| >and you can trust your politicians to not undermine this currency by bad economic policies and/or creating very high inflation. Congratulations! However, a large part of earth's population do not enjoy this stability. And how do cryptocurrencies, fluctuating between extremes of overblown worth and deep falls at a whim solve this problem exactly? >For them crypto offers a way to store wealth No they don't, because the tokens by themselves are worthless, as they do not enjoy a backing entity (like real currencies) and have no intrinsic worth (like gold). Since their entire worth depends on what others are willing to pay, "crypto" is, and always will be, a null-sum-game...for every penny someone makes, someone else has to lose one. >How much energy would you say the financial system in your country use in order to keep a sound ledger and enforce the monetary rules & policies? I know that BTC uses up the energy equivalent of an entire nation like New Zealand. So this single crypto currency alone requires as much power as a country, which has a banking system, communications infrastructure, public services, hotels, supermarkets, street lights, air conditioned homes, foundries, factories, agriculture and transportation. So no, I do not need to know how much energy my country spends on its banking system energy-wise to say with absolute certainty that it's orders of magnitude less than "crypto". >Bitcoin uses less energy than the gold industry The "gold industry" excavates, cleans and prepares a resource that has widespread applications in electronics, metallurgy and science. The device you wrote your post on most likely has gold inside it, as do most electronics we use on a daily basis. So other than "crypto", this industry thus produces something of ACTUAL, TANGIBLE AND INTRINSIC WORTH. >Energy usage should also not be equated to bad energy production Yes it should, because every KWh wasted on "crypto" is energy not available elsewhere. If we took the energy equivalent wasted on it, and used it to power de-salination plants, we could probably provide clean drinking water to hundreds of millions of people. |