David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Energy is fungible. Not as fungible as money, but it's fungible like money is. If these datacenters are using that renewable energy, then it means that other places are likely to look toward coal or oil. Yes, it's making an impact on our greenhouse emissions. Glorifying this system should not come without the discussion of is it worth it? I think the listeners, you make the call of whether you think that all of this utility that this new monetary system has brought, is it worth it if we race toward raising the global temperature by one or two degrees Celsius over the next 10 or 20 years. I don’t know. I think the jury's out. I'm not sure there's really much we can do about it. Again, it's a decentralized thing, so what are you going to do? There's also the question—I certainly haven't done the work to know, I don't know if you have—of how much energy and emissions does the traditional finance system produce. For sure it's also a lot. I bet it's a lot more. Yeah. Here's an interesting aside. Remember, when we talked about these, these are really ideal for big secure transactions, not credit card transactions. But in some ways, there's a lot of smaller transactions they're being used for today. A single Bitcoin transaction consumes more energy than 100,000 visa transactions.…

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