Bitcoin and proof of work should totally be banned.
I agree that there seems to be a lot of interesting work going on and the ideas of decentralized finance have a lot of potential. At the moment it really is hard to cut through the noise though and from what I can find just searching for an afternoon it looks like a minefield. I'm hoping that the bad stuff will all fade away and something useful will remain.
The truth is that no one uses cryptocurrency for anything. Ethereum is just as much a speculative store of value as Bitcoin is, if not moreso given the numerous competitors it has to contend with — Bitcoin arguably has none.
In a way, “speculative store of value” has merely been whitelabeled under the terms “digital gold” and “defi”. The people who claim increduously they’re buying ETH to do transactions are misrepresenting the situation to an extreme degree.
> Bitcoin and proof of work should totally be banned.
Where is your disclosure statement?
Not everyone wants to take down banks or destroy fiat.
https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560626) talks about the Steem/Hive split, and explains how the community democratically overrode the network owner's undemocratic decisions.
Anyway, when you have a democratic (or otherwise subject to popular influence) institution which can do things like "print more money", forfeit some part of existing money, levy taxes etc. - then indeed it's an interesting and potentially positive-in-my-opinion cooperative pooling of resources. Of course then you have the opposite problem, which is the tyranny of the majority, but "you can't grab the rope at both ends".