Great. Is this system that provides, so far, minimal to no advantage over other transaction systems worth expending the same electric power that a small developed country (Portugal) uses?
I do agree that a system that used less energy would be better. When it's available, and widely enough accepted, I'll switch.
> And about anonymity. Yes, Bitcoin itself is not at all anonymous. Everything's in the public blockchain. But one can use mixing services, through Tor, and get different Bitcoin. Which aren't linked to the starting Bitcoin, or to any identity or IPv4 address that's linked to the user in meatspace. Maybe it's not perfect, but it's good enough for me.
So yes, usably anonymous.
Wait, you're saying they're criminals? I wonder why the bitcoin guys aren't.
People hurting others (what's criminal to me) will use any system that's secure, hidden, anonymous, etc. Tor is a good example. But in a sense, they serve as canaries for other users.
There are techniques to try to find that out, but they're not infallible.
What's the overall energy expenditure for all fiat production,maintenance, asset storage (gold), mining of assets etc?
There are some interesting developments in the crypto sphere moving away from high energy proof or work to a holding system (Proof of stake).
I like to think of myself as caring about ecosystems. But after decades of work on decentralized electronic payment systems, Bitcoin is what we got.
I'm no expert, but I suspect that the Bitcoin protocol could be tweaked to make humongous mining operations unprofitable. But the chances of that are likely not so great.
I do hope that proof-of-stake systems will develop. Stake still means wealth, but at least it's not wealth that's funding energy-intensive proof-of-work.