> Ethereum is switching to proof of stake, which uses a normal amount of electricity and forever solves this issue

This has been said for a few years now. The originally deadline for this was January 2020. Suffice to say, it didn't happen. I'll believe it when I see it.

Ultimately, Blockchain seems to me to be a solution in search of a problem. There are a lot of issues with the current implementations, and a lot of words about how to solve them, but these are hard problems, and there's no guarantees they're going to be solved, and they are often problems that our current financial tech industry just doesn't have.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. I'll preface with saying that I listed my points as a contributors to the source of feelings I have about the crypto space - they're observations subject to selection bias.

RE 1. I keep hearing this for years now; I'll believe in PoS when I see it actually working.

RE 2., I just tend to keep finding (or being approached with) really bad ones. Last time I got excited was with FileCoin, but that seems to be... not moving too fast at all. I'll look into the quadratic funding/voting thing; it looks interesting, but from the brief overview, it's not necessarily crypto-specific.

RE 3. That belief is what I consider naive - or just perhaps I strongly hope it's wrong, because of point 1.

RE 4. That's true. I just keep hitting the obviously scammy ones - but that's perhaps because I'm an outside observer. Honest people who are knee-deep in crypto are definitely able to separate the wheat from the chaff.

RE 5. I don't doubt your friends are thoughtful and have strong moral compasses. But in that last statement, I was talking about trading these currencies in general - which counts in scam coins, bullshit "crypto! AI!" startups, and various criminals using cryptocurrencies for illicit trade. I would think this point is self-evident - an unregulated space with features that give more utility to criminals than to law-abiding citizens will, by definition, attract disproportionately more of the former than the latter. Also, when I say "disproportionately more" I really mean it, it's not a code for "everyone is bad".

> such as being top-ranked on coinmarketcap or backed by in-industry VCs, then there're hardly any scams at all

I have to disagree there. Looking at the top 20, I see

  3. XRP (Market cap hugely inflated, vaporware)
  8. Bitcoin SV (This is textbook)
  9. CRO (Not obvious today but time will tell)
  11. EOS
  15. TRON
  19. NEO (Depending on your definition of "scam" and maybe it was well-intentioned initially, but having tried implementing for it, it's nowhere near living up to what they claim the current state is)

Then there's Tether/USDT, which I know is a contentious one given their history.

I'm very much a long-term believer (10y+ until ready for mainstream, and even today an important hedge to mainstream finance and national economies) but we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking the majority of current volume is not what we'd like to believe it is. There's also the fact that you can have a big team of well-intentioned and intelligent people being orchestrated by a charismatic and convincing charlatan. There are multiple historical examples of this.

> 5) [It's a wild west...] Respectfully, this is an unkind or perhaps bigoted statement. I have many friends in crypto who are thoughtful, kind people. They think deeply about the ethical implications of the systems we're building. The same is true of many leaders in the space.

Its undeniable that the proportion of criminals among cryptocurrency enthusiasts is far higher than in the population at large. I don't see how its unkind or bigoted to point that out.