> One of the early promises of cryptocurrency was to "sick it to the man and governments". Now its powered largely by greed and consuming our most important resources in breakneck speeds.

There is a really critical distinction between truly trustless currencies like bitcoin and "managed" [centralized, trusted] assets like the ones Ethereum offers. Interesting that once you start to grant some amount of trust there are options that don't leverage proof-of-work at all, so the waste is not necessarily a concern.

Proof-of-work is "only" necessary if you want trustless coin w/egalitarian distribution. Some folks would argue that it's not necessary to be truly trustless (perhaps bootstrapping a new bitcoin node could suffer a DoS from a sybil false-chain attack, at which point you would trust someone authoritative's copy of the blockchain).

No matter how you slice it, you should be very, very suspicious of any new cryptocurrency and super extremely suspicious of any new "crypto-asset".