I agree as it relates to bitcoin: It's positioning itself as a store of value... and it kind of works as long as the collective delusion that it _is_ a store of value holds up. But that sort of self-fulfilling prophecy is kind of flimsy. Governments get to decide what money is based on charging taxes and demand how it gets paid.

Legal contracts are similar. They 100% are reliant on social and institutional forces for enforcement and meaning. But I think smart contracts are different because they are self-enforcing. It would be very difficult to use a smart contracts as a replacement for legal contracts in most circumstances. But when the contract relates to state and digital assets on the network then it's a great tool. And if you end up with a network that hosts a lot of these important contracts, then the native crypto asset (which is used as gas to power said contracts) has value as a commodity. And if that commodity also shares all the properties of good money (fungibility, durability, portability, etc.) then all of a sudden you have money.

Author here. Gas costs have actually come down a lot over the past few years. It only costs me a few dollars to run the transaction. It's more that scheduling, setting up, conducting, and tearing down each burn session is a huge pain in the ass. So if I can burn 10 bills an hour, then I'd clear maybe $450 an hour after gas, which doesn't feel crazy for providing boutique financial services.

Being able to handle Bitcoin transactions is fine, but it's disingenuous to act like it's the only way to be truly decentralized.

Hinges on you definition on truly decentralized. ETH is not truly decentralized (and never will be since their shift to proof-of-stake) as there is no way of not-knowing that the majority stake is not in a single force (or a conspiring group) - which in theory could already be the case. Absence of the counterproof and presence of a case where it would be centralized can never make it truly decentralized.

That's not really a valid criticism. You can say that same thing about any protocol. Who's to say that the majority of btc hashing power isn't single force or conspiring group?

oh with truly decentralized you mean like “verifiably” decentralized in the same sense as a scientific truth right?

I was a bit confused at first but I now get the criticism.

Frankly, this is better than a stablecoin since the value is locked on the blockchain forever no matter what.

It's a federal crime a federal crime pursuant to United States Code Title 18 (CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE), Part I (CRIMES), Chapter 17 (COINS AND CURRENCY), Sec. 333 (Mutilation of national bank obligations):

Whoever mutilates, cuts, defaces, disfigures, or perforates, or unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

The math here doesn't really work out for a couple reasons.

First... sure, if you spend $500,000 on buybacks instead of paying dividends, then large shareholders might make trillions of dollars. But individual investors make money also. In fact, every shareholder will make money in proportion to how much stock they own! The little guy isn't really getting screwed here.

Second, the stock price is determined by supply and demand. Stock buybacks increase the price by reducing supply. But, if we take the example mentioned where the company blows its entire bank account on stock buybacks (thus, harming the actual business)... the stock becomes less valuable, demand goes, and the price goes down.

Stock buybacks are functionally the same as if the company pays a dividend, and then every shareholder decides to reinvest. Except doing it as a buyback is (I believe) more tax efficient since the investor doesn't get hit with income tax before the reinvestment.

> POW is necessary to keep the network secure

It's certainly a way to keep the network secure. At best it's marginally better than POS. At worst, it's a ticking time bomb security budget cliff.

Pretty much everything other than bitcoin, monero, and dogecoin are running proof of stake these days anyhow, so it kind of doesn't matter.

Litecoin goes in that PoW group too.

In fact, Litecoin has an optional privacy feature called MWEB, which is probably why Litecoin too got kicked off of being named on some conventional news sites.

KAS is PoW, at ~240 times the hash-rate of LTC, ~120 000 000 times the hash-rate of XMR, and 0.0007 times the hash-rate of BTC. Obviously not really comparable...

https://poolbay.io/coins

There are different flavors of stablecoins though. There's the ponzi scheme flavor that is propped up based on hand waving alchemy, and there's the boring (and now regulated) flavor that's actually backed by real money.

And who is the authority to prove which stablecoins are ponzis and which are 'backed by real money'?