> Perhaps you'll be able to offer the first

In quite literally every single practical application that Bitcoin has been used, from currency, to anonymity, to investment, to regulatory circumvention, to price reliability, to the democratization of finance, even to independence from the USD, Bitcoin has been found lacking. I'm not making that last criticism up either, there's strong evidence that Bitcoin's value tracks with the stock market. That should be a major red flag to its proponents, but it's not because... :shrug: sunk-cost line needs to go up.

The criticism of Bitcoin is that from its inception, it has not succeeded in a single one of its goals. On literally every axis, both technological and economic, it has either been surpassed by other coins or the underlying theories have turned out to not hold up in the real world.

The criticism of Bitcoin is that all of its hype boils down to the hope that it might become useful in the future, even though it has thus-far failed or been surpassed in every attempt to be useful. And this has been going on since Bitcoin began, and still people come in and say "well, I got into this a few years ago and it seems sound to me." My sibling in Christ, there is a history of failure here that you are either not privy to or are ignoring.

You can have all the theories you want, the problem is that none of them are demonstrable and the things being built with those theories don't actually work in the real world. But as long as you keep everything in theory and keep talking about gold vs beads, sure, you can debunk anything that anyone says because economics are complicated and it's easy to make arguments that sound good even if they're not practically useful in the real world for building actual systems that people use.

> it doesn't work as a currency (I agree, not yet at least, maybe never)

This is also why these conversations are exhausting, because there is no singular philosophy that Bitcoin proponents share other than that they think Bitcoin is good. I can jump from a Bitcoin proponent telling me that Bitcoin is the future of financial transactions to someone telling me that it's not intended to be a currency in the first place, and they'll happily promote Bitcoin alongside each other even though their actual goals are completely contrary to each other and their philosophies are completely incompatible.

This should also be a warning sign to people, but for some reason it's not. There is no unified consistent philosophy from Bitcoin proponents about what the coin is even intended to do. There are a lot of factions, and you'd think they'd all be at each others' throats, but they're not. For some weird reason, people with radically different philosophies about the goal of the coin don't seem to have much disagreement with each other as long as the USD-price keeps going up. Almost like the USD-price going up is the actual uniting goal. Almost like it is first and foremost a speculative asset designed to exploit FOMO, and all of the philosophies and theories are secondary to that goal.

> it's used differently to how early proponents thought it might be (I don't care)

The irony of someone saying this after coming and saying, "if you're critical you obviously don't know enough about the theory behind the coin" is not lost on me. You're coming into a conversation extremely late, looking at the people who invented the thing you're calling revolutionary, looking at their claims which ended up being proven wrong, and saying, "it's actually everyone else who doesn't understand what's happening here."

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> it wastes energy (I disagree in the strongest way - I'd prefer it to use more energy)

Not so much relevant to our conversation, but for anyone else reading, this is why discussions about proof of stake are contentious in crypto spaces and why efforts to build efficient coins are likely to fail, because a large portion of the space sees the wastefulness as a feature. The entire design is oriented around making the coin inefficient and making transaction verification inaccessible to anyone who does not control large amounts of power/hardware. Burning the world is not an unfortunate side effect that can be mitigated, it is a desired part of the process, to the point where I have actually heard proponents call Bitcoin a "battery for excess electricity." Their philosophy is that burning the world is desirable as long as they're able to sell the ashes for a profit.

And that's a big reason why it took so long for Ethereum to move to PoS and why people were so mad about it; that's why discussions about energy efficiency aren't going to work out. That's also why the only way that energy usage is ever going to decrease for Bitcoin is if the coin crashes entirely, because the energy usage is a function of the coin's USD market value and the USD market value that miners can extract from wasting that energy. If energy prices go down, miners will use more electricity until they rise again. If there's excess electricity somewhere else, miners will use that too. They have to, that's how Bitcoin is designed to work, it's designed to soak up any electricity that is priced efficiently enough that it can be used to mine coins. Bitcoin is a machine that purposefully inflates energy usage in proportion to its USD market value.