Yes, I know that it still exist, and yes, decentralized currency which utilizes distributed, cryptographic validation is not actually a strictly bad idea, but…
Is the speculative investment scam, which crypto substantially represented, finally dead? Can we go back to buying gold bars and Pokemon cards?
I feel like it is, but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen. Maybe crypto scammers moved on to selling LLM “prompts?” Maybe the rug just got pulled enough times that everyone lost trust.
It’s a small foot print for a real user and expensive for bots who are generating enmasse. It worked on Windows 98 PCs so isn’t really an issue like you describe.
PoW is indeed an interesting solution to protect against DDoS in some situation, like how Tor Onion Services does it.
Not all applications of PoW are bad.