Yeah, it's appropriately ironic that these things were supposed to give power to the people (excluding the private jets), but power has become consolidated to those who have the means to consolidate it ... and the climate pays.
The energy consumption of proof of stake is inherently less of an issue because, unlike proof of work, it does not itself incentivize waste in an escalating vicious feedback loop. In other words, an industry where energy expenditure is an input is categorically different than an industry where energy expenditure is an output, which is the real existential crisis of proof of work.
Additionally, a question for you: I don't have experience in finance. Do you think this idea of having a settlement period for crypto transactions could work?
The carbon emission problem with crypto currency and AI is analogous to the oil and gas industry. When you boil it down to first principles, we are extracting resources from the Earth, and destroying our climate, in the hope of some sort of economic gain.
And the economic gain is tenuous at best.
I wrote an opinion on HN about the carbon problem in crypto as well.
I'd be really curious to know if this could be use case for AI code generation tools using speech recognition. I don't know of any, but this could be very interesting.
I was part of this discussion in 2009-2012, and was curious if it was still out there. It is!
It's fascinating to take dig stuff up like this and replay it, knowing what we know now.
Of course, everyone is using the new ES modules spec now, but it's hard to imagine how we would have got there without working through the ideas which led to CommonJS.
This started before Node.js, when we were playing around with the Narwhal runtime.
One really interesting concept which never got traction was creating a standard library for JavaScript.
