Was it even the majority of voters?
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-ELECTION/RESULTS/zjpqnemxwvx/
Anyway, it still went horribly wrong.

And here I thought Luigi is just a suspect and innocent until proven guilty. But what do I know.

You’re righr. I wasn’t specific enough. I meant inflation of the supply, the currency units. Increasing the supply can cause loss of real purchase power aka inflation.
With a stable supply and only the forces of supply and demand in place, real purchase power loss or increase are possible, which means there can be inflation or deflation.

You’re dead wrong.
Have you ever heard of Bitcoin mining farms? Their electric energy consumption dwarfs a league of mainframes.
Am IBM Z16 may need several dozen kW at full load: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/systems-hardware/zsystems/Z16M-A01?topic=requirements-general-electrical-power
Fully equipped with 8 PDUs and 4 BPAs a single mainframe is limited to an electric power of 173 kW.

Well, the Bitcoin miners are estimated to use around 175 TWh of energy annually, which equals an electric power of around 20 GW : https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin-energy-consumption/
This is several orders of magnitude above that of all the mainframes in the world - unless there are more than 116 million mainframes of that type in operation and running at full load.

But unless you use Monero or other crypto with similarly strong privacy all you do is leave a permanent trail for agencies to investigate.
Using shell companies on the Cayman Islands might be the safer approach.

…and the hate is strong.

Yeah, that may very well be the case and it’s hard to verify or falsify it.

Are you saying that financial institutions own most of all crypto in existence or do you mean Bitcoin specifically?

I agree that scaling power comsumption is unsustainable - both ecologically and ecoomically!
But power consumption is no inherent attribute of crypto, but a design choice.
Bitcoin just refuses to adjust.
Ethereum did that not very long ago.

What I’m trying to say is: there are designs available that operate at a very tiny power consumption.
Don’t lump all crypto together with Bitcoin.

XRP is fast, but neither instant (usually around 4 seconds) nor without fees:
https://xrpl.org/docs/concepts/transactions/transaction-cost

The cherry on top is the skewed token distribution.
Thanks, but no thanks!

All of what you say applies to most cryptocurrencies.
But I’m aware of at least one digital currency that is

• without fees
• usually confirmed in less than one second
• eco-friendly because it requires no special hardware to operate the network and it uses very little energy

It has also zero inflation, is decentralized and designed with incentives that increase the degree of decentralization over time.
It also has no built-in limits regarding transactions per second.

Consumer protection without middlemen/centralization is hardly possible.

I’m hesitant to drop a name here, because I don’t want to come across as a shill, but if you’re interested we can discuss the attributes of this gem.

edit: ah, the good old “I don’t like what I see, but I have no arguments, so I just downvote without engaging” approach. Or does it just sound too good to be true?
You know what, I’ve changed my mind: https://nano.org/en

If financial institutions own most of it and aren’t regulated accordingly, what you say seems to hold true.
As soon as there’s sufficient regulation in place or financial institutions don’t own most of it, it won’t look so bleak.

Well, it was not as regulated as e.g. the stock market, but regulation of cryptocurrency was there and improving - with all the benefits and drawbacks.
In the very early days there were no KYC and AML policies at all.
Taking back the little regulation that has been introduced in the last few years doesn’t improve customer protection.

If the deregulation of cryptocurrencies happens in the US, it will get even worse except for the predators.

The vast majority are, but not all of them.
Albeit it’s hard to find those that aren’t.

What about if you take out inflation and offer transactions for zero fees while operating a network with little appetite for (electric) energy?
That would mean you’d never be left with dust amounts you can’t spend and no entity could debase your holdings by issuing more currency units.
Then the price would just be the result of supply and demand.
Of course that’s not what that teenager did or what the vast majority of cryptocurrencies do, but how it could and should be done.

You might have a different understanding of billionaire bacon than the person you replied to.

Speaking of the pradoxof tolerance, Karl Popper realized that intolerance often involves violence.
I, for one would argue that health insurance denying claims arbitrarily asserts violence in some way - even worse to especially vulnerable people.

So how do you imagine not tolerating this kind of intolerance?
Writing stern letters and emails? That seems to have happened.
Starting a legal battle that might be decided in your favour after you’ve died from not receiving health care due to denied claims?
What would you suggest?

Popper also draws attention to the fact that intolerance is often asserted through the use of violence […]

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#Proposed_solutions

Language.

Sure!
I was merely trying to raise awareness for the need to bring privacy protection to a level beyond E2EE, although E2EE is a very important and useful step.