Unavailable at source, here’s their Bluesky.
Replace bitcoin with ‘AI’ and it is just as relevant today as when it was first created.
At this point, whether or not you support such harmful things like AI and crypto aren’t differences in opinions, they differences in morality and (especially with AI) empathy. It’s one of those things where I just can’t be around someone who even takes a “neutral” stance, because it means they don’t care about the planet and people around them.
How come? These things can be used for benefit too, they’re not all bad
Of course there is some nuance to it. However, the massive ethical and environmental issues that come alongside AI and crypto usage just make any good use of them moot. Along with the fact that nobody is using them for those good uses, since those don’t rake in money, which is what companies want. People need to use their brains and need to think for themselves. AI is entirely antithetical to that.
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.
Also, ChatGPT is a murderer and anyone selling it to schools is accomplicing its next murder
Bitcoin issues an increasingly smaller share of coins to miners, in order to maintain their supposed guarantee of a hard cap of 21 million that will ever be created. This means that the price of Bitcoin has to double every four years just to keep the amount of money paid to miners the same. Bad for viability/security of the network, but good for long term carbon footprint prospects. Although it’s probably likely that there’s always going to be some kind of semi-scalable and fungible way to make money from running computations, so the failure of any one method isn’t going to be a lasting solution to environmental problems.
Some hope.
Wind and solar reached 30% of EU electricity, higher than fossil power (29%) for the first time on record, and up from 20% just five years prior. By 2025 wind and solar generated more power than all fossil sources in 14 of the 27 EU countries.
Early 2025 was less windy and rainy but sunnier than early 2024. The same weather conditions that caused an annual drop in hydro (-12%) and wind (-2%) boosted solar generation, with renewables providing nearly half of EU power (48%). Wind remained the second largest EU electricity source at 17% of EU power, above gas.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricity-review-2026/
