Yes, I know that it still exist, and yes, decentralized currency which utilizes distributed, cryptographic validation is not actually a strictly bad idea, but…
Is the speculative investment scam, which crypto substantially represented, finally dead? Can we go back to buying gold bars and Pokemon cards?
I feel like it is, but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen. Maybe crypto scammers moved on to selling LLM “prompts?” Maybe the rug just got pulled enough times that everyone lost trust.
Bitcoin (as it uses proof of work) is incapable of handling all transaction of the world without creating insane amounts of wasted energy.
Updating the ledger (actually writing down transactions) is only a fraction of the total computing resources it consumes. Most of it is just spent doing random hashes over and over again (the proof of work part). This is computing power that does not actually do any of the money related tasks, it’s just there to keep the ledger trusted.
This is an awesome idea in theory, but completely unscalable in reality.
Other Blockchain technologies like proof of stake don’t have this issue of energy waste, but they have other hurdles.
But Bitcoin as it is implemented now can never be the money of the future in my opinion.
I don’t know if you’ve heard about Lightning Network, but this is a layer on top of the bitcoin blockchain that is much more suitable for small payments. That’s how I do most of my bitcoin payments now, and while it’s still a maturing technology, it mostly works well. Transactions are fast and inexpensive.