Technology

Your position was clear.

I'm not sure how else you'd prefer someone to call out untruths that you've posted. It's either calling you a liar, or some version of saying you're talking out your ass, or what not. But you're right, that's what I was saying. FWIW, I don't think it's lying the way Trump lies; I think there's just a lot of uninformed knee-jerk reactionism. For example, you talk about processing times; have you ever heard of Lightning? It's a crypto used a lot in Nostr and which has instant transfer times.

My point is that I you're arguing a point that is easily refuted, when you have other points that are reasonable and justifiable. I could argue against the other points, too; for example, I could bring up proof-of-stake crypto-currencies which do not have huge energy use, and which haveno more energy footprint than the SSL transactions that you're using constantly, every day. But it would be a harder arguement for me to make because the original cryptocoin, Bitcoin, is proof-of-work and has had a huge eco impact.

And I might not try to argue that unless I thought you were open to discussing the topic in good faith. Which I don't believe you are; I think you've already made up your mind on the topic, and now all that's left is evangelism.

I do have a question, though: do you understand how blockchains work, and the what the various kinds of proofs are? Not in the "could you program it" sense, but in general, like could you describe how they work to someone over beer? Or have you just read a lot about how bad they are? How much of your opinion is based on your social media filter biases?

Also I really don’t appreciate your passive aggressive way of calling me a liar

They're not wrong to do so when most of your points are outdated or crap:

the overhead for making the transaction is just a non-starter

Outdated

if the power goes out, your wallet goes with it

Bullshit

For a decentralized currency, people sure do love centralizing under large exchanges, and the massive losses, thefts, fraud, etc. have shown that no matter how “decentralized” it’s supposed to be, it’s still susceptible to the same bullshit as any other currency

Privacy coins are the best way to live the dream of fungible secure currency, which is why they're being suppressed. All the others are an experiment in how to monitor transactions more deeply.

Its high profile association with grifters, scammers, malware, and dark web shenanigans has completely soured its image in the public mind

If I may don a tin foil hat, likely left rampant by design. The proof of concept has been done, the tech works and has been in the hands of the public long enough that it's normalized. This may be to pave the way for countries to replace their currency with "legit" crypto versions in the next decade or two, which requires putting a bullet in the head of the rest.

It’s entirely a speculative investment scam now.

If you talk in absolutes you're destined to be wrong.

The issue with retail is how long it takes for a bitcoin transaction to be confirmed. The overhead simply isn’t feasible. A vendor isn’t going to sit around an wait an hour for confirmation that payment has been received.

Outdated.

And yes, let me be perfectly clear: I absolutely do want cryptocurrency to fail. That’s not about being a shill for government hegemony. It’s about there being literally no inherent good in it, either in principle or in practice. From the fact that it consumes more energy than entire countries and pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere than entire major industries, to the environmental impact of increased mining for rare earths, increased manufacturing strain, and supply chain disruption due to the demand for the chips to drive the miners.

At some point PoW will probably die a death and PoS will be all that remains. PoS is cheap.

I think a lot of people just have difficulty decoupling a few separate but connected ideas like crypto being internet money, from the blockchain as a ledger, and transaction records as a means of proof.

What people really need is a ledger for cash itself, where notes can be scanned and then structured into a transaction and popped into the blockchain where said transaction ID gets verified and printed out like an EFTPOS note.

If that sounds like we're going full circle it's probably because everything becomes harder but not always necessarily better with the more you DIY.

there are decentralized currencies that work perfectly well without wasting tons of energy, although I agree that none have yet achieved the necessary scale to actually replace current centralized money systems. These currencies might find a niche that doesn't need the capacity to handle thousands of transactions per second, or perhaps one of the many many different ways to scale these currencies that are currently being worked on will end up being good enough (they aren't, yet)