Do you feel the same way about centralized currency’s apparatuses? Visa, MasterCard, Chase, BoA, PayPal, the U.S. Mint, the FBI’s anti-counterfeiting department, point-of-sale terminal manufacturers, etc. These all use so much more resources than all of crypto combined, not to mention the human lives wasted to support it all.

You say that if crypto disappeared, nothing would happen. I posit that if fiat currencys disappeared (and were replaced by a crypto that isn’t energy intensive) that you would have a net improvement to global society. You could hand out lifelong annuity/pension/UBI for all the displaced workers, pay them to dump all the executives/shareholders at the bottom of the ocean, and still have excess money left over. All those former bank tellers would have time to pursue their interests, and maybe produce some music/art/whatever for the rest of us along the way. (Bitcoin and proof-of-work’s energy waste do need to be trashed though.)

No true Scotsman and Godwin’s law, nice. Anyways, BLM is an obvious continuation of the civil rights movement, and calling them “slacktivists” is derisive and reductionist.

Protesting until you die of old age is not what it used to be. The surveillance of the modern world makes protestors into easy targets if they ever become a true threat. The powers that be have learned plenty from the civil rights era.

Nobody should have faith in any nation to erode in the first place. Every single one has fucked over their neighbors and their own populations to further the ambitions of the rich and powerful. Look to the erosion of antitrust and privacy laws to see where we are headed. Look at how SOPA and other protests have gone. You seriously think nobody knows how to protest anymore, and it’s just a generational failing? Despite the obvious ways the oppressors have adapted to the modern world?

Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter are pretty recent examples of where “showing up in numbers” just wasn’t enough. The system is rigged and blaming victims isn’t getting us anywhere. Anecdotally throughout my life, I have seen uncountable numbers of people come to work/school/etc. with an “I voted” sticker, and my conspiracy theory is that the numbers are meaningless and the people who rigged the system already decide who is winning before the first vote is cast, unless they abandon the plan because their polling shows an absolute landslide that would reveal their fuckery.