Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.
Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.
People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.
Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.
Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.
Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions—things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis—while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.
It’s not just about power.
First off, solar power still comes at a cost to the planet. It’s not an infinite energy hack. You have to build solar panels, which involves a lot of labour and resource extraction. That should be going to things that will make the world a better place for everyone. Is a really inefficient database really the best use for those resources?
Second, that’s not the only physical resource involved. Modern crypto mining is done on ASICs, single purpose chips designed for only running crypto mining apps. These chips burn out after about two years of continual use, and they cannot be recycled or repurposed; they can only be used for crypto mining. That means that crypto, as a whole, generates an absolutely staggering amount of ewaste. This is a business that demands infinite growth, because the difficulty of the chain scales with the amount of compute power applied to it, so the miners are all locked in an endless arms race, and that infinite growth comes at the cost of infinite resource extraction.
That’s exactly the kind of thing we have to get away from if we want a green future. We cannot keep building infinite growth engines and expect to have a livable planet.
Monero and many other coins do not mine on asic chips.
https://www.okx.com/learn/top-11-asic-resistant-coins
First off, sooner or later someone will invent an ASIC for any sufficiently popular coin (even the article you cited acknowledges this). Trying to make them ASIC resistant is a losing battle. Most of these have only held out as long as they have because the return on investment isn’t worth it.
Second, mining on GPUs doesn’t actually solve the ewaste problem. They’re still constantly buying and constantly replacing endless amounts of computer hardware, all for the purpose of running a very inefficient database. As long as the money put into buying more hardware is less than the money obtained from using that hardware for mining, people will continue to buy and run more hardware. That kind of infinite growth and infinite resource exploitation is completely counter to any notion of living on a green planet.
If you really dont like ewaste then you should turn your attention towards how many resources are being consumed to produce and power new AI hardware.
I’d rather have too many GPUs than a bunch of financial mainframes that are pretty much useless for any other task.
It’s not a question of “turning your attention.” If I say “murder is bad” that doesn’t imply that I think rape is therefore good.
Yes, AI is also a huge producer of ewaste, as well as using power and clean water for no real purpose other than enriching investors and destroying job security. It’s also notable that most of the firms that were heavily shilling crypto and public blockchain products have now pivoted to shilling AI products. Almost like these are just tech bros looking for a new scam to sell. All of that is bad. Everyone agrees it’s bad. But it’s not the subject of conversation here. All you’re doing is engaging in whataboutism.