Just a thought, if we use even 1% of all computing power that is currently being used for mining cryptocurrency, what can it be used to accomplished?
> Subjective
There is no point in debating this. People are simply putting their money where their mouth is.
So what do you get? People trusting "centralized" front doors to something distributed. Like coinbase or any of the other exchanges. Now you have literally the worst of both worlds. Centralized but still slower and more expensive, + lack of regulation. I'm just not seeing it as ever being useful.
It has no social value and never will.
It doesn't. I just think the value of blockchains is near zero. I have yet to hear of any problem that isn't better solved with a normal database.
It can make a large hostile network with extremely high computation resources act like a single computer with the performance of a 10 year old desktop.
In the case of PoW cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, the token is the reward for the useful application: verifying a series of transactions.
There is a practical (as close as we can get) non-zero cost for moving bits around the internet. It seems like there should be a similar mechanism for building trust in the blockchain.