this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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You are right I shouldn't have equaled bitcoin with the rest of the crypto ecosystem. While most crypto is utter scam, it's true that there have been some slight advances here and there, and there are coins that may be actually useful for some cases, mostly Monero and I suppose Ethereum. I'd still say that crypto has done more harm than good in the world, and I say that as someone who's really focused at privacy, care about it a lot and have invested significant amount of time and effort into staying as private as possible.
But it's great that Ethereum managed to solve most of the issues with Bitcoin - unless I'm mistaken, it's not really used for investment speculation, and if it managed to keep the energy requirements low, that's good. But last time I remember researching about blockchain (it was few months, so feel free to correct me), isn't it running into serious issues with ledger size, that makes it infeasible for long-term (decades) of use, without sacrificing some of it's guarantees? Which is one of the main issues with blockchain tech in general, that I don't think has been solved so far.
It's a process. There certainly are a lot of scams, and correct regulations need to be in place. It is a tool used by people who do harm, though it is not the cause of harm. At the same time, it's helped a lot of startups innovate in non-traditional ways, and i think a global and affordable currency that is not tied to the local currency has the potential to help a lot of people. Ethereum in theory should be more stable in terms of price as it keeps being minted and destroyed trough use of the blockchain. You can speculate with it, or the ERC-20 tokens in it's ecosystem. Ledger size is an issue i've had to deal with myself setting up a node, but it's also an issue that can be fixed in several ways if it looks like it could become a significant enough issue, as they did with PoW to PoS.
I think it's hard to measure what good and bad crypto is done when you only hear about outragous corruption and crime but not how the everyday person uses it. I use it in a way that helps myself and others and I'm no north korean drug lord scamming people.