Bitcoin hasn’t made much progress. There are some layers on top of it that let you send instantly and cheaply, but they are at best impractical (for lightning, of you want to be able to receive money you have to create a channel with a “server” node and them spend bitcoin which buy you liquidity to receive money. Utterly worthless)

The two I have my sights right now are monero and ltc. Both of those let you send pretty fast and with less than a cent fee

There is a tech that is called proof of stake that means that mining is waaaay more energy efficient but none of those are implementing it. I’ve heard it has drawbacks but I’m not sure I understand them

Also monero is mined in a way that buying GPUs or ASIC (mining specialized hardware) is not worth it. You get better results on a CPU, making mining more accessible for everyone

Both of those have confidential transactions so no one know who sends who how much money nor how much money each part has. Which is pretty cool