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Remember when critics were convinced crypto was killing the planet?
That criticism has gone quiet as of late.
Every new invention in the brief history of humankind endured its share of skeptics.
And when I say "every" invention, I do mean every single one.
Take coffee, for example. In 1674 London, "The Womenâs Petition Against Coffee" denounced the beverage as an "effeminate" indulgence that supposedly contributed to male impotence.
The petition wrote: "Can any woman of sense or spirit endure with patience that when she approaches the nuptial bed, expecting a man that should answer the vigour of her flames, she, on the contrary, should only meet a bedful of bones, and hug a meager useless corpse?"
How about novels?
In 1813, the North Carolina Star ran a scathing piece warning that novels lured "young people into an enchanted country" and filled their minds with fantasies of "an imaginary world full of inviolable friendshipsâŠas never will be realized in the coarseness of common life."
"Such false, overstrained ideas have led many a poor girl to ruin," the writer cautioned.
Source: Pessimists Archive
If caffeine and escapist fantasy were enough to conjure such moral panic, imagine the uproar over a technology threatening to dismantle fiat money and central banking.
From being called an outright scam to something of value only to criminals, blockchain technology has been subject to all kinds of criticisms.
On the climate impact side, US Senate hearings in 2023 framed bitcoin mining as "harming Mother Earth" and included calls for miners to report their CO2 emissions. In the previous year, New York banned all carbon-based cryptocurrency mining unless it used renewable energy.
Critics commonly framed the ecological impact of bitcoin mining as akin to the energy use of small countries like Finland.
That argument sounded the alarm bells, even if it did not always hold up under scrutiny. According to the latest available report by the Bitcoin Mining Council (August 2023), bitcoinâs total energy usage (348 terrawatt/hour) was only about 0.21% of global energy consumption.
348 TW/h is about 39% less energy used than in gold mining (571 TW/h), or only about 63% more than estimated energy usage for video gaming (214 TW/h).
But even in context, bitcoin mining still uses just as much electricity as ever. Itâs still largely a speculative asset, so itâs not like it became such a valuable medium of exchange that politicians felt its usefulness justified its carbon footprint.
So why the silence over cryptoâs environmental toll just two years later?
My best guess is that proof-of-stake is now so widespread in blockchain that blanket smears donât stick.
Unlike proof-of-work, which requires vast computational power to secure the network, proof-of-stake uses a fraction of this energy by relying on token holders to validate transactions. As more blockchains adopt this model, it's harder to paint the entire industry with a carbon-heavy brush.
The moral of the story here? Given enough time, market innovation can solve the worldâs problems.
â Donovan Choy
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Brought to you by:
ZKsync is accelerating institutional blockchain adoption and the rise of tokenization.
Institutions choose ZKsync to move tokenized assets securely across enterprises while preserving privacy and governance.
With gasless transactions, seamless onboarding, and scalable ZK infrastructure, enterprises can transfer financial products and data privately using ZK Stack â an open-source, trustless blockchain platform designed for speed, low costs, security, and interoperability without sacrificing control.
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