Crypto is going to compete against existing systems like every technology has done since the dawn of creative thought. You can invest in any new system you want to and I will continue to tell you that it is a terrible idea. It has potential, but that's all it has. The good traits necessary to replace conventional systems are scattered across multiple coins. You need stability, usability as a PROPER currency, energy efficiency, simplicity of use, safety, reliability of service, ease of integration for consumers and vendors alike, and only then will it be adopted en masse due to the superiority over its competition.

I come from the aerospace industry where technology must be proven or else people die.

So I've been around for awhile. I initially bought nitro because Discord was a pleasant to use service and fulfilled a niche I needed of an accessible private social platform without any of the gross advertising and data collection of other social media. I've kept my nitro subscription thus far because Discord continued to fill that niche without any complications.

I know that Discord relies on nitro subscriptions because their other monetization methods have failed. They have merch but that's a side deal. They tried a games store but ultimately that failed because you can't challenge Valve unless you have the money to bleed away like Epic does. They increased the cost of nitro and I had no qualms with that because ultimately, the features of nitro had certainly changed from being able to use emotes everywhere. This was all well and good until yesterday.

I'm not financially supporting platforms that are going to prioritize a short term gain over long term effects. Crypto is not a currency, it is a type of asset called a "security". It does not meet all of the requirements to be a currency and never will. Calling it currency is financial illiteracy.

It is also extremely inefficient compared to traditional methods of wiring money. 100,000 VISA transactions require 148.63 kWh of electricity, a single ETH transaction requires 178.89 kWh. Allegedly, because it is a promise and not a reality, ETH 2.0 will consume as little as 1/10000 of its current energy, meaning it will now be an astonishing 10x less efficient compared to being 100,000x less efficient than conventional transactions. And I'm approximating in crypto's favor here for a function that is yet to be seen.

And these are just the two easiest things to point at because they're objective and indisputable. If I look at blockchain as a whole from an engineering perspective, I see an incomplete and half baked idea with promise that has been adopted by an isolated ecosystem that has to cannibalize itself to survive.

This post was re-published with approval by u/LightTankTerror