I'm not asking for a pitch deck or a prospectus. I'm asking for a little bit of humility and learning from history. Like, credit where credit is due, the original Bitcoin paper posed a real problem (real in the sense that solving it could actually be net beneficial for society as a whole) and proposed a novel, clever solution to it. That's great! And from the perspective of when the paper was written, it was hard to see the ways in which Bitcoin would fail to actually solve the proposed problem. But now, not only can we see how Bitcoin failed to deliver on its initial promise, we can see how someone who is clever enough to come up with Bitcoin could fail to grasp the implications of it.
Like, from where I sit, Chia looks like it's trying to solve the unintended consequences of Bitcoin, which is a tacit admission from the Chia people that Bitcoin has those problems. It also looks like Chia has an easily foreseeable set of unintended consequences as well: doing to SSDs what Bitcoin has done to GPUs. It doesn't seem to me like the Chia people are worried about that, and I don't know why.
I understand your argument, but Bitcoin hasn't been mined on GPUs since 2011/2012. Broaden your argument from Bitcoin to "proof of work schemes" more generally, and from GPUs to "profligate (mis)use of resources", and it will land more effectively.
If you are against cryptocurrencies more broadly, inclusive of proof of stake and other more recent approaches that aim to address the resource consumption issue, then that position didn't come across clearly.
It's all right. For every unjustified cryptocurrency sceptic such as myself, there are 10000 cryptocurrency zealots pumping and dumping every day. Hodl, right?
I am not against proof of stake, exactly. But proof of stake has been around for a long time, and is a very small part of the crypto market right now. I don't really understand why, but until proof of stake is able to get adoption, I don't think the existence of proof of stake is a very good defense against the accusation that cryptocurrencies are wasting resources.
Like, from where I sit, Chia looks like it's trying to solve the unintended consequences of Bitcoin, which is a tacit admission from the Chia people that Bitcoin has those problems. It also looks like Chia has an easily foreseeable set of unintended consequences as well: doing to SSDs what Bitcoin has done to GPUs. It doesn't seem to me like the Chia people are worried about that, and I don't know why.