You come home one evening to find your house almost burned to the ground. Someone is standing outside with a can of “organically sourced, sustainable green diesel”. They hand you a certificate for “One burned down house”. It’s a new currency, they say. If you trade well you may be able to turn it into two burned down houses and perhaps even 200.

That’s bitcoin, crypto, NFTs, a whole model of scams, grifts and Ponzi schemes that are based on the destruction of energy and materials. Bitcoins are expensive to create because they involve the use of very specialized computers processing gigantic number-crunching exercises that uses up vast amounts of energy. At the end of the process, the bitcoin grifter gets one bitcoin if they destroy enough stuff. Pointless destruction of the Earth’s materials and energy. In the middle of a climate crisis. That’s the tech bro culture.

It used to be that we created value by building things that other people found useful, like houses, chairs, cups, hammers, stuff like that. In the tech bro world, they attempt to create scam value by destroying things.

Crypto is both a scam on gullible investors and on the environment. It has no useful function other than as a tool in a Ponzi scheme, or perhaps as a way criminals can transfer their funds. Crypto uses blockchain, which is a technology that does nothing useful. Think of blockchain as a competitor to Visa. According to Digiconomist, one blockchain transaction costs as much energy as almost 1.5 million Visa transactions. The crypto underworld destroys as much energy every year as a country like Australia or Argentina uses. Bitcoin creates the same amount of e-waste every year as the Netherlands. All for nothingness. Bitcoin energy consumption has been rising by about 40% every year because bitcoin is designed to destroy more and more energy every year.

How can that be environmentally sound or economically viable or useful? It’s not. It can’t be. It doesn’t need to be because it’s gangster stuff. It’s criminal on multiple levels. These days, the only difference between Silicon Valley and Las Vegas is in the chips they use. They’re both gambling meccas.

There are so many crypto and blockchain scams that you have “Crypto scams of the week” pages. Not scams of the year, not scams of the month—scams of the week. To in any way interact with the crypto world is to fall into a toxic sewer of seedy avatars screaming “Buy the dip” and how they’re giving away free this or free that, or how bitcoin is actually the savior of the poor or the answer to the climate crisis, or whatever grifty thing they can think of as they fish for desperate, greedy suckers.

Crypto reflects a tech culture that feels that energy and materials are limitless and that tech bros have the right to use and trash as much energy and materials as they want. Crypto reflects planned obsolescence thinking, whereby the routes to maximum return on investment are found through piling up the maximum amount of waste possible. Crypto has massive costs and absolutely zero useful, real value other than the value of the sucker who thinks it has value.

Blockchain is like Brexit. There’s nothing there. Nothing useful anyway. It’s a scam.

Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
US government evaluation of crypto
Cryptocurrency’s Dirty Secret: Energy Consumption
The 6 most overhyped technologies in IT
Bitcoin has seen a 41% increase in energy consumption year-on-year