to address climate crisis.
To pretend romance / affinity scams and crime were created by crypto is absurd. It’s fair to argue crypto made crime more efficient, but it also made the responsible parties quicker to patch holes.
The primary use case of crypto is to protect wealth from a greedy, corrupt, money-printing state. Everything else is a sideshow
I greatly despise video games. Why is that not a waste of energy? If you are entertained by something, even if it serves no human purpose other than entertainment, is that not a valid use of electricity?
