Cryptocurrencies! Cobalt! Bitcoin! Batteries! Are These A Net Positive or Negative For Society? How Should We Feel When The Goods We Love Lead to Ransomware, Child Labor, More Carbon, and Death?

The Best Paragraph I've Read: A truly consequential innovation is one that makes possible entirely new business models that touch the lives of millions. The car enabled motels and shopping malls, the internet enabled e-commerce, and smartphones and GPS enabled ride-sharing. What business model that touches the lives of millions have cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin made possible? American motorists now know: ransomware. In such attacks, hackers encrypt and sometimes steal the victim’s data, demanding a ransom to decrypt and not release the data. Crypto is how Colonial Pipeline Ltd. paid hackers who earlier this month forced offline a conduit that supplies 45% of the East Coast’s fuel. A few days after the Colonial attack, Tesla Inc. announced it would no longer accept bitcoin as payment for cars because of the carbon emissions generated by the computer processing necessary to mint new coins. The two events underline how an innovation that was supposed to displace the dollar as a medium of exchange has proved largely useless for buying legal things yet frighteningly effective at facilitating extortion. This paragraph comes from the Wall Street Journal in an article titled: "Cryptocurrency Has Yet to Make the World a Better Place."  The article is written by Greg IP.  You can read the article here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/cryptocurrency-has-yet-to-make-the-world-a-better-place-11621519381 Zac and Don discuss whether cryptocurrencies have brought an overall negative net value to society.   Another Best Paragraph I've Read: In June, 2014, a man began digging into the soft red earth in the back yard of his house, on the outskirts of Kolwezi, a city in the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo. As the man later told neighbors, he had intended to create a pit for a new toilet. About eight feet into the soil, his shovel hit a slab of gray rock that was streaked with black and punctuated with what looked like blobs of bright-turquoise mold. He had struck a seam of heterogenite, an ore that can be refined into cobalt, one of the elements used in lithium-ion batteries. Among other things, cobalt keeps the batteries, which power everything from cell phones to electric cars, from catching fire. As global demand for lithium-ion batteries has grown, so has the price of cobalt. The man suspected that his discovery would make him wealthy—if he could get it out of the ground before others did. This article comes from the New Yorker and is written by Nicolas Niarchos.  The article is titled: "The Dark Side of Congo's Cobalt Rush."  You can read the article here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/the-dark-side-of-congos-cobalt-rush Zac and Don continue to talk about the idea of net value while looking at the example of cobalt and how it is produced in the Congo.