I did not downvote you, but I want to respond to your question instead of taking the approach of weaponizing hn votes to simply suppress perspectives I disagree with, and I'd encourage my pro-crypto friends to do the same. We have to treat dissenters and critics with the same open-minded, good-faith, respectful dialogue we want them to offer us. I don't mean to suggest I'm not a biased partisan, but I will be a good-faith and respectful biased partisan. My views follow.

Bitcoin is not fool's gold. Bitcoin is essentially a permissionless (third world citizens, political outcasts, people governments don't like are still able to use it without the government being able to cut them off), non-inflationary (inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon - the result of too many units of currency chasing too few goods and services, almost always a result of rampant currency debasement, not possible with bitcoin's hard-coded 21 million cap) universal (every country can trust it because no one country can control it) currency.

The economic implications of these properties are incredibly powerful and difficult to overstate. This enables a framework for the working class to start saving in ways government cannot steal back from them through inflation. This enables trustless international trade settlement. This can prevent rising geopolitical tensions from currency wars over FIAT (backed by absolutely nothing, takes a a few key strokes to produce more) currency. Currently, it appears impossible to forge or fake Proof of Work, the way governments can forge and fake new currency into existence with a few keystrokes, which again, is the ultimate cause of inflation.

Proof of Work is not without drawbacks, it is computationally expensive, but again, that's the point - it takes a ton of work to do all the SHA256 hashing to get hash results with dozens of leading zeroes - governments don't appear to be able to cheat at this yet. It's worth acknowledging in good faith that these computational costs have electrical load costs, which often do have carbon emitting costs, too.

It's also worth acknowledging that there are alternative proposals to Proof of Work, such as Proof of Stake. While architecturally sound, PoS greatly simplifies and enables the rich to seize control of the whole system, and that would enable them to start stealing people's money. This is not theoretically impossible with Proof of Work, but Proof of Stake essentially streamlines that process, which is why a lot of folks like me distrust it.

I'm not opposed to the idea of pondering other alternatives to proof of work, but they will be critically analyzed, and if people like me find issue with them as I do with PoS, there's a real good possibility that they'll keep preferring PoW like I do, too.

Bitcoin is a truly decentralized, voluntarist system. Even if you seize control of the Bitcoin core wallet developer accounts, and start pushing major protocol changes, the Bitcoin community will most likely refuse to use your version, and keep the main chain intact. Bitcoin makes it fundamentally and systemically difficult to exercise force against the network to shove in changes that the actual users of Bitcoin do not want. The only way the network adopts changes is when the network likes them. Sometimes vocal minorities do play the intransigence card, and that's how we get forks like Bitcoin Cash, which anyone who wants to use is free to, but it's not Bitcoin, and the vocal minority interest hasn't fundamentally changed Bitcoin at all when this happens. Even bad actors who are secretly colluding in exercising force against the "general public" of bitcoin users don't get their way. If that's not the most tyranny-resistant form of an ethical, voluntary monetary system we can envision as a society, I don't know what is.

Ultimately, this is all just my opinion, I don't claim to be some magic oracle of absolute truth, and I think we should be skeptical of anyone who says they are.

I invite and accept all good-faith comments and criticism and want to open a dialogue for supporters, detractors, and neophytes alike. I hope we can all be kind, respectful, open-minded, and avoid name-calling and other childish gotchas.