the power consumption of computers
so let’s do a thought experiment; let’s say the reality of climate change kicks our world into a sort of post apocalyptic movie like, oh everyone says Mad Max but today I’ll say Book of Eli. But picture that fear we all have, that time isn’t running out to finally get serious about global warning and climate change, it ran out.
And in this thought experiment, don’t worry, this is just a thought experiment, but let’s say the way this manifests itself first is one day the power to your whole neighborhood block goes out. And you think at first oh this is just a blackout, it’ll be over soon, but then days go by and still no power. Finally it comes back but this starts becoming a common thing. The new normal is: power isn’t always going to be available. Would we then, in this new would teetering on the edge of Eli, we would start shutting down server farms?
Would it be unethical to run Facebook anymore?
It feels like we either solve our energy needs (which are infinite) or we don’t. But pretending a technology like Netscape Navigator in 1993 or Amazon in 1997 or Google in 2004 or Bitcoin in 2008 or…
Why is Bitcoin evil to be a new thing that forces computers to always be on?
Taking what was already going to infinity and just speeding it up… yes but maybe it’s speeding up the answer to how to run our society correctly. Maybe it’s ripping off a band-aid and getting to what’s next.
But wait, now it sounds like I’m being cavalier about being green. But great thing are happening in crypto like this and this and many more, but, I still own BTC and ETH. Should I sell them and replace with ADA and ALGO?
Well, even if we all sell our lets say “fossil fuel challenged” coins, that doesn’t mean 100% of us will or even close. I’d join some kind of pledge to only support the greenest coins we know how to make and deprecate older ones:
Deprecation
, in its
programming
sense, is the process of taking older code and marking it as no longer being useful within the codebase, usually because it has been superseded by newer code. The
deprecated
code is not immediately removed from the codebase because doing so may cause regression errors.
But this deprecation will take time! Years! I don’t want to just waste electricity, lets call crypto 1.0 the early years of crypto and 2.0 is happening today; but let’s not lay the blame for melting ice caps at the feet of all BTC holders.