There are many new systems that are superior to Ethereum (e.g Polkadot, Terra LUNA) that already satisfy your requirement.
I found the idea of a non governmental controlled currency with an upper bounded amount interesting, as inflation can't be a thing.
But as a means to satisfy greed... Nope, I am happy with what I have.
So there are other spaces in science and computer science I am more invested and interested in.
As I'm sure you would realise if you give the textbooks a chance, deflation is much worse than inflation. Nor is bitcoin truly inflation-less; the prices swing like a yo-yo, it's simply deflationary on average thus far.
Regarding energy use, Bitcoin mining inherently seeks out the lowest cost electricity which turns out to be either stranded energy (not usable for anything else) or renewable (solar, wind, hydro). This is yet another reason to push governments to stop subsidizing fossil fuels. Also, since Bitcoin mining can be done at any time and in any place, it is able to act as the buyer of last resort for renewable projects whose energy production does not line up with grid demand. Having this extra buyer can greatly reduce the payback period for a proposed solar/wind project that otherwise would not have been able to attract the investment to build it.
Let them eat crypto
I may be the chosen one, but am I that important?
To phrase it differently: all you said may (sic!) be true, doesn't change my personal interest though.
I was never that interested in monetary policy or the history of money until I found out about Bitcoin and started doing my own research.
I am very interested in the history of money, but it made me a Marxist, or rather a Trotskyist ;)
Cryptocurrencies may have a part to play in the future of humanity, but Bitcoin will not be it. It's a proof of concept that's overstayed its welcome.
Energy storage is inefficient and expensive, so a new renewable project based around this is less likely to be funded and built than one that can directly monetize the excess. Profit and greed is the incentive structure for much of human society.
Bitcoin has all of the properties we need in a store of value for the base layer of a digital monetary system of the future. The energy expenditure is required to provide the highest level of security and decentralization which is needed for a global reserve asset. Any other system is vulnerable to attack or centralization, which will inevitably succumb to human greed like every fiat system in history.
Are the unbanked really going to operate a number of different wallets, including decoy wallets, to prepare for this scenario?
> Bitcoin has all of the properties we need in a store of value for the base layer of a digital monetary system of the future.
Its parameters were picked on a whim by somebody nobody can ever find. "Completely unchangeable parameters handed down from the equivalent of God" is not a property that I look for in a monetary system.
The parameters of the Bitcoin code are changeable (and have changed multiple times since inception) via hard-fork based on the 'voting' of the nodes which verify all new blocks and number in the tens of thousands distributed across the globe. The parameters of the protocol are set such that anyone can run a verification node on only a couple hundred dollars worth of hardware, thereby encouraging decentralization.
https://river.com/learn/can-bitcoins-hard-cap-of-21-million-...
In principle, yes. But look at the clusterfuck that was the BCH fork. Something as basic as blocksize led to an outrageous amount of venom and two communities hating each other. Now imagine if the core devs wanted to change things that more directly affected the relative wealth of early adopters. Could you believe the anger if they proposed that we double the number of eventually mined bitcoins?