I disagree that Ethereum is "scam and junk." Ethereum's ability to auto-execute and auto-terminate swap contracts, for example, is totally brilliant.
Jeremy can probably tell us why nobody is making new proof of work cryptocurrencies.
I have no problem agreeing that Bitcoin is all one needs to achieve the concept of "digital gold" and to underpin the principles of crypto-anarchy.
Well the technology in Ethereum is not unique. It is not unique to the point that BTC for awhile has been able to incorporate similar but slightly different and functionally the same actions as ETH. But other blockchains do it for a lot less money. Polygon is very popular in corporate development.
To me it is the same issue as with XRP. XRP does not gain money value because it is used as a settlement network. You are on and off in an incredibly short amount of time, down to mere seconds. The whole point is to skip clearing houses and not have value shift so it is extremely cheap in GAS fees and preferably more stable. ETH has steep gas fees on any given day so it has issues there. People would always say, "banks are so rich they do not care about gas fees" which seems to be a gross misunderstanding of the banking industry - tolerating costs is different than willingly absorbing them. So the implementation has a lot to do with it all, and if it can compete with trad finance. Honestly I am not completely sure why they are/have not adopted more and started using it for more things because some of this seems like pretty easily solved problems. Hire me, we will work on it.
Short term I am bullish on ETH, long term not so much. I think the fact it has taken this long for people to see any appeal in BTC means ETH lags it a lot. It is about 7 years younger as well.
Of course they pay for it, but if you're not convinced of the value of the concept it looks like a colossal waste of energy, land and resources. It's more like turning the tube amp on for a few years in a hot climate while never listening to it. You get to run the air conditioner more too! Once the tubes are burned out you can save those as proof of work. You can then move up to a large facility with thousands of tube amps to produce burned out tubes faster, so long as people keep buying them for some reason.
Hey, maybe a smart use of all this energy used to mine crypto could be to warm apartment buildings or shopping malls in cold climates. They have to heat them somehow.
Oh yes, just what we need, another excuse to try to keep shopping malls alive... If you want to really make that case you might as well just embrace your true misanthropy and say humans are a colossal waste. Just FYI BTC is the industry leader in using "renewable" energy - although wind should be outright banned and dismantled ASAP as it is the only true ecological disaster here.
I think a lot of people would like to integrate mining into buildings etc but truth is the power infrastructure is not there.
We are entitled to our own opinions but not our own facts. Every extra ton of CO2 we add to the atmosphere is contributing to a climate disaster. Bitcoin is needlessly adding millions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. Assuming that bitcoin has some legitimate purpose other than speculation, money laundering and blackmail, the blockchain calculations could be done with far less energy use. It is a fact that bitcoin is doing enormous damage to the future of our planet.
Meh. At this point I think anyone taking a rational look can see that CO2 scares are about tax credits and essentially an obfuscated way to legally pollute the environment since it is an amorphous moving target that isn't represented by the numbers. Short examples: hybrids are less CO2 but the push is on EVs, plastic bag bans turned into making the customer pay for bags that are 100x thicker plastic so they now pay to pollute the environment 100x more, etc.
As pointed out above BTC actually does a lot of hydro etc. The miners can be recycled to a certain degree, or the equipment if oil bathed is reused semi-indefinitely. It is absolutely nothing compared to the coming AI craze that will result in all technological faucets being used to drive us insane with ads and stuff.
Reports go back and forth on BTC energy but it is somewhere between half and 56x less than trad forms. People say it services less people but the irony is to service people on BTC or other cryptos it only uses the energy they already use on computer and phones. The new arguments are focused around CO2 because then they can claim new facilities, infrastructure, and miner deployments in the figured to offset the fact the electricity itself is not that high.
Honestly unless you have a minor background in something you could not really pick apart all the ridiculous claims from facts. Like
this place starts the article with utter nonsense of how BTC works, very loosely extrapolated from reality in such a way it makes no real sense. I actually stopped right there because I know that anyone going to that big of an effort to confuse a reader has nothing but nefariously biased content to provide. That or the person has an IQ of 65 and somehow an overcapacity ability to read and write. Honestly I have no idea how someone could unintentionally be like that short of being an actual alien to earth. I am not taking the time to decode their scramble of reality. One of the other sites claiming how bad BTC is told me my browser is out of date - like that would make any difference for displaying text - when it is in fact not and they are out of date morons that want everyone on Chrome and Edge so they can track and sell your data.
I guess I will finish with a comment on the ridiculous claims of bad acting with BTC. Has it been used for bad acts a few times? Yes. But only because bank transactions can be reversed - which should make you uneasy that they just decide what happens with your money. The reality is more like this... Don't quote me on who said it, I think an idiot politician was pointing out some cartel used cryptocurrency for something like $680k and that was
bad but neglected the fact that it made up less than 10% of their transacted money in their evil empire. All that tells us is that some of their relationships used something other than USD, which could have just of easily been any other currency. The reality is the most crimes world wide are probably backed by USD, whether or not the USA is supporting them or not. Here is some fire to the flame, that 10% crypto could have all been USDC or USDT which is an onchain version of USD, which both creators have to hold USD balances equal to the USDC/USDT on chain.... so the USD representation may have been significantly higher.
