[danamit]

I am someone from a developing country who regularly used crypto either to get paid, or to pay for things online.

Does crypto have issues? yes. Is it good enough that in occasion it was my preferred payment method? yes.

Crypto community and companies are maybe bad, but if you zoom out into IT overall there is a fair share of greed and misuse. The internet is full of scams, gurus selling courses with false claims, spam emails that drain your grandpa's account, affiliate programs with 70% margin to sell fake products from questionable weight loss ebooks with health-harming diets to fragrances claiming to be perfumes that attract females supported by endless fake video testimonies, online communities encouraging hate, demoralization, and lack of belief in society.

Seem to me that those articles are nothing but status quo bias, does crypto has bad aspects? yes, is it worse than say internet? I don't know.

[KptMarchewa]

Did "gurus selling courses" have 3T market cap?

Did "affiliate programs with 70% margin" emit more CO2 than New Zealand?

Once the scam can cripple whole countries, it becomes dangerous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War

[yieldcrv]

In both of your examples, crypto provides an advancement in live valuation that the other industries cannot.

Despite you making them rhetorical demonizations of crypto, the answers are actually “maybe? we don't know, what does Forrester and other market research firms say, do they have that data?”

(Other times when this is pointed out, people typically reveal that they view everything else as more useful than crypto - which naturally would then include gurus and affiliate programs - so their market size and country size emissions doesn't actually matter when this point is more accurately challenged. Just wondering if you had a more articulate argument or a more predictable one)

[Grimburger]

Doesn't spam email energy usage come in close to 50TWh? That's from memory.

Only decent link I can find on this is from 13 years ago with 33TWh:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...

[KptMarchewa]

And everyone agrees it's waste of time and energy, except actual scammers - spammers, right?

[forum_ghost]

An open and permission-less global monetary network that does not exclude anyone at all, is about as valuable to you as malformed viagra emails?

4 billion people today live under less than ideal circumstances.

Spending a fraction of a percent of global electricity is absolutely worth it. It provides those 4 billion people with access to the financial services that they would otherwise never get.

Nigeria alone has 34+ million users. Just one country.

What, they are all scammers to you?

[Nursie]

> It provides those 4 billion people with access to the financial services that they would otherwise never get.

It demonstrably does not, and with its transaction rate limitations, it cannot.

[forum_ghost]

are you open to new information?

1. Nigeria has 30 MILLION people that use it. Most of the usage is for cross-border transactions. 2. transaction rate limitations only apply to the settlement layer. retail does not need to use it, only very large transactions that need high settlement guarantees.

Lightning network has essentially unlimited tps, currently has close to 1 million (!!) live nodes, and even sub-penny transactions are perfectly viable because fees are even tinier or can be even nil.

Live LN stats: https://1ml.com/

If you truly do care about lives of 4 billion people on the planet, you should at least internalize these basic facts, as you are simply repeating misinformation: tps are low, no traction. it is simply not true.

[Grimburger]

Certainly, but I don't see anyone trying to properly stop it in both cases here?

Amusingly the PoW as we know it in cryptocurrency came from attempts to combat email spam with HashCash, it's clearly referenced in the Bitcoin whitepaper as a precursor.

[hazmazlaz]

I am not sure if I am correctly interpreting your question here, but if I am then I can assure you that a great deal of time/energy/resources are devoted to stopping spamming/scamming, particularly over email. There is an entire public-private industrial sector focused on doing so and many billions of dollars per year are spent towards that end.