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.
Wait until you hear about the energy cost of traditional finances.
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.
Bitcoin wastes so much energy, I think all normal payment systems combined use less energy than it.
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.
Perhaps, but it’s no more silly than comparing something’s energy usage to Norway.
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.