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Same as their past: Get-rich-quick schemes, outright scams, massive wastes of electricity, criminal funding tools, investment instruments that aren't backed by actual companies making anything (and are therefore 100% speculation)... and sometimes some interesting technology.
Awwww I wrote my essay and here I come back to your comment saying everything better in one tenth of my words.
Aside from the electricity, that sounds a lot like traditional currency.
So no improvements, but a bigger ecological cost. So we should dump crypto, got it!
I'd actually be curious to see the comparison between the power consumption/ecological impact of physical money and digital banking systems vs crypto. I assume the latter is way worse because the proof-of-work model is painfully inefficient and literally just a waste of energy (proof-of-stake is better but still wasteful), but I'd be interested to see actual numbers for comparison. Is crypto twice as bad? Or ten times? Or even worse?
Just thinking of all the things traditional money and banks require (just for the US):
- Growing and harvesting cotton and flax for paper bills (and manufacturing linen from the flax plant)
- Physical buildings need to be constructed to hold money, so all the materials required to build a bank need to be manufactured and then constructed in many places all over the country
- Mining and then refining and forging gold and silver bars for places like Fort Knox
- Power consumption from all the banks' servers that handle all of the digital wiring of money all over the world
- Mining copper/nickel/zinc/manganese for minting coins, and then the manufacturing process to mint them
- Fuel consumption moving physical money from place to place
Prolly more stuff I'm not thinking of. I wonder if any studies have been done to add it all up. At least a lot of the stuff traditional money requires creates jobs, too. Farmers, construction workers, miners, etc.
I'm not necessarily a fan of physical, paper/coin currency, and I think finding better ways to move to digital currency are worth it! I just don't think crypto, in its current state, is that solution. Both systems have loads of room for improvement.
You can't compare crypto with physical currency, that is like compring apples with pears, instead compare the energy use of the transactions on BTC and those made in the VISA network, that is far more accurate.
Making a direct apples to apples comparison doesn't work because it's too theoretical and impractical. Cash isn't going away any time soon.
It's like <1% for fiat versus prob at least half of crypto tho
investment instruments that aren’t backed by actual companies making anything (and are therefore 100% speculation)
Yep, only the evil bad crypto has ever done this! Our revered financial institutions would never sanction such filt-
2008 enters the room
SHIT
Who claimed that only applies to crypto? Don't attribute to me things I never said.
Well technically, (s)he never claimed you said that either...
That's the sad state of things right now, but I hope things will change for the better, and crypto will become an acceptable way to keep and spend money (rather than ponzi ICO schemes, or sorry, "investment"). I also hope that more crypto switch to proof-of-stake to avoid the huge waste of energy, though that has its own problems as well (fears of more centralization, though this didn't happen with ETH, or at least not yet).