[BorgHunter]

> The invention of cryptocurrencies (specifically Bitcoin at least) is not to replace banks, but to replace the way transactions happens.

This is a wonderful hypothetical in much the same way as spherical cows, but in the real world today, crypto is treated as a (quite volatile) speculative asset, not a way to transact everyday business. The world does desperately need fast payment processing that doesn't involve companies like Visa or MasterCard skimming off the top every time to enrich themselves and dictating one-sided terms to others (hello, OnlyFans), but I'm not seeing any evidence that crypto is poised to handle that. It's too risky. And the compatibility layer with legacy currency is too unwieldy: Every time you convert to regular currency you generate a taxable event, which is fine if you treat crypto as akin to a stock, but it'll make tax time hell if you're buying groceries and lattes and gas with it. It's not impossible to pass laws to make the best-case for crypto happen, but that would require a lot of political will that I just don't see happening; too many people benefit from the current system.

If there's a cryptocurrency that solves those problems, please let me know, I'd be interested to hear about it. But the current players all just seem like speculative bubbles for wealthy techbros to play around with. Many of which are driving electricity consumption for mining, which has, shall we say, some environmental downsides.