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> I still think that, as a concept, it's dumb as shit, even thought it was profitable for me. I just got lucky. What, specifically, do you find dumb as shit? I don't want to come across as confrontational here, but it's difficult to gauge how much a person knows about blockchain, its uses, current pitfalls, and the technology's mission. And these conversations usually end up in one of two ways for me depending upon how much the person on the other end actually knows. Either they know next to nothing besides how to buy and sell it, in which case, the conversation almost always tends to lean into pointless vitriol; or they actually know a lot about the current crypto industry, see it for all its weaknesses and none of the potential, and are willing to have a civil conversation. Frankly, like the other user, I'm in the boat of thinking that our current financial system is in desperate need of some kind of overhaul. Blockchain/crypto could be a part of that overhaul, but doesn't necessarily have to be. But it's clear to me that something needs to change. Anyway, I'm just always curious about other people's thoughts. I'd say the majority of people I talk to on this topic though just jump straight to abusing the person that's pro-blockchain-as-a-concept without having substantial reason for disliking it besides: 1) it's a huge waste of the world's non-renewable energy resources, which is not necessarily true, it's mostly only true for blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum PoW, there are blockchains that require substantially fewer resources to be a player on the chain. 2) That crypto prices fluctuate too much when cashing back out to fiat. This argument seems short-sighted, because in a possibly ideal situation you would never need to liquidate to a fiat. In an possible future (for blockchain) you would be able to pay for your morning coffee at a PoS terminal using your crypto wallet directly and there's possibly a government system that lays out the purchasing power of a coin. I use the word "possibly" a lot here to point out that there are probably competing theories on ideal implementations of crypto as a general and worldwide currency. 3) That the transactions per second (TPS) that a blockchain can handle aren't comparable to systems like VISA. That seems true, for now. Blockchain is still very much in the early stages of development, culturally and technologically. Keep in mind, fiat currencies have been around for nearly a millennia. A technical solution to replace an ancient system needs engineering time and public adoption. If you have other reasons for thinking blockchain/cryptocurrency is dumb as shit, I'm very interested. And genuinely, I'm not being sardonic or anything else when I say that. |
1) PoW is the only way that is actually decentralized. If you want decentralized power over the currency - PoS will never work on a long time horizon, because you'd need some way of representing stake that is just impossible. As far as the whole "waste" complaint: relative to what? I've never seen a comparative study that included the entirety of the existing financial system. The academic papers I have seen complaining about bitcoin were full of comically bad errors: using geolocation to try and pin mining operations to nearest power plants, estimating hashes per watt based on FPGA or first gen ASIC miners, etc.
2) Bitcoin volatility has been going down every year, which makes sense given wider participation. Volatility is obviously different from price.
3) Bitcoin has had the capability for offchain transactions a long time now - using smart contracts with onchain settlement, so this really isn't a real concern any longer.