Comments on Profile Post by WithTheFish

So one day, a bunch of weird tech nerds looked at their dollar bills for the umpteenth time and decided that, "Hey, fiat currency is very volatile and unstable, what if there was a form of currency that wasn't volatile and unstable?"

With this golden idea in mind, they went about creating a sophisticated algorithm that processes a form of "decentralized" money, that is, a currency not subject to government interference. Goods and services can only be paid using crypto, and specialized online wallets are created to store this money, all on what they call a blockchain, a ledger that does these transactions and is unhackable.

It sounds good on paper, therefore it must be flawless, correct?

Except that it wasn't, and although the new currency is what those weird tech nerds claim to be champion of the digital age of finance, all it really did was create the opposite effect. Both crypto and fiat do what money is supposed to do, and that is payment for goods and services - except that a single BTC transaction consumes the same amount of electrical energy as around 600,000 Visa transactions.

Not only that, in order to even obtain Bitcoin, which in the industry they refer to as "mining", you'd need so much electrical energy and GPUs and the amount of heat energy produced to mine a single Bitcoin can probably power the city of Shanghai for 5 minutes. Environmental concerns aside, cryptocurrency wallets have been proven to be hackable, so surprise, surprise.

It's as if their thought process was: "Paying $3 for a cheeseburger in dollar bills is kind of stupid, and I wish this was more complicated and consumed millions of kilowatts at the same time."

I mean, in a world where your "stable and non-volatile" money can either become valuable or worthless depending on an eccentric billionaire's tweets, or when it can have its value crash by half depending on said billionaire dressing up as Wario during a television programme, then it's needless to say that your money is fucking stupid.

The most foreign thing to me in all this is paying 3 dollars for a cheeseburger they're all like 5 here wtf ,,,, ,,,, ,

Thank you, I will now go to bed tonight knowing about cryptocurrency

To be fair people are working on alternative solutions for both mining and the inherent power consumption (which kinda depends on how green our energy is overall) so it might become a little more viable in the future but yeah the popular cryptocurrencies right now are kinda awful