Attention Economy


Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Crypto - Risks Remain

Beware the ‘sensible’ crypto crowd — they’re worse than the fanatics
https://www.ft.com/content/29605ca8-494a-4762-bedc-43e3671226ab
The strait-laced, earnest types threaten to legitimise a high-risk, opaque and ill-understood industry

Crypto Is Mostly Over. Its Carbon Emissions Are Not.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/03/crypto-bitcoin-mining-carbon-emissions-climate-change-impact/673468/
And it is America’s problem now. After China clamped down on crypto mining in 2021, such computing work increased in the United States. Miners set up shop in communities with low energy prices. And owners of unprofitable power-generation infrastructure, such as waste-coal-burning power plants, opened up crypto-mining operations to create another revenue stream. These companies have put a lot of money into their hardware and their physical space, and they will continue mining until they are actively losing money.

Nothing Redeems Crypto
https://www.wsj.com/articles/nothing-redeems-cryptocurrency-ftx-sec-regulation-carbon-mining-hardware-gambling-tokens-exchange-dee0c358
Part chlorofluorocarbon, part cocaine, part bearer bond. We need policies that will eliminate it. 

The Crypto Collapse and the End of Magical Thinking That Infected Capitalism
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/opinion/the-crypto-collapse-magical-thinking-capitalism.html
Harvard’s Mihir Desai notes:
I have come to view cryptocurrencies not simply as exotic assets but as a manifestation of a magical thinking that had come to infect part of the generation who grew up in the aftermath of the Great Recession — and American capitalism, more broadly.
For these purposes, magical thinking is the assumption that favored conditions will continue on forever without regard for history. It is the minimizing of constraints and trade-offs in favor of techno-utopianism and the exclusive emphasis on positive outcomes and novelty. It is the conflation of virtue with commerce. 

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