The carbon footprint point was based on false data. Energy requirements of BTC were greatly exaggerated.

It is based on untrue 'research' published by the site bitcarbon.org, which is referenced by the source article you link to.

Bitcarbon based their entire calculation on a wildly-inaccurate, very outdated guesstimate of power consumption they found at https://blockchain.info/stats

Clearly neither Bitcarbon, nor the source, made any effort to verify this number (despite a note at blockchain.info pointing out that it is probably not reliable). This totally undermines their data and brings all of their claims into question.

The fact is that the hardware that Bitcoin transaction processors are using today is 50-100x more efficient than it was a year ago. Although the difficulty of the work is increasing, the power consumption is not. In addition, far less power is being lost as waste heat.

In short, they are built differently. All the disagreement is about is whether this is due to environment or genetics, or intrauterinal hormone exposure, or combination of the factors.

|if kids don’t have laptops they don’t have pc gaming, and it’s hard to see why they would prefer consoles over tablets especially if I have to pay 10x as much when games are a $1 consumable like candy.

I am confident that games on PCs, laptops and consoles would always be better and prettier than games on tablets. And gaming is a big reason why children and teenagers buy computing devices. So I dont think they would disappear. Serious gaming needs high performance computing and good peripheals, its not limited just for work.

Speech recognition?

How is this different from Twitter now? You follow users in your feed and can search tags - thats Twitter.

Came here to say this.

Why not add "(OP)" instead?

"and in addition I don't see any reasonable alternative that is in use in the world at present"

This. Unless the critics of capitalism propose a viable realistic alternative that does not contain equivalent or even worse problems, I dont think they have much of a point. And I think most problems they talk about can be fixed or at least greatly mitigated by sensible laws and regulations. And if such regulations dont get implemented, its more of a governmental problem than private sector problem.