Bitcon is good for turning narratives that the political and economic zeitgeist thought were unturnable. The response is usually a screaming finger pointed back at the status quo along with some half-baked half-mumbled half-truth. To me, "zeitgeist" and "status quo" is just Russian for "I'm outsourcing my opinion because I don't have the time, intelligence, or willingness to DYOR." And that's fine. We all do it — there's not enough time in the day to parse all information coming at you in the Information Age.

But don't lean on zeitgeist when we're talking basic human functions like money and environment.

This is the objective truth about what PoW can do, through bitcoin specifically, to increase global wealth and energy efficiency while helping the environment.

This is not my opinion. The X factor continues to be people's willingness to execute one strategy instead of another — kind of like it's objectively true exercise will improve your health, but your willingness to exercise is what really matters.

Vitalik's PoS Theory

Proof of stake is interchangeable with piece of shit here.

Because Vitalik's too smart to not understand the points real environmentalists make about bitcoin's superior ability to help the environment. Vitalik is making a choice to take Ethereum another way for other reasons. He's optimizing for political expediency, not math — and that doesn't sound like a real techie to me.

But let's start from the beginning. Vitalik takes the status quo line that "lowering energy consumption reduces carbon footprint." This sounds perfectly sensible, just like more paper dollars in everyone's hands equals more money for everyone.

Bitcoin has taught us the second is not true, but what about the first?

It is objectively true that reducing Ethereum's energy consumption reduces its carbon footprint. Nobody's arguing that. You reduce consumption so that it tends towards zero, you always emit less than you would have.

But does this mean you have optimized your helpfulness to the environment? No. Because you could be a net negative waste producer, but you have chosen to limit your effectiveness to creating the least amount of more waste. And you've increased political attack vectors on your "decentralized" protocol to do it, effectively killing the real benefit of your network to society. Keep in mind that Ethereum as a database is still much slower than the stuff we already have. Might as well go back to AWS, unless you're rich in $ETH already and you stand to make more.

Becoming a Net Negative Waste Producer

The notion of "carbon" footprint is just another zeitgeist misnomer. The real thing you are trying to reduce is waste, but carbon footprint just sounds so much more sexy.

All life is carbon. You can't reduce a carbon footprint if you expect to retain and grow life.

With this in mind, the objective truth of PoW mining is that it can be done anywhere and with any source of energy. The truth is that if large miners were to use the forms of energy that create more waste than carbon dioxide, such as methane gas, to mine bitcoin, the net effect is negative waste output.

Actually, using methane to mine BTC creates MORE carbon dioxide. But the methane is so much worse for the environment than CO2 that removing methane from the environment improves all metrics by multiples over trying to force the energy consumption limit to 0.

So you can reduce consumption (PoS) and drive emissions down for a smaller increase in waste production, or you can increase consumption of toxic energy (PoW) and increase emissions for a huge decrease in waste production.

This is the objective truth. PoW mining has the ability to far outpace PoS as a clean environment initiative.

What the Argument is All About

PoW > PoS, but the willingness of people to implement PoW using toxic energy < PoS. Why?

For one, consuming toxic energy must be done professionally and at scale. Only institutions and governments have the ability to do that right now, which is like asking the status quo to finance its competing system. Won't happen.

Individuals could do it, but it would be more difficult than just buying an ASIC miner and sapping energy from the grid. Which is also like the status quo funding its competition, so you can bet Biden will have something to say about this soon.

Vitalik is definitely of the mind that most people are lazy. He said so publicly many times. I tend to agree with this mindset. Convenience trumps all, and PoS is convenient.

But PoW is better. There's no argument about this.

And what's the political effect of PoS? Well, the US government and its institutional flunkies own all the $ETH, completely control the percentage they don't directly "own," and take away your ability to create your own tokens on the network to create your own wealth and system of wealth.

Now — what will humanity do?

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