Welcome to HN, where crypto is the devil and must be eradicated at all costs. Anyone who thinks otherwise here is either perceived to be an idiot or a grifter.
It should, perhaps, tell you something that a community with one of the most highly concentrated populations of technically literate people on the internet are so vehemently against a technology.
Crypto is just a paperclip maximizer for silicon and electrons that does what traditional companies have been doing for at least 60 years. Only 100000x less efficiently.
> This community is nowhere near consensus on this matter. A small minority of loud naysayers is
There's an information bubble. It's not the crypto skeptics. There's a reason when governments around the world have moved to ban crypto there's been little to no popular resistance beyond angry 4channers.
> more governments have invested time, money, and regulatory effort into the crypto ecosystem than have banned it
Lots of chatting. Looking at actual dollars and laws, we're weighing the elephants of China, India and increasingly the EU against...Singapore, El Salvador and Malta?
Outside young men, disproportionately minorities, crypto has a limited beachhead [1]. It was an easy money phenomena with historic comparison. We're now seeing the regulatory mood shifting decisively against it with limited competent pushback.
> a16z is a large investor in the space and proponent
They're notable for where they're prominent and where they're not. Aggressive fundraising followed by SoftBank/Tiger style deployment. Tweets and blog posts galore. Yet middling returns, even on an internal basis, and absolutely zero presence worth mentioning in D.C.
I'm no greybeard. But I've worked in finance long enough to see the game they're playing.
Yes, but you still need, say, one computer to run what Bitcoin does (without the PoW hashing - just checking and recording 5 transactions per second). BTC uses around 15 GW currently, a computer say 15 to 150 W, so we are talking a factor of 1e9 (Giga) to 1e10.
Crypto is just a paperclip maximizer for silicon and electrons that does what traditional companies have been doing for at least 60 years. Only 100000x less efficiently.