How has Bitcoin saved Venezuela? Well it helped a small number of people in the country, sure. It obviously didn't fundamentally make any difference, and it's not going to anywhere else either. For the average person Bitcoin is not easier to acquire, use or manage than USD in locations such as Lebanon, Turkey or Venezuela.
How much crypto is traded to avoid corrupt regimes and hyperinflation? 1%? 0.1%? There's probably a few zeroes in there.
Regarding Netflix, it's better for the environment than buying a blu-ray and blu-ray player or driving to the cinema. Can the same be said about crypto?
You can't know, and that's the point.
You can leave a country carrying nothing but a seed phrase in your brain and with it all your wealth, if you need to. Just the fact that governments know that this can happen can change things.
If you have a pile of Fakeistan dollarydoos you wish to convert into USD, spending those dollarydoos in Fakeistan on electricity to apparate some Bitcoin, then converting those Bitcoin into USD in the USA does not create a foreign claim on Fakeistani economic output. On the other hand, directly exchanging your dollarydoos with foreigners for USD does leave those foreigners holding a pile of dollarydoos, which does represent a claim on future Fakeistani economic output.
It certainly is in terms of being only for entertainment and no deeper use. However the amount of energy wasted here (let’s say 300W on a fairly high end machine) falls into the average area of energy spending per person, and thinks like driving or keeping unnecessary light bulbs on is same or worse. Crypto things however seem a whole other level of energy waste.
According to the New York Times, Bitcoin uses a little less than half a percent of all the electricity consumed in the world [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitco...
The latter's religion has been based in seeing governments bailout bad actors with 0 consequences & devalue a currency astronomically over a 100 year period. Salaries are not keeping with the rise in asset prices which means the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Buying a house in CA as a millennial is laughable.
Bitcoin or a gold standard is the only system that encourages a thriving middle class economy and keeps the government from poor policy decisions. Bitcoin seems to be better than gold since its mobile, transparent, finite. But i'd welcome a return to a gold standard with open arms.
I believe that 1) not all solutions can be 100% perfect for all problems an 2) a medium of exchange created by the people is our only hope to keep the gov/fed from enslaving with us debt forever 3) Judging what should/should not be able to use electricity is a slippery slope.
In the end, Bitcoin's relentlessly conservative approach to crypto will likely be its downfall.
In other words, bitcoin & co. aren't the first toxic, destructive get-rich-quick schemes, and we as a society have shown time and again we're unable to really resist most of them.
Because this common caricature of "smallpox blanket" is not based in verifiable historical fact. There's no clear evidence that Europeans were literally weaponizing smallpox to wipe out most of native American populations. The understanding of how infection spread happened a good 200 years later, than depopulation.
Incidentally, if you want a good example of horrors meted out, try the residential school system, which does seem to be far less well-known among the lay public. Maybe "we're trying to civilize them!" turning out to involve horrific amounts of abuse (and, yes, death) is too much to countenance?