It was near the top of the front page 5 minutes ago. Now it's not anywhere in the top 200 stories.
The fact that an entire natural gas power plant in upstate NY was purchased to exclusively power Bitcoin mining seems to be pretty newsworthy, at a time where we're trying to cut carbon.
Perhaps bitcoin is a nice academic theory and would work well if humans were responsible. Just like nuclear cars are nice in theory - so long as people don't have accidents.
Edit:
> If needed, we can better incentivize green bitcoin mining with carbon taxes or renewable energy mining subsidies.
Plastic is a wonderful material but virgin plastic is cheaper than recycled and various attempts to artificially decrease the price of recycled plastic via government incentive programs haven't worked.
Electronics are awesome, but despite efforts to recycle electronic waste it all ends up in third world countries where it gets burned off. it's just cheaper that way. Some ecyclers were even caught trying to game the system. Taking government incentives and still shipping e-waste overseas.
I'd like to believe in the idea that some sort of incentive program would come into place but so far none have worked in the may other industries that desperately need it.
> According to the Web site Digiconomist, a single bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of power that the average American household consumes in a month, and is responsible for roughly a million times more carbon emissions than a single Visa transaction.
How can you justify that as a cost worth paying? A month's worth of electricity for a single transaction?
It doesn't matter what you do with taxes or renewables. That's insane.
Until this is changed I can't see cryptocurrencies having a future, despite their utility.
[0] Yes, I know mining in Iceland is a thing. But mines in Iceland don't make up a huge chunk of the network.
