> The same was said over and over on the nascent days of the internet, about how it facilitated anonymity so easily and how it would be used by criminals.

There's 2 things I want to say about this comment:

1. Those accusations were not wrong. In the same sense that we have pretty clear evidence that a lot of the value injected into bitcoin and stored there is via money laundering.

2. Unlike proof of work currency blockchains, the internet clearly delivered and had no direct theoretical challenges to its very existence that people subsequently and fervently denied.

Proof of work is a bad idea. It's been discredited. It doesn't do what people thought it did. And it's MUCH too expensive to keep doing.