We don't. It will be bypassed.

Remember those happy times when you could mine crypto at home? We know how that story unfolded and ended.

Remember those happy times of a year ago when the greater fool game was being played out? We know how that story unfolded and ended.

The shape-shifting blockchain moved on.

There will be plenty of people that pursue their blockchain ideas with promises of revolution with people able to get kidney transplants extra betterly due to blockchain, promises of freeing people from the slavery of the 'fiat' printed money, promises of helping remote farmers in Africa have title to their land, promises of vegans able to buy their avocados with added blockchain goodness and so forth. There will be a lot of big words tantamount to pseudo science uttered complete with 'playground voices' (shouting louder if questioned) so these people will be able to get on with their save-the-world by blockchain things, in good faith, no arguments needed, picking up investors as needed. People like myself that ask the questions out of concern that folks involved don't get burned will learn to shut up.

This group of people that are ideologically invested in blockchain will be making promises for solving the problems of 'making it green', leave them to it and watch how the market for crypto investments shakes out. I think that the problem will get bypassed.

Bitcoin futures did not take off, really this was a failure of marketing rather than a fundamental problem. Next time round you will be able to invest in a fund with your 'fiat' currency (or real money if you want to see it that way). The bank will invest your money in Bitcoin but they won't be trading in it or using it as a means of exchange. Other crypto-currencies including Ethereum will go by the wayside and the Bitcoin maximalists will kind of win.

In time this Bitcoin will be as originally promised - as good as gold. It will sit there in a bank and not in your wallet. It won't be vulnerable like a normal stock (even Apple isn't totally golden) or even property come the big crash. I am not saying that there will be a big crash in late stage, post 2008 capitalism, but what goes up must come down. Many perceived disadvantages of Bitcoin will become advantages. Not being able to do transactions quickly will become an advantage, it being too complicated for your grandma will become an advantage.

When the world was on the Gold Standard the gold just sat there in Fort Knox, none of it being transacted. Bitcoin will be just the same, it will just sit there, not having to have blockchain things actually happen to it. It is in this way that the PoW problem, the slow speed problem as well as the mining-green problem gets solved.

Already there are moves afoot for this new model of acceptance of how Bitcoin is going to be. Once Bitcoin is in the digital vaults of the financial institutions it will have a different store-of-value to today, people will be happy to invest in these products. It will work out fine and the people who are a tad zealous about saving-the-world-with-really-complicated-blockchain-ideas-and-no-domain-knowledge will just be heard from less and less.

I am not trying to be nasty or dismissive of blockchain out of any bitterness, this is just my assessment of how things actually are panning out.