I was kind of sympathetic to Bitcoin in the early days. Despite the awful politics of the community surrounding it and the obvious grift angle, it seemed a positive that we might possibly be able to escape the stranglehold that payment processors are currently demonstrating online.
Obviously, the incentives at play inevitability led the project to become a series of pyramid schemes within pyramid schemes, and anyone who has actually used the Bitcoin network will tell you that it did not scale well, with slow transfers and high fees.
However, could it be done well? Is it conceptually possible to have a left cryptocurrency? How would that work, technically, politically, practicality within this economy?
To be perfectly honest, these were the questions I wished our glorious thought leaders in left media would grapple with a decade ago, but maybe we all have enough perspective on this thing now that there is some fruitful discussion to be had on here at least.
No. Bitcoin fundamentally cannot “be done well”.
Aside from the fact that it features a public ledger that makes tracking funds and users easier than cash does, and that right there blows any chance of it functioning as a stateless, anonymous payment system out of the water, it was also designed to do what it does, ballon in price to reflect the feedback loop of rising cost of electricity that makes its use possible. Bitcoin was a bet that we wouldn’t have cheap power and it was a correct bet.
If we did have cheap power then there wouldn’t be anything stopping wealthy entities from using their wealth to poison the well on both proof of work and proof of stake systems.
It’s designed as a pyramid scheme to siphon up cheap power and kick the stored value up the chain to people who have more money or got in earlier.