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this is a really good article about how bitcoin is a terrible tool for the problem it claims to solve, its enormous environmental costs are still being understated, and some fun anecdotes about the scale of the fraud it engenders (pirate HV transformers!) https://www.ofnumbers.com/2021/02/14/bitcoin-and-other-pow-coins-are-an-esg-nightmare/
like I'm less bullish on proof-of-stake cryptocurrency because "you get free money in proportion to the amount of money you have" is still a bad system, but it at least gets rid of the "idling your car to generate solved sudokus" part
it's also cracking me up to see this passage dumping on the labor theory of value in an article that bemoans the fact that cryptocurrency mining is using scarce integrated circuit manufacturing capacity in competition with "actual productive activities"
like bro, having a definition of "productive activities" that's not tethered to profit requires you to come up with some sort of non-capitalist theory of value anyway, and coincidentally the labor theory of value says that value is created by _socially necessary_ labor
marx would probably also argue that the work done by computers is more like the work of bees than labor to begin with, because it doesn't produce "a result that already existed in the imagination of [the computer] at its commencement" ( https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm)
