Having mined cryptocurrency a long long time ago when it was still a novelty, it's really good to appreciate just how bad the externalities are for cryptocurrencies. The incentives are created for people to buy the cheapest energy possible and just burn it up for a made up financial instrument [0], even when that comes with a significant carbon footprint. Even if mining is only a tenth as bad as the University of Cambridge thinks [1]. On a much more minor note, it takes up energy generation (renewable and otherwise) and chip production resources that could be spent on actual production instead of yet another financial instrument.
I'd be in favor of banning the trade of all PoW cryptocurrencies for this reason alone. There is no proper way of banning mining in general, and neither should anyone desire to ban specific types of computation. Banning its trade to strongly disincentivize the sheer senseless resource consumption is more important and much more clear cut than any financial arguments to do it.
I realize this would utterly devastate the current cryptocurrency market, but that's the point (at least for anything that isn't proof of stake). We should get this over with before our dependency on it further increases and the environmental damage gets worse.
The zeitgeist around this has changed substantially. PoW cryptocurrencies really aren't credibly grassroots and have been captured by whales. And there really isn't any application of PoW ledger designs outside of cryptocurrencies with significant mindshare either. For all of this - proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies should be an alternative. Not a direct replacement, but able to cover most use cases.
Coinbase was founded under a different zeitgeist and I don't blame them for jumping into this market. But I think that banning PoW cryptocurrencies should be strongly advocated, and once this realization catches up at the right level, they have a significant liability on their hands.
[0]: For the record, all financial instruments are "made up". PoW cryptocurrencies are the only one that come with blatant resource consumption however.
I'd be in favor of banning the trade of all PoW cryptocurrencies for this reason alone. There is no proper way of banning mining in general, and neither should anyone desire to ban specific types of computation. Banning its trade to strongly disincentivize the sheer senseless resource consumption is more important and much more clear cut than any financial arguments to do it.
I realize this would utterly devastate the current cryptocurrency market, but that's the point (at least for anything that isn't proof of stake). We should get this over with before our dependency on it further increases and the environmental damage gets worse.
The zeitgeist around this has changed substantially. PoW cryptocurrencies really aren't credibly grassroots and have been captured by whales. And there really isn't any application of PoW ledger designs outside of cryptocurrencies with significant mindshare either. For all of this - proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies should be an alternative. Not a direct replacement, but able to cover most use cases.
Coinbase was founded under a different zeitgeist and I don't blame them for jumping into this market. But I think that banning PoW cryptocurrencies should be strongly advocated, and once this realization catches up at the right level, they have a significant liability on their hands.
[0]: For the record, all financial instruments are "made up". PoW cryptocurrencies are the only one that come with blatant resource consumption however.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/the-debate-about-cryptocur...
(For the record, if a ban on PoW cryptocurrencies would come into effect today I'd lose money over it.)