> Most modern banks also don't manage transactions with employees anymore, they use computers to transact.

so, there's some of that carbon expenditure going into computers and networks to manage these transactions? Banks also use your money to make more money for themselves, does that bother you at all? considering that this thread started out by looking at things "holistically".

In any case, my point here isn't that crypto currencies are the best thing ever, but they're definitely a step in the right direction. I hope you can see the potential in these ideas and what they're trying to achieve. Basically, we need a system that can't be defeated with fraud, if everyone was honest we could just pass around a piece of paper and ask everyone to write down how much money they have and we'd be good, unfortunately that's not the case, as I see it, most of it is a just the cost of preventing cheating, we can certainly observe the current networks and come up with better ones in the future.

> Making a human is a net increase in entropy. Burning fuel is a net increase in entropy.

> This is not a fight you can win as the amount of energy you need to expend is magnitudes larger than the amount of entropy you decreased, actually, by the law of thermodynamics, any energy you expend to reduce entropy will produce an equal or larger amount of energy as a result. > Entropy may decrease temporarily in a locality but overall it will always increase inevitably.

so, are you suggesting that we stop reproduction and burning fossil fuels and slow down the "advance of entropy"? (or is it just bitcoin you want stopped?)

Also, "net increase" in what system?

20K people (debatable) and a bunch of computers and networks which need to be managed by more people, and the infrastructure doesn't run on sunshine either (yet).

Without laboring the point, if your position is: * The methods applied by the crypto currencies waste more energy than our current system of currency.

I'll accept this, iff we make sure we've collected data rigorously and we notice that the difference is significant. Even then, there's no reason to give up on the idea of crypto currencies, we just have to make it more efficient.