The most serious current objection to cryptocurrency (as it’s currently construed) is the massive environmental impact of proof-of-work (PoW) mining. I won’t devote a single second towards minimizing this concern. Many defenders have tried to paint the electricity consumption of Bitcoin and other PoW currencies as “green” or define it as a form of energy storage. This is dishonest nonsense: estimates hold that at east 60% of mining energy consumption still comes from fossil sources.

This wasteful resource consumption colors the public’s views of cryptocurrency in a highly negative way, and it is absolutely right for people to have these feelings because we are in a climate crisis and wasting this much goddamn energy on a single consensus protocol is pointless, harmful, and quite possibly evil — particularly when the result of all this energy consumption isn’t even a particularly decentralized network.

But all is not lost.

Proof-of-work is not the only technology we have on which to build consensus protocols. Today, many forward-looking networks are deploying proof-of-stake (PoS) for their consensus.

And proof-of-stake is no longer theory. It’s already been deployed in production within a number of successful projects, including Avalanche, Cardano, Algorand, and Tezos. The Ethereum project is in the process of rolling out a proof-of-stake upgrade they call “Ethereum 2”. [...] Beyond proof-of-stake, there are other technologies in deployment, such as the proof-of-time-and-space construction used by Chia, or more centralized proof-of-authority systems.

It’s very unlikely that shade or hypothetical cryptocurrency bans are going to fix the problem any faster, and in fact: government overreaction could make it much, much worse by driving resources away from the cleaner chains that are coming online to solve the problem.

Transaction reversibility is not about the ledger, but rather about the transaction rules that a currency uses. A reversible currency requires that someone anoint this trusted party (or trusted parties) and that they use their powers to freeze/burn/transact currency in ways that are at odds with the recorded owners’ intentions.

Credit card merchant fees are similar, or have actually risen in the United States since the 1990s, and that is an absolute tragedy — since these fees are baked into the cost of most retail goods and thus fall heavily on the working poor (who pay them even if they use cash.)

If all you care about is technology, consumer payment tech has improved at a glacial pace. It took nearly two decades to roll out anti-fraud improvements like EMV chipchards and tap-to-pay (NFC) in the US.

Maybe the result won’t even be a success for blockchain solutions: perhaps we’ll simply get more and better offerings from “traditional finance” industry as they start to wake up to the fact that more open systems can compete with their closed offerings.

So while I don’t know if cryptocurrency will be the answer, I’m just hopeful that something will be.