[Scarblac]

> For all the various ills it is sometimes associated with, cryptocurrency remains the only frictionless, 100% transparent, publicly accessible international monetary and payment system.

Its insane energy use, slow speed, high transaction costs, and structural inability to have any legal oversight (for eg reversing fraudulent payments) amount to a huge amount of friction.

And the existence of unknown entities with huge wallets that could pump or crash the price of a coin on a whim also means its not 100% transparent.

Is it money? I would say no, but opinions on that can differ.

[K0balt]

There are plenty of cryptocurrencies that do not suffer from insane energy use, slow transactions, or lack of oversight… and governments have not historically been very good about crashing currency valuations, if not on a whim than with a catastrophic plan. There are stablecoins that are verifiably and transparently backed, which is more than I can say for any extant government issued currency.

But sure, there are lousy performers in the space, just as the banking system is a poor performer in energy use and speed for many kinds of transactions.

For example, If you stack up the energy use of financial institutions, many SOTA cryptocurrency systems compare extremely favourably on a per transaction basis.

I think people easily forget that the space is not at all homogeneous, and there are vast differences between different blockchains and tokenisation systems.

Lumping them all together is like saying that all government backed currencies are total crap just because so many currencies have seen catastrophic inflation and counterfeiting in the last century.

Many countries debt backed currency projects are actually fairly stable and well managed.