This community is nowhere near consensus on this matter. A small minority of loud naysayers is.

> This community is nowhere near consensus on this matter. A small minority of loud naysayers is

There's an information bubble. It's not the crypto skeptics. There's a reason when governments around the world have moved to ban crypto there's been little to no popular resistance beyond angry 4channers.

Substantually more governments have invested time, money, and regulatory effort into the crypto ecosystem than have banned it.

The facts don't support the narrative to which you seem to be attached.

a16z is a large investor in the space and proponent, as well as several other prominent tech investment firms. Are they angry 4channers?

It's ok to be personally against it, but please don't misrepresent the facts.

> more governments have invested time, money, and regulatory effort into the crypto ecosystem than have banned it

Lots of chatting. Looking at actual dollars and laws, we're weighing the elephants of China, India and increasingly the EU against...Singapore, El Salvador and Malta?

Outside young men, disproportionately minorities, crypto has a limited beachhead [1]. It was an easy money phenomena with historic comparison. We're now seeing the regulatory mood shifting decisively against it with limited competent pushback.

> a16z is a large investor in the space and proponent

They're notable for where they're prominent and where they're not. Aggressive fundraising followed by SoftBank/Tiger style deployment. Tweets and blog posts galore. Yet middling returns, even on an internal basis, and absolutely zero presence worth mentioning in D.C.

I'm no greybeard. But I've worked in finance long enough to see the game they're playing.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/11/16-of-ameri...

I don't think it is a minority. In my personal and work life, it does seem to be something like 80/20 or 90/10.

You might be right though, it's impossible to tell without doing some kind of vaguely rigorous poll.

> Only 100000x less efficiently.

You're being too kind to crypto there, I think, by a few orders of magnitude.

Only 2^200 times less efficiently (even that's generous).

I'd say between 1e7 and 1e11. 1e5 is too generous, 1e60 is way too harsh.

When a fundamental part of token generation is brute-forcing secure hashes?

Yes, but you still need, say, one computer to run what Bitcoin does (without the PoW hashing - just checking and recording 5 transactions per second). BTC uses around 15 GW currently, a computer say 15 to 150 W, so we are talking a factor of 1e9 (Giga) to 1e10.