Hundreds of Bitcoin Wannabes Show Hallmarks of Fraud

>No legal use case found to date

Thanks to regulatory capture and governmental privacy erosion that eschews anonymous transfers such as cash.

While it has speculative value [0], you can use it to buy stuff, but while doing so you will spend on exchange fees to convert in and out of crypto, you will use as much electricity for your transaction as 33 US households use in a day, you will subject yourself to liquidity risk and volatility risk [1] and you will have to wait for anywhere from ten minutes to a couple hours [2].

Calling this complicated, risky and expensive process a "use case" is like calling a Rube Goldberg machine that opens a door "useful for opening doors". It's like no, not really. It can do it, sure, but there are significantly better ways of achieving the same thing.

[0] When there are no more greater fools entering the market, the price will tank and you will not be able use it to transfer value.

[1] It's possible that right after your purchase, the price of the token shoots up or down 50%, making rational purchasing decisions difficult.

[2] transactions on Visa, Apple Pay, or PayPal all get complete within seconds.

In the end, the "reputable" ICO-backed companies will mostly (perhaps entirely) turn out to be no better. Enron was a real company that did real things. During the time it operated, hundreds of aspiring future Enrons were born in the penny stocks, took down a few thousand in profits, and died. Skeptics of Enron could have pointed to those overt frauds and said "sure, the space is littered with frauds, but look at Enron over here; there are real companies too". In the end, it didn't matter; in fact: Enron was the more disastrous of the two threats.

One year AMZN calls @1000.

First of all, no one is forcing you to use cryptocurrency.

Second, your post is incredibly one-sided and misleading.

>>The space is littered with fraud.

And also unprecedented accessibility. In no previous era in history were so many teams of capable developers living outside of wealthy countries able to raise enough capital to pursue ambitious technology projects.

Also unprecendented innovation and market evolution: we're seeing:

* rapid emergence and growing popularity of websites for vetting and rating token sales, and identifying scams

* an investor class that is becoming wiser to scams, and more discerning in general, every day. No longer can a whitepaper alone raise tens of millions of dollars worth of ETH. In just the space of 18 months, we've seen investor behaviour undergo a massive transformation towards sophistication.

>>Wallets have bugs that lose hundreds of millions of dollars

Wallet bugs and scams are largely a thing of the past in Bitcoin. Ethereum's ecosystem is much younger, and so we see it going through the same trials.

Once the industry matures, these kinds of problems will be much less common.

>>Energy consumption forecasted to hit 0.5% of the world’s electricity consumption by end of 2018

That's because energy is one of the largest, if not the largest input to the production of cryptocurrencies and maintenance of blockchains.

Blockchains require very little resources other than integrated circuits and energy, which makes them very different from other product categories, where labour costs are much higher relative to direct energy costs.

So the flip side here is much lower costs in other types of resources relative to the cost of the good/service being generated.

Also, proof of stake is coming.

>>Promoters yelling “decentralize everything” while exchanges, development teams and mining are all highly centralized

Development is highly decentralized, with people defecting through hard forks when they disagree with some coalition of developers (see Bitcoin Cash versus Bitcoin Core).

In Ethereum at least there are also multiple independent implementations of a full node.

All changes to development occur through consensus, with a straightforward exit path, via hard forks, for those who do not agree with that consensus.

As for exchanges: several decentralized exchanges have been released over the last year.

Once blockchain scalability gets better, and peer-to-peer usage increases, exchanges will also be much less necessary.

>>No legal use case found to date

Absolutely ridiculous claim. How about avoiding rent-seeking by monopolistic platform providers, by encoding the rules of use and fee levels in an immutable smart contract?

Anyway, providing people with the ability to circumvent regulated industries that impose financial censorship can have social value. Unless you think Wikileaks bypassing the financial blockade was not a net benefit to the world, or that repressive governments never impose tyrannical laws.