The Ecology of Cryptocurrency and Mining

Over the past few years, the buzz around cryptocurrency has increased. We hear the words ‘blockchain’, ‘NFTs’, ‘Bitcoin’, ‘mining’, ‘ethereum’, but most of us do not fully understand these concepts. This project attempts to talk about the ecology of cryptocurrency, how the rise of cryptocurrency affects inter-human and human-technology relationships and how it impacts the environment. Apart from that, we also look at the term ‘mining’ and try to understand the reason behind using that term and draw parallels from what we have learned throughout the course.

While we were shortlisting on a topic, we first thought of doing something along the lines of veganism. Soon after, we heard about how NFTs are bad for the environment and the entire controversy that took place around that over social media, and we thought it would be interesting to discuss the same. When we first began discussing it, we just wanted to show how NFTs are bad for the environment, but that required us deep-diving into what not only NFTs are but what blockchain, cryptocurrency and crypto market actually is. We did not know anything about this topic - everything was new to us, and so we began from scratch. Instead of writing a paper, we wished to experiment and thought of creating a video (on Canva) to explain our ideas. When explaining complex concepts such as the whole system of blockchain and mining, we felt it is best to represent this visually.

The more we read about cryptocurrency and mining, the more we realised we knew less. The concepts were very new and alien to us; we never really felt the need to read up about this before. We scanned through the official cryptocurrency pages and web pages dedicated to the same; we talked to people who knew more about this who helped us understand this topic better. After understanding how it works, we realised that there is a problem as significant as that of the environment that we did not even look into - and that is how drastically, with the onset of cryptocurrency, there is a big change in how people interact with each other and with technology in this digital ecosystem and hence we then shifted our topic to understanding those aspects as well. An interesting thing we tried to talk about is how the term ‘mining’ plays out in the digital realm and how it is fundamentally different from what we imagine as mining. When we first heard ‘mining’, we could not make sense of how that would play out in digital space and hence thought it would be interesting to talk about that as well.

We have tried to look at this concept and its implications through various lenses of interdisciplinarity, most predominantly, economics, sociology and psychology. The more we read, the more we understood the different realms of cryptocurrency and its market. Understanding complex concepts like how blockchain works, proof of work and proof of stake, ethics of trading NFTs, psychology of consumer behaviour in digital vs real life, carbon footprint and environmental impacts, human relationships and more has enabled us to understand this topic in a more comprehensive manner.

In conclusion, we believe there is a lot more to learn about the crypto market before we become strong critics of the techniques and trading practices of the market, but the research we have conducted is a gateway to understanding and learning more.

Link to the Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6jUHcFqS28