[thelamest]

You can only be sure in hindsight which solution is comparatively or net good. Not all hard work done by smart and nice people turns out to be worthwhile. There are always trade-offs and cryptoassets bring them too. You have good reasons to be worried about centralization, but concerns that this technology empowers crime and totalitarianism, just in a different way, are valid too.

[nine_k]

All technical solutions are trade-offs.

See, burning coal is bad for the environment under many angles. But it fed the energy to the industrial revolution, with immense improvements to everyone's quality of life (from running water to advanced medical care). Now it's time to retire it, but it won't be realistic to go from muscle power to nuclear and solar power directly.

Same thing with crypto currency. It's like a steam engine from 1800: large, dirty and inefficient as it is, it already solves real problems.

Now, moving from proof of work to proof of stake is a huge step, like moving from firewood boiler to a turbine. Maybe not a complete perfection yet, but a huge jump in efficiency.

[hnthrow1010]

>it already solves real problems.

That's not true though. Crypto currencies do not solve any real problems in any meaningful sense. The problems it solves are all either problems that were created by crypto itself, due to the insistence on using that particular network architecture (which isn't even good), or are better solved in other ways. Moving to proof of stake fixes one of the fatal flaws in the scheme: the energy usage. All of the other fatal flaws still remain: The inability to do anything about fraud, the disastrous security of smart contracts, the ponzi-like economics, the inherent unfairness of mining/staking, the practical lack of decentralization and vulnerability to 67% attacks, the lack of any kind of legal structure around anything whatsoever, and not to mention that the technology is actively enabling new kinds of crimes like ransomware and evading sanctions on a grand scale...

It's patently obvious that the "tradeoff" for most people is that you get to gamble on the price of a highly speculative asset in exchange for enabling massive amounts of crime. I don't like that tradeoff. As a society, we can collectively decide not to make it.

[nine_k]

Why. Imagine that I lawfully own something valuable which is located in Russia: say, a moderate-size business, or a piece of realty. I want to stop dealing with them, sell the assets, and take away the funds.

My two options are: (1) Fly there, sell stuff, and bring a suitcase of cash. (1) Sell stuff remotely and transfer the payment over Bitcoin. I suspect that the second option is more economical even with the proof-of-work electricity-guzzling proof-of-work BTC network, because two transatlantic flights are even worse.

You'll call this a marginal problem. I'll say that marginal problems are still real, and need solutions.

[hnthrow1010]

Or just trade it for some other asset or currency that isn't crypto? Why are those your only two options? I don't understand how you jumped from "I need to trade something" to "my only option is cash or crypto". Those dots don't line up.

[nine_k]

I specifically used Russia as an example, because transferrimg nearly any fiat currency between it and the West is now blocked, due to the sanctions.

If Swift transfers worked, they could be a preferred alternative.

[hnthrow1010]

The sanctions will also be blocking the legal crypto exchanges from dealing with them as well. So that isn't going to work either. You might respond that you'll just use an illegal crypto exchange, but from that perspective it's not the crypto helping you. It's the illegal exchange, which doesn't actually need crypto to function.

Edit: Also, there's a bit more to unpack here. The transfers from Russia are only a problem with RUB. If you can transfer another currency to them into an offshore bank account then it's not a problem. And I hope you don't transact in RUB anyway, that likely means selling the business back to Putin's war regime, unless you physically go over there and use the proceeds to help the anti-war movement.