Is Crypto Finally Dead?

peanuts4life@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 234 points –

Yes, I know that it still exist, and yes, decentralized currency which utilizes distributed, cryptographic validation is not actually a strictly bad idea, but...

Is the speculative investment scam, which crypto substantially represented, finally dead? Can we go back to buying gold bars and Pokemon cards?

I feel like it is, but I'm having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen. Maybe crypto scammers moved on to selling LLM "prompts?" Maybe the rug just got pulled enough times that everyone lost trust.

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Have you heard of hashcash, it’s POW precursor to bitcoin. It stops spam, was originally developed for email but could be incorporated into Lemmy eventually on sign up. Principal is similar to what you suggest.

@Senseibu @FaceDeer POW was one of the biggest issues with crypto in general. Let's not kill a tree everytime someone wants to sign up

@shipp Ethereum switched to Proof-of-Stake consensus nine months ago, it no longer burns a significant amount of energy to operate. I'm primarily interested in Ethereum because it's got smart contracts, allowing a huge variety of applications that older, simpler cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin can't handle.

It’s a small foot print for a real user and expensive for bots who are generating enmasse. It worked on Windows 98 PCs so isn’t really an issue like you describe.

@Senseibu PoW should just be straight up illegal everywhere. It's a plague on the planet.

Except it’s been around for decades and put to good use but you’ve only heard of it from crypto and are referring to crypto.

@Senseibu so has crime lol, doesn't mean it's good. There's also a reason it hasn't caught on. If you ignore the whole killing the planet thing, it's very inaccessible.

Hasn’t caught on pfft dude why are you even replying when you clearly know nothing about the tech except for it’s bad for the planet we haven’t even got into how it could be powered with renewables (when its applied within a crypto currency that is)

Good day to you sir