UN trade body calls for halting cryptocurrency rise in developing countries

Open source central bank technologies with client side compliments. Maybe provide some gratis consulting services to get emerging economies running on their own financial infra. It’s just pushing messages across busses and adjusting figures in ledgers and databases.

>>It is naive to think the rise of cryptocurrencies will help anyone but large companies specialised at scamming retail investors

There is nothing inherently scammy in using a distributed blockchain to record balances, and cryptography to authenticate updates to the balances. While opening the door to financial contracts to every one in the world with a computing device may make scam offerings more common, it's overly simplistic and lazy to resort to a caricature of cryptocurrency solely enabling scams.

The only fundamental difference inherent to the respective designs of blockchains and traditional banking, is censorship resistance through genuine self-custody. The former, through its reliance on public key cryptography and decentralized consensus, is designed to provide this quality, and the latter is not.

So if you believe cryptocurrencies are inherently problematic, then you have a fundamental belief that human liberty has no inherent benefits.

First of all, the average household in Argentina uses 3,500 kWh of electricity, which is 5 times more than the energy consumption of Bitcoin divided by the number of transactions it processes.

Second, Bitcoin is a special case, in that its leadership deliberately chose to not scale its transaction throughput, which is independent of its mining-rewards/energy consumption. Had Bitcoin scaled, then its energy consumption would be securing a massive number of transactions, leading to far less energy expended per transaction.

Right now speculation sustains this massive expenditure of resources to maintain the Bitcoin network, and if the speculators are wrong about the value of the BTC the network sustains, then they will lose a huge amount of money, and the energy consumption of the network will plummet.

We should let the market decide, instead of assuming we can be so certain of the potential of novel technologies, that we can overrule millions of investors. Maybe they know something we don't? Maybe looking only at number of on-chain tranasctions processed is an incomplete analysis that misses other utility derived from Bitcoin, like off-chain transactions, store-of-value functionality, high-powered money transfersr between nation-states, etc?

Bitcoin also uses Proof of Work, which the largest cryptocurrency network, Etheruem, is going to abandon in a month when it transitions to Proof of Stake. So your analysis is quite limited and doesn't justify the blanket anti-cryptocurrency stance you've taken.

>>Have open banking standards. Implement proper consumer finance regulations. Fight against corporate capture of government. You aren't going to bootstrap human liberty — power concedes nothing without a demand.

This puts all hope in the political process being effective. If this effort fails, people will be stuck with the same global financial system we've had for decades. You're advocating a plan that's based on a naive idealism, and there is no space for that when the stakes involve the financial well-being of billions of people.

Allowing consumer choice and multiple competing ideas to co-exist is how historically societies have evolved and progressed.