I see where the disconnect is, and maybe I can explain by answering your last two comments:
Point 2. “I’d argue is where you want the State involved.” The State is involved. The blockchain is a public record. No private entity controls it. A State can just choose to regulate it. A State can choose to maintain several copies of it, run verifiers, etc. Currently all of your financial information is held and controlled by private companies. Your credit score belongs to Experian, Transunion, or Equifax, not you. Your browsing data is owned by Facebook and Google, not you. Blockchain flips this on its head.
2a. The contracts have to follow the rules of the blockchain. The details can be written by a lawyer and have the weight of any contract. In the last financial meltdown there were several cases of foreclosure where the mortgage paperwork simply didn’t exist, or there was outright fraud by brokers changing records. If you had your own unique wallet on a blockchain, this could not happen without your interaction. You cannot write to a blockchain wallet address without a private key. The caveat to this is that people can make mistakes at another point in a transaction, and there will need to be regulations and designed systems.
Data is not stored on a blockchain. All it is is a record of transactions. NFTs aren’t even on the blockchain. Those images have to live on a computer somewhere else, and the record would point to that location. So all you’re buying when you purchase an NFT is a certificate of ownership that will exist as long as there as at least one copy of the blockchain.
However, you could create a distributed ledger of locations that allow reads and writes to be charged. This is what Filecoin is. It uses the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) protocol, which is basically distributed http. So, instead of https, it would be ipfs. If you have extra storage on computers that is not used, you could potentially get paid to provide it to Wikipedia for much less than Wikipedia pays in centralized storage, with the added benefit that there would be several copies of parts of it. This has already existed for 20 years in peer to peer file exchanges. If you’ve ever used Bittorrent, it’s like that, but you get paid. The experience would be the same to the end user.
Correct - I would just point out that it is slated to change in 2022. You’re not wrong, just incomplete with your information, and that could provide the wrong message. Arguably the energy benefits of blockchain will reduce total energy use of financial services. That would be an interesting article.
We pay Mastercard when we make a transaction at a point of sale. It’s no different. You have to pay Mastercard to transact on Mastercard. Mastercard shareholders get paid for keeping the network up. If you transact on Ethereum, Ethereum miners (and in the future validators) get paid to keep the network up.
You can be speculative with existing sovereign currencies at a Forex. You can speculate with corn and soybean futures at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. You can speculate on the New York Stock Exchange. There is no difference. In all cases you are betting that the value will increase because people will use it more.
I think you’ll find not too many people here love how much of our economy is based on trading futures, which helps a couple people get rich at the expense of everyone else but otherwise provides no real value to the world.
Here’s the key thing with speculation: there is never a point where there’s enough. It’s not like building a railroad where at some point you have what you want, it’s like stocking the pharaoh’s tomb with gold. So there’s no meaning to efficiency. If it takes less resources, you do more.
Which means your boast that Ethereum is about to become less energy intensive, someday soon we promise, would meaningless even if it turns out not to be more vaporware. So long as the blockchain is maintained primarily for the purpose of speculation, all that means is people will burn the same resources doing more of it…trying to get rich at the expense of everyone else.
The environment we depend on is dying. There’s a number of reasons. Saying Ethereum isn’t worse than some of the other things murdering it is not really the high praise you seem to think.
Of course you can. A blockchain is just a ledger - what you put in a ledger is up to you whether it is financial transactions, proof of ownership, supply-chain movements or academic qualifications. All of those are perfectly reasonable reasons to implement blockchains and not one of them involves a cryptocurrency.
Yeah I mean “Billionaires taking sightseeing tours to space” probably still account for less than 0.1% of the global carbon footprint at present but that still doesn’t mean it’s an environmentally friendly thing to do.
The funny thing about all these libertarian social experiments like decentralized non-government-issued currencies is that as soon as the weaknesses become apparent people tend to re-invent the mechanisms that made the original versions viable in the first place.
Case in point: cryptocurrency users were getting ripped off in various ways by bad actors and usually had no legal recourse or means of recovering assets, so now they’re basically re-inventing banks.
This is what regulations are for. Again, though, what is going on in the current system is hiding this activity in opaque private companies. Harder to do with a public ledger.
