Linus Torvalds has said that cryptocurrencies are simply "a great vehicle for scams"
Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, does not believe in cryptocurrencies, calling them a vehicle for scams and a Ponzi scheme.
Torvalds was once rumored to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, but he clarified it was a joke and denied owning a Bitcoin fortune.
Torvalds also dismissed the idea of technological singularity as a bedtime story for children, saying continuous exponential growth does not make sense.
Crypto - Meh, I have digital banking and payment processing already, with easy enough international transfers. I'm good.
AI - I see the possibilities, I think we should continue to develop it even if just for the medical applications of machine learning. Right now people just like playing with it, but, privacy issues aside, I don't think it's a waste.
Crypto is worse tho, it requires about the same amount of energy as the entire global banking network, but only serves less than a percentage of the transactions
I think both have their uses. A true state backed cryptocurrency used interchangeably with physical cash could be quite useful. Crypto as it is now not so much.
AI has a bunch of useful applications in medicine, manufacture, research, monitoring... But where we see it is language models, art remixes, and deep fakes.
Manipulating currency is a useful tool. If you don't think so, that makes you more liberian than me.
Like many here, I'm big into open source, and card payment systems are an issue. Crypto is one solution to that. Crypto has advantages, but it falls down as a currency because of blind faith in the invisble hand.
From what I found, and varies due to values/date, looks like a PoW transaction is about 2+ million times more energy than traditional banking. PoS is over 1000 times less than PoW, so about 2+ thousands times traditional banking. But transitional banking has other problems. For one, the market of payment is stitched up. Not like openness of a crypto currency.
Everyone has hardware enough already. Your phone is perfectly good enough. For tills it will be easier to implement. No nonsense with a card machine and things like WorldPay and whole locked down PC. The hardware and platform wouldn't matter.
POS does not consume resources.
This goes to show how low-effort the criticism campaigns are.
However... all cryptos have their health tied to bitcoin which is a large energy consumer. So the point is actually still very true (due to some other reason).