It's still early days for cryptocurrency. As I was explaining to a friend today, traditional finance hates crypto because they make their living applying financial dogma while crypto takes, as its fundamental assumption, "money doesn't work like that."

The problem is people involved in crypto tend to be either (A) computer science dudes who live a life of abstraction or (B) libertarian buttheads who say "fiat" like it was a four letter word. There aren't a lot of big picture people and those who are talking about it find no audience.

I think the US government is big picture.

Fundamentally? cryptocurrency permits a trustless exchange of value without any threat of violence to back it up. That' something entirely new under the sun, something the human race has never encountered before. It also, obviously, permits an nth-decimal-place level of accounting across all digital frontiers. It's an accountant's wet dream - most of the fantasies of the early cypherpunks took the form of "we will beat the government... at computing!" which can be true for six to eight months under the best possible conditions.

Ultimately? Crypto can eliminate the middle man in transactions. It can automate all the stuff we currently need banks for. I think that's a big deal, and I think it's going to be revolutionary. But I also think it'll make it a whole lot harder to avoid taxation and tariffs, and i gotta ask what kind of fucking moron thinks your average government wouldn't jump on that shit.

I suspect Bitcoin would have evolved to something else if Paul Calder LeRoux weren't in jail.

Until we have widespread quantum computing, it's all a major energy problem, and that's at least two or three decades away.

An Ethereum proof of stake node can run on a raspberry pi. Technically it can run on your phone but that's the low-power version - everything Uniswap or any of the other Web3 services is running on the beacon chain.

There are currently 292,000 validators running on the beacon chain. Most of them are virtualized, with many running on DigitalOcean or AWS. Unlike proof of work chains, there is no advantage to bringing more firepower to the table - a lightweight instance does the same job as a heavyweight.

Presume Raspberry Pis. Presume 12.5W ea. Presume ten million validators, a fully built-out chain. That's 125MW. By way of comparison, Bitcoin most likely topped out at 132TW last summer - we're at six orders of magnitude less.

Compare and contrast: there are three million small businesses in the United States. Presume each one of them has a credit card reader. We've got a Square - it sucks down 20W. The existing credit card infrastructure in the United States consumes on the order of half the power of a fully-formed proof of stake network under the most egregious estimate.