Oh no, the people trying to start a financial revolution accidentally screwed over people who wanted to play video games!!! Give me a break. Its very possible that cryptocurrencies will never make a difference and end up being a failed experiment but the majority of the arguments i see against it are so weak/tired. Large companies are ruining the environment in developing countries but you’re worried about the energy consumption of cryptos??
I am worried about both things, in fact I touched on it in regards to manufacturing all this hardware to calculate virtual numbers that have absolutely no value in reality.
I don't think you should be so absolute in your assessment, it has many values to a lot of people. Also the traditional banking system is hardly a paragon of virtue when it comes to illegal money laundering, currency manipulation, LIBOR scandal,the sub-prime mortgages.
As the eco-system evolves hopefully the environmental impact would be reduced significantly.
Plenty of real world uses. Cash on the internet needs to exist. Centralized financial control is not a good thing 100% of the time.
It does indeed suck it's turned into such an insane hype machine and get rich quick scheme - but it solved a real world problem that is going to become more and more acute. The war on cash is real, and having a digital cash to fight back with is necessary if you value freedom or privacy on any level.
Ask wikileaks how well relying on banking access went for them. And like it or not, plenty of grey and black markets exist.
The one that worries me the most is environmental (power cost, gpu/asic manufaturing).
It also sucks for projects that actually needs to use computational time for real world problems like folding@home and seti@home.
And it sucks big time for PC gamers.