One thing I love about that article you linked to is that it underscores that everything about these blockchain networks are public. We can compute all of the impact they make because in order to function all transaction costs must be public, which means that things like carbon footprints of transactions can be computed openly and it's impossible to hide what you're actually doing. You can lie about it, but someone is going to catch you in that lie.
Agreed on this. That said, one thing people have been focusing on is that blockchain-based tech was obviously built from a place of great privilege.
If you're a techbro, it never occurred to you that life in public would be a bad thing for some people. However, marginalized communities (for whatever reason- and this includes everything from minority groups to LGBTQ+ to domestic violence survivors to people in areas of conflict) do not always have that luxury.
One of the most ridiculous and terrifying recent example of this was the spitballing about putting ... medical records ... on a blockchain. At a certain point, you just can't even.
It's one of those fascinating dichotomies that we have a technology that both facilitates transparency and openness while also being the go-to choice for anonymity and illegal activities; and that this technology (and associated wallets) is therefore so appealing to people with power yet increasingly seen as problematic for people that can be exploited.
(There's a few papers that have come out on this recently- I think I linked to them in a past thread)
