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Is Crypto Finally Dead? (beehaw.org)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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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.

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[–] 8 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Some of these points are not inherent properties of cryptos, like the environmental impact and the transaction overhead.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    it's not even just that. if you count the number of transactions across all cryptocurrencies that are confirmed by mining, they are absolutely dwarfed by the number of transactions that are not confirmed by mining. same thing with volume of money moved. the environmental complaint applies to a minority of the total activity.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    And shouldn't the environmental cost of "real" currencies be compared as well? It's not like printing and minting all those bills and coins is zero energy. Even treating it virtually (direct deposit, etc - we rarely handle cash) has some overhead.

    I don't have a horse in this race, but comments that are obviously trying to grind an ace are suspicious to me.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago

    On the tech side of things, the environmental impact of running traditional, centralized services is inherently lower than running any cryptocurrency off of a blockchain. To overcome the technical limitations would be to create another centralized service.

    But yeah, there are almost certainly ways that traditional currency can reduce their environmental impact, too.

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