> ...we can all agree that cryptocurrency has an external appearance of being environmentally bad.
From: [1]
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Maybe I assumed you read this guideline, but clearly it seems that you did not read it, given that your own assumption lacks substance. Which is why I ask again:
Do you have evidence to your own assumption that cryptocurrencies have the perception or appearance of being bad for the environment? On top of that, where is the evidence that support the case that ALL cryptocurrencies are bad for the environment?
The fact that you are actively dodging these questions leads me to think that you have no evidence in general to support your entire sentence in [0] given that it has ZERO sources which means it is absolutely baseless.
I think your request for sources is quite unreasonable -- clearly the original comment was based on general informal observations and the fact that the environmental impact frequently shows up in news articles. However, I did find a paper you can look up:
An Index of Cryptocurrency Environmental Attention (ICEA), (Yizhi Wang, Brian M. Lucey, Samuel Vigne, Larisa Yarovaya).
It is pretty dense, but here's the first paragraph of their conclusion:
"We have developed a new measure of attention to sustainability concerns of cryptocurrency markets’ growth. An Index of Cryptocurrency Environmental Attention (ICEA) has been constructed using 778.2 million news stories from the Lexis Nexis database. The index demonstrates significant increases in attention to cryptocurrency environmental impacts displayed via both traditional and social media channels from 2014 to 2021. Our findings suggest that the public is growing more concerned with energy consumption of these innovative asset."
> I think your request for sources is quite unreasonable
So the HN guidelines [0] for keeping the discussion substantive is somewhat 'unreasonable' when talking about something controversial like cryptocurrencies which even the commenter knew their long reply was unfounded? [1]
I am simply keeping the discussion substantiative.
As for the source you provided, it's now substantiates the observation claim I am asking for. It answers the first request for evidence but not the second one and this paper primarily focuses on only two PoW cryptocurrencies but doesn't target 'all' of the others in general which would which make case if every single cryptocurrency have the same energy inefficiencies as the two cryptocurrencies mentioned in the article, which is what I am also looking for.
One commenter gave an alternative cryptocurrency [2] that wasn't mentioned in the paper which aims to be energy efficient and addresses the other commenter's response even when they failed to answer my question by replying with another question. [3].
Given that one mention of the existence of an energy efficient cryptocurrency, what evidence exists that 'all of them' are harmful to the environment?
As has repeatedly been pointed out, the claim is based on the perception of environmental unfriendliness, so this tangent about the hypothetical existence of a non-harmful one is irrelevant.
The paper described the terms they performed analysis on:
("cryptocurrency" or "bitcoin" or "ethereum") and atl1("energy" or “energy consumption” or
“energy footprint” or “climate change” or “carbon footprint” or "environment" or "environmental"
or “environmental impact” or “carbon footprint” )
So, while they didn't list every niche cryptocurrency, they did include the catch-all phrase. This should capture some of the sentiment about those niche cryptocurrencies (to the extent that people care about them).
> the claim is based on the perception of environmental unfriendliness, so this tangent about the hypothetical existence of a non-harmful one is irrelevant.
It is still relevant given that the grounds of whether if this is true or not needs to be substantiated, as soon as they said:
> Maybe that's unfair, maybe it's not.
The claimant couldn't help dangerously blanket labelling all cryptocurrencies as the problem (and knew it was unfair) and left it up for discussion. They should have just given sources in the first place, informal or not.
> So, while they didn't list every niche cryptocurrency, they did include the catch-all phrase. This should capture some of the sentiment about those niche cryptocurrencies
Given that paper also explored the truth of PoW-cryptocurrencies being bad for the environment (with evidence) and the claimant blanket labelling 'every single cryptocurrency' as being perceived as environmentally bad (without evidence), the truth of whether it this is the case for 'every single cryptocurrency' can be explored in this thread very quickly with evidence.
It isn't that hard. One user in this thread has already defeated your description of a 'hypothetical existence of a non-harmful' cryptocurrency given that it already exists.
Do you have evidence to your own assumption that cryptocurrencies have the perception or appearance of being bad for the environment? On top of that, where is the evidence that support the case that ALL cryptocurrencies are bad for the environment?
The fact that you are actively dodging these questions leads me to think that you have no evidence in general to support your entire sentence in [0] given that it has ZERO sources which means it is absolutely baseless.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29065284
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html