Cryptocurrency is Climate Kryptonite

Stop trying to sell me your bro culture doomsday money.

Bitcoin photo by Alesia Kozik from Pexels, burning globe photoshopped by author

Cryptocurrency is out of control. Proponents will argue that that’s the point, spinning a narrative of economic freedom through crypto and somehow sticking it to the man, but it’s the get rich quick promises that drown everything else out. Let’s be realistic for a moment: a struggling single mom is no better equipped to invest in crypto than she is to get rich playing the stock market. To do that sort of thing you need to have significant disposable income to begin with. Get rich quick schemes usually involve some sort of hidden cost, false assumption, dishonesty, or negative impacts externalized to others against their will. Cryptocurrency explodes that downside to a planetary scale: Bitcoin alone could hammer the last nail in the coffin of our climate future all by itself.

If we lived in a sane world, that really ought to be enough for everyone to abandon crypto, but we all know that’s not the world we live in. “I‘ve never given a crap about anyone but myself for a single solitary second” seems to be the general attitude of every crypto bro I’ve ever encountered, and the technical complexity involved in diving into the crypto world seems like less of an obstacle to entry than the staggering level of douchebaggery and weapons-grade misogyny. If immersing myself in that sort of culture really was the doorway to financial freedom, it would be the first argument that ever managed to make debt slavery sound good. Thankfully, I’ve discovered a far less stressful route to reducing financial anxiety: simply not desperately wanting to own a Lamborghini to begin with.

Meanwhile, for all of its talk about decentralization, cryptocurrency hasn’t really eliminated the toxic presence of central banks to create a truly democratic dispersed currency model. Instead, what they’ve done is replaced the publicly deplorable central bankers whose atrocious behaviour we can all see with invisible “miners” who are the de facto central authority in cryptocurrency exchanges with just as little, if not even less, accountability. I agree wholeheartedly that Goldman Sachs is a vicious abomination. I just don’t agree that replacing them with a douchey brogrammer operating from behind a curtain represents an improvement.