What you're missing is something can be criticized even if it fulfills some needs. Drugs, gambling, crimes all satisfy some people's needs but most people have negative view on them.
Drugs, gambling, crimes all satisfy some people's needs
I call bs on the "drug" scapegoat. People are salty they work in tech and don't understand bitcoin.
Don't like Bitcoin's Proof of work properties, check out Ethereum. Don't think that everything needs to be on one central ledger? Check out Polkadot. It feels like so many commenters here put their heads in the sand about an entire class of technology because they're caught up in their opinion as fact.
Wasting any effort on fake decentralization is objectively inferior because it adds to the cost with no benefit.
Go make a fork "fixing" these problems you speak of. Demonstrate its utility and people might adopt it.
It's opt-in yet you speak of it as an authoritarian power.. when in reality government currency is literally this.
why a hyper deflationary monetary system
Ethereum's move to a Proof-of-Stake system was the best thing to happen to the cryptocurrency world, from an ecological point of view; however, that does not change anything about Bitcoin's energy consumption.
Someone who objects to Bitcoin due to its excessive energy use will not stop disliking Bitcoin just because an unrelated cryptocurrency became better.
i smell sour grapes from those people. They saw bitcoin very early on, and gave it the dismissal way back in 2008/9. That missed "opportunity" continues to bias them into thinking that their initial assessment must still be correct (for dismissing it early), otherwise they'd have to admit their dismissal as being hugely mistaken.
Second, the "you just don't understand it" argument is as old as Bitcoin itself. It's tiring. It's not new, it's not crazy complex...it's understood. It's just useless and ripe with scams.
They ruin families, neighborhoods, cities.
I do contend that "ruining families" is not a thing we should base policy on because it implies both a crazy amount of government intrusion into individual lives and because it imposes rules on everyone to make the nuclear family work.
Please spend like 30 seconds of analytical thinking trying to poke holes in this. It's remarkably easy to disprove. The challenge is what if anything we choose to do about the harms that they can cause.
However, said individual could harm others in the persuit of drugs and gambling when their own income or savings are unable to satisfy their own cravings. But how is that any different from any other forms of harm from crime conducted for other reasons?
The bad things people do to other people to get money for drugs and gambling are included in the blanket statement “drugs and gambling”.