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All valid and fair points.
There are plenty of crypto community initiatives. The one I am involved with has sent 2,000 kids to school and provided them with clean water and food for a year in Haiti, set up a women in technology initiative in India and contributed towards healthcare bills for various people with serious illnesses in the last year. We've also pioneered a technique to reuse bitcoin mining hash power to secure additional blockchains for zero extra power output as an interim improvement before the real energy efficient consensus models are ready.
Not claiming for a second that it offsets the horrying usage of natural resources. Just an indicator that there are some projects out there with a conscience.
Something that pisses me off is that the UN blockchain committee meets in Geneva several times each year and all of the attendees and delegates sit around talking about how great Ethereum is but they never touch on the wider impacts and changes that crypto will bring.
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Stonehedge
I disagree on this.
The volume of energy consumption on a global scale is still a very real concern, particularly while significant portions of most developed nation's energy is derived from non-renewable sources. It's an additional load that we weren't bearing through our combined systems. Environmental impacts simply don't observe boundaries.
Claiming that the Bitcoin mining powered through the Three Gorges Dam power supply is clean is all well and good. However this ignores the important knock on effect that this has. Yes, power is generally localised in supply and usage. However, it is also generally networked across grid structure systems. Therefore, all of that power used for cryptocurrency mining is then no longer available to be used by other customers who are peripheral to the TGD power generation position and thus have to be powered by other power generation sources. Even if those sources are themselves renewable, the ongoing chain effects are at some point going to lead to power demands that aren't supplied by renewable sources.
Claiming all is good for this bit of cryptocurrency because its powered by renewable effectively castigates the customers of adjacent non-renewable energy sources such as the simple householder wanting to heat their home because its winter. What do they get out of it? Basically nothing but a kicking.
Now if we take a look at those currently most vulnerable to climate change, those living in under-developed nations without the capital standing to invest in environmental defence mechanisms (against things like rising sea-levels and desertification, the ensuing civil and militarised unrest caused by scarcity of resources, etc), where do they factor in the cryptocurrency environment? Not at all. The vast majority of the global population that is going to suffer from climate change first operates in a cash economy and they remain largely dependent on foreign aid which is funded through taxation. Taxation that itself is diminished through the rising use of cryptocurrency on that limited volume of its use in transactions.
Are there any cyrptocurrencies that are, in some form, putting back into the communities they are taking from? Because, environmentally, this has become an absolute shitshow.