Anyone who believes this is good work and helping the world is deluded. It's full on race to the bottom, treat people like robots, surveillance state stuff.
I am convinced that crypto/blockchains are slowly and pointlessly re-encountering the same problems that existing centralised systems and agencies were setup to solve.
It’s as if we are all disregarding the centuries of evolution that has gone into creating what we already have today. Systems that, whilst sometimes flawed, for the most part enable us to live our daily lives freely and easily. Systems that already have means of verifying people when you need to make an important transaction and that already allow for trust and stability. As the essay mentions making people the agents of their own verification with documents that you’d have to backup forever would be an absolute nightmare.
There is a reason we have centralised systems and there is a reason we can’t escape them.
Thanks to everyone for your replies below, they provided me with some really useful insights and I understand that it's definitely less directly polluting than fossil fuels and that it's also part of an interim plan.
However. I still think humanity can do better.
If we put all the energy, resources and research that we are putting into nuclear into truly sustainable energy like wind, solar, wave and geothermal, which to my knowledge produce less or no byproducts, then that would be best.
It's unfortunate that the world can't take an aligned approach and build solar farms in deserts, wind farms at sea, wave energy on coastlines and then just export it all fairly to countries. I think I'm almost campaigning for energy as a global right and not for sale as a commodity.
My only question about nuclear is why is it okay to bury the nuclear waste?
I can understand that it might be fine to bury small amounts in specific stores but if countries slowly adopt nuclear energy at scale then over time won’t we be burying a lot of waste that, correct me if I’m wrong, has to be stored for thousands of years? I don’t understand how this can be sustainable long term. I also think it’s maybe arrogant of us to assume that it will always be safe to just store it and that something won’t happen that could disrupt that.
I’m no expert on this though so if someone has a great explanation I’d love to understand it.
Distribution is the most underrated, most difficult part of creating a tech company.
In the UK Squarespace peddles the slogan 'a website makes it real'. This is very misleading. Making the website is the easy part, being found if you have no prior audience, no experience with SEO or a lot of money for ads is incredibly hard. In my opinion breaking into the tech world now is much harder than it was 5 years ago regardless of how good your product is.