Make it Monero mining, it's CPU-efficient and private.

https://fidelramos.net - I'm trying to blog more in hope my children will read it some day, it's kind of autobiographical of my interests.

What about Coreboot/Libreboot?

https://www.coreboot.org/

https://libreboot.org/

Even with Coreboot on anything vaguely modern, there is a 'Management Engine' or 'Platform Security Processor' you can't practically control. On the better understood Intel versions, this is running a full MINIX 3 operating system and controls the network card in ways the BIOS and operating system root cannot monitor. It runs a significant amount of code; with hardware obfuscation that has not yet been broken.

You are right of course, but I consider that a hardware concern, not BIOS.

That was precisely Bitcoin's goal as stated in its whitepaper [0]

> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

> Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non-reversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.

> What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes.

[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

A decentralized blockchain has no middlemen, the trust is put in the network to be honest.

The same can be said to a degree about cash.

Since we don't actually need visa or mastercard, but they make it damn convenient to buy stuff.

Similarly blockchain got their equivalent of this.

Right, that's why the whitepaper is titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". The idea is to bring many of cash payments features to the digital world, which are not possible with payment systems with intermediaries: uncensorability (nobody can keep you from transferring cash); non-reversability (no chargebacks, escrow systems are optional); low fees (contentious because BTC decided not to scale on-chain, but that was Satoshi Nakamoto's idea.

> So why didn't crypto block or ban them from doing these scams using their technology?

Bitcoin code is open-source. How do you prevent someone from using open-source?

> If you could pay rent and utilities and buy food using some sufficiently decentralized token, crypto may become a viable alternative.

You can do all that today, although it requires some learning and setup, but at least in the US it's totally doable.

I know of Joel Valenzuela who is an evangelist about paying everything with decentralized cryptocurrencies:

https://descentr.net/

The interesting thing about cryptocurrencies is using them directly, i.e. when users have their own wallets under their full control. Then it's magical when you make a transaction to somebody and think that nobody is censoring, filtering, moderating or rejecting it in any way. Oh and no PII either.

Edit: typo.

As a GrapheneOS user I can speak of my experience: the app for my bank was working fine until 2 months ago, when after an upgrade it stopped working because of Integration API.

I will contact them to try to get them to support GrapheneOS, but I will not be holding my breath. I uninstalled it in the meantime and use my computer. If they ever require the app I would likely switch to a different bank.

I read OP as in "they just don't care about privacy [enough to change their behavior]", and in that sense I fully agree.

Same can be said about climate change. Sure they worry and complain, but when pointing out concrete measures they can take, basically nobody does.

Complaining is easy.

Some people will learn to use these AIs to make top-quality audiobooks (and books, movies, TV shows, comics...). It will be a more manual process than pressing a button, but still orders of magnitude less than what it took before. As a result there will be a tsunami or high-quality content.

There will be curation and specialization. Previously ignored niches now will be economically profitable. It will be a Renaissance of creativity, and millions of jobs will be created.