Can I buy a pizza with it or pay my bills with it? Can my employer pay me in it? Or is it just an “emperor’s new clothes” thing? I just don’t see the tangible value in it. Rhetorical questions, BTW, I know you can’t buy a pizza with it, at least outside of some edge cases that I’m not aware of.

I thought what made money money was everyone agreed it was valuable and was willing to exchange it for goods and services directly. I don’t see that with crypto.

  • Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    11 hours ago

    Bitcoin alone uses more electricity than Norway.

    And that electricity is mostly from burning coal, so crypto is great for creating global warming

    • dhork@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      3 hours ago

      Bitcoin burns so much energy because it’s developers are stubborn. It’s really that simple. Ethereum transitioned to a different algorithm that uses a fraction of that energy and only a few dorks care.

      • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        16
        ·
        11 hours ago

        This is a silly thing to say. Normal payment processing uses more energy, but that’s only because there are many, many more payments going through it. It’s orders of magnitude more energy-efficient than crypto.

          • JennyLaFae@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            5 hours ago

            Bitcoin wastes so much energy because it’s proof of work based which to my understanding is basically a bunch of computers churning out answers competing to be “first and correct” in order to print coins.

            I like the idea of decentralized currency but the current execution of cryptocurrency leaves much to be desired.

        • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          9 hours ago

          Bitcoin in specific doesn’t scale, but other things like Bitcoin Cash scale without increasing the energy usage, because the energy cost of PoW Blockchains comes from their security, not from the scale, so doing 1 or thousands of transactions costs the same.

          Plus, things like Ethereum have migrated to PoS which uses very small amount of energy comparable and also scales without increasing energy costs.