You’re equating Bitcoin with the entire concept of cryptocurrency. I hate being “that guy” in this thread that seems like a shill for crypto, because I’m really not. I just don’t blindly hate it, and I have a nuanced understanding of it. Wild, I know.

Ethereum reduced it’s energy consumption by over 99% by switching to Proof-of-Stake.

People need to stop using those two words interchangeably. Bitcoin was the first, and in the realm of technological progress, when has the very first try of anything been the best?

Every piece of modern tech we use on a daily basis, ultimately, originated from some primitive form of that tech; Your smart phone didn’t just appear. The airplane you flew in didn’t arrive fully formed (Boeing might wish it did).

Computers used to take up entire rooms and could do basically nothing. People used to use horse-drawn carriages for transportation. etc.

Shit, even the concept of currency/trade itself has changed dramatically over the course of human history. Did you know that our money (USD) used to be backed, literally and physically, by blocks of shiny metal? And any person could literally take their dollar notes and trade them for shiny metal if they wanted? Pretty wacky!

Turns out someone realized that the metal was unnecessary. Lots of people like yourself around back then, and they lost their minds: “How could this piece of paper be worth anything if I can’t literally trade it for a piece of shiny metal? Even if that metal has no real inherent value beyond what society has ascribed to it?”

How long ago was that? Almost 100 years… I think it turned out OK.

I don’t know, just some things to think about I guess.

You practically use the energy output of a nuclear reactor to process transactions.

Every time you pay with your credit card or use an ATM the same thing happen, with the difference that you are not using a decentralized and open source service.