There is no sound, practical way to ban cryptocurrency, but... ban cryptocurrency. Shun everybody who uses or enthuses over it. It's a racket that is making life worse for everybody on earth and hastening the tipping point of the unsustainable aspects of our society. https://twitter.com/JoshuaACNewman/status/1386673987971948551

The fact that the inventors of cryptocurrency did not foresee their creation becoming a computing arms race that swallows up rare earth minerals, bandwidth, processing power, and energy at an escalating rate demonstrates how ill-equipped they were to change the world.

The stuff that cryptocurrency is hastening the destruction of is all stuff that cryptocurrency needs to work, to even exist.

It's "sound money" that sets fire to itself as you print it.

And if it was *just* destroying the means of its own existence I'd say let it burn, but we've got a ton of much better, actually productive or beneficial uses those resources could be going towards.

Sure! It consumes a fraction of the resources to produce something of value to humanity. Next? https://twitter.com/defstar_1982/status/1386684216776302592

Like, video games is one of the things I was thinking of when I said we have other, actual useful uses for those resources. They could be used to create art and entertainment.

It can be argued that a dog is a poorly made aardvark but that doesn't mean I'll find the argument worth entertaining.

Crypto is a garbage tech that consumes much and produces nothing. It's a plague, and I despise those who spread it. https://twitter.com/defstar_1982/status/1386685183471104000

Like every once in a while I'll have the thought: what if instead of performing arbitrary math whose answers mean nothing, cryptomining was cloud computing performing actual useful, needful research? But if it's still going through "the blockchain", it remains inefficient...

...and becomes more so as the ledger increases in size, which it always will, at an accelerating rate as more people adopt the currency.

Cryptocurrency ultimately doesn't work as a currency because the more people who use it, the worse it works. That's a critical flaw.

If you want to say that cryptocurrency is fun for the enthusiasts to enthuse about and therefore it's like a game and you want to say that it's performance art for the people making and pushing it... sure, okay, but at what cost? It's still destructive.

The idea of creating a scarce commodity that has no value except its arbitrary and provable scarceness so it can act as a store of value... "You just described fiat money."

Right, you're just recreating fiat money, at an incredible cost, for no actual reason or purpose.

And the things you do to make sure your new fiat money is arbitrarily scarce and to make it "secure" both make it incredibly costly to use, costs currently not directly born by the people making *real* money off it.

Cryptocurrency is not fiat money because it's not backed by a government or other authority that guarantees its value, but it's not sound money because it's not backed by anything else. It's less a pseudo-currency than it is a pseudo-commodity; people might buy it from you.

That's the "value" of cryptocurrency; that some sucker might buy it off you at a hypothetical future moment when the going rate suckers will pay for it is more than the amount you paid to acquire it.

That's not money. That's a commodity.

But it's a commodity that has no actual use, except for the ability to turn around and sell it to somebody else. It's like a bizarre placeholder in the incredibly distorted and artificial financial and economic ecosystem we've created.

And it doesn't make sense outside of that system. Cryptocurrency will never and can never fully revolutionize anything, because it needs actual currency to exist for it to have value to store.