What Bitcoin’s Environmentalist Critics Miss | Opinion

What Bitcoin’s Environmentalist Critics Miss | Opinion

When the telegraph made its mid-1800s debut, Samuel Morse was besieged by critics. Some, including members of Congress, thought his new technology—which transmitted dots and dashes over wires at great distances—was just a clever magician's trick.

Others, like Henry David Thoreau, wondered about technology's value. "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas," he wrote, "but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."

Maine and Texas, it turned out, had a fair bit to say to one another. Over time, the telegraph became the forerunner to the telephone and the internet—epoch-defining technologies that ushered in the modern era. Since then, Thoreau's critique is a powerful reminder: What is new will be condemned and critiqued—that is, until it is embraced.