Good point! I suppose the hope is that there are new ways for validation to happen on blockchains that don't use excess energy. What intrigues me is the new developments that are happening which could allow for new orchestrations combining value creation / value exchange with governance / decision-making structures. These could be design…
Good point! I suppose the hope is that there are new ways for validation to happen on blockchains that don't use excess energy. What intrigues me is the new developments that are happening which could allow for new orchestrations combining value creation / value exchange with governance / decision-making structures. These could be designed to support ecologically beneficial activities over ecologically destructive ones. For instance, some kind of token which you gain by doing something regenerative, or the idea of a negative-interest currency which works against hoarding capital / resources. But yes, the energy use is a big problem until other forms of decentralized validation become available. Ethereum got stopped a few years back by the slowness of validating transactions. One new project is Polkadot which uses side chains or "para chains" to create a tree structure and in theory this makes it possible to have hundreds of thousands of transactions per minute. But yes it is also still feasible that blockchain will have turned out to be another destructive waste of energy without achieving ecologically regenerative goals.
Thank you Daniel….thinking about the positive/ revolutionary potentials for Blockchain illuminates what seems like several insurmountable gulfs between my ideal of/ aspiration to have basic behavioral/ moral integrity as a modern human…within a system where I am already deeply, habitually, decades-locked-into several hyper convenient, indispensable 20th and 21st century Faustian material consumer habits, and their associated environmentally catastrophic infrastructures.
I guess I just don’t want to end up feeling compelled to (necessarily) always tacitly have to morally support whatever the, “latest thing“ is, just because I’m already so deeply locked into all of the other prior technologies...+ even though in many cases it wouldn’t even be possible, I generally think that having one’s policy approach and regular behavior evolve in the direction of “local Luddite fantasy“, in general, usually is probably gonna the better course of action; IE on a cultural level, abolishing the space program, etc = reducing and eventually eliminating anything that actually doesn’t serve the current first principle needs of the Earth/ oceans/ air, people, and the entire non-human animal world as its primary moral objective.
My point is is that the entire development of blockchain, inasmuch as it already is (apparently) so catastrophically out of sync with natural limits…IMO (possibly) ought to be the grounds for totally discontinuing it outright, until further notice… but unfortunately I think most people these days would disagree with me about this (as well as about the space program, the Hadron megacollider, etc) these days... I’m just generally suspicious of the way a type of uncritical (anthropocentric) futurism can (again) be philosophically frictionlessly transposed onto the development of another (already demonstrably!) Earth killing technology (+ please forgive me if this was a little meandering...I believe in your essay you already alluded to what I’m getting at in many ways, here!)
Good point! I suppose the hope is that there are new ways for validation to happen on blockchains that don't use excess energy. What intrigues me is the new developments that are happening which could allow for new orchestrations combining value creation / value exchange with governance / decision-making structures. These could be designed to support ecologically beneficial activities over ecologically destructive ones. For instance, some kind of token which you gain by doing something regenerative, or the idea of a negative-interest currency which works against hoarding capital / resources. But yes, the energy use is a big problem until other forms of decentralized validation become available. Ethereum got stopped a few years back by the slowness of validating transactions. One new project is Polkadot which uses side chains or "para chains" to create a tree structure and in theory this makes it possible to have hundreds of thousands of transactions per minute. But yes it is also still feasible that blockchain will have turned out to be another destructive waste of energy without achieving ecologically regenerative goals.
Thank you Daniel….thinking about the positive/ revolutionary potentials for Blockchain illuminates what seems like several insurmountable gulfs between my ideal of/ aspiration to have basic behavioral/ moral integrity as a modern human…within a system where I am already deeply, habitually, decades-locked-into several hyper convenient, indispensable 20th and 21st century Faustian material consumer habits, and their associated environmentally catastrophic infrastructures.
I guess I just don’t want to end up feeling compelled to (necessarily) always tacitly have to morally support whatever the, “latest thing“ is, just because I’m already so deeply locked into all of the other prior technologies...+ even though in many cases it wouldn’t even be possible, I generally think that having one’s policy approach and regular behavior evolve in the direction of “local Luddite fantasy“, in general, usually is probably gonna the better course of action; IE on a cultural level, abolishing the space program, etc = reducing and eventually eliminating anything that actually doesn’t serve the current first principle needs of the Earth/ oceans/ air, people, and the entire non-human animal world as its primary moral objective.
My point is is that the entire development of blockchain, inasmuch as it already is (apparently) so catastrophically out of sync with natural limits…IMO (possibly) ought to be the grounds for totally discontinuing it outright, until further notice… but unfortunately I think most people these days would disagree with me about this (as well as about the space program, the Hadron megacollider, etc) these days... I’m just generally suspicious of the way a type of uncritical (anthropocentric) futurism can (again) be philosophically frictionlessly transposed onto the development of another (already demonstrably!) Earth killing technology (+ please forgive me if this was a little meandering...I believe in your essay you already alluded to what I’m getting at in many ways, here!)