I don’t think cryptocurrency has much benefit anymore since these days it’s not really an anonymous payment method and more of a get rich quick grift. Even for what people would consider the better coins out there. And corporate AI companies (and their models) aren’t much better either.

There’s some nuance of course, there might be coins that can still be mined by us mortals, though I don’t care enough to look into that. There are non-corporate AI models you can run on your PC which don’t have power impacts of datacenters, though the majority do not license training data, which many consider equally problematic.