Bitcoin's extreme inefficiency (in terms of electricity consumption) is the main reason why I didn't give cryptocurrency a second look when I learned about it several years ago. It never made sense to me that something should have value just because it's expensive to produce. You'd think capitalism would reward efficiency and not punish it.

That said, I think that Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrencies will revolutionize a lot of things including:

- How tech companies are created and who will end up owning them (it will be developers and early adopters instead of VCs and investors).

- It will transform what it means for a project to be open source; the GPL license will become increasingly important.

- It will transform how people think about ownership.

One of the biggest innovations of blockchain technology is that for the first time in history, it has allowed open source projects to have actual financial value. The value so far has been restricted to cryptocurrency projects but it will soon spread to other open source projects.

The value of a coin is not about the coin itself, it's about the community and the network of services that exist around it.