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As the recent GameStop events have shown, it's uncertain who owns how many shares, settlement is slow and error/bezzle-prone, etc. etc. Plus I venture to guess that HFT algorithms do consume country-level amounts of energy as well. Unlike blockchain, it's not surplus electricity from renewables in faraway places. And all that energy does not even improve the whole ledger security.

But hey, unlike the filthy blockchain, it works!/s

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Go read Money Stuff before you spread more misinformation about how the financial system works. There are no counterfeit shares, ownership is obvious except for cases like voting (because a short can pay a negative dividend but can't perform a negative vote), settlement is not error-prone and is slow on purpose (Russia tried real-time settlement and went back to T+2), HFT is literally just a service provider doing inter-temporal mediation between buyers and sellers rather than some evil money-stealing machine. Front-running is not real, naked shorting is super illegal with very few exceptions. If you can't tell me what part of Regulation SHO governs naked shorting, what the bona-fide market maker exception is and when they are required to fulfill a FTD, then you probably shouldn't be talking about this confidently in public.

I am confident we'll know more in few years. Something being merely illegal has never stopped anyone.

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