[jrsj]

This is a common opinion but I think many miss the purpose of proof of work. You get compensated for making the network more resilient. Other systems do this to a lesser extent with a combination of proof of stake and validated, but at a tradeoff of being less decentralized. Ultimately this is a necessary cost for developing the technology, and cryptocurrency & tokenization are necessary to facilitate a more decentralized internet. It’s unfortunate this has begun to take off while we are still in the process of transitioning to green energy, but that will happen soon and generally speaking miners are doing it faster than the rest of the economy. Negative environmental impacts of crypto are because of bad government energy policy, not the technology itself.

As far as it being “Monopoly money”, >40% of US dollars were created since the start of the pandemic. Yes, there’s a lot of technical details there and most of that money isn’t “in circulation” and many would argue that the way this is being done shouldn’t be inflationary, but it’s never been done at this scale and we do have the worst inflation in 40 years so it may be a contributing factor. Contrast this with Bitcoin which has a fixed known supply, or other crypto currencies or tokens which may exist primarily for their utility, and IMO “Monopoly money” isn’t a fair characterization. Even BTC which has little in terms of “utility” can be used to move money equivalent to billions of dollars a far lower cost than the traditional financial system so it has its advantages.

At least blockchain related technologies enable new use cases, IMO it would be more fair to blame something like Electron and inefficient web technology replacements for native apps for being inefficient and wasting energy. But I wouldn’t do that either, it’s silly. The people making software don’t control energy policy and that’s the real issue.