back to article Mozilla founder blasts browser maker for accepting 'planet incinerating' cryptocurrency donations

A few days ago, Mozilla Foundation invited netizens on Twitter to send in cryptocurrency donations via a new payment service provider. This move by the Firefox browser maker rapidly drew criticism, including that from Jamie Zawinski – who named the Mozilla project and was one of the original Netscape developers. You can read …

  1. Ilsa Loving

    I can't remember if I've heard of this guy before, but just from the quotes posted I can already say I really like him.

    1. Claverhouse Silver badge

      He has a nice turn of phrase.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Expanding horizons and equations

    Ah me, the author has done JWZ a disfavor. Equating the insight that klepto-currencies are hard on the planet with the mere quip that regexes are hard is.. um.. hardly fair. And the resulting pain and toll are hardly comparable. Give the guy credit for expanding his horizons over the ensuing 25 years.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Pirate

      Re: Expanding horizons and equations

      Wow you have misunderstood that comment. Is not that regexps are hard, which they are not really. Is that they are regular and if you seek to parse something which is not a regular language with regexps then you ... have two problems.

      So for instance lots of people think, 'look I can parse email addresses with regular expressions, it is easy to do'. And they can not because RFC822 email addresses are not in fact a regular language because of at least comments which can be nested: 'splodge@splodge.splodge (splodge (main account))' is legal, ''splodge@splodge.splodge (splodge (main account)' is an error.

      But people do not know this, so they start out with their regular expressions and eventually they get something that will parse all the addresses they know ... but does not actually work. And to do that they perhaps end up with this (which explicitly does not cope with comments).

      And so we have a troupe of idiot clowns rushing around who think they can use regexps when either they can't or the regexp they need is much larger than they think. And so we have endless things which will not parse splodge+splodge@splodge.splodge or whatever it is. And when they do get a regexp which works most of the time they end up with something big which has security holes in it because it does not properly validate the thing they think it does and they cannot see that because it is big line noise thing.

      And so they have two problems, and we all have two problems.

      1. heyrick Silver badge

        Re: Expanding horizons and equations

        "but does not actually work"

        The number of times I've had websites reject my spam drop email address because it has a '.' in the middle (this.that@domain.com). It's perfectly legal, but people who tested their code on a sampling of the email addresses of others in the same office are going to miss a lot of legitimate addresses, and in commercial terms, potentially lose revenue.

        1. theOtherJT Silver badge

          Re: Expanding horizons and equations

          Who on earth messes that up? That's about the most common form corporate email address format in existence. forename.surname@company.tld is almost the archetypal email address!

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Expanding horizons and equations

            The company that settled on [I]nitial [Surname] as their naming convention, as in "msobkow", or any of a host of other naming practices, including some variants that look like employee number hash codes.

            When you're talking "global internet", you can count on their being a LOT of people doing exactly what you think doesn't make sense.

            1. John Robson Silver badge

              Re: Expanding horizons and equations

              "employee number hash codes."

              You're an optimist... those are just the employee ID from the payroll system.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Expanding horizons and equations

              The company that settled on [I]nitial [Surname] as their naming convention, as in "msobkow", or any of a host of other naming practices

              Obligatory Dilbert

          2. David 132 Silver badge
            Thumb Up

            Re: Expanding horizons and equations

            > forename.surname@company.tld is almost the archetypal email address!

            I work for a large company that, as expected, uses that format. Everyone, from most-recently-hired intern up to CEO, has firstname.lastname@ as their email address.

            Except for one colleague of mine, who has firstname@ as his.

            How he achieved this I don’t know but I believe it had something to do with working for the IT department at juuuust the right time a few years ago…

            1. John Robson Silver badge

              Re: Expanding horizons and equations

              As a temp I took the first.last@ combo at a company many moons ago. 6 hours later (TZ difference) a permie joined and ended up with first.last2@ since we shared names exactly.

              I did offer to switch, but since I was in the IT office they wouldn't hear of it.

          3. JimboSmith Silver badge

            Re: Expanding horizons and equations

            Who on earth messes that up? That's about the most common form corporate email address format in existence. forename.surname@company.tld is almost the archetypal email address!

            I know one media company back in the dialup days who used a variation of this. Their stars had email addresses that were firstnamelastname@mediacompany.xyz for their fans. Those were looked at by a PA not the talent themselves. For business purposes they also had firstname.lastname@mediacompany.xyz which were supposed to be private and the talent looked at themselves.

            1. sreynolds

              Re: Expanding horizons and equations

              Bah. My company only has one address for each user - root. It's just that everyone is on a subdomain as the best way to fail undeliverable email is at the DNS level.

        2. DomDF

          Re: Expanding horizons and equations

          Most websites give up at my hyphenated surname before even getting to my email address.

      2. theOtherJT Silver badge

        Re: Expanding horizons and equations

        "The pony. He comes."

      3. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: Expanding horizons and equations

        But you are sort of proving his argument. While you can create all kinds of very reliable parsers with regular expressions, handling edge cases can lead to regular expressions which themselves are impossible to read and, hence, maintain.

        Fortunately, we now have better tools for working them, things like regex101.com which help you step through them, but also heuristic tools (fuzzers) that help test them to cover those cases you didn't think of.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Alien

          Re: Expanding horizons and equations

          Had intended to prove jwz's argument because jwz's argument is true. Regular expressions are simple to understand and if you use modern language they are even easy to write.

          But they are not powerful enough to do things people want them to do (like my rfc822 example). And also, well, is easy to understand 6502 and is easy to write code for 650s in hex or even assembler. But you would not want to write large programs that way if you could avoid doing that. And yes, tools exist to help you with giant regexps just the same way tools exist to help you with giant program written in hex. But most people like not to write in hex or even assembler.

          Of course regexps have good place: if you are writing parser for language regexp is completely appropriate tool for tokenizer etc. But not for whole parser.

    2. djnapkin

      Re: Expanding horizons and equations

      That isn't how I took the comment and comparison at all.

      The regex comment is very well known & high profile, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who enjoys it but didn't know who coined it.

      The comparsion was purely pointing to Zawinski's excellent ability to turn a phrase - something that is well apprecited by the denizens here, to be sure.

  3. Clausewitz 4.0
    Devil

    Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

    Cryptocurrencies.

    Is this maybe the reason Central Banks are hushing to adopt them?

    You can hire developers even in sanctioned countries with them.

    You can fund NGOs governments are afraid of.

    Soon, you will be able to ditch the Petrodollar.

    1. sreynolds

      Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

      Just more proof that the world is full of idiots.

      1. phuzz Silver badge
        Alien

        Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

        I'm about 70/30 that that account is a bot.

        It makes about as much sense as amanfrommars1, but with less humour.

        1. sreynolds

          Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

          My guess is a sino origins with machine translation.

    2. Potemkine! Silver badge

      Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

      You can hire developers even in sanctioned countries with them.

      How is this a progress? Is your goal to provide funds to country like North Korea?

      For me this argument is just another one not to use cryptocurrencies.

      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

        It's always been possible to avoid some of the fairly arbitrary sanctions, though this sometimes incurs a high cost. For individuals, money drops usually work pretty well. And there are equivalents for countries: why shouldn't Iran sell North Korea oil? The embargoes and sanctions generally just create black markets, of which the cryptoexchanges are just a new variant.

        1. JimboSmith Silver badge

          Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

          why shouldn't Iran sell North Korea oil?

          Off the top of my head because they’re both nuclear states and cooperating on missile technology and the bomb. Also at least one of them is a dynastic dictatorship and no one is quite sure what would happen if the Kim has one too many wheels of Emmental cheese and they can’t save him. They launched another projectile last night didn’t they. According to my Iranian friend Iran’s not as stable a country as everyone would like it to be either.

          1. Dog11

            Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

            > According to my Iranian friend Iran’s not as stable a country as everyone would like it to be either.

            Since 6 January 2021, we've seen that the USA isn't as stable as everyone would like, as well.

            1. JimboSmith Silver badge

              Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

              According to my American friends it stabilised again on the 20th of January (and some of those are Republicans).

          2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

            Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

            You could apply more or less the same criteria to other states: Pakistan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and, of course, Russia.

      2. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

        I don't know what goals, if any, that post wants to recommend. Whichever way that was supposedly going, it's not getting it right. If circumventing sanctions is a positive thing in their mind, then cryptocurrencies are one of the many ways that can be done. They don't really work as well--North Korea does use a lot of them, but mostly by keeping and exchanging them in other countries where it's less obvious it's them. They do the same thing with dollars and euros. Exchanging cryptocurrency for other stuff is hard if you're located somewhere with sanctions, just like with other money, so the situation is mostly the same.

    3. JimboSmith Silver badge

      Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

      Please start taking the medication again, you’re obviously having another episode.

      Countries are concerned and rightly so about the vast amounts of power being used (wasted) in the creation of these things. Have you seen the price increases we’ve experienced recently in the UK for power?

      “Wake up, Tom! You know, and I know, that chaos and bedlam are consuming the entire world! Cryptocurrencies are only the beginning, Tom. We have an inch of topsoil left.”

    4. Alan Bourke

      Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

      Yes let's ditch the petrodollar for energy gargling Ponzi nonsense favoured by ransomware groups.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

        It was a mere slip of the tongue. He meant "burn the Petrodollars". Literally. To convert them to whatever scamcoin is fashionable.

        I'll totally buy into this the day when you can exchange your shitcoins back into the energy that was used to create them.

        1. heyrick Silver badge
          Happy

          Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

          Well, in a roundabout way petrodollars are burnt...mostly within internal combustion engines in the form of hydrocarbons.

          By the way, was there ever such a thing as an external combustion engine, or is internal mostly a redundant word?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

            "External combustion engines" are things like steam engines where the actual combustion doesn't occur in a sealed chamber

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_combustion_engine

            1. heyrick Silver badge
              Thumb Up

              Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

              Thank you.

        2. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
          Joke

          Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

          The UK energy prices are going up... It may be cheaper to burn the Pound notes to generate heat this winter.

    5. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

      Yes, they're essentially the biggest Ponzi scheme yet created. Notes on the power wasted on the associated blockchains are a distraction, which while probably true, masks the fact that the endless chains are a bad idea for finite transactions.

    6. RegGuy1 Silver badge

      Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

      "Is this maybe the reason Central Banks are hushing to adopt them?"

      They are shit scared of losing control. They were invented for the dark web precisely because they could not be traced. If I buy a kilo of weed online I don't want my local plod knocking on the door...

    7. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

      Why do you think banks have your best interest in mind when they do... anything?

      Hint: they NEVER do.

      Ergo...

    8. atle

      Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

      Proof Of Waste is so last decade. Waste is not enough. I want more.

      How about a new cryptocurrency, called Nukoin, based on how many nuclear power stations can be made to blow up?

  4. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    "the gambling instrument and ecological disaster that we know as cryptocurrencies"

    Ooh, I like that phrase.

    I'll be re-using that.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "the gambling instrument and ecological disaster that we know as cryptocurrencies"

      Well, it's not like gambling in that people often end up with more money than they started.

      Also as I'm sure you know before you go posting on the internet, many crypto currencies use minimal electricity and Ethereum is scheduled to switch this year.

      1. JimboSmith Silver badge

        Re: "the gambling instrument and ecological disaster that we know as cryptocurrencies"

        Well, it's not like gambling in that people often end up with more money than they started.

        Define money for me in this context, are you talking about fiat currencies or more crypto? What people end up with depends on the willingness of someone else to buy the stuff off them. If you can’t find a buyer then you’re stuck with the stuff. If someone finds a way of increasing the supply artificially say by finding a quicker mining method or just inventing them then again the value drops, maybe to nothing.

        The fact that these things are unregulated doesn’t worry you at all? Onecoin and Bitconnect to name two don’t make you think twice? What burning issue are crypto currencies going to solve? Other than the obvious what can my ransomware demand (other crimes are available) be paid in?

        Also as I'm sure you know before you go posting on the internet, many crypto currencies use minimal electricity and Ethereum is scheduled to switch this year.

        So if I buy a ‘mining device’ for Bitcoin and run that as opposed to using my laptop to play games I won’t see my energy bills massively increase?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Alien

          Re: "the gambling instrument and ecological disaster that we know as cryptocurrencies"

          What burning issue are crypto currencies going to solve?

          Buying heroin is what my friend uses them for (well he is not now my friend as I gave up on trying to help).

          1. JimboSmith Silver badge

            Re: "the gambling instrument and ecological disaster that we know as cryptocurrencies"

            I think now that I should have put

            what useful burning issue are crypto currencies going to solve.

      2. the hatter

        Re: "the gambling instrument and ecological disaster that we know as cryptocurrencies"

        It's just like gambling in that people often end up with than they started. And then they keep going, and end up with much less money. But the house wins, regardless

      3. Ian 55

        Re: "the gambling instrument and ecological disaster that we know as cryptocurrencies"

        "Ethereum is scheduled to switch this year" - that's been 'true' for at least a couple of years, hasn't it?

        Even if it ever does make the switch, it still fails in every regard in desirable aspects of a currency, unless you're a scammer or a hacker.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ...the more their energy requirements grow, without any discernible upper bound, which is grossly irresponsible given the global environmental crisis.

    Ethereum 2 (when it's merged - Q2 this year) will be a Proof-of-Stake system which is predicted to be at least 200 times (and up to nearly 900 times) more energy efficient at processing transactions than the entire Visa payment network is today.

    https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/

    1. Andy The Hat Silver badge

      That's ok then ... if you are a crypto-scammer you may lose the accumulation of stuff that was worthless when you obtained it if you get caught. That sounds much like if you raid a bank and get caught you'll have to give back what you stole.

      I wonder how they compute the energy efficiency as "900 times more efficient than a visa payment"? Perhaps they are privvy to the internal operating procedures, software and hardware systems of the VISA system? Or perhaps they are actually using their own referenced figures which appear to show that a Bitcoin transaction is about 1200000x the cost of a single VISA ... So allowing for a 99.95% energy reduction that means it's still 6000x less efficient than VISA. Or am I not seeing something?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        re. how they compute the energy efficiency as "900 times more efficient than a visa payment"?

        I'll tell you how: because it's got a nice sound to it and idiots will buy into this as yet another proof they invested their money wisely, lol.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Visa publishes a Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Report every year.

        The one from 2019 states "In calendar year 2018, we used approximately 711,268 gigajoules (GJ) of energy from electricity, natural gas and other fuels." That same report states they processed 124.3 billion transactions in that year.

        Obviously not all of that energy would have been spent processing transactions. Their 119 offices and data centres need to keep their 17,000 employees warm and the lights switched on, but at the end of the day their entire business is about processing transactions.

        It'd be nice to think the person who published the Bitcoin comparison did more research than a 20 second Google search, but that's how long it took me to find that data.

        1. This post has been deleted by its author

        2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

          but at the end of the day their entire business is about processing transactions.

          Not really: this is a misconception that the monopolists are keen to see circulate but their main business is preserving their monopoly on transactions and hence margins and mining all that lovely personal data they accrue by it. Alternative payment provides would, theoretically, drive down both fees and energy use.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Duopoly. There's Mastercard too.

            And also American Express and Discover and a few others, but they're tiny compared to the big two.

            1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

              Well, yes, there's a cartel. Amex doesn't even really compete on handling transactions because its charges are even higher, it competes by market segment by promising to bring big spenders…

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Alien

          Given those figures (their 2019 report is here (PDF link)) is very simple to get number of 5.4kJ/tx, including all office expenses etc, for Visa.

          Here and <a href='https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/>here (this is link cited by previous person)</a> Etherium people claim that in future better version they will manage 35Wh/tx. Well a joule is a watt-second so this is in fact 35*60*60J/tx or 126kJ/tx.

          Which is (will be in future better Etherium) more than Visa by a factor of about 23. So not 200 times less or 900 times less, but in fact 23 times more.

          People who support ponzi scheme lie, even to themselves about ponzi scheme: what surprise this is to all of us.

          1. Mark #255
            Coat

            "But what's a watt-hour worth?"

            I was wondering how these numbers translate into something I've got an intuitive feel for, and decided that heating up water for tea might be it.

            That (new, improved, if-it-ever-actually-happens) proof-of-stake transaction cost of 126 kJ would heat 377ml of water from 20°C to 100°C, to make a fairly large mug of tea.

            The 5.4kJ to process a Visa transaction would heat up 15.7 ml, to make a tablespoon of tea.

      3. doublelayer Silver badge

        I don't know if their numbers are correct, but I do know you've read the post wrong. They could still be flawed or lying.

        "I wonder how they compute the energy efficiency as "900 times more efficient than a visa payment"? Perhaps they are privvy to the internal operating procedures, software and hardware systems of the VISA system?"

        Their numbers for Visa are cited in the post, which you've referenced later on, so why are you asking where they got them? You already have the answer. It wasn't them who came up with those numbers. Attack that source (Statista) if you will.

        "Or perhaps they are actually using their own referenced figures which appear to show that a Bitcoin transaction is about 1200000x the cost of a single VISA ... So allowing for a 99.95% energy reduction that means it's still 6000x less efficient than VISA. Or am I not seeing something?"

        What you aren't seeing is that it is Ethereum who said this, and Bitcoin you're comparing it to. Ethereum is already more efficient than Bitcoin, and they anticipate cutting their energy usage. The comparison to Bitcoin is just so they can use the dataset. If Bitcoin improved by 99.95%, it wouldn't give them parity with Visa, but Ethereum could surpass them with that level of improvement. The numbers you've cited cut the Ethereum step out and acted as if it was Bitcoin getting improved. Bitcoin is not getting improved and will stay as inefficient. Time will tell if Ethereum's claims work in practice.

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Perhaps they mean that ONE Etherium 2 transaction is 900x more efficient than the entire VISA system.

        Which means as soon as more than 900 Etherium 2 transactions take place the energy use will exceed that of VISA.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Headmaster

          Umm, no. As stated in my original link: The energy usage of Ethereum is the same in 1 minute regardless if it does 1 or 1,000 transactions.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Crypto currencies are the world's most popular Ponzi scheme. Only those who got in "on the ground floor" do well; those who came late to the game pay for the early adopter's winnings that everyone hears about.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In a desperate attempt to remain relevant …

    … the previously untecognized contributor to this ancient and increasingly marginalized project

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Pirate

      Re: In a desperate attempt to remain relevant …

      oh you are funny

    2. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: In a desperate attempt to remain relevant …

      Don't cut yourself on that edge, m'lord.

    3. the hatter

      Re: In a desperate attempt to remain relevant …

      Previously whatnow ? Have you been on this internet thing ? I mean apart from to save some money on shopping ? He did enough before, and enough after, and he's certainly never been one to hide in the background, or keep his views quiet about things that don't work as they should.

  8. This post has been deleted by its author

  9. RegGuy1 Silver badge

    Lisp

    Kudos for mentioning Lisp.

    1. In total, your posts have been upvoted 1337 times

      Re: Lisp

      Then there's that other old adage that goes something like the more complex a program becomes, the closer it resembles a crap implementation of Lisp.

      How's the Firefox codebase looking these days?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Alien

        Re: Lisp

        Is Greenspun's tenth rule:

        Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

        Corollary due to Robert Morris (who is that Robert Morris):

        ... including Common Lisp

        Of course these jokes date from the time when Common Lisp was regarded as a very large language (not helped by not specifying the library separately from the language), which was before C++ metastasized and before things like Java etc which are truly bloated.

        Now I look and just in bytes: full CL implementation including IDE, many documentation is 225MB, another one including whole git repo for it is 262MB. Firefox is 346MB, Racket (derivative of Scheme, a 'small' Lisp-family language) ... is 925MB. CL is not large now.

        Zawinski's law of software envelopment is

        Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

        Suspect today it might read '... until it includes a web browser/server'.

        (I believe the RTM comment is not about CL's FORMAT function or the awful LOOP macro as I thought it was but probably about CLISP in which much of the language was implemented directly in C, which was then the buggy slow CL implementation of half of CL and which I think they used for Viaweb (I don't know as all this was before I was big enough to remember). Most CLs of course just have enough in C (if are running on C machine) to get the system into memory and perhaps do low-level memory GC & I/O, and the rest is all in CL.)

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Re: Lisp

      I still find it deeply annoying that Lisp wasn't called Lithp. It's almost as if the inventors were trying to be taken seriously.

      1. David 132 Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Lisp

        Other languages have code-checking bots, or detecting-stackoverflow-copy-and-paste bots.

        Lisp has Violet-Elizabeth Botts.

        (Yes, that’s my coat there. The grass-stained one with the gobstoppers and catapult in the pocket.)

  10. mark l 2 Silver badge

    What is needed instead of a crypto currency like Bitcoin where the proof of work just goes into verifying transactions and mining more bitcoin for ever increasing energy costs, is one where the actual computing power is put to some practical use.

    Look at something like SETI or Folding@home apps where unused computer cycles were put to use on their huge datasets, If that model could be commercialised so your computer cpu/gpu power can be rented out for a fee to people who need to crunch a large amount of data, then I could see that being a worth while endeavour.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      That's exactly what CureCoin is.

  11. martinusher Silver badge

    Crypto is the epitome of "A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing"

    Ignoring the detail that blockchain is inherently not np-complete -- its one of those problems that doesn't scale the whole concept of proof of work is a dreadful kludge that is based entirely on the notion of wasting computing resources and so power. Like a lot of bright ideas it just doesn't scale -- its one of those things that works on the bench, as it were, but rapidly fails when developed for use on a large scale. (Pretty much the story of computing, or at least spectacular softwre failures.)

    That said there's no point in getting hysterical or sanctimonious about it. It exists, and a slice of the population has sunk considerable amounts of money speculating in it so its not going anywhere soon. Its just going to decamp to wherever power and bandwidth can be obtained cheaply and like many other money schemes it will parasite off anything or anyone who either doesn't notice or doesn't care ("someone else's problem").

    Central Bank Digital Currencies are different. They have to be designed to be both energy efficient and secure which explains why they're taking some time to roll out. Currently digital payments are all subject to a bank tax -- fee -- which is a bit like paying 3-4% extra VAT on every purchase (and a lot more if the purchase is in a different currency to the one you use). Making the system official should stabilize this with the costs of running the currency offset by the savings in managing actual cash.

  12. djnapkin

    Where are we up to, with Bitcoin's energy use? Last time I looked, it was exceeding that of Ireland, or Croatia.

  13. babaganoush

    Bravo Mr Zawinski.

  14. Ignazio

    Markus: we are bad but others are worse

    Every non scammer: sez bad person

  15. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    I guess, but...

    I guess. I mean, JWZ is right, proof of work cryptocurrencies use major amounts of electricity and all that. AFAIK the expectation was the supply of new coins would dwindle, not that more and more electricity would be spent keeping the new coins flowing -- it seems to be that's what's happening, which indeed is not great environmentally.

    But, they could accept the donations in cryptocurrency, exchange them for "fiat currency" (i.e. cash) at an exchange, then the cryptocurrency is back in circulation, the energy used to make it is not some sunk cost that was lost when it was donated.

    Of course, if accepting cryptocurrency donations is just going to get them bad PR and few crypto donations, maybe it won't be worth it. Personally, due to the reason I gave above, I'm fine with it either way.

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