> I just can't see why the one technology that has unbounded energy waste problems and is primarily used for get-rich-quick schemes is also seen as a feasible way to solve societal problems.
I see where you're coming from, but cryptocurrencies are not the only use of blockchain.
That's a shame that bitcoin throws such a big shadow over everything else.
Does it? I've been using it on and off, on Android. I have set it to disconnect when screen is off. The impact on battery does not seem to be drastic, though it is difficult to do real side by side comparison.
Another option is to only use it on demand, while browsing.
It can leave connection open which prevents many cellular radio technologies from falling into lower power state.
Really depends on how optimized the cell modem is and how often keepalive packets are being sent by the VPN. Honestly, I haven't seen too much of a battery hit on ipsec VPN on the iphone SE. However, my older android phones used to get shredded on OpenVPN.
EDIT: If anyone's asking, I use the algo.sh script to deploy ipsec vpn on digitalocean (has option to enable adblocking too) https://github.com/trailofbits/algo.
I see where you're coming from, but cryptocurrencies are not the only use of blockchain.
That's a shame that bitcoin throws such a big shadow over everything else.