Physically impossible: yes - you've suggested using a currency made by the infinitely wasteful PoW system to finance the power used to compute something useful. You might as well try to fly by pulling on the arms of your chair.
Witness Moscow commuters not being able to enter their metro as Apple Pay cuts them off.
Witness the AML surveillance regime shutting out entire countries:
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2020/10/23/money-reimagined-...
Per your example, ok Apple Pay got cut off. Is the transit system going to support crypto? Will they be able to run their business and make that transition with regulators? It’s a drastic measure that cuts one off from the structures that they physically exist in, and unless those structures are overall crypto-supportive, they would just be putting themselves further between a rock and hard place (which as we’ve seen by the lack of serious business adoption, companies and orgs are not really willing to take that risk in any meaningful way)
Edit: I agree with your use of the term “regime” and am not arguing against the sentiment of your point. Just that I don’t think crypto actually has the backbone to solve it, there’s not enough physical-world tie in yet for it to have the leverage it needs to truly overcome the global financial regimes that are neck-deep in fiat and physical assets that actually impact everyday peoples’ lives.
That's the big question. But assuming for a moment that crypto can act as a substitute for traditional centralized payment systems, then it has significant advantages in some contexts over those systems.
Except that, fundamentally, distributed permission-less systems can't come close to the computational efficiency of centralized systems. So this is like "assuming perpetual motion machines existed, we could build a post-scarcity society" levels of assumption.
With zk-proofs, the redundancy of a blockchain can be significantly reduced without comprimising security. What redundancy remains provides the high process integrity that critical applications like financial transactions require.
It’s been around for a bit already, why is it not more widely adopted compared to BTC/ETH, any thoughts?
https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-...
zcash initially used zk-proofs only for privacy. It is only now looking to utilize it for scalability.
The same old behaviour should be applied to machines, it doesn't matter how much resource a machine takes to do the job, what is important is the output. The pay should not be X*Watts, but X agreed in advance for training that specific neural network, this type of market incentives evolution, where the machines that can do the same job with lower resources have the lower hand
In the past nearly everyone was a serf and they provided their goods/services to their lieges in exchange for basic needs like having someplace to live.
In the present it's pretty much the same thing, except with us serfs being paid wages (which we then end up spending most of as rent and taxes) and serving multiple lieges.
In this scenario, labor power has been replaced by GPU power, which can be measured in terms of electricity. Everything from ordering a meal at a restaurant to building a house to designing a new computer system can be measured this way, and the price of everything is tightly coupled to the price of electricity and the price of compute.
Under these conditions, it might make sense that programs/robots would incorporate smart contracts or participate in some sort of generalized proof-of-work system to finance themselves. Running a program would require currency as input to cover the computational cost of actually running the program, even if the program is open source.
That's where I see this going. Traditional currency is great for incentivizing human labor, but the problem is it's not designed to be programmable.