I don't know how this got written without including the words "double spending." I'm shocked how many people have opinions about cryptocurrency without reading Satoshi's surprisingly accessible Bitcoin whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Preventing double spending is the reason for all of this hullaballoo, no more, no less. It's easy to create a distributed ledger, but hard to create one where you cannot double spend, hence mining and staking.
You can't double spend physical cash because you can't give someone else a physical object and have it too.
You can't double spend your fiat because your bank says to your counterparty "trust us bro, he didn't double spend" and your bank is pretty trustworthy.
You can't double spend your bitcoin because to do so you'd have to have more than half of the computing power in the world, which is pretty tough to do, and even if you did actually succeed at double spending it would render your investment worthless, because all transactions are public and someone might notice the double spend and the value of bitcoin would plummet.
Soon, you won't be able to double spend your Ethereum because if you did, everyone would notice, point it out to everyone in the network that you double spent, and then everyone would automatically slash your Ethereum stake to zero going forward and carry on without you.
That's all. It has nothing fundamentally to do with voting or economic distribution or proving ownership of scare resources or anything like that. It's about preventing double spending on a distributed ledger of transactions.
If you solve double spending, then yes, your cryptocurrency will work.
Focusing on "solving double spending" as though it were the one thing that represents the entire financial system seems to me kind of like imagining that the global transportation system can be replaced by some sort of algorithm with the singular function of ensuring large metal objects don't physically coincide.
"Solving double spending" doesn't represent "the entire financial system" but it does represent the entirety of why we have miners and stakers, which seems to be the main point of contention by those who describe themselves as "anti-crypto."
Multi spending fiat used to be pretty easy actually. Write a check, use credit card outside credit limit with slow transactions. And so on. Only thing was that on other side you had banks who were friendly with governments.
Preventing double spending is the reason for all of this hullaballoo, no more, no less. It's easy to create a distributed ledger, but hard to create one where you cannot double spend, hence mining and staking.
You can't double spend physical cash because you can't give someone else a physical object and have it too.
You can't double spend your fiat because your bank says to your counterparty "trust us bro, he didn't double spend" and your bank is pretty trustworthy.
You can't double spend your bitcoin because to do so you'd have to have more than half of the computing power in the world, which is pretty tough to do, and even if you did actually succeed at double spending it would render your investment worthless, because all transactions are public and someone might notice the double spend and the value of bitcoin would plummet.
Soon, you won't be able to double spend your Ethereum because if you did, everyone would notice, point it out to everyone in the network that you double spent, and then everyone would automatically slash your Ethereum stake to zero going forward and carry on without you.
That's all. It has nothing fundamentally to do with voting or economic distribution or proving ownership of scare resources or anything like that. It's about preventing double spending on a distributed ledger of transactions.
If you solve double spending, then yes, your cryptocurrency will work.
(reposting this from the github)