It's kinda scary how finance and payment processing companies can just destroy a company and a whole bunch of people's livelihoods by themselves just because they decide they don't like what they sell, and have no oversight whatsoever preventing them from doing this.
If only an environmentally-friendly, non-volatile cryptocurrency was possible...
It’s possible, just not in a completely decentralized system optimizing for energy consumption. I think this is an area where the liberal assumption of individual humans being the atomic unit of operation really bites the whole system in the ass. There are absolutely no means of governance built in. I understand that’s the point, but it’s some real “invisible hand” logic.
All the useful properties of a cryptocurrency could be done with a centralized server that generates tokens at a fixed rate and offers transaction management, with like a discarded netbook's worth of computing power.
It wouldn't be decentralized or crypto though, so you wouldn't have weird libertarians propping up the value.