The headline says it's a ponzi/pyramid scheme, which doesn't get mentioned until the second to last sentence, in the form of a speculative question: "In the me

The headline says it's a ponzi/pyramid scheme, which doesn't get mentioned until the second to last sentence, in the form of a speculative question: "In the meantime, though, Bitcoin is still a little bit of a Ponzi—or is it a pyramid?—scheme that its libertarian early adopters are trying to cash in on." The general statement of the article is that Bitcoin is not as good as it seems because it's infrastructure takes energy to run and lacks some features banks have. While every other aspect gets compared to banks, the infrastructure of them doesn't even get mentioned. Yet, the costly infrastructure of the Blockchain is one of the main concerns raised in the article. The Blockchain costs a lot of energy. So does every Google search you make, if you remember that comparison to how many hours of light you could generate instead of a single search. How much energy does it take to run the parts of banks that the Blockchain could replace, globally? No one knows. My guess is that it puts the Blockchain to shame. As more and more things go digital, the biggest cost aspect of a lot of things will be electricity. If it's not the Blockchain, something else will need that much energy. More than likely whatever industry develops around VR will eat loads of energy. That doesn't necessarily mean we shouldn't go for it, or that it's bad.