Thread by @apotheon

People debate energy and emissions costs of cryptocurrencies. They should also debate the costs of fiat currencies, of course.

Fiat currencies are backed by force, much of it in the form of #war torn places most Twitter users don't think about very much.

It's worse, though:

In addition to the wars and "police actions" and international pissing matches, and all the energy waste and emissions produced by them, there's also all the domestic policy BS around fiat currencies also eating up energy and producing emissions.

It's worse, though:

Cryptocurrencies -- at least some of them -- solve very real problems that governments aren't interested in solving. In fact, they want to exacerbate these problems.

Business cycles are huge drivers of waste, but also job security for regulators.

The implications get weird:

Without all these troubles around fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies in their present forms wouldn't even have been invented. Part of what makes them take this form is the need to survive the hostility of those who depend on fiat currency dominance for their power.

Eliminating fiat currencies would, in and of itself, be a bigger benefit to energy efficiency and reduced emissions problems worldwide than eliminating cryptocurrencies but, secondarily, cryptocurrencies could be more efficient if they didn't have to contend with fiat currencies.

As long as fiat currencies -- tools of power centralization, of oppression and corruption -- are so widely supported by the masses, people will still need cryptocurrencies. There's no real way to just eliminate cryptocurrencies that way.

In fact, the oppressively powerful, corrupt primary beneficiaries of fiat currency will increasingly want some cryptocurrencies to exist for their own purposes, too, so hoping they'll be regulated out of existence is a fool's gambit, for at least two reasons:

1. You won't perfectly regulate everything without regulating it all to death. The most effective way to do that right now is probably nuclear war. This is not what I'd call an acceptable solution.

2. The regulators' masters' interests require cryptocurrencies in some form.

All that being the case, the best way to reduce energy consumption and emissions around currencies -- and by far the most effective -- is actually to push cryptocurrencies to quickly dominate, so fiat currencies essentially go away altogether.

Incentives for cryptocurrency design will change toward more overall efficiency, the tremendous waste around the systems dependent on fiat currencies will see significant reduction, and so on.

To effectively oppose cryptocurrency "waste", oppose fiat currencies instead.

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