In ideological terms: low-information lefties don't like crypto because it's been hammered into their heads that it's bad for the environment due to how much electricity those calculations require. And you gotta save the world, y'all!
Their way of trying to explain it to normies is so fucking far off the mark as well, and show's how little they understand. Gonna go on a bit of a crypto sperg for a bit so apologies in advance.
One of the big comparisons they love to make is comparing the energy consumption of bitcoin to something like Visa. This is such a false equivalency that we're already into concave skull territory. Visa is simply a payment system. It relies on the existence of an underlying financial infrastructure, namely, the US dollar and everything that gives and maintains it's value.
Bitcoin IS its own financial infrastructure. It is it's own full monetary stack, it's ability to make payments between users on the network is only one small part of it. If you wanted to really compare Bitcoin's power drain to something you should compare it to the US dollar itself. Bitcoin's value comes from the blockchain, a shared ledger that's difficult if not impossible to tamper with. The dollar's value comes primarily from the strength of the US government. So have to calculate the energy usage of aalll the relevant federal agencies+ the federal reserve, INCLUDING the United States Military. That's a massive pillar of the dollar's value, is America's military might. And if Jim expects me to believe that the blockchain consumes more energy that the largest industrialized army in the world he's got some serious brainrot.
Second they don't understand crypto's energy mix. Crypto miners love going after what are known as "stranded energy assets" basically electricity that is being generated but not being used. This is why big mining operations got set up in China despite China's somewhat negative attitude towards crypto. The Chinese built a bunch of hydo-power stations in southern provinces that were far away from major cities, but didn't bother building the infrastructure to transport that power to anywhere it could be put to use. Miners saw this and were like aww yiss free energy, and it's renewable. Granted not all, probably not even most of the energy crypto uses is renewable, but miners definitely like to go after it when they can, even in unexpected ways. One of the more extreme examples is miners going after natural gas. Oil drilling produces methane as a byproduct, but that methane doesn't really get captured or used. Miners started setting up natural gas rigs to capture this methane and use it as fuel for their mining pools. Now this isn't totally environmentally friendly, but burning methane to produce CO2 is way better for the environment than just methane on it's own.
Then there's the issuance factor. This isn't applicable to all cryptos but for Bitcoin, which is obviously the biggest and baddest of them all, the energy consumption isn't because of transactions and fees like so many of these brainlets like to say on repeat. It's because miners for the moment make most of their money from being issued NEW Bitcoins. For those who don't know crypto at all, I'm sure you're all familiar with the "money printer go brrr" meme. Well the creator of bitcoin designed it so you don't get to just print new bitcoins for nothing, you actually have to earn it by expending resources, namely energy. This is going to be the case until the last bitcoin is mined in 2140 (it's going to take that long because the amount you get for mining blocks gets halved every 4 years)
Lastly, and this one annoys me the most, they make these fucking insane predictions about what crypto's energy consumption is going to grow to in the future using variables they cannot POSSIBLY know. Like, they're literally just pulling shit out of their ass. There's this idea that crypto miners are all lavishly wealthy, and while they do make good money, what alot of people don't know is that for the big mining pools, profit margins are actually pretty thin. Most of what they mine goes back into operating costs. Investment funds and private investment firms rarely like to fund mining operations because they're really not that profitable, if you just purely wanted to make big money on crypto you'd probably be better just trading it on an exchange. I saw one article (i think it was the new york times..?) that tried to say within the next 5-10 years the energy consumption of bitcoin could double, or grow even more than that. This is probably the single stupidest statement I've ever heard someone make about Bitcoin. Because remember, bitcoin issuance gets halved every 4 years, so miners are gonna get less per block that they mine. That means in order for miners to remain within their already thin profit margins
the value of bitcoin would also have to DOUBLE every 4 years. And there is absolutely no fucking way they could know or predict that happening. There's not a soul alive who could reliably tell you whether bitcoin is going to go up or down within the next 4 months, let alone say with absolute certainty that it is going to predictable DOUBLE every 4 years.
Also worth noting one of the reasons mainstream media started cracking down harder on crypto in the last year or so is when the George Floyd shit was happening and all the big businesses were bending over backwards to support BLM, Coinbase, the biggest crypto exchange kept their mouth shut, the new york times noticed this and the CEO put out a statement basically saying the company isn't gonna commit to any political causes, instead focus on its mission of making crypto use more widespread and accessible. Globohomo's sure didn't like that. Coindesk wont donate to BLM = crypto is white suppremacy.
Final sidenote to Jim about NFT's. NFT's only make up a fraction of the transactions settled on the Ethereum blockchain. Which by itself has a much lower energy consumption than bitcoin's blockchain cause it runs on PoS. If you wanna moralize and make me panic about the oceans boiling come to me with some actual solid numbers. Otherwise pop another painkiller and cope seethe and dilate.
Okay I'm done, thank you for listening to me
SNEED
