I've worked in industries I had no idea even existed until I worked there. But they made sense once I found them, and I created value, as did most of my colleagues. Maybe you're in a bad job at the moment and need to look a bit wider?
> Companies like Snapchat are worth billions of dollars, but they lose billions of dollars each year. At least most cryptocurrencies don't lose money (except some of them due to electricity costs).
All cryptocurrencies are burning money on electricity costs. And what do they have to show for it? I've got plenty of fun out of Snapchat, so even if their investors don't get a return it's not like the money was completely burned, whereas cryptocurrencies spend electricity with nothing to show for it except some numbers that hash to other numbers.
> I've worked in industries I had no idea even existed until I worked there. But they made sense once I found them, and I created value, as did most of my colleagues.
Value is relative. You may have created value in the reference frame of a particular industry, but perhaps that industry is not of value. As e.g. Ponzi schemes show, people pay for things that have no value, so money is not a reliable indicator.
Another example is the entertainment industry. A lot of money is being spent, orders of magnitude more per minute of content than say, 40 years ago. But are people more entertained now per minute of content than back in the old days?
> Value is relative. You may have created value in the reference frame of a particular industry, but perhaps that industry is not of value. As e.g. Ponzi schemes show, people pay for things that have no value, so money is not a reliable indicator.
It has its flaws but on the whole it works. Certainly in the cases I'm thinking of my industry was producing value and I was producing value to the industry.
> Another example is the entertainment industry. A lot of money is being spent, orders of magnitude more per minute of content than say, 40 years ago. But are people more entertained now per minute of content than back in the old days?
Yes, much more. Try watching old films, playing old games. There are a few gems but there's a lot of awfulness, and even more than that, even in the good ones everything's so slow.
> Value is relative. You may have created value in the reference frame of a particular industry, but perhaps that industry is not of value.
You seem to be confused to the point that you assume that value can only exist if you personally find anything to be of any value and only in the long run. That's not how the world works. Value is subjective and everyone has their particular needs at each point in time. I don't go buy speedos in the dead of winter or skis in august, nor I'm going to spend money on a show or a book that doesn't interest me. Does that mean that any of those things has any value?of course not.
Mining is a highly nessisarily industry, but it depends on a lot of niche industries that we don't think about. Yes, building high explosives is nessisarily because we need them to mine with. But high explosives are now an industry that needs support, quality control, R&D etc.
Keep going and the beast feeds it's self with communication overhead requiring a lot of office workers.
Not the same thing. Your browser does a necessary computation and nothing more; if computers get twice as fast, your browser will spend half as much electricity, but bitcoin "miners" will be burning as much as ever.
Recommended bit sizes for a given cipher do increase but only very gradually, since the attack cost is exponential in the number of bits. 20 years ago 1024 or 2048 bit RSA was standard; now 2048 is recommended as a minimum for extremely high-value and long-lived keys (i.e. CA root certificates) but that's all. Host key lengths are actually shorter these days than they were 10 years ago, since algorithmic improvements (elliptic curves) allow the same level of security with much shorter keys.
Burning electricity is not the only way we know to secure a currency, though. It's the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies that requires their high operational costs, because the "good guys" and the "bad guys" are equal from the point of view of the protocol, so the "good guys" need to spend more than any "bad guy" can afford.
A centralized currency lets the central source of trust protect their security at far lower cost.
Then you aren't comparing like-for-like. Value in bitcoin represents a disagreement with your consideration of who is "good", in the same way investment in a currency might be seen as confidence in the institutions that back it. You could just as well argue there should only be one monetary currency.
How much effort do credit-rating, fraud etc agencies make? A centralized currency requires trust, which crypto-currencies don't. To compare value, you need to add a price tag to this liability. The lower cost comes from the savings made in not having to secure against the central authority itself.
But this decentralization is a feature, not a bug. It might be more efficient on the surface to centralize and just have everyone trust a mint, but that defeats the purpose of decentralization.
There are other upsides like independence.
It’s more efficient for everyone to take a bus and never drive a car alone. But cars give freedom. It’s more efficient for the world to eat soy lent instead of a diverse diet.
Complaining about how cars use more fuel than buses or how strawberries take more water and fertilizer than soy neglects to capture all the benefits gained for those higher costs.
There's a lot of work in everything: https://xkcd.com/1741/
I've worked in industries I had no idea even existed until I worked there. But they made sense once I found them, and I created value, as did most of my colleagues. Maybe you're in a bad job at the moment and need to look a bit wider?
> Companies like Snapchat are worth billions of dollars, but they lose billions of dollars each year. At least most cryptocurrencies don't lose money (except some of them due to electricity costs).
All cryptocurrencies are burning money on electricity costs. And what do they have to show for it? I've got plenty of fun out of Snapchat, so even if their investors don't get a return it's not like the money was completely burned, whereas cryptocurrencies spend electricity with nothing to show for it except some numbers that hash to other numbers.