It takes living with a broken system to understand the fix for it. There are millions of people who have been saved by Bitcoin and the freedom that it brings, they are just mainly in the 2nd and 3rd worlds, so to many people they basically don’t exist.
That’s great and all but doesn’t sound like a valid excuse for the excessive amount of energy it consumes. It’s also hard for me to imagine 3rd world places that somehow flourish because of a currency that needs the Internet to exist.
I just looked it up, it looks like it is the a difference of 35% to 80% in the developed world.
Imagine this, you are forced to hold your wealth in corrupt government run banks. They often print tons of it for themselves, criminals are printing it, the government can seize it from anyone they want. You can try to store it at home, yourself, or you can give it to the banks. Now there is a third option, store it as Bitcoin. No need for risking it under your bed or with the corrupt banker politicians, and on top of those be victims to their inflation. Sure, your bank probably doesn’t often seize your money, and your currency probably isn’t rapidly devaluing even compared to the dollar, but if it was then you would probably think the energy is worth it.
But crypto also suffers from crashes and being devalued and if you’re buying Bitcoin with your hard earned dollar that is worth less and less then you are ultimately buying less and less Bitcoin. The fact that Bitcoin still needs all of the other currency to function as a middle man makes it vulnerable to the same risks. Maybe it helps people in niche situations but I’m sure we’ll all be thinking it’s worth it when those same struggling places are the hardest hit by climate change. At least they’ll have a bunch of digital currency propped up by fiat currency.
