MorbidCuriosity

I think the last hurdles will be sentience and a theory of the mind. Theory of the mind is probably something that a LM could predict given enough data, but sentience? I don't think we understand enough about our own sentience for us to create it in a machine.

That's a good point, I hadn't considered the limits of GPT's memory.

Yes. Infinity is weird.

The problem is a catch 22, you cannot be stable until you gain volume and you cannot gain volume until you are stable.

Simply using a smart contract between two parties doesn't give the underlying coin stability, and it introduces the risk that one party ends up with an undervalued/overvalued coin. The average person will still earn in dollars, shop in dollars, pay tax in dollars and do accounts in dollars. The demand for crypto as a result will be restricted to speculators, criminals and (some) geeks. I cannot see stability anywhere on the horizon.

Their value is so volatile because they have no intrinsic value, no government (that I am aware of) is demanding tax paid in a cryptocoin. There is also no mechanism for increasing the value of the coin, through a central bank interest rate. There's also no means to increase the supply (after mining runs out) to allow for economic expansion, eventually you will end up with run away inflation, with no mechanism to control it. Honestly they don't work as currencies, they are speculative assets underpinned by some interesting but largely redundant technology.

Proof of stake is built on trust, much like the financial system, so why reinvent the wheel for a corruptible ledger of a non-trustless, non-currency?

No cryptocurrency is a monetary system, they aren't even a functioning currency. For that to happen they would need to fulfill three functions that currently none do. Namely:

A means of exchange A unit of account A store of value

They satisfy the first but not the other two. I cannot know for sure what value my coins have on any given day, let alone what they are likely to be valued at by next year. Thus they do not act as a store of value nor a unit of account.

If it takes the electricity consumption of Denmark to secure less than $10bn in transactions, how much will it take to replace the $6tn daily Forex volumes?

Honestly I wish people would realise how utterly pointless crypto is as a currency. Maybe then I'll get a cheap graphics card.