Last time I sent money to someone internationally Etherium really was pretty convenient. The Coinbase fees were a little high but otherwise it was near instantaneous, I already had some anyway, and I didn't have to deal with any real hassle.
We already just exchange "coins" electronically, but with the Visa or MasterCard network getting involved...
Per wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake
The biggest proof-of-stake blockchains by market capitalization in 2021 were Cardano, Avalanche, Polkadot and Solana. Other prominent PoS platforms include Tron, EOS, Algorand, and Tezos.
There have been repeated proposals for Ethereum to switch from a PoW to PoS mechanism. In April 2021, the Ethereum Foundation announced that it planned to switch to a PoS system by the end of 2021. This has since been pushed back to the second quarter of 2022.
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So if most of crypto transactions are conducted on proof-of-work chains, which do require burning large amounts of electricity, why would this make you think someone doesn't know about the current state of crypto. What exactly about the current state of crypto is incompatible with this critique?
Ethereum is by far the most widely used cryptocurrency network, and while it consumes a lot of energy relative to the number of transactions in processes, and a lot of energy in absolute terms, it consumes on the order of a thousandths (0.1%) of the world's energy output.
It will have switched to Proof of Stake long before it grows large enough for it to account for a materially significant portion of global energy consumption. So the rhetoric used above, which makes the generalization that "Crypto is a planet-destroying ponzi-scheme", is entirely hyperbolic with respect to the environmental criticism (and a blatant mischaracterization with respect to the ponzi-scheme allegation).
It's been "about to go PoS" for several years now. The fact is it hasn't. When it does, you can tell people their concerns are out of date. About Ethereum. Bitcoin isn't even going there and its consumption is as bad or worse.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1265897/worldwide-ethere...
I'm sure it is closer than ever, if it wasn't then there's something wrong with the development process! I sincerely wish the various people involved good luck in this venture and a speedy success in moving it to production. In the mean time I'm still going to get pissed off at people saying that energy concerns are outdated, especially when they're referring to the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem.
I still prefer Ethereum's variation of Proof of Stake over Proof of Work, but it's by no means clear to me that Proof of Work based blockchains are less resource-efficient than traditional financial systems, and I would wager a comprehensive analysis would show in fact that they have the potential to be vastly more efficient, if they're allowed to scale up their transaction throughput to amortize their energy consumption across more numerous transactions.
This is just more nonsense.
A bunch of automated nodes, strewn across the globe, and connected via the internet, maintain the network, with the network being able to seamlessly/autonomously manage nodes joining/leaving.
There are no legal contracts that need to be drawn up, filled out and signed for someone to start submitting PoW, or validating and propagating transactions, to the network. There is no HR department. No payroll. Just machines, and a deterministic compensation mechanism, managed by a fault tolerant network of machines.
This is a spurious comparison, traditional banks provide orders of magnitude more services to orders of magnitude more people.
> Nothing is free and I'm fairly certain that crypto will end in less energy consumption, not more.
One day, could, will.
But still isn't and doesn't. With a background of a world scrambling for cleaner power to mitigate climate change. That's the problem.
As for the transition to PoS, the first phase of the transition was implemented on December 1st, 2020, with the launch of the Proof of Stake Beacon Chain. The Beacon Chain has been running without problems for over a year now.
The testnet for the second phase of ETH2 - which is when the execution chain is merged into the Beacon Chain so that Ethereum can fully switch from PoW to PoS and reduce its energy consumption by 99.95% - was launched on December 20th, 2021:
https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/12/20/kintsugi-merge-testnet/
The second phase is expected to be completed before the end of 2022.
Ethereum, maybe, it's been six months away for years. BTC, nope.
The projections on the completion date of the switch to PoS is now far less speculative / more reliable.
While providing 1/700,000 of the computing power of a Raspberry Pi.
No offence.
Because it looks to me like the current state of crypto is worse than ever - https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-less-green-than-ever-before...
Emissions on a par with Greece. And just for one coin. Ethereum is still going to PoS any day now, totally, just a few months off. Like it has been for several years.
So what is it about "the current state of crypto" that you think you know better than these?
BTC mining is creating new business models for renewable energy [0][1], BTC uses less energy than many other activities that don't get the same flack- AC usage, Data Centers, etc [1]
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/10/11/bitcoin-mining-is...
[1] https://blockworks.co/mining-mutualism-renewable-energy-and-....
Finally, if energy is one of your biggest expenses, you're economically incentivized to reduce those costs as much as possible.
> BTC mining is creating new business models for renewable energy
It's also helping bring fossil-fuel power plants back online in the US, purely to service cryptocurrency - https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-58020010
AFAICT there are others in the works too.
> BTC uses less energy than many other activities
Pointing desperately at other things doesn't change the argument at all.
> Finally, if energy is one of your biggest expenses, you're economically incentivized to reduce those costs as much as possible.
So? This doesn't make bitcoin clean?
There is already huge demand for clean power in this world, adding to it with PoW systems doesn't actually help, and as we can see by the power plant and by the article linked above about a fall in renewable use in BTC, we're not in the "Bitcoin has incentivised green energy and helped the world get cleaner" stage, we're in the "Bitcoin is adding pressure to an already over-pressurised system and is making the problem worse at a critical time" phase.
Even your own linked article is sub-headed "Cryptocurrency mining has the potential to address the obstacles to more widely adopting renewable energy" - not that it has or is, but that it could.
These pseudo-intellectual economic arguments about "helping the world move to renewables" are tripe.
Unfortunately, with Bitcoin (and other Proof-of-Work blockchains), the economic incentive is the opposite: to use as much energy as possible, until the return from the block rewards and transaction fees is smaller than the price you pay for that energy. Reducing the energy costs only allows you to use even more energy before reaching that limit, increasing the total costs again.
As soon as we hit a population limit on the planet there will be no bigger fool to sell to in the future and the economy becomes stagnant.
As for the literal definition of ponzi scheme I don't think it holds up because everyone is fully aware, or should be of what it is they are buying and where the money is coming from if they want to sell.
What is sometimes up for debate is whether something is serious utility, such as “owning” a picture anyone can look at, or a digital experience in the metaverse with artificial scarcity.
But then again, under the capitalist system, we need to introduce scarcity even where it’s not easy to do so, in order to recoup initial venture capital. So for example, I remember stories about SWAT teams raising grandmas for downloading movies illegally, or about manufacturing companies all forced to cripple their software with DRM, or the blowup at the W3C, or crackz of popular software that kiddies handed out until all these companies like Adobe went full SAAS. It’s an antipattern that is the direct result of any capitalist system.
By contrast, open source, creative commons etc. doesn’t have that issue.
https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-ponzi-scheme/
"Bitcoin doesn’t really meet this broader definition of a Ponzi scheme any more than the gold market, the global fiat banking system, or less liquid markets like fine art, fine wine, collectable cars, or beachfront property. In other words, if your definition of something is so broad that it includes every non-cashflow store of value, you need a better definition."
Fiat has value because it's legally recognized by governments that issue it: it extinguishes tax and debt obligations in those jurisdictions. This makes it markedly different to any other of the commodity items listed: my government will only ever tax me fiat currency, which is sufficient to extinguish those taxes and fulfill debts. I can't be ordered to pay them in gold, or bitcoin.
Not saying it is better than the other options presented (and definitely not recommending it as an investment) but BCH does work quite well for transacting.
A (traditional) bank does all 3 for me on a regular basis.
Compare that with using something like UST (Terra), which took only ~1 minute with a fixed fee of ~1 UST for a similar transaction. I also have total control over my money.
> Now I'm at the mercy of the bank regarding what I can do with that money.
This is going off-topic, but you are with crypto as well. Unless every merchant you use supports your cryptocurrency, you're going to have to convert it back to fiat.
> There are a ton of alternatives that cost fractions of a penny in transaction fees.
Transferwise takes much more %.