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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.