Crypto-enviro-disastro

Tim Taylor has a nice summary of a recent Bank for International Settlements report on cryptocurrencies. Not only are they unstable and completely ill-suited as a form of money...

On the issue of energy use, as the "miners" who update the system while solving computational problems burn energy to do so: "Individual facilities operated by miners can host computing power equivalent to that of millions of personal computers. At the time of writing, the total electricity use of bitcoin mining equalled that of mid-sized economies such as Switzerland, and other cryptocurrencies also use ample electricity. Put in the simplest terms, the quest for decentralised trust has quickly become an environmental disaster."