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.
I would say yes. The only existing cryptocurrency that is a currency and not a security or a proof of concept is monero. The usecase is more or less contained to illegal or shameful purchases, which are not necessarily immortal, but a lot of them are. Any proof of work system will be computationally expensive, but the usecase of proper crypto is so small the scaling isn’t a massive issue. I don’t expect cryptocurrency to be that useful in the future, but a niche usecase will probably remain.