Thank you for sharing!

This is how money works. If you use a medium of exchange and unit of account for goods and services then that medium must increase at the same rate as the increase in goods and services otherwise you get second and third order effects such as inflation, contraction, rising unemployment, etc., directly impacting its ability to act as a unit of account.

In Bitcoin you don't generate cash, you earn block rewards for acting as a consensus broker which otherwise would require a central banking settlement layer. This activity, tied directly to the transaction layer, acts to maintain the equilibrium between increases in goods and services and expansion of the money supply.

Wall Street got ahold of it and now Bitcoin is primarily acting as a Store of Value for the purpose of speculative investments. Driven primarily by the fear of missing out and market manipulation since Bitcoin is heavily centralized.

Think of it this way: If you pay with physical cash, there are people somewhere who do the work of digging ore out of the ground, smelting it, shaping it into coins, cutting and printing paper and so on. All these people do that, because they get paid in the same currency that they themselves have minted.

It turns out that nobody has yet found a way to create a digital decentralized currency that that works without incorporating a similar concept of incentivizing the creation of currency.

Normal cash is just printed out from thin air by those who have the power. In that sense (some) cryptocurrencies are better because at least the process is open.

Cryptocurrencies allow market participants to communicate value to each other without having to trust other market participants or an institution. Mining verifies transactions and commits them to the public record, earning the miner a fee for their work.

Monero is similar to Bitcoin Cash, a useful replacement for cash in most cases.

Because you need an incentive for 'miners' to participate in transaction processing.

Main functionality is transactions which are not controlled by any single entity (like the government).

Most of it is speculation unfortunately, which gives it a bad name, drowning out real usecases.

I can use my compute and energy how I like, whether that’s for AI or crypto or a Minecraft server. You don’t have a right to call one “wasteful” and one not

But solving the problem of how to transfer value trustlessly and anonymously, instantly anywhere in the world is one of the biggest breakthroughs since the Internet.

Amazing how in a few short years kids started growing up with Bitcoin and don't understand how it work or why it exists :(