I was skeptical about Bitcoin for a long time. I could not understand how the price kept going up every year for so many years. So I started reading everything

I was skeptical about Bitcoin for a long time. I could not understand how the price kept going up every year for so many years. So I started reading everything I could about our monetary system and learned that it essentially became a ponzi scheme in 1971. Then I found out about Proof of Stake and learned that it consumes very little electricity and doesn't require specialized hardware and that's what won me over. I feel like the HN community and many people in tech are in the same boat as I was 3 years ago. 3 years ago, when I saw people buying up $20K worth of crypto, I thought that they were completely reckless and that they would lose everything. Now, I feel like crypto is the safest asset of all (same level as Gold and Silver). I think people are insane to keep more than $20K in the stock market. Given what I know now, I could not bring myself to invest even $10K of my hard-earned money in the stock market because: - I don't trust the stock broker (intermediary) to hold my shares on my behalf. What if they go bankrupt? What if they are malicious and disappear with my money? - I don't trust corporate executives to have my best interests. - I don't trust corporation revenue numbers because they are inflated by artificial currency supply and manipulation (e.g. corporations feeding off of debt-fueled shell companies to generate fake revenue). With cryptocurrency, I hold my money in my own wallet on-chain so I trust no one and I benefit from the inflation and manipulations of reserve banks and corporations without actually participating in it. ---- As a developer, the mental hurdles which were holding me back 3 years ago included: - Insane amount of electricity consumption of Bitcoin - I can now see the benefits of this in terms of added security, but for me personally (as someone who is not a billionaire), it's way overkill so I can't say that I've moved past that mental hurdle. I've heard some decent arguments about Bitcoin mostly consuming surplus or green electricity from the grid but I'd probably have to see it for myself to fully believe it. - A blockchain's scalability has hard limits. As a developer who had experience in building scalable (centralized) systems, this perplexed me a lot initially. Now, I see it as an advantage in that it will ensure decentralization by forcing people to adopt multi-blockchain interoperability solutions as they become more popular. I think that interoperable blockchains will end up forming hierarchies and you will be able to pay for stuff using any token from any blockchain within that hierarchy; different blockchain tokens will be accepted interchangeably since the historical price and volume data can be calculated from the blockchains themselves. They will all be connected together via decentralized exchanges.