'The majority of cars worldwide are not electric. They are all petrol and diesel cars. That means that ALL cars are bad for the environment and that will not change and thus should be all banned.'
Not all cryptocurrency projects are scams, just like not all cars are burning up the planet.
The absolutism towards whether if all cryptocurrency projects will go away due to a 'bUnCH OF Scam PrOjEctS' or 'it's ALl a scAm™' is just as silly as suggesting that all cryptocurrency projects are guaranteed to survive, 'becAuse iT is the FutURE, bRO™' or 'JUst WaiT fOr ThIs PrOJEct ReAL sooN™'.
I'll tell you that both extremes are incorrect. That is even before accounting for regulations getting involved.
Okay, I'll bite.
What's incorrect at the anti extreme? In other words, what crypto-currency isn't a) burning down our planet and b) disproportionately rewarding early adopters?
It can just take a single example to invalidate that question and Nano [0] perfectly does so. Unlike the others, it is not 'burning down our planet', was not 'pre-mined' / 'pre-allocated' or ever did an ICO back when it was launched. sorry.
Now here's my question to you since I answered yours: Hence your support for the anti crypto-extreme: Are they all going to go away 100% guaranteed despite all the other scam projects existing and with looming regulations on the horizon?
And that's great. But why is everyone and their dog still using proof of work? Large nations worth of power is being burnt to process all the others.
Why would they go away? Regulation, even bans will only disrupt the price, push wallets offshore. While there's an anonymous currency you can throw around, accept K&R payments through, it's going to be popular with tax cheats and criminals for a very, very long time. See: the effect of regulation on drugs.
Are you sure that's an argument not to use 'cryptocurrencies' (since you tried to label all of them as 'burning up the planet' which that was debunked) or was that more to do with those using PoW? It's like asking 'Why is everyone and their dog still driving diesel and petrol cars and trucks, with those still emitting tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, despite the existence of greener alternatives?
> Regulation, even bans will only disrupt the price, push wallets offshore. While there's an anonymous currency you can throw around, accept K&R payments through, it's going to be popular with tax cheats and criminals for a very, very long time.
That's the same way of saying that they are not going away 100% guaranteed and there will be lots of regulatory compliance; exactly what I already said. That's why mining PoW cryptocurrencies are banned in countries like China [0] and Kosovo [1]. Instead with regulations, it is going to get a lot harder for tax cheats, criminals, etc to use their privacy coins as the exchanges will delist them to prevent undesirables from converting it to fiat. [2]
[0] https://fortune.com/2021/11/17/china-bitcoin-mining-ban-cryp...
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59879760
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/31/eu-parliament-vot...
Exactly. More crickets that are unable to respond to my question(s). Is that why you also haven't responded to my latest question and went on to vent your anger on to the latest crypto post?
> I'll tell you that both extremes are incorrect.
Being extreme or not have little bearing on an opinion being correct. Some opinions, such as "murder is bad", are both extreme (they suffer very few exceptions), and correct.
And it happens quite often that the most informed opinions also happen to be the most extreme. And as far as I can tell, this seems to be the case for crypto currencies: the more I look at them, the more I think they cannot be redeemed: to date, I have seen no problem that is best solved by a blockchain, and I increasingly doubt there ever will be.
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> Not all cryptocurrency projects are scams
I can believe that. However, I do believe that all crypto currencies, without even a single exception, are a net bad for the world. If we restrict that to proof-of-waste crypto currencies, that belief is a near certainty.
Long story short, it seems that in practice, all crypto currencies eventually devolve into a pyramid scheme. They're also used as an actual currency, but their volatility is such that it's not very practical to begin with, and that use is so marginal compared to "investment" that the financial freedom gained by people who actually need it is outweighed by the harmful side effects of the pyramid. (We ruin more people than we save.)
Add proof of work (or space-time, or whatever scarce resource you can think of), and you end up with a massive waste of resources on top of that. A waste so massive in fact that it manages to influence electronics prices around the world, not to mention the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network alone, in a world that really really needs to reduce its CO2 emissions. Like right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Sixth_Assessment_Report
They may not be all scams, but as far as I can tell all honest attempts are doomed to fail.
Cryptocurrency is not an industry and doesn't have any good parts. The technology itself is useless and universally bad for any practical purpose. It solves no problems, it only creates them. The "good things" done by companies using cryptocurrency are in spite of the technology, not because of it. Some companies don't even seem to bother with this though, and I'll call those out specifically.
I would also call out a virus-scanning company if we found out they were secretly developing and deploying the viruses on the side and then selling the solution to increase their own profits. The same thing is happening here with a lot of blockchain products except they aren't even trying to keep it a secret what they're doing.