This week’s issue reviews a new paper called, “How to pay for saving the world: Modern Monetary Theory for a degrowth transition”. Is MMT a superior choice to bitcoin? I promise to get back to Peet’s book soon.
This week’s issue is an tourist’s review of the book Cryptocommunism. Did your head explode immediately after reading the word, “cryptocommunism”? I will return to my review of “Energy and Ecological Economics” next week.
I finished Part 1 of John Peet’s Energy and the Ecological Economics of Sustainability and what follows are my thoughts on this introductory section of the book. Thank you to everyone who supported my conference fundraiser, I reached my goal and I’m all set for the trip!
Bitcoin’s energy consumption is what really gets a lot of bitcoin skeptics’ blood boiling. Thanks to ridiculous claims that bitcoin would use all of the world’s energy by 2020 or that bitcoin will push warming above 2 degrees Celsius all on its own, many people have an unrealistic impression about bitcoin mining.
I’m mostly back from a very needed vacation. Before getting into this issue’s topic, I want to share my recent appearance on the Progressive Bitcoiner, with Mark Stephany. This is my favorite podcast appearance so far. We spent a lot of time on degrowth, so I highly recommend it.
This issue’s topic: The IPCC’s Shared Socio-Economic Pathways
This issue’s topic: The economics of never-ending growth
This issue’s topic: How to implement demurrage using bitcoin and thoughts on bitcoin and freedom
This issue’s topic: How fiat demurrage leads naturally to a CBDC.
This issue’s topic: I’m still in the demurrage rabbit hole, sorry, not sorry.
This issue’s topic: The price of money is interest and so what?
A recent report found that indirect carbon emissions from the amount of cash and investments a company has in the United States banking industry greatly diminish their efforts to decarbonize their operations. When comparing the bank industry to bitcoin, which turns out to be better for the planet?
This issue’s topic: Green Keynesianism is still consumption-based growth.
This issue’s topic: The time I realized that bitcoin and degrowth could be the same…
This issue’s topic: what’s degrowth?
In a recent op-ed[1], Yanis Varoufakis argued that to escape the zero-sum game in which we have socialism for the very few and austerity for the rest of us, “it is necessary, though insufficient, to end bankers’ dual monopoly of the payment system and the money tree. But how?”
The end goal here is not to push a libertarian or Austrian economic wet dream of a Bitcoin reserve currency future, but to disrupt the financial system through Bitcoin in order to create a window of opportunity to transform the financial system to meet the needs of a climate change world. Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that is in a position to be this threat.
I have alluded to some issues related to the digital currency, but the most important one for the climate change community is that of its environmental impact. There are issues with mining companies and underlying energy sources that drive the high-computation costs.
The goal here isn’t to focus on all the details of the shifting economic landscape but to argue why Bitcoin is the kind of disruption that we need to stop the global climate from warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius. However, the reader must understand the dire situation we are in before such an argument can be made.
We need a major system disruption in order to make the transformative societal change that is necessary to stop the planet from warming humans into extinction. Bitcoin, the decentralized digital currency, may be the very disruption that we need. Bitcoin is transferred over a peer-to-peer network and its’ transactions are verified using network nodes that must solve cryptographic puzzles.