Honestly, it continues to surprise me how clueless most of HN commenters are on this topic.
Once even one of the major chains is on Proof of Stake or Proof of Space or something we can talk about how associating cryptocurrency with PoW is unfair. AFAIK the closest we've come is that Ethereum people started experimenting with proof of stake in December? Things like that are progress but don't do anything to put a dent into the massive electricity and resource squeezes being created by cryptocurrencies.
Cardano, Cosmos, Polkadot are a few protocols that are PoS but are still very early in their development.
> "we're what, over a decade in to the history of cryptocurrency"
I would argue that's not long at all. The internet was technically invented in the 1960s (ARPANET) and TCP/IP went global in the early 1980s. Took a while for things to get to where we are now.
If you look at the five biggest coins by market cap (excluding USDT which is just digital Dollar) then three of them use proof of stake, Cardano, Polkadato and Ripple. Ethereum is actively transitioning to proof of stake.
Bitcoin is the ONLY outlier. Though also the biggest market.
How many other topics that get posted here have the same thing happening??
Why would we want to create another currency system when we feel enslaved to the first one but at the same time aware we are the minority of people, and hold an incredible privilege.
It's easier to pretend you don't understand, or just don't think about it, look the other way and suck on those corporate titties to the tune of 250k USD/year because that's the attitude that got us to the top.
We have a technology that takes thousands - by some measures hundreds of thousands - of times as much power as existing networks for one transaction, that isn't used in a practical day-to-day sense anywhere, and many people are still defending Bitcoin specifically as a successful currency. How much power does it have to consume, how few real-world uses does it have to have, before everyone agrees it could really do with some improvements?
Convincing users to migrate to 'alt coins' requires longevity of these chains, amongst other qualities, to prove they can be successors.
* User A: Bitcoin is bad, it uses tons of electricity.
* User B: Bitcoin is great, and [other thing] uses just as much electricity.
And I'm just confused why User B never says something like "Bitcoin is great, but I agree it really needs to use less power and allow for more transactions."
To your point I've also seen that some coins may still prefer PoW, and may have mitigated many of the disadvantages of it (e.g. made it harder to centralise mining).
Moreover, the driving force behind Bitcoin keeping it ahead of the pack so far is the promise of short/medium term profit as an investment vehicle due to the artificial scarcity of its deflationary algorithm. Other cryptocurrencies are better positioned toward forming a long-term solution as a low overhead global decentralized payment platform, but what they offer is more of a collective benefit rather than a strong monetary incentive to any individual backer/investor on an individual level. (Which arguably is just an emergent property of human greed within the regime of unchecked capitalism.)
In first world countries for most people I would argue for all its faults the banking system is "good enough". In my local country can send money to people almost real time and pay by card quickly and easily without fees. Sure there is still room for improvement, but for most average people the need to change is low. Especially when I still need the banking system as "primary" to pay my taxes, settle my bills, etc - you know all the "real stuff".
It would seem that Bitcoin is more popular amongst those who don't use cryptocurrencies, and Ethereum is more popular amongst those who are. Just a thought.
And they don't have a fair distribution mechanism. They exist primarily to make their creators rich.
Anyway, yes, I agree that 99% percent of existing cryptocurrency implementations are at least partially affected by short-sighted greed.
However, I think it's important to note that there is no technological constraint preventing the potential success of more egalitarian implementations. In that sense, it's at least disappointing to see technological potential for societal benefit being so categorically dismissed due to the flaws of early prototypes such as Bitcoin.