My personal bias is that open source authors and maintainers don't owe anyone anything. They're making their code available to anyone for free, and it's on you if there's something you don't like about it. You can always fork it if you need to. Heck, you don't even have to use it. Write your own thing if something fundamentally bothers you about it.
And yet there's a large group of people who think they're somehow doing you a favor by using your open-source code, as opposed to the other way around. I've tried to talk to some of them, to try to get some idea of it. It typically boils down to either
1. I used and advocated for the project, making it more popular, and therefore they owe me.
2. Using an open-source library is an investment. I'm making a compromise by not writing it myself exactly how I want it. I'm attempting to do things their way, which in some ways is mentally harder than writing it to begin with, so when it changes radically or goes away, or they ask me for support, they have done me dirty. I deserve better.
3. #2, except they recognize that the author/maintainer doesn't owe them anything and hasn't acted maliciously, but they're still bummed that they either have to change things or fork the project and maintain it themselves. It's emotional rather than logical.
Of the three, I can kinda understand the last one, but I'll never agree with it.
> So you're also telling me there isn't a choice or a way to avoid PoW cryptocurrencies and only accept PoS cryptocurrencies? Are you also going to tell merchants to close their Stripe accounts because Stripe still plans to continue to support Bitcoin?
No, I'm not telling anyone do do anything. I'm merely pointing out that Stripe supporting PoW blockchains causes more carbon emissions than their recapture efforts will offset. If they wanted to avoid that, they could have only supported PoS blockchains, or not supported crypto at all. But it's their decision. I'm not telling them what to do, only pointing out that this decision reduces their recapture efforts to nothing to greenwashing.
I haven't tweeted at Patric Collison because the decision is already made, whatever I say isn't going to change that. A coworker of mine did try to discuss the issue with our Stripe sales rep and was told that the decision has been made and it's not changing. What good would it do to pester and antagonize the CEO on Twitter?
> And? Everyone knows that.
Then why are we arguing? If you read my original post, it was clear it's the only point I was making. I also made it clear that the existence of PoS blockchains doesn't invalidate the argument as long as Stripe supports PoW blockchains.
This is correct. I was using transactions as a standin for demand. As in, Stripe could increase the demand for transactions, which increases gas fees, thus enticing more miners to participate, increasing the hash rate.
> Maybe is that why I see Solana on the front-page of Stripe Crypto?
This would be a great argument if Solana were the only cryptocurrency that Stripe was supporting, or if Stripe was only supporting cryptocurrencies with similar carbon footprints, but the top image above the fold is a screenshot of using Stripe to purchase Bitcoin. ETH and other PoW blockchains are also featured on the page.
My core argument is that supporting PoW blockchains does more damage than their carbon recapture efforts reduce. The presence of Solana in the list doesn't invalidate that.
I didn't mean to imply that NFTs were the biggest economic driver of ETH, but rather that they occupy the zeitgeist. There are systems that are successful because they are successful. If you look at Bitcoin, ETH, and a couple other altcoins, they are much more popular than all the other blockchains out there, and are seen as much more important than other blockchains. They have a perceived legitimacy and large numbers of people participating that other cryptocurrencies do not. Due to the nature of human attention and competition, there's room for a handful of cryptocurrencies in this space, and the rest, including Beacon, will never garner the same kind of attention or participation unless they replace one of the big ones.
When you have way more forces in the market, many who aren't motivated by making it work, I think that's where PoS has some real weaknesses, and I don't think we'll see practical attacks against it until one of the important ones goes PoS.
There are a few reasons I can think of. I'll be upfront about the iffiest of them. I philosophically don't like the notion of digital scarcity. I've blogged about it [1] before, but in short, capitalism is a pretty good system for dealing with scarcity in the physical world, but like any system, it doesn't work well for everyone. Cryptocurrencies can allow those who have been failed by the existing capitalist system to improve or worsen their situation, but they do so by introducing digital scarcity, which doesn't make more sense. Increasing the number of capitalistic systems on the Internet reinforces the capitalistic systems in the physical world, and I believe the flaws of capitalism can't be solved by more capitalism in the long term.
Secondly, renewables have been falling in price long before cryptocurrency mining picked up. The economics of renewables don't need the help.
But more realistically, as I alluded to upthread, blockchains don't only run on renewable spikes. Even if they ran on 100% renewables, that would mean solar panels, dams, and wind/wave farms would be rolled out specifically for mining. There's also the mining rigs that are constructed. That equals rare earth mineral mining, manufacturing, and transportation of resources for the sole purpose of cryptocurrency mining, and those actions all have environmental consequences.
When those consequences are in furtherance of something that I think is a net negative for society, I'd rather have the resources used for something else.
Yes, and it's definitely impressive, and I know this might seem like moving the goalposts, but the market cap of Beacon is very small compared to ETH Mainnet. More importantly, it's not _the_ ETH blockchain. Beacon may be working so well because PoS is optional. The people participating in Beacon have bought into PoS on a conceptual level and are working to make it work. When you're incentivized to, you can ignore the pretty fundamental design problems of PoS.
Once ETH tries to get everyone into PoS, that's where I think problems start.
If ETH weren't so established right now through the NFT marketplace, I might suspect you'd see a jump to other blockchains, like Bitcoin, that are still on PoW. Since it is established, I worry that people will try to make it work for a few years, but it ultimately won't work, and ETH Mainnet will either be forced to revert to PoW or lose popularity to another fork.
I'm following the progress. I don't like estimating release dates for other peoples' work, but I wouldn't be surprised if your EOY estimate is correct.
The biggest concern I have though, is that you can run as many testsnets as you want, but that doesn't mean the rollout is going to survive contact with the enemy. I'm very pessimistic that PoS can replace PoW in real-world usage. Once everyone is on the PoS ETH, I suspect that problems will eventually manifest, and either ETH will be forced to roll back to PoW, or there will be splits, and one of the PoW chains that splits off will supplant ETH in popularity.
I don't think this will happen immediately, but I think it's very likely to happen within a few years of ETH switching over to PoS.
If that were the only energy used for blockchains, then that would definitely eliminate the environmental arguments against cryptocurrencies, but I doubt you could run large blockchains on only renewable spikes.
Even then, if battery tech improves enough, I think there's a compelling case to be made that the spike energy is better sent there than to mining rigs.
As I said in my original post, it would be great if that happened. I'm skeptical proof-of-stake will work at scale. If it does, great, but Stripe should have waited until then to support ETH, and not support Bitcoin or other chains currently on proof-of-work.
They damage they're doing in the meantime is more detrimental than their recapture efforts are beneficial.
I'm mainly talking about the present and the near future. But there's more to the equation than carbon in, carbon out. Recapture isn't going to fix the non-warming issues with emissions, like ocean acidification.
In a world without renewables, we'd never get to a place where the marginal costs of carbon capture would be lower than the marginal costs of burning fossil fuels for energy. The best hope for recapture is to be powered by cheap renewables. This requires having a lot more renewable capacity than we do now, which is absolutely something that's happening and should continue to happen, but it's not environmentally free. Mining and battery production/recycling/disposal have economic consequences.
In its best form carbon recapture is trading emissions today for the promise that they'll be mostly recaptured in the future using renewables. But renewables also have to serve our other needs. So all the carbon we burn in the meantime creates more demands for solar panels, wind farms, dams, wave farms, and batteries in the future.
Thus, it is better to not emit than to recapture. We recapture because we have ti.
This is not a convincing argument, but even if it were, carbon recapture is currently even more of a "rounding error" in the grand scheme of carbon emissions. Current carbon emissions are somewhere around 50 billion metric tons a year. I've seen varying estimates of crypto emissions, so I'm going to cite one [1] on the low end here, since it's more favorable to your argument, but the highest I've seen is less than double this number, so they're all in the same ballpark.
ETH currently emits 7.4 million metric tons of CO2 a year. Bitcoin is much higher. I've seen estimates as low as 16 million and as high as 55. There are other chains as well. To keep the math simple, let's round it to 50 million, so crypto is contributing 0.1% of total carbon emissions. Like you said, a rounding error.
I think we're just going to have to disagree on mitigations. I don't think they're working very well.
Crucially, at the beginning of 2019, according to the source I linked, ETH was only at 2 million tons a year. It's more than tripled since then. In 2021, Carbon recapture removed an estimated 9 thousand tons of CO2. [2] The CO2 from the growth of ETH eclipses anything that carbon recapture is currently capable of. The technology will get better. The most optimistic estimate I've seen is that carbon recapture will hit 30 million tons a year in 2070. But this year, Stripe Crypto only has to increase crypto transactions, across all blockchains it supports, by 9,000 tons to completely offset all of the money it's putting into recapture efforts. Even if you remove all the other chains, Stripe only has to increase ETH transactions by 1.3% to achieve this own-goal.
Long term, Stripe alone could end up causing more CO2 emissions on the blockchains to grow faster than all of carbon recapture.
It's very strange seeing the option near the bottom of the page to donate a fraction of your revenue from Stripe Crypto to carbon recapture efforts. I agree with Stripe that, at this point, the solution to our climate problems must include carbon recapture, but it's not an ideal situation to be in.
Businesses entering the crypto space always seem to tout carbon offsets and sidechains that use less energy, but offsets are insufficient, and NFTs minted on sidechains inevitably migrate to Mainnet, where they're just as environmentally destructive as any other NFT, or they fail.
Stripe's carbon recapture efforts seem to be in the same category. Recapture is good, but not nearly as good as not emitting the carbon in the first place. If Stripe's support of crypto increases the use of blockchains, the overall impact of extra carbon emissions could very easily outpace all the carbon recapture they'll ever achieve.
It's a shame. When Stripe announced their carbon recapture efforts, I was impressed by how sincere they seemed in finding solutions to climate problems. Next to Stripe Crypto, however, it appears to just be greenwashing.
(And to head off the replies, I know all about proof-of-stake, but it's not relevant here. I'm unconvinced it will work, and even if it does, the ecological damage done and being done in the meantime is massive. If Stripe really cared about carbon emissions, they'd wait to launch Stripe Crpyto only on proof-of-stake blockchains, and only after they proved that the energy usage at scale was similar to the energy use for transferring fiat currency.)
My personal bias is that open source authors and maintainers don't owe anyone anything. They're making their code available to anyone for free, and it's on you if there's something you don't like about it. You can always fork it if you need to. Heck, you don't even have to use it. Write your own thing if something fundamentally bothers you about it.
And yet there's a large group of people who think they're somehow doing you a favor by using your open-source code, as opposed to the other way around. I've tried to talk to some of them, to try to get some idea of it. It typically boils down to either
1. I used and advocated for the project, making it more popular, and therefore they owe me.
2. Using an open-source library is an investment. I'm making a compromise by not writing it myself exactly how I want it. I'm attempting to do things their way, which in some ways is mentally harder than writing it to begin with, so when it changes radically or goes away, or they ask me for support, they have done me dirty. I deserve better.
3. #2, except they recognize that the author/maintainer doesn't owe them anything and hasn't acted maliciously, but they're still bummed that they either have to change things or fork the project and maintain it themselves. It's emotional rather than logical.
Of the three, I can kinda understand the last one, but I'll never agree with it.