this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Eh. Bitcoin mining alone accounts for about 0.7% of 2024 global CO₂ emissions annually, with 40% of that mining happening in US and Canada. 130.50 Mt is nothing to sneeze at.
Far too little and too late.
I literally just said:
Yes, Bitcoin still uses proof-of-work. That's because Bitcoin is itself a fossil, its userbase and developers have consciously decided to not adopt new blockchain technologies and remain locked in the current protocol. Other blockchains have continued moving on. Alas, Bitcoin has name recognition and inertia on its side, which will keep it around for a long time. But at some point I expect its obsolescence will catch up with it and overcome that inertia.
Sure. But they're relegated to the realm of highly sketchy pre-mining schemes and pump-and-dump market gambits. There's no serious third party mining community for these boutique coins.
We still have people digging yellow rocks out of the ground and shoving them in big vaults to store fiscal value.
If that's not obsolete, I'm not holding my breath on Bitcoin.
Ether has a market cap of $450 billion, and that doesn't count all the other tokens running on the Ethereum blockchain. It's been running since 2013. If you call that a "boutique coin" based on "pump-and-dump" then clearly you've either got a highly biased or highly ignorant view of cryptocurrency.
There are technical flaws in Bitcoin that could literally crash it if they aren't patched out before they become exploitable, as in it's at zero value and will never recover. That's not something that can happen to gold.
Ah, yes. The fine folks that gave us NFTs.
No pump and dumps to be found over there
To be fair, the concept of an NFT was very cool when it was first imagined, but then all people used NFTs for was stupid gifs to be sold like trading cards or fucking pogs...
But the concept is cool if you actually use it for something. For instance, you can create an NFT as a digital key (like a literal key that unlocks something) or as a legal deed that proves ownership of something. Then you have a digital asset that can be resold or folded into a smart contract, where the digital item actually controls something physical. For instance, you could design an NFT to be the actual key that can unlock and start a car. If you sell this digital asset, you will not be able to start the car, but the new owner will. That is cool, monkey gifs are stupid bullshit. And if you try to convince people to buy bullshit, that makes you a scammer.
But Etherium didn't invent the stupid bullshit, they just created a system that made more interesting things possible. And then with the power to do anything, some people made the stupidest shit in the world. It's like, you can hand someone a pencil and paper and some people will use that to prove a theorem, some people will sketch a landscape, and some people will draw a huge cock and balls... But you don't blame the people that created the pencil and paper.
Going to have to agree to disagree.
It was always vaporware. A bunch of empty promises that predicted a digital monoculture. Feel like I have to carve "Ready Player One was a Dystopia!" on a baseball bat and hit people with it.
So I'm hearing that perhaps the idea I talked about in my example didn't sound cool to you. But it was cool to a lot of people, and your opinion doesn't speak for everyone. And it does work, like today.
So were pogs
So you really think the ability to trade digital keys is useless? That's honestly weird.
I mean there are so many instances of people actively using digital keys right now, so clearly that part of the functionality has value. Surely there are situations where one might want to sell access to something, and the ability to transfer a digital key with a single transaction would be useful.
I think you're being overly dismissive based on preconceived notions.
When the keys cost several hundred dollars to generate? I'd say the price vastly outstrips the reward.
Bailey: "Cryptocurrency is useful."
Moot: "Oh, so you think cryptography is useless?!"
That's fine. I don't really value your opinion.
It does not necessarily have to cost that much... But even if it did, the key to my Honda cost a couple hundred dollars to copy, so that's not really different.
I don't expect to change your mind, but it seems worth pointing out that the things you're saying are pretty dumb.
And yet that's the selling point behind proof-of-work cryptocurrency models. The whole reason they have value is the raw material cost to fabricate a new key.
Absent that cost, it's not cryptocurrency. It's just cryptography.
Hey, good luck out there.