What's the incentive to create it without something like Bitcoin mining, which can be deployed practically anywhere with an energy source and internet connection, to balance out the costs of doing so? Even if there are better uses, if we can't transport the energy now then it's pointless to build new stranded energy sources. Bitcoin provides the incentive to start that development now. Maybe in the future, batteries will offer a better use of the energy, and won't we be glad to have the existing energy source as soon as that happens?

You misunderstand the problems with energy production, we already produce excess. The plant produces a fix amount of KwH, wether it's used or not. So some of it isn't used, and is considered excess.

It can be used to do anything, but for some reason you want it to do crypto.

The excess can’t be used for ‘anything’, just for the types of flexible demand that can quickly migrate across space and/or time.

The shady nature of what often goes on in crypto has a lot more to do with human nature than the technology of trustless distributed ledgers. It's still a wild west out there, and we weren't exactly model citizens during the literal wild west either.

There's no fundamental law that says a technology must be abused, that's human choice.

BTW another choice is Bitcoin choosing to stay with extremely wasteful proof of work consensus mechanism, when proof of stake by all indications seems to work too. Again that's not something fundamentally flawed with crypto, that's people making greedy decisions because they're balls deep invested in it.

I find it extremely disappointing how even the HN crowd struggle to distinguish ubiquitous human greed from the problem crypto solves and its potential uses.

But crypto serve no purpose that isn't best served by an existing solution. Feel free to keep writing novels about scams.

Thanks for proving my point so vividly.

Maybe my hope regarding HN being one of the last places for civilised and nuanced discussion is misplaced, and it sure seems to be changing in recent years.

You still don’t give an obvious use case for cryptocurrencies (beyond the math being interesting). You are right that most technologies are not inherently evil but the same holds for „traditional“ banking including credit. There are plenty of customer-owned banks and there is no reason a transparent, fair and secure alternative to visa couldn’t exist if someone bothered to build it instead of some power hungry crypto scam.