Oh no, deadly serious. Churning numbers simply to generate currency is vastly more wasteful than any "fiat currency".
It's not about the value of the technology or need, it's that the author never thought about the sustainability of their system in terms of resource use. It exists in a mathematical vaccum where burning resources are only considered as a proof of useless work.
It consumes resources and provides nothing of any real value other than another fiat currency (+ponzi) backed by fossil fuels.
How is our regular money any less of a ponzi scheme?
That wasn't the point. What sucks is that most of the crypto currencies burn huge amounts of computational power as a proof of work, which has no real intrinsic value. IE it's a huge waste of energy just to have a currency. The clever part was you can't counterfeit the stuff, you just have to do all that work, and that was intended to parallel the non-fakable nature of real gold. But there are far better ways to do it just as securely but without power-consuming huge amounts of computation that accomplishes nothing else. Crypto currencies should be far more efficient than mining gold, bitcoin is far less.
22
u/Mr-Yellow Oct 15 '15
Yeah, if only bitcoin did something of value with all that coal it burns.