Mastodawn

Is cryptocurrency good for anything?

Is cryptocurrency good for anything? - Lemmy.World

Can I buy a pizza with it or pay my bills with it? Can my employer pay me in it? Or is it just an “emperor’s new clothes” thing? I just don’t see the tangible value in it. Rhetorical questions, BTW, I know you can’t buy a pizza with it, at least outside of some edge cases that I’m not aware of. I thought what made money money was everyone agreed it was valuable and was willing to exchange it for goods and services directly. I don’t see that with crypto.

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Ek-Hou-Van-Braai 2d ago

Bitcoin alone uses more electricity than Norway.

And that electricity is mostly from burning coal, so crypto is great for creating global warming

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witheyeandclaw 2d ago

Wait until you hear about the energy cost of traditional finances.

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YaBoyMax 2d ago

This is a silly thing to say. Normal payment processing uses more energy, but that’s only because there are many, many more payments going through it. It’s orders of magnitude more energy-efficient than crypto.

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Nibodhika

Bitcoin in specific doesn’t scale, but other things like Bitcoin Cash scale without increasing the energy usage, because the energy cost of PoW Blockchains comes from their security, not from the scale, so doing 1 or thousands of transactions costs the same.

Plus, things like Ethereum have migrated to PoS which uses very small amount of energy comparable and also scales without increasing energy costs.