Hi I hate capitalism, also please gain a better understanding before criticizing blockchain and ledger technology. I know all the headlines are making many of you upset, but also they have lots of misinformation.
I would love to read good critiques of cryptocurrency but its always ignorant in the way the right wing is ignorant about things. Think about the last time you argued with an ignorant chud. That's a lot of these posts.
Rule of thumb if you don't understand what it is don't criticize it. Be angry all you want but when you do make criticisms it's important that they land. Because there is a lot of really bad garbage. There's also lots of good things like https://eva.coop/ https://yewtu.be/watch?v=_V7wThsAUs4 .
Anyway I don't mean to scold too hard here. So I'm gonna provide some information.
NFT: A unique indivisible asset. could be a blockchain domain like .eth .crypto etc. Could be used for ID. Could also be used for speculation.
Smart contract: Lines of code used to program money, this could be used with stable coins to offer interest and replace banks.
Remember there are parts of the world where banks only serve the rich. This could also be use for encrypted messaging and email. Imagine if a company had to pay transaction fees to spam you. It would stop happening.
Stable coins: you know that thing no one seems to mention when they say it's too volatile to use?
In general just stop grasping at straws because even the gravel institute gets it wrong here. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=0AAUrMuMPlo . Imagine throwing away credibility out of hatred and ignorance. It's very disappointing.
Also mind you when payment processors shut down HRT for trans people often crypto gets used to bring life saving medicine to trans people.
The most salient criticism of crypto at present is the wastefulness of ASICS and Proof-of-Work. Regarding privacy, projects like XMR (Monero) fill the gap where the open nature of distributed ledgers poses a danger to users. Regarding wastefulness, next-gen concepts such as Proof-of-Space, such as XCH (Chia) are some attractive solutions. Proof-of-Stake is not an ideal solution because it reinforces the systems and organizations that already have influence and power, whether monetary or political, and pooling requires entrusting those parties with the crypto assets. Curious to hear other points of view!
I would love it if someone could break down how this is any different the PoW's mining pool. Also we need to clarafy which PoS system you are talking about. System that inhert from DPoS where you only have 1000 or so validators which users are required to delegate to, are not in my mind decentrilized and I think that statement make sense for those. Eth 2.0 on there other hand has no upper limit of fixed set size of validators. And there is no way to delegate to validators (by the base protocol, there are third party solution of this though).
So a couple things. The current power consumption is bad sure. You know our current financial system spends more energy right? The transit of money, the banks, wire transfers large server farms processing thousands of transactions per second etc. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/research%3A-bitcoin-consumes-less-than-half-the-energy-of-the-banking-or-gold-industries
This is precisely what I mean when I say half baked. Now I think that you are genuinely trying to inform yourself. And I think you aren't consumed by anger like the folks I am criticizing. Power consumption is a valid concern, however there are people who waste lots of mental energy ruminating and being upset, and saying any negative thing they can say with 0 understanding.
While I think chia is great it's not the first proof of space/capacity coin. And some have brought up the energy to mine conflict minerals, manufacturing and the 3 year avg failure rate leading to over use of hard drives. And not to mention the energy required to plot the damn thing is as intensive as proof of work. So it needs to be quantified and it does show promise.
Proof of Stake can be problematic, however I think there are good implementations of it with no downside except for "long range attacks" which proof of space is also vulnerable to as well. Cardano is a great example because all funds can be spent while staking its useful to think of it as interest in a banking account. Delegation reduces power consumption and efficiency. Yes interest is not ideal, however that's not an issue with crypto it's about an issue with capitalism.
So it's all a trade off. However I have a solution that will make PoW seem not so bad. Have you ever heard of Merged Mining? It's when you mine many coins at once with the same hashes. It requires the developers to work together, but for example when you mine LTC you also get free DOGE. So imagine all the PoW coins adopting RandomX. No more ASIC e-waste, more egalitarian distribution, and less energy usage. All chains can be running on less power. Just a couple thoughts. What you think sorry for the wall of text lmao.