'The majority of cars worldwide are not electric. They are all petrol and diesel cars. That means that ALL cars are bad for the environment and that will not change and thus should be all banned.'
Not all cryptocurrency projects are scams, just like not all cars are burning up the planet.
The absolutism towards whether if all cryptocurrency projects will go away due to a 'bUnCH OF Scam PrOjEctS' or 'it's ALl a scAm™' is just as silly as suggesting that all cryptocurrency projects are guaranteed to survive, 'becAuse iT is the FutURE, bRO™' or 'JUst WaiT fOr ThIs PrOJEct ReAL sooN™'.
I'll tell you that both extremes are incorrect. That is even before accounting for regulations getting involved.
Okay, I'll bite.
What's incorrect at the anti extreme? In other words, what crypto-currency isn't a) burning down our planet and b) disproportionately rewarding early adopters?
It can just take a single example to invalidate that question and Nano [0] perfectly does so. Unlike the others, it is not 'burning down our planet', was not 'pre-mined' / 'pre-allocated' or ever did an ICO back when it was launched. sorry.
Now here's my question to you since I answered yours: Hence your support for the anti crypto-extreme: Are they all going to go away 100% guaranteed despite all the other scam projects existing and with looming regulations on the horizon?
And that's great. But why is everyone and their dog still using proof of work? Large nations worth of power is being burnt to process all the others.
Why would they go away? Regulation, even bans will only disrupt the price, push wallets offshore. While there's an anonymous currency you can throw around, accept K&R payments through, it's going to be popular with tax cheats and criminals for a very, very long time. See: the effect of regulation on drugs.
Are you sure that's an argument not to use 'cryptocurrencies' (since you tried to label all of them as 'burning up the planet' which that was debunked) or was that more to do with those using PoW? It's like asking 'Why is everyone and their dog still driving diesel and petrol cars and trucks, with those still emitting tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, despite the existence of greener alternatives?
> Regulation, even bans will only disrupt the price, push wallets offshore. While there's an anonymous currency you can throw around, accept K&R payments through, it's going to be popular with tax cheats and criminals for a very, very long time.
That's the same way of saying that they are not going away 100% guaranteed and there will be lots of regulatory compliance; exactly what I already said. That's why mining PoW cryptocurrencies are banned in countries like China [0] and Kosovo [1]. Instead with regulations, it is going to get a lot harder for tax cheats, criminals, etc to use their privacy coins as the exchanges will delist them to prevent undesirables from converting it to fiat. [2]
[0] https://fortune.com/2021/11/17/china-bitcoin-mining-ban-cryp...
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59879760
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/31/eu-parliament-vot...
Exactly. More crickets that are unable to respond to my question(s). Is that why you also haven't responded to my latest question and went on to vent your anger on to the latest crypto post?
> I'll tell you that both extremes are incorrect.
Being extreme or not have little bearing on an opinion being correct. Some opinions, such as "murder is bad", are both extreme (they suffer very few exceptions), and correct.
And it happens quite often that the most informed opinions also happen to be the most extreme. And as far as I can tell, this seems to be the case for crypto currencies: the more I look at them, the more I think they cannot be redeemed: to date, I have seen no problem that is best solved by a blockchain, and I increasingly doubt there ever will be.
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> Not all cryptocurrency projects are scams
I can believe that. However, I do believe that all crypto currencies, without even a single exception, are a net bad for the world. If we restrict that to proof-of-waste crypto currencies, that belief is a near certainty.
Long story short, it seems that in practice, all crypto currencies eventually devolve into a pyramid scheme. They're also used as an actual currency, but their volatility is such that it's not very practical to begin with, and that use is so marginal compared to "investment" that the financial freedom gained by people who actually need it is outweighed by the harmful side effects of the pyramid. (We ruin more people than we save.)
Add proof of work (or space-time, or whatever scarce resource you can think of), and you end up with a massive waste of resources on top of that. A waste so massive in fact that it manages to influence electronics prices around the world, not to mention the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network alone, in a world that really really needs to reduce its CO2 emissions. Like right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Sixth_Assessment_Report
They may not be all scams, but as far as I can tell all honest attempts are doomed to fail.
As opposed to our current financial system which is built on the idea of creating real (except when we reeeeally want some extra money, in which case we just make some more), regulated (unless your regulated activity is conducted by an entity that is sufficiently rich or powerful) money and then control a global hegemony with it.
Crypto is not a solution to every problem and it definitely makes some new ones, but it sure would make for an interesting redistribution of power. I think there reaches a point where the levers of the modern currency system are much, much too attractive for human governments to be trusted with.
No that's not what I was saying and this is one of the most terrible things about any cryptocurrency discussion. People can't seem to avoid viewing it as something "opposed" to any current financial system, when that's not true. Cryptocurrency at best is the same as the current financial system and that's a huge stretch if you can somehow avoid all the negative externalities created by the insistence on using blockchains. So I would really suggest you avoid this angle when talking about this. Yes, all money is technically "fake". The difference is that real currencies that function as currencies are backed by some kind of real productive human activity to sustain that thing. Cryptocurrency by definition is not this, and it never can be unless you discard the fundamental concepts of it.
>but it sure would make for an interesting redistribution of power.
No not really. If you define "interesting" as something unpredictable and dramatic, then it would be more interesting to have the government raise tax rates to 99% and then randomly redistribute the proceeds via lottery. But nobody wants to talk about that because it doesn't require any kind of tech solutionism like cryptocurrency does. And also it would just be awful for most people. But hey, if you just want to convince some rich people to voluntarily pool their money into a trust that then redistributes it via lottery, you might as skip straight to that and avoid all the cryptocurrency shenanigans.
As for your next point, I'm not sure in what sense our current currency is backed by real human activity in a way that crypto is not. Currency is backed by bullets, bombs, and bayonets ( and sometimes softly spoken implications of the aforementioned alliteration). I guess that's a sort of human activity.
"But the regular financial system is a scam too!"
It has lots of flaws, but it grew organically over thousands of years, and so did regulation that offers some reasonable protection that lets people use currency without massive risk of getting scammed (I'm sure there is a pedantic counterpoint to this, but overall, people get by on real money, much better than if they "invested" - because that's all you can do, you cant actually transact in any normal way - in the current crypto nonsense.)
Anyway, if your best argument is that real money is also a scam, it's hard to believe anyone would be lining up to switch to your scam
Cryptocurrency is not an industry and doesn't have any good parts. The technology itself is useless and universally bad for any practical purpose. It solves no problems, it only creates them. The "good things" done by companies using cryptocurrency are in spite of the technology, not because of it. Some companies don't even seem to bother with this though, and I'll call those out specifically.
I would also call out a virus-scanning company if we found out they were secretly developing and deploying the viruses on the side and then selling the solution to increase their own profits. The same thing is happening here with a lot of blockchain products except they aren't even trying to keep it a secret what they're doing.