> Banning their trade won't categorically stop PoW cryptocurrencies. What it should do is completely tank their value and get the world to move on to less destructive coins.
This ban needed to be internationally, though. Pretty difficult to enforce on a global scale. And then it would only have a short term influence on the price of, say, Bitcoin, until enough “black” mining power emerges.
I would just relax. Bitcoin is not going to destroy the planet. In the long run it’s going to be a niche financial tool compared to the scale of Ethereum or other competitors (Cardano, Solana or Algorand). It’ll be the PoS enabled DeFi networks that are going to disrupt the banking business.
In the long run, it's going to be very green. There are Crypto Climate Accord groups working to ensure Bitcoin is carbon-neutral by 2030. What is being done currently is making leaps and bounds in using solar, hydro, wind and trapped energy for bitcoin mining. It's pushing industry to green. Not the phony narrative that's constantly pushed by people who are quite literally, spreading allowed disinformation across HackerNews for the past several years on end.
Are the people downvoting the above comment considering things like trapping excess flare gas [1]? This is energy that is literally wasted otherwise, and would be vented into the atmosphere, if not used for PoW mining (or put to some other undetermined use, but PoW is the only profitable alternative that has made sense so far vs just flaring the gas).
Maybe there need to be more guidelines around how to use excess energy instead of coal, but to totally disregard that PoW could be mined from excess energy is shortsighted. Flare gas is just one example.
This ban needed to be internationally, though. Pretty difficult to enforce on a global scale. And then it would only have a short term influence on the price of, say, Bitcoin, until enough “black” mining power emerges.
I would just relax. Bitcoin is not going to destroy the planet. In the long run it’s going to be a niche financial tool compared to the scale of Ethereum or other competitors (Cardano, Solana or Algorand). It’ll be the PoS enabled DeFi networks that are going to disrupt the banking business.