Squandering Resources: Manifesto

Manifesto

The ramifications of the global application and acceptance of blockchain have not been properly considered. Blockchain hashing algorithms already account for __% of global energy consumption as it exists today - a fringe, nascent field. The technology will experience exponential growth as new use cases are adopted in industry and those intended to disrupt industry. This growth will quickly grow beyond our ability to control it and therefore could cause catastrophic social, economic, and environmental catastrophe.

The global hash rate is increasing exponentially. Consider that blockchain is only being applied to a handful of cases, bitcoin being the largest at roughly 300,000 transactions per day. The media pollutes the public opinion of blockchain, conjuring images of drugs, hacking, and treason, suppressing adoption rates. King Canute cannot hold back the tides forever. Bitcoin itself is greed-driven arms race. Moreover, blockchain, as a decentralized, append-only ledger creates a paradigm where a trusted third party arises from the network itself. Any application that requires an independent intermediary is now susceptible to unparalleled efficiency gains and eventual incorporation into a blockchain paradigm. The use cases are staggering in scope.

Exponential growth is horrifying. There aren’t analogs in your day to day to associate with that kind of process. One can recall that a quintillion grains of rice is the result of a fable about a chessboard-based wager, but few finish the thought to realize that the pile would be larger and more massive than Everest. The power of compound interest drives the marketing of investments, but that dizzying return is recognized over a lifetime, a rate so imperceptible that an industry has spun up to divine wisdom from the noise around it. The effects of being ratcheted up the J-curve are only beginning to be observed. Like blockchain itself, technology and progress are append-only. There is no turning back.

We will cook each other alive because we don’t trust each other. We will squander the precious reserves of potential energy seemingly gifted to humanity to foster its maturation through its adolescence. Our capitalist economic model causes each individual to structure their own objective functions using parameters inconsistent with the greater good – that is people will make their mining decisions to optimize the amount of money they make without considering the impact on the wider populous, almost by definition leading to inefficiencies and waste. We are squandering our resources.

Squandering Resources was founded with the mission to raise awareness, propose checks and balances, propose a new way of thinking about blockchain to remedy this problem, and contribute to a meaningful conversation about the risks posed by a changing paradigm.