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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Technology
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I just hope bitcoin will finally die. It's literally just wasting absurd amount of energy, only to allow scammers to scam billions of dollars from victims, and regular people to steal from eachother by investing into it. I mean, if the only use of bitcoin by now is for speculation and investment, then it means that any dollar you made, you literally stole from someone else who will be left with useless bitcoin once it's all over. There's no value, and with the ledger getting bigger and bigger, and bitcoin more expensive to mine, it will eventually be worthless. And we all know it, so anyone who makes thousands of dollars, there's someone who probably financially ruined himself by making a wrong and stupid investment at the wrong time.
I hate crypto so much :D.
You can exchange it for goods and services in the same way as the dollar. Which is the goal of it in the first place. Disregarding the cost for the sake of this point, it functions in a similar way as the dollar, which you could argue is also just used for speculation, but it would be equally inaccurate. Then there is describing bitcoin as all of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, which is also incorrect. It's an evolving technology, and the system bitcoin uses is legacy and expensive, and is currently being kept alive by being the first in the space, money interests wanting to keep it dominant because of investment and a horde of cultlike followers. However, in the ethereum ecosystem, transactions keep getting cheaper through layer 2 protocols and upgrades to the system. It uses proof of stake which is vastly cheaper. I think there certainly are valid arguments against cryprocurrency, but the stuff everyone keeps NPC copypasting is generally nonsense.
But you can't disregard the cost. No big box retailer is going to start accepting BTC transactions at the point of sale. It takes too long, and is too resource intensive. So you're essentially limited to secondary markets or person-to-person transactions where seconds in processing the transaction don't count. Not to mention the volatility of the exchange rate. A business or a government aren't going to accept that the currency they accepted today could potentially be worth half its value tomorrow. Without some sort of major catastrophic world event, something like that isn't going to happen to the dollar. That kind of shit destabilizes entire economies and nations.
There's also the issue of reputation. Regardless of validity, cryptocurrency is seen as something used for criminal activity. If your local city government said they'd start accepting BTC for your water bill or trash bill, the majority of average folk are going to think "that stuff people buy drugs with on the Internet?"
BTC has never been and will never be viable as a mass market currency system.
I agree, BTC is awful. But I also think its just a starting point for something that has the potential to become much better.