Comment Bitcoin is not the only one (Score 1) 327
while I realize that bitcoin is the first and the biggest crypto...its also the most useless one.
using bitcoin as an example for anything crypto is setting your analysis up for failure. I agree that bitcoin can't ever be green... but there are chains that are currently carbon negative (like algorand) and quite a few other chains that use low power but aren't carbon negative (like near and avalanche). algorand has the total power consumption of 3 houses. this is with 1000 tps (soon to be 10k) and 4.5 second finality.
the next topic is banking the unbanked. obviously bitcoin is useless for this too (and so is eth)due to their insane fees... but again they aren't the only chains. quite a few chains have fees that are significantly less than that of a credit card or Vodafone.
next thing is the securities fraud. I dont see how this is an issue with crypto as much as it is with our totally useless government. they could easily step in and prevent fraud without stifling innovation, but they won't because they can't decide even after a decade whether or not a crypto counts as a security or cash (or something new in between). if they can't even give regulatory clarity to the industry, how do you expect them to regulate it?
then we move onto the ponzi scheme issue. lots of crypto are ponzi schemes, i agree. Terra was obvious from the start ( 20% forever with 0 risk?). you had to be a moron to not realize that was a ponzi. I agree that chains should be valued based on their real world application value and not some random nonsense like 'digital gold' or just because they have a bunch of expensive jpegs like eth. you just have to do due diligence and not get sucked into hype.
will crypto fail? quite possibly, but to say it's doomed to fail is like saying the internet was doomed to fail. there will eventually be some winners in the space (and they won't be btc or eth). these winners will be cheap, easy to use, decentralized, carbon negative, and have tons of real world applications.
Algorand already has tokenized real estate, tokenized ticketing systems, payment systems, vaccine passports. they even are used as the back end for bitcoin payment systems (because as pointed out in the op, you can't use bitcoin as payment)