unfortunately as its supply is limited... it being consumed for useless work means it can't be used for useful work, and as a result dirty energy is being generated for that instead
none of which require burning hundreds of barrels of oil a day calculating quadrillions of sha1 hashes to keep their value from collapsing
and if you don't want to physically hold them then there's ETFs for that
Bitcoin would still compete for other things which are much more critical toost people on our planet.
Things like a storage battery. Or melting aluminum or other ors.
If you have already mined coal burning in a field and instead take that coal and put it through a generator and mine bitcoin with it you are using more energy and cleaning up emissions. https://www.wesa.fm/environment-energy/2022-01-31/how-waste-...
In a lot of places in the midwest up to 25% of wind or solar energy is priced at a negative level, this means they are paying to produce energy. Setting up a bitcoin miner is perfect because it can be quickly turned on/off and doesn't require consistent power like most manufacturing or other energy intense activities. This makes renewables more economical.
This goes into all of this as well. https://niccarter.info/wp-content/uploads/txsummit_nc_oct08....
Burned methane/negative priced reproducible energy/excess energy in general would be better spent on more valuable energy intensive pursuits such as desalinization, metal smelting, direct air carbon capture....
For every solar panel, there's a pile of toxic garbage that must be dealt with after ~20 years. It's unquestionably better than the billions of tonnes of CO2 that would be produced by the equivalent coal plant, but it's still a problem.
There is no "ethical consumption" of cryptocurrency.
No one.
Don't use a strawman argument.
And independent of this issue: there are of course things which are objectively better for that person in Afghanistan and objectively better for everyone.
Your poor Afghanistan person might like to have less heat waves than Bitcoin because he might not have enough money anyway to save it away as Bitcoin.
Normally those countries use dollar or euro anyway. It's much easier for them than being able to remember a Bitcoin wallet
Until then there are countless better ways to use it. And yes, Crypto isn't the only wasteful use of energy, but it sure is the most obnoxious.
