Cryptocurrency as an open source form of money should have been more popular.
However, unfortunately I would now say that it's been co-opted by US-centric grifters/charlatans/hustlers.
The grifters need to go, but the crypto community doesn't really seem to want this to happen, as if the movement has been co-opted by these exact types of people.
Sidenote: I would hazard a guess that the people memeing about "oh my energy use" haven't looked into it with all that much detail. Fiat is MUCH worse in this position.
> Sidenote: I would hazard a guess that the people memeing about "oh my energy use" haven't looked into it with all that much detail. Fiat is MUCH worse in this position.
No, fiat is processing literally millions of times the amount of transactions of BTC & ETH combined for a fraction of the energy use. Sure, the whole financial sector is larger in energy use than BTC and ETH, but most of that is all the parts that BTC and ETH don't cover at all - insurance, loans, risk eval, customer support, investments, KYC and AML, and many other functions that are crucial to the economy.