Author: Tom Gauld
Blockchain tech never was meant for privacy (how could it with the ledger being public?)
Stuff like Monero can hide that. And even bitcoin is better than banks. You don’t have to link your identity to a Bitcoin wallet, meanwhile some banks even want a sample of your voice.
Monero is the only crypto that may actually provide the most barebones version of what Bitcoin was originally supposed to be, but it still has the problem of being massively slow inefficient and unscalable, compared to existing fiat currency electronic banking systems.
Crypto is never going to be widely adopted at PoS, by retailers, basically every attempt at doing that has failed, and I remember when that was the main sales pitch for Bitcoin.
Monero might work for hiding some money, illicit transactions, or doing cross border remittances without massive fees… but in general, crypto is 99% completely baseless speculation and scam grifts.
I agree that a lot of cryptocurrencies are scams, but if you’re worried about inefficiency, you can use proof of stake crypto, such as Polkadot. It uses as much energy as 5 households iirc. Even if everyone can see transactions, no one can take that money away from you, which banks can easily do.
Proof of Stake only shines compared to Proof of Work. There’s no consensus algorithm that isn’t blown out of the water by conventional database tech performance-wise and there never will be because of the network character of blockchain tech.
Token-bros (I refuse to give you the term “crypto”, it stands for cryptography) ignore this, maybe even rightly so, since the benchmark cannot be conventional tech if you’re trying to implement trustlessness (the DB would be controlled by some entity like a bank) but since there is no trustlessness (trust the network, the devs, the exchange for real money, etc), it’s a baseless idea.