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Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

Well, Cryptocurrencies are part of said new era. They aren't strictly a problem that made things worse: they're a technology that comes with tradeoffs. The cat is out of the bag and we have to design around technologies that are here to stay in whatever capacity. Distributed, cryptography-based currencies/tokens are one of those technologies.

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Yes, on the one hand, they enable a lot of shady illegal business, but in the other hand, they also destroy the environment while doing it, so it's really a toss up whether cryptocurrency is good or bad overall!

bitcoin is forecast to uses about 150 TWh of electricity this year vs all other datacenter operations foretasted to use 1000 TWh. Bitcoin is esitimated to be about 52.4% sustainable energy (renewables plus nuclear) where datacenters are 42% sustainable energy.

And those other datacenters are mostly doing useful things, while bitcoin is somewhere between pure waste and the least efficient way of doing security ever conceptualized. (A few dozen centralized nodes, set up right, would likely be more secure than the current mining pools.)

are they? or are they running, spam, ecommerce throw away culture? overreaching government data collection? lots of porn as well.

Equating the concept of cryptographic currency with specific implementations such as proof-of-work just shows that you have no idea what you are talking about.

The importance of financial sovereignty can not be understated, whether you understand that or not.

What problems are solved by financial sovereignty? How does crypto solve those problems?

> What problems are solved by financial sovereignty?

It's right there in the name. Some people believe that their assets should not be freezable or restricted by the whim of their local government-of-the-week. Cryptocurrencies have obviously solved this problem quite well or people wouldn't be complaining about how it has enabled more cybercrime (specialists, include cyber criminals, are often quicker to adopt trends than society at large).

Moving beyond that, the utility of a cryptographic smart contract system paves the way for the future of the internet. People forget computers are less than a hundred years old, and that there are thousands of years of computing ahead of us. The fundamentals will look very different one day.

Inability to evade the justice system is not something that most people would agree is a problem; quite the opposite. The rule of law is the thing that allows you and I to live in such relative splendor. If you remove the ability for courts to operate you will not be in a libertarian utopia, you will be a dystopian free for all where there is no one to uphold contracts or stop people from doing what they like when they have even a bit more power than you.

> The rule of law is the thing that allows you and I to live in such relative splendor

Speak for yourself, I grew up in poverty. I also said nothing about Libertarianism and did not endorse it; Please do not inject your biases, patronize or turn this into a straw man. Do you want to actually address my argument?

Crypto has been an awful development in many ways, but I happily welcome it when it has made malware so much more benign to me. The last malware that affected me personally was a crypto miner worm, and the one before that was a crypto wallet stealer, neither of which affects me at all as I don't meddle with crypto.

I don't know the statistics, but it seems like it's way more profitable for the grifters to target other grifters instead of taking over my machines and extorting me. Or maybe I just got lucky.

> when it has has made malware so much more benign to me.

Eh?

Cryptocurrencies have enabled ransomware. Possibly the most nasty malware to hit the internet in terms of damage caused...

This damage has affected services you use (including hospitals, schools, research institutions and local government) even if it hasn't infected one of your boxen directly.

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