What's wrong with starting with an ideal, building what's possible and then striving to progress closer and closer to the ideal over time?
I think it's been packaged together with a set of assumptions and other ideals that have negative implications and interactions with one another. There's a choatic mix of other motivations and schools of thought from monetary, economic, and social systems built in.
The thing is, when two or more seemingly contradictory elements intersect, they can for a time be reconciled. It usually involves sacrificing something else, or making someone else pay the price.
The trustless decentralized ledger with in-built monetary theory and an allergy towards governance needed to sacrifice other things, and that turned out to be an external resource, moderation, and the well-being of systems and people it impacted.
So a positive feedback loop whose side effects are offloaded onto anyone else it can find does not seem like it is compensated adequately by a marginally lower cost of doing business with money transfers in the event that it crosses between established networks.
It's the degree of experimentation in crypto and the disruption to the status quo it is causing that I find most interesting. Not any specific implementation.
Specific implementations have costs, which practitioners universally do a poor job of handling themselves.
If there's no better way. I'd like to see if a better way can be found.
You'd want a selfless AI programmed to never commit fraud or disclose information to do the ledger processing. It would be able to recover from catastrophic events or flaws in a manner not self-serving while preserving as much of the correct transactions as possible.
It wouldn't need to mine and it wouldn't need to necessarily care about the number of blocks. New ones cold be fed in by outside maintainers unless a monetary policy AI is created.
A highly efficient transactional network that manages its costs well would not serve the self-interest of person's profit motive as much as a mining or transaction node on a coin that facilitates inefficiencies that raise transaction or block reward, or allows costs or liabilities to be passed on.
Existing coins have exchanges and committees or designers that steer the algorithm with patches and hard forks. There's one or more third parties now, and even if a coin became an actual currency that didn't need a third party for easy conversion, its software support and stakeholders are a slow or absentee one.
Sure, there's tons of complexity around the basic simplicity of the core concepts. But there are enough different approaches to dealing with those complexities both in practice and in development that at a certain point which approaches are and are not effective will start to become apparent.
The extreme volatility of these so-called currencies seems to show none of them have it figured out.
Why the rush to judgment? I doubt that when currency was initially invented it changed people's approach to economics (or whatever passed for economics at the time) overnight.
The growth was more organic and modest in scope. It didn't have the amplifying effect of a method capable of exponential or super-human reactivity, and there was a more direct path for redress, clawback, or retribution as moderation or corrective factor.
A method that is mathematically and philosophically resistant or evasive to that last informal mechanism is perhaps blind or very cynically aware of the nature of the problem space it claims to solve.
Collectively or as individual concepts?
Altogether as they are in Bitcoin, their impact is greater than the sum of their parts. Coins that have a substantial overlap may not reach its extremes, but from the power numbers estimated earlier it's a matter of being at least 20X worse each versus at least 50X worse all on its own.
For the purposes of this thread, the major factors appear to be how equivalent power consumption is to revenue, and how strongly the coin limits or encourages an arms race to maintain the multiplier of the former relationship.
The price per coin and other considerations are more political in nature, though some elements of it appear to have feedback effects such as how well abusers can avoid society's existing methods of curtailing negative externalities, or make it difficult to self-correct.
PoW has definite problems at scale. Unfortunately it is the only method that has been vetted to work at scale, at least at the scale that Bitcoin has reached. This is one of the areas that is seeing the most experimentation, though.
What is the relative gain in utility for an unbounded trustless PoW method? In absolute terms, the hash rate and number of nodes needed to secure a block chain from external threat is vastly exceeded by the existing network, and it's seemingly for philosophical reasons rather than a practical one.
If one of these alternative block creation methods can be proven as secure, then this argument becomes moot.
If they aren't mining with proof method that has unbounded consumption habits, then they'd fall out the scope of this thread's topic on environmental impact--unless said scheme is proof-of-whale-killing or some other tragedy of the commons.
Any method that produced a limit on how many can be involved in the process or injects a level of coordination or hierarchy tends to hit one of the pain points for cryptocurrency proponents. Which element would you propose sacrificing?
There's still the most powerful lever of all. If the system doesn't work for most people than most people won't use it. The best thing about crypto is that in it's current, flawed, form you have the choice to not participate in the system.
To note, most people don't, and not everyone can avoid the side-effects that get amplified by unsustainable behavior in their vicinity.
Also if a system doesn't work for one person, they can just copy an existing coin and even an existing blockchain, maybe tweak it, and launch it.
That's part of the problem as well from the point of view of a store of value and transaction element. A useful fiction derives the most utility the more universal it is, but having near-zero cost to making up one's own useful fiction seems to be missing the point.
Possibly, but the current implementations need just be a foundation on which to build.
The other half is in the category of "what does this make better again?"
