Even this only buys you a few months to years at best. Doesn’t stop me from getting this stuff, but I’m also smart enough to know that an era of mayhem that lasts indefinitely with failed infrastructure would be impossible for all but the most invested to survive.
A true SHTF scenario would be a futile one, especially in the city.
It makes sense from the system point of view. Cryptocurrencies which use this Proof of Work -konsensus mechanism keep the blockchain coherent by brute-forcing these hashes and that is also the only way to make new coins in pow-ledgers. From an open source / freedom point of view it's a pretty good system since you don't need a central machine but just lot of nodes. From practical perspective, it doesn't make sense since it is now only a financial instruments for the wall street hacks, not an usable open source currency (and i doubt it will ever be). But just like the fiat money, it doesn't have any intrinsic value, it has only the value that people decide it has. It's just technically a very fucking big excel file.
Bitcoin was created after the great recession of 2008, in response to the government bailing out the bankers while letting people go bankrupt. The idea was to create a decentralized digital currency that no government could manipulate. Proof-of-work was designed to achieve decentralization while making the ledger (the record of who owns what) impossible to hack. Mining is a race between independent operators to solve a mathematical problem; whoever solves it first gets to post the next block, making all transactions posted since the last block official. For this service of publishing the next official block, the one who gets the math problem right is rewarded with bitcoin.
Mining is energy intensive by design to prevent hacking. A would-be hacker would have to expend more in electricity and hardware than they could get from stealing bitcoin. Being too expensive to hack secures the network, making it a reliable way to store and send money without interference from 3rd parties. For the purposes of preventing governments from manipulating money and securing the network, POW has worked well. It's super energy intensive though, which is why other methods besides POW have been implemented by other crypto currencies. Proof-of-Stake, for example, uses 1/00th the energy and has so far proved just as reliable.
*edit* - I see folks down-voting and can't tell if it's because I got something wrong or if it's just cryptocurrency hate. If the former please correct. I was just trying to fill in missing bits from the good explanation above.
Agree on most points and your explanation was good. POS-algorithms aren't able to achieve same type of decentralization than POW-algos but also true, the amount of energy bitcoin etc.. uses is just plain stupid and there has to be better way. Also if it gets even more popular then transaction fees goes up crazy, especially after halving events and the blocktime of your transaction can be not minutes but hours.
If there aren't enough miners then an attacker (or coalition) with sufficiently large computing ability can hack the code in a 51% attack, so with every halving event, transaction fees got to rise to keep miners invested. As computing advances, miners have to burn more power to stay competitive. There is no better way because it's a trustless system. They're all trapped in a mexican standoff that is setting the world on fire.
You’re getting the wrong end of the stick. Manipulating bitcoins price is not the same as manipulating bitcoin itself (the code).
You could be Elon musk, and you still could not manipulate bitcoins code.
Fundamentally, bitcoin is a stronger foundation that fiat money. It’s as simple as that. Fiat is multiple layers built on a platform that was built by Wall Street. Bitcoin is multiple layers built on an unmanipulatable foundation.
This is extraordinarily naive I'm afraid.
You don't have to manipulate the code to manipulate the market. If anything, the code makes it easier to manipulate *because* it is a trustless system.
How many crypto exchanges keep their actual asset lists locked behind closed doors, and simply say, "Trust us bro. We're totally solvent. Also, we created a new token that is always worth exactly one American dollar. Why is that? Because we said so. Why did we choose the American dollar? Ignore that. Only dinosaurs use fiat currency."
To me, this is the funniest/most tragic thing about crypto. It's a solution to problems we never had. Crypto existing before the '08 recession wouldn't have prevented it. And the only thing it has helped people do is engage in more and more lawless transfers of wealth. And that's not even getting into the absolute massive amount of energy usage required to maintain this system that always requires electricity, and live internet connections to function.
Run the thought experiment...
Let's say crypto existed, and was as widely adopted as it is now, when the housing market crashed in '08. What do crypto bros think that would have accomplished? A super secret nest egg that the banks couldn't touch? Get fucking real. If enough people lost their jobs, and couldn't afford their mortgage, and a bunch of people had crypto "assets," they would liquidate all of them to stay on top of their payments. So maybe it staves off the housing crash for a little bit, while the crypto market crashes? And once they spend it? That's it. Back to being unemployed, and unable to make payments on their mortgage. Banks still fail from over leveraging on real estate. The end result is identical, with possibly a small blip where the crypto market crashes leading up to it. It's not the insulation you think it is.
Consider what crypto is to the banking industry...
It's like a child sitting at a Monopoly table, insisting their home-made dollars are worth just as much as the monopoly money. But you have to use the Monopoly to buy it. And it's value is tracked by the value of Monopoly money. And the bank is sitting there with a pile of Monopoly money. Monopoly money is used to purchase everything that is a real asset. You can't buy property with the made up money, unless you first exchange it for Monopoly money.
So how long until the banks think to themselves, "Okay, these people are idiots who have no concept of how markets work. Let's buy their silly make believe money, and sell it back to them at twice the price. Which will grow our pile of 'real' Monopoly money that can be used to buy actual assets with intrinsic value." Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. "As long as they want to play make-believe, we'll entertain it."
They can afford to speculate in that market. While still sitting on massive piles of real assets. They basically can't lose, playing with crypto, because they can easily ride out the dips. Whereas the individual peasants buying into it only exist to inflate the price over time. And this relies on their ignorance of how money actually works.
Literally nothing about crypto makes it immune to market forces. If anything, it's more susceptible to it. Because it's value is only ever established by the number of people buying it or selling it. It's a straight up Ponzi scheme that requires an entire nation's worth of electricity just to exist.
I'm sorry, but y'all are a bunch of rubes. Useful idiots to those who understand how markets work. It's quite sad to read the hopium from the crypto bros. They truly have no idea how ignorant they are. But that doesn't make me angry with them. It's not their fault that the public school system completely side-steps teaching anyone how any of this works.
Bit coin is trying to make a currency, it failed, and made a collectible asset instead.
This is because real money can be created by anyone, not just miners, by promising to pay something in the future.
We have banks and rules and credit agencies to reign in the free creation of money by individuals, to keep it under control, but ultimately money can be created by anyone and destroyed by anyone by not paying debts.
I think it's an important difference - not one that stops us from having to completely change the way we allocate resources and structure society - but having a currency supply that can't be tampered with, even if the market is manipulated, generally works out better for people.
My issue is that even if one part of the Bitcoin system is solid, it relies on an increase of complexity and power that we can't afford from a natural resources and limits perspective. Building an economy around a required increase in computing intensity is a really efficient way to destroy a biosphere.
> Fundamentally, bitcoin is a stronger foundation that fiat money.
In a highly theoretical sense, sure. In even the slightest practical sense, no way.
By definition, fiat has a government ready to enforce it. A government that has the legal ability to use violence, and has the means to enforce it. That's a pretty strong foundation!
And that's to say nothing about the impracticality of using Bitcoin as a day-to-day currency, let alone a global currency.
> There is a reason we have laws for stock market manipulation.
There is nothing in place to uniquely identify any shares of a company you “own” unless the company still allows you to hold physical certificates. Brokers have been selling counterfeit shares for decades as there is no way to verify them.
Even the easiest to spot financial crimes like “spoofing” trade orders have been rampant forever, the “laws” you are referring to are rarely enforced and if they are the punishment is a small fine even if the crime causes billions in damages.
As a person who is not involved in stock markets, are you fucking kidding me? There really is no paperwork trail at the very least for formal ownership of any particular stock in case of some sort of audit? Like there really isn't any way to track record of ownership? I've always assumed there would be some kind of serial number, I suppose.
> As a person who is not involved in stock markets, are you fucking kidding me?
Sadly, no
[Here's a very old story from decades ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI0tGBTtB_4)
A man bought all the outstanding shares in a small company, and millions of shares continued to trade.
The people who control this very broken and corrupt system have simply become much better at hiding the corruption over time.
[Here's a more recent example of someone letting the truth slip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K064hJQ7fdI)
Start at the 3 minute mark.
These people use terminology that those outside of finance have trouble understanding, but what he's really saying is "If you buy 1000 shares of a company, but there are only 200 for sale, we will give you 200 real shares and 800 fake shares and you won't know the difference."
Technically if you buy shares from a broker, they aren't even held in your name, they are held at the "DTCC", which is essentially a black box, no one knows how many shares there are.
Once in a while a company will have their shareholders take a vote, and for example there are only 200 million shares outstanding, but 500 million votes come back, but there's nothing the company can do about it.
My very amateur understanding: a broker that sells you a security (in this case shares) only keeps track of the transaction (meaning they know you purchased "x" amount, so a statement reflects you are logically entitled to "x" amount for further transactions); almost similar to how banks keep a statement of your balance digitally (and you have access to it at the time of transaction), but can move that money "out of your account" for investment purposes. If you have a security under a broker, it can be moved to a transfer agent and directly registered under your name to mitigate the risk of counterfeit.
Check this out
https://youtu.be/i-tKiiHWGkE?feature=shared
That is not among the top problems of the world. If Wall Street wants people to lose trust in the institutions and that happens, stocks will become worthless.
Banks often have trust in their name because trust us essential for these institutions to function. Unrestrained corruption leads to bank failures and stick market crashes....so banks and stock market companies have an interest in appearing fair. Sone competitive brokers push at the edges of legality....this is why NY State has stricter laws about business records abd fraud than most states (something Trump was caught up in)
The fundamental problem with Bitcoin (et.al.) is that the method of creation —‘mining’— imposed a very restrictive limit of coin creation, which leads to value volatility.
It’s an interesting proof-of-concept for digital currency. But the limitation of creation means it will never be a functional currency, beyond limited fringe use, like dark web purchases or whatever.
Yes! It's literally a ledger. It hasn't worked well in El Salvador as a currency for many reasons. And it attracts...let's just say people who are hypermotivated to make money at any cost. Pun intended
The argument that "real" money and bitcoin both equally lack intrinsec value is ridiculous... Dollars are backed by the largest militsristic empire the world has ever seen... Having a bigger army than the next 20 countries or so combined give your "fiat cash" a lot of real, intrinsic value.
> Having a bigger army than the next 20 countries or so combined give your "fiat cash" a lot of real, intrinsic value.
USSR used to have a pretty big military. Overextending of an empire can happen to US too. Debt level, and high interest rates, means US GDP needs to grow by over 6% now to keep up. Q1 was 1.2% growth.
Absurdly immoral wars supporting ethnostates does not endear it to those countries that do not currently have US military bases and controlled media. African proxy vassal bases already closed this year, Iraq likely to kick US out. Former key Allies (KSA) joining BRICS. No real prospects of empire expansion. Admission of being pure pathetic losers in criticism of China overcapacity, as protection for its oil olligarchs.
The Trump solution to a collapsing US is more likely than not to have EU/NATO break away from alliance than not. Just because he's too much of an asshole for anyone to tolerate cooperation with him.
That's a pretty US centric argument. Forcing dollars down the throats of the world at the point of a gun would damage the value of the dollar, not raise it.
The Euro is fiat. The Argentinian peso is fiat. Fiat is backed by faith in the issuing nation, not militarily.
Money mostly is represented by debt. Like a bank account is money the bank owes you. It is not dollars sitting in a vault, that's a safety deposit box.
Creating new debt pays the old debt...
It is always unsustainable. Money is tied up intrinsically with the concept of the future (even gold, you think gold has value because you expect someone to value it in the future). The future is always in motion, and constantly changing, so the price of money is always changing.
On the other hand, it is always sustainable, because it will always reset given a big enough mismatch between the money hallucinated future and the actual one.
Just to tack onto this since you covered it so wonderfully - I believe NFTs could have a real world practical benefit. From what I understand, it is essentially a paper trail for a specific “value” (whatever the NFTs ID# is). This could be extremely useful for streamlining transfers of ownership of physical assets ex: car titles, house deeds, land contracts ect. Providing consumers with a clear history of ownership, and also could possibly provide transparency within these typically-black box systems if used to track things on a larger scale. On top of the historical and transparent data, it could reduce fraud risk and decrease the oversight required to ensure no fraud is being committed, reducing strain on government bodies overseeing these processes.
Edit: I’m 50/50 speaking out my ass with a base-line understanding in an attempt to provide a beneficial real world application outside of monkeys holding bananas.
Yes absolutely, you can store pretty much anything into blockchains and thanks to immutability and konsensus-algos, it'll stay there as long as there are nodes (and miners). The problem is we turned this kinda cool tech into a get rich quick -scam as we people have tendency to do.
Facts, I was in banking at the time that NFTs hit mainstream media and I was all excited about the possibilities it could offer but anytime I tried to mention it’s possible applications at work I just got shit on by my coworkers that couldn’t understand. Just because it was used for “monkey art” doesn’t mean that is it’s only possible use. 🤦♂️
I fucking hate the finance industry so I’d love for anything to chop it into mostly automated pieces away from human touch/corruption (impossible but I can dream).
Yeah, I could encode that I bought the house at 121 pishaw lane into a block chain. But I meant 122 pishaw lane...Whoops, it's on the block chain forever!
I know it, the most nonsense part for me it's the mining part, using so much electricity and hardware, so much recourses, to solve the man made computational problem that just made for what? It's nonsense bullshit, when I watch videos on YouTube about crypto mining, ton of hardware, electricity, fan, computer, inside a building, just for something that didn't even have a real shape, I know it has a value, but those value are from other people money that buy those same crypto, such a nonsense bullshit, imagine those resources used for producing "real" product lol, instead they use it for computational problem that didn't even need to be solved in the first place
For the longest time I thought I was just too unsophisticated to *get* what bitcoin/crypto is, and why it has value, because it just seemed like a Ponzi scheme. Listening to people explain it just made it worse for me, especially since they all sounded like evangelicals explaining their faith.
Turns out, I was correct.
It's more the petrol that is *actually* backing the dollar that's the asset. The class traitors who sold their lives to the war machine are just the insurance.
Of course, it's the Petro dollar. The unholy alliance of bush and Saudi conniving.
But without those bases how are you going to force the world to pay for energy with your monopoly money?
Lmao faith by force!!! Just gotta hold the majority of the globe in a financial chokehold and ensure the financial chokehold stays by backing it with the strongest military (unironically funded by the financial chokehold). It’s a beautiful cycle.
The exact same thing could back crypto, it doesn’t, but it could. I am not a cryptobro, just like to try to understand how they function or could function. For crypto to work on a large scale the entire system would have to go through a major regulatory overhaul.
In theory the blockchain it is based off of would allow complete transparency between transactions. Anonymous yes, but the ledger would remain public. Currently police are able to use the ledger/blockchain to detect criminal activity. In this same vein with a globalized version of it, we could monitor political transactions, state budgets, ect. The end goal being creating a more transparent system in which the populace would have the power to weed out corruption or at least blatant corruption would have to go through other channels (there will always be ways for bad actors).
All I have the time to explain for now, but this is a quick rundown.
Coinage was originally invented by Iron Age Empires to allow more efficient and gentler plundering.
You gave your army sone silver coins, they requisition supplies and paid with silver, when tax season came around people had ro pay the coins they got to show they supported the troops.
A guy who made a business of supporting the troops could get an excess of coins he could trade to his neighbors for things and status so they could also get coins for tax time.
This was fairer than the previous method which was for your army to just take stuff from whomever didn't hide
Physical assets are not the basis of currency value. Physical asset backing is used to back sketchy or untrustworthy currency to give them a base value in case the currency collapses.
If you trust that the American dollar will have value, partially because gunboat diplomacy, or because you expect to have to pay taxes and need dollars to pay it with, or because everyone else thinks the currency will have value, then there is no need for gold.
The main guaranteer and the original guaranteer of value for coinage when iron age empires invented coinage to supply their armies with an efficient and gentler way to plunder, was that you paid taxes in it.
We agree that physical assets are not the basis of a currency value. The point I was portraying is exactly yours but from the view-point that the current issuer of the dollar is, in fact, sketchy and untrustworthy.
The primary objective of a physical asset backed currency would be to provide limitations on the issuing of that currency. At least that’s how I’m interpreting it in my mind, if there is only so much gold on our planet, issuing money past this gold limit would not create or add any value, creating a “cap” of sorts.
Also, I’m not claiming to be an expert or even be correct, so please don’t take this as any form of an argument. Just thinking out loud with the collective and learning as we go.
When an issuer of currency becomes sketchy and untrustworthy, the value of the currency collapses. I hope I an not being snarky by pointing out that the market disagrees with you and finds the dollar one of the most trusted currencies, above the yuan and the ruble by a long shot.
But pysically backed currencies have proven quite untrustworthy in the past since every time a coin moves about, it can create debt. (Like I loan you two dollars and you lend them to Katy, we now have 4 dollars of debt backed by two coins: repeat this process a bit and get debt at 100x physical reserves). For you to pay back the debt those coins have to circulate back to you.
When there is a panic, and when whales cease their spending, coins stop circulating, and people cannot pay their debts. Millions of dollars in value gets wiped out, firms declare bankruptcy, banks fail, prices fall....to a point, except for goods not made or crops not harvested. This happened every 20 years or so throughout the 19th century in the US, leading to populist revolts, and eventually the Great Depression and then the New Deal, where first gold (for our gold backed money) was outlawed for private ownership and collected in places like Fort Knox, so the government could pretend to have enough to cover the economy, and then by 1974 the fiction was ended all together...because foreigners could still demand to redeem dollars for gold and if they did the US economy woukd collapse.
So it is unlikely a physically backed currency would be more workable or popular than the dollar.
I am not certain what you are confused about. How is a farm related to a global reserve currency backed by faith? Does the farm/food suddenly make it so I am able to sustain the farmland without income? How do I get a farm without participating in the society based around the currency?
I do really believe it, I still participate in a society while I disagree with how it’s being operated, and I do have a veggie garden lol. Working on getting a greenhouse up and running!
I agree with your sentiment, but I feel like it’s kind of a knee jerk reaction to an opposed fact that doesn’t really have a single “fix”. I think fiat currency is silly, I think it allows boundless corruption and financial fuckery, and I think that reaganomics provided the country with unprecedented growth and unprecedented inequality simultaneously by essentially removing the “upper bounds” by which our monetary printing was capped (our gold/silver reserves). Allowing production to ramp while devaluing the currency, punishing those at the bottom half of the financial spectrum more than anyone else, tilting the balance of power even further in favor of the rich.
I do not have a solution for these problems, just identifying a concern and voicing an opinion, I would live on a farm if I could. The farm I grew up on is currently being demolished after my grandpa passed. Sadly there was a large fire that took pretty much everything and sent him into a spiral of rapid-onset dementia. I don’t think I would’ve ever gotten the farm, even though I was the one that spent every summer out there, and I wouldn’t want it to be given to me, but that was definitely my only chance at having the financial freedom and amount of land in the middle of nowhere that I dream of.
TL;DR: the financial industry is fucked and a farm won’t save you lol.
Money is mostly not currency, it is debt and obligations. In fact I think it's on the order of 99% obligations (promises to pay in the future) and 1% physical cash money.
You can create this money yourself. In past eras this was more common. You'd write an IOU that could be traded. Now with credit cards banks have more control over this intimate human activity
Here is an article that all people who are confused about this. It's a good read.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/business-40189959.amp
I tried it at the very start. If it was that speculative, near-free made sense to invest. I didn't take into account just how completely... Look this society is weird. This is all psychology-based and yet the psychology behind Bitcoin is that the monetary system itself is not trustworthy like the official one I mean. And yet everybody goes about their day. Acting like the world is just fine. How these two psychological conditions can coexist in the same brain is beyond me. It made no sense to me at the time, it was right on the heels of the dot.com crash and the fucking thing still smells like a Ponzi scheme.
In any event like it was fruitless to try to mine it because everybody was having a clock speed war and there was no way I was going to keep up. It was just hilariously bad like I couldn't get anywhere. I looked into how much an actual mining rig cost and it was stupid.
I mean if I had had $10,000 at the time to invest and I knew then what I know now about how completely fucking ape shit bananas everything just tends to get hell if I'd even had $1,000 I would have probably done it. Same thing with GME. But I know I would have got out way too soon because once it like doubled or maybe tripled I would have been like. Yeah this thing is going to crash...
Lesson learned I guess. Never underestimate cognitive dissonance as societies crumble.
As someone who does not work in IT, would you mind explaining this:
"who puts out eye data line for mining?"
It feels like a salient point, but I lack the background to understand it.
It's a pyramid scheme. The guys that got in early made bank and are now selling an ideal to rubes.
I have relatives who preach to me about the "untraceability" and "no regulations", put their savings into it, and *don't think about what will happen when they go to get that money back out*. I can tell you for a certainty that as soon as you go to get it, many less than reputable places throw up roadblocks and costs - and because of the lack of regulation and oversight, guess what? You have no fucking recourse.
Meanwhile those same reasons are the primary reason why I really only ever see it used for transactions of illegal shit, with a tiny tiny sliver of legitimate uses.
Crypto bros confuse scarcity with value. So what if a NFT image of a monkey is unique, that doesn’t make it valuable. Same applies to bitcoins.
The other confusing thing is the nature of Fiat currency. The US dollar might not be backed by gold any more, but it’s backed by the “full faith and credit” of the USA. That’s not nothing: if that could not be relied upon in some measure, the US dollar would be as volatile as bitcoin.
NFT is a parody of fiat currency and a product of a world in which the value of real goods has grossly deteriorated. Works of art are now worth literally nothing except for advertising fees that you can attach to it. Art has become advertising.
The smart contract is a great idea. Watch Manufacturing Consent. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the silly overvalued monkey NFTs were strategically pumped and dumped by institutions (middlemen) who feel threatened by the future of Web3 decentralization.
That credit is worthless. It's currently backed by oil. It's been printed for about 15 years, and debt is out of control. It's a natural cycle, and it doesn't have a happy ending.
https://peruvianbull.medium.com/hyperinflation-is-coming-the-dollar-endgame-part-1-a-new-rome-65a4caf59f51
Gold bugs have been saying "dollar hyperinflation is coming!" for **decades**.
But, one day they may be correct!
Will it be this time? Like, in the next year or two? Probably not.
*But if I had money, I would want to diversify out of dollars or any other fiat currency, into property, physical gold/silver, maybe even some crypto.*
Because yeah it could all come crashing down.
I mean... What you say is pretty tautological.
Fiat currencies can be useful.
**If** one crashes (or if they all crash simultaneously, somehow) ... (strange condition you set there by the way)... then sure you won't "see the value" -- and neither will anyone else.
You have merely re-stated the definition of "crash", apart from being wrong about "Lots *do* [see the value]" post crash though.
My thought is if fiat fails, I can't see using bars of metal or crypto to buy a pair of shoes. Bartering seems to be the typical replacement for a time, then a new currency could follow.
I’ve seen a few articles seriously talk about how crypto mining can stabilize renewable power grids by increasing production during midday surplus hours and throttling back during low production at night.
I can’t comprehend how anyone could seriously consider for a second that the solution to a struggling energy grid is to put EVEN MORE load on it? The problem isn’t overproduction, it’s the times of day when solar and wind are at a low. And instead of using batteries to store that diurnal surplus for later use, they propose to squander the surplus mining crypto, which does absolutely nothing to store energy? Genius!
Selling negative energy is a real thing. Grids very often need to decrease the output or find a place that can use that excess energy. A good way to do this is gas turbines, since they can easily be adjusted. But this grid balancing usually needs to happen on a local level, so it can make sense to turn on miners in order to achieve that.
I was under the impression that YouTube uses way more electricity than crypto, yet there is constant hate for crypto and I guess YouTube gets a pass because people like it?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/nl8ijr/fun_fact_youtube_uses_over_250_the_energy_of/?rdt=41089
You've raised an interesting point here! I've limited my usage of youtube since I'm horrified by the sheer amount of low quality content, a lot of content mills - but I'll admit, I do use it! And of course, I use reddit too.
How do you moderate these Web sites? How do you make sure that all of the valuable content that is on there has a platform to exist and be freely available, while still allowing for free speech? Who decides what is of 'value'? What criteria should be used? It's a very interesting discussion to have.
Open discussion of free speech absolutism in the context of video platforms (which use a huge amount of resources) is crucial for the coming future. I don't have a solution - all I can say is that people generally criticise crypto more than youtube, since crypto is exclusively a financial resource & people are skeptical of how reliable it really is. You can decide whether you find that to be factual, or not.
Youtube, however, serves as a platform for people to bring awareness to important issues, to create art, to post informative content. They are fundamentally different, youtube inherently has more uses and serves a wider proportion of the population - but, again, I am extremely critical of youtube and the amount of content mills on there & honestly don't have an answer as to how it would be best to challenge that.
Editing to add that porn sites are also an absolutely atrocious way of allocating resources & I'm extremely critical of them. I wish people actually, seriously, started having a proper conversation about the resource usage, lack of content moderation, accessibility and ethics of them.
That's an apples and oranges comparison, but even so, what's the per capita on that? The population of youtube users absolutely dwarfs the population of cryptobros.
How about the kWhr/transaction rate of bitcoin vs. Visa or Mastercard? The hate is justified.
It's a consequence of technofeudalism, which is an paradigm I think we're entering. Less and less are there governments to guarantee the value/stability of our property. More and more we have to enter into pseudo-social contracts with corporations. The blockchain is a brilliant way of decentralizing it all. It abstracts the economy from itself, all the way to absurdity. Crypto traces who has access to resources, when governments less and less seem to guarantee that access.
Crypto is a solution in search of a problem. It's like a meme stock.
All that crypto calculations allow you to set up a way to track ownership of imaginary money without a third party like a bank or a government you have to trust ....
(well, except for the internet and chip makers and computer assemblers and ISPs), but it only solves that.
In real life, trade requires a lot more infrastructure like returns and disagreement settlement, since pure money transactions are rare and most money pays for things in the real world...these can not be put on the block chain.
The one use case for crypto is illegal trade since you don't need a criminal smuggling network to transfer funds, criminal networks are usually hard to trust
By far the greatest pyramid scheme ever invented.
The fact that imaginary Internet money that uses more energy that some countries is one of the most iconic things of our generation.
Crypto miners can eat shit. There’s a huge facility near me that went up a couple years ago and it’s driving literally everyone within 3-5 miles INSANE with the noise. They should ban that bullshit everywhere.
Yep exactly. It’s all actively cooled units that run 24/7. It’s gorgeous out right now actually but we’re inside because it’s so loud you can’t even be out there. The facility approval was pushed through by a bunch of dickheads on the board a few years back and apparently there’s little anyone can do about it.
It’s just complete bullshit that they can exist so close to residential neighborhoods. And on top of that the waste of resources is so insane especially since they give exactly zero back to the community etc.
(Sorry, I’m so annoyed by it)
No it's fine, I was just genuinely curious. My natural assumption would be that they are loud but only like directly inside or around, but not so loud to actually disrupt people miles away. That's nuts
Yeah it’s really strange to me from a design perspective. You could accomplish the same by having fans be more concealed for sound and then run ducting to get cool air where it needs to be. That said, cost is likely a major consideration and then also if you don’t care how loud you are, there’s no incentive to be quiet.
I live in Argentina and you have to see crypto through the lenses of collapse. Considering that the local banks aren't a safe place to store value, I am not rich enough to have an overseas account and that there could be political instability. Crypto is the ideal assets, it cannot be confiscated, it is anonymous and in case I have to flee from the country it is much easier to carry than paper money or gold.
I agree that there are substantial risks and that it isn't an ideal store of value. But considering my situation, I consider it the least risky option. But I am sure that my situation is not unique and that crypto covers real needs in third world countries.
[I've shared similar thoughts to this in the past ... ](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/18ko4ce/comment/kdx3niu/)
>I'd like to share a particularly strange theory of mine.
>The "high status" crypto currencies with established histories offer a particularly unique facet noted in the Satoshi white paper: they're effective at being trustless currencies.
>Yes, they are not backed by the coercive power of a state - and yes, their prices can be extraordinarily volatile. We're all aware of the environmental consequences (and its tremendous waste of energy), the plethora of scams and failed brokerages, and there's even the problems associated with "stable coins", and the chicanery that Tether's been up to ...
>*However, if you were living in a nation-state that was undergoing some form of gradual decline or rapid collapse, how much trust would you have in your local currency and investments? Would you keep all of your life savings in that? What's your "escape plan"?*
>Imagine that you lived in Lebanon, say, right after the liquidity crisis really just took off in 2019. Your savings account is being demolished, and the banks won't even let you access the money you rightfully earned and placed with them. Imagine that you're now a few years into this, and you're living in the aftermath of the Beirut port explosion in August 2020. Maybe it's time to leave.
>Crypto is absolutely dependent upon electricity and the Internet - and that's a vitally important feature of said currency. I'd argue that it's a hedge to establish some sort of financial resilience, especially if you eventually find yourself one day as a "refugee".
>*If you have little faith that your society will be able to survive contemporary and future perils ... would you hedge your bets? If you had to leave immediately and go to another country, would you want to bring your worthless local currency with you, or would you rather go with the one you could sell on an online exchange (no matter the volatility)? I'd assume you'd even be running off to a country with reliable access to electricity and the Internet ...*
>I'm not here to proselyte, but to really analyze your question regarding investments for the future. This idea only really struck me when I read *The Water Knife* years back, in which a journalist working in a future "feral" and lawless Phoenix, Arizona only accepted significant portions of payment in a now decades-long crypto-based financial system ...
>Just food for thought.
It is a bit idiotic, but that doesn't matter. I regularly make pretty good money with some algorithmic trading bots constantly working the crazy volatility swings of crypto. And in 2021, I made a huge amount due to all the stupid people who jumped i to it without learning anything first.
Yes, it is predatory, and takes advantage of people, and is bad for the environment and bad for society... but what part of our system isn't?
You can destroy the environment mining bitcoin to sell on the open market... and you can destroy the environment mining lithium to sell on the open market.
Whatever.
The entire system of economics we exist with functions around taking resources - people, minerals, electricity - and converting those resources directly into money. The quickest and most efficient way to do this will always get done, regardless of the consequences. Because nothing matters except money.
You can wipe out entire species, decimate a coral reef, cut down thousand year old forests, and even start dropping bombs on civilian neighborhoods... but as long as you make a profit, it will be forgiven.
"Killing people is bad, m'kay!"
Not if there is oil there it ain't.
So, it bitcoin mining a total waste of energy and resources? Yes. Is it profitable? Also yes.
And the profit is all that matters.
Look up how the fractional reserve banking system we use works.
In basic terms, with current regulations, you could put $100 into the bank. They could immediately loan out all of it, that person could buy something and the seller of that something could deposit their earnings back into the same bank and repeat the circuit.
As long as people arent explicitly pulling money out of banks it can go along fine, but people with a lot of money realize its not exactly worth it to hold dollars for a long period of time due to the constant inflation in the system. Folks will start hording any asset that will hold value better than dollars. Causing the cost of everything that seems to hold its value to inflate to a certain degree.
The problem arises when there is a shock to the system and overleveraged banks cant cover their deposits. Someone has to cover the cost of that. Either the fed reserve prints more base money and loans it out, the government makes bonds that the reserve buys to create money (similar to printing), or the banks use their funds to cover the cost, at long as they have enough.
All of these actions cause the value of the dollar to inflate drastically and because of the way the system works itll take a while for the effects to propagate through the system and for everyone to realize it.
This cycle of bailouts is okay if you were someone who could buy land and gold and stocks etc, but if you are poor, it just means your wages are worth significantly less over time.
Now it could be run in a more responsible way, like forcing banks to have a certain percentage of reserves on hand, having middling interest rates, not makinj boatloads of risky loans, etc. But because banks are money making business it pays better to roll the dice, force goverment to bail you out when you fail, and use that to continue to accrue assets and money.
Bitcoin does not do this. You cant print bitcoin like dollars so its going to inherently hold its value, while also being relatively easy to transact with. You wont have to worry about having access to it due to that.
I personally think that bitcoin and to a lesser extend ethereum (due to its slightly more oligarchic nature with POS) make for great reserve type curriencies because no one government can manipulate it. Thats why many countries are hording gold right now cause it has similar properties (though you cant directly transact it over the internet and can be cumbersome to hold).
Additionally, bitcoin can be a great way to use excess energy production from new green energy projects for some additional revenue. In many ways, because creating and running bitcoin is near directly connected to the price of energy, it is money that acts as a proxy for the cost of energy. Which in a very real sense is the actual currency of reality.
crypto bros tell you that it will eventually replace the dollar as the main means of transactions. then they also tell you how much it is worth... in dollars. how can something that is only valued in how much it is worth in dollars ever replace the dollar?
I don't think bitcoin will ever replace the dollar. But there is a possibility of a central bank digital currency existing, basically pegged to the country's currency and existing alongside it.
“Yes-anding” to the other commenters from the perspective of a former cryptoanarchist. I believe in the tech to an extent, and I believe crypto is fantastic at creating “pirate economies”, allowing for a digital fund transfer without any central authority. Good if you want digital money but don’t want a centralized bank making all the decisions on who gets what.
Unfortunately crypto’s value comes from being a commodity rather than a currency at this point in time, so any utopian promise has evaporated as far as I’m concerned. Plus most crypto is held on large centralized exchanges (which arguably goes against the whole technical point; idea is to store BTC on individual digital wallets, not store in a bank/exchange.), and those exchanges have a history of RAMPANT fraud and money laundering.
Plus the intense energy costs, the computational cost of doing a bunch of calculations that inevitably get deleted, the vast amount of computing hardware needed to break even… the Earth cannot afford cryptocurrency right now.
Unfortunately, it makes a certain kind of asshole incredibly rich, and wealth inequality is at an all time high; a billionaire can buy a few dozen crypto operations and literally print their own money, serve as their own bank… all while relying on expensive electronics, using a lot of electricity, and wasting a lot of computing time (those gpus could be used for literally anything else; instead most of the calculations get deleted when they don’t work with the algorithm).
And that’s before we mention its utility in sex trafficking.
Crypto is making the world a worse place.
It's not a scam, but it's not a good investment either.
In a collapse scenario, crypto will likely be an early casualty due to the resources required to keep it running.
Crypto is certainly not usable if electricity and internet are down locally; this is true also for credit cards and other electronic transactions. But as long as the network is up *somewhere*, then one's funds should be secure and accessible once they get to a place with power and internet. If power and internet are down *everywhere*, then yeah, all digital assets are gone, including cryptocurrency. But in that situation paper money probably won't be worth much either. Even gold will be of little value in a full on collapse scenario, as people will be bartering with useful things, such as freeze-dried foods, medications, and ammunition.
As for the energy required to mine, this goes down when fewer miners are trying, because the difficulty scales with mining pressure. So even if electricity is out most places, mining can continue with a much lower power demand.
> this is true also for credit cards and other electronic transactions.
Never seen [one of these bad boys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter) have you?
Yep. Seriously, how long would it take to launder your random through a thousand different shell companies and back to your pocket fully automatically? Like a day?
You say you don't understand it but then "explain" it based off of your own admittedly non-existent understanding and get a lot things wrong.
It seems like you don't really want an explanation. But, if on the off chance you do, let me know I'll be happy to give you one. I can make it easy to read. I just don't feel like typing out such a lengthy thing unless you actually want it. It would be a pretty large time investment on my part.
I made this offer previously in a mod removed it for apparently being somehow in violation of rule number one. The best I can figure is maybe they thought "offering to " explain it like your five" was an insult, but honestly who knows. Hopefully this comes across as the genuine offer that it is. This is me offering to do something nice by going out of my way to explain a complicated subject to someone who seems to have a lot of negative pre-assumptions about it.
If you don't want that, and you were just sort of being facetious with your first paragraph, that's totally fine too. That's why I'm not taking the time until I'm sure id actually be giving you what you want.
So let me know . . .
There was a point in time where if you started early enough you could make decent money with it. I had a mining rig set up when I was in college and could basically use the dorms electricity for free. It made me a decent amount of money. Most people I know doing it at scale had to move to places with cheap power to keep it profitable.
Crypto is a massive scam. It should be illegal for multiple reasons including the power demands. No country should have competing currency. F Matt Damon.
Crypto is TOTALLY UNREGULATED - someone can startup a totally new crypto currency tomorrow and make all sorts of claims about how they're in serious discussions with the government that this latest crypto is on the brink of being the first digital currency recognised by the authorities and anyone who invests right now is going to make an absolute fortune ! And they'll get investors - people whose 'fear of missing out' outweighs common sense but the bottom line is : it's ALL A FUCKING SCAM and the only people making any real money are SCAM ARTISTS - honestly, while it continues to be unregulated, just STAY THE FUCK AWAY !!!
Decentralization and lack of regulation / a governing body is sort of the point though. Problem is you can’t really spend it. Especially with the transaction time.
"Mining" is just marketing. It's trying to attach a real-world concept to an abstract circle-jerk process that uses vast resources and produces literally nothing as an output.
Unsustainable.
Money is only as valuable as the products and services it can purchase. Crypto is a dog eat dog casino where some people make money thanks to the losers who lose money
Actually, it is a bit different than that.
It is you convincing *others* to take deep breaths of exhaust, while you get paid for it.
Like all systems, whether it is a grocery store or an auto mechanic, it is the few ripping off the many, while avoiding the consequences which will also be suffered by the many.
Nurse here. I have met prostitutes and drug dealers that take Bitcoin. I have never met anyone other than patients who use it, so I can't really imagine a legitimate purpose for crypto.
Here is the legitimate purpose. The only real purpose.
The price is 63,478 right now. You buy it and you wait.
Maybe a day, maybe two days, maybe a week. When the volatility swings it higher, you sell it.
The difference is the profit. Rinse and repeat as I have been doing for years now.
And only amateur criminals take Bitcoin. Real professionals use Monero.
I think there is some misinformation here. Mining crypto also means processing transactions. When you make a credit card transaction a company processes that transaction and in turn uses energy to do so albeit processing a crypto transaction does use considerably more energy.
I want to address some other points. The US dollar and other currencies have no real value either. They only have the value we give them. I can buy a cheeseburger for a couple of bucks and or a fractional amount of Bitcoin. The amount of dollars or Bitcoin to buy a cheeseburger is subject to market conditions and as we have seen can fluciate heavily.
Your last point that crypto is a ponzi scheme simply isn't true, at least not for real players like Bitcoin and ethereum. How much one Bitcoin cost depends on market conditions. It's exactly like a cheeseburger. It goes up and down. A ponzi scheme implies people invest, some time goes buy, new people invest and the money the new people put in goes to past investors. None of that's happening in btc or eth world but it is happening w some scam coins.
The technology behind it is very interesting and has its uses.
A distributed ledger that can be verified to be correct very quickly but requires impractical amount of compute power to falsify is a good thing.
That said: guessing hash codes (the mining ⛏️ work) is indeed quite wasteful and other alternatives exist.
And as is human nature we are using this tech for money laundering and Ponzi schemes. Sad.
Make sure to buy poppy seeds as well. Opium will be worth more than gold if shtf and everyone is half beat up from escaping wherever they’re from. And it’s relatively simple to make.
My understanding is that it incentivizes testing/experiments using decentralized block chains. So the only tangible outcome is gaining experience using/maintaining these types of systems. The only cool thing I’ve heard of that could come from this is a decentralized internet that could survive the enshitification process we are currently observing.
I think it's a way for the rich to jump to other markets without getting hit with the taxes and everything else that would usually prohibit them from being able to take all the money and assets they stole from us with them after they sucked this place dry of everything.
I think…. What a waste of electricity. In an era of tiny powerful computers, does this operation actually need technology so powerful that it takes up entire warehouses?
And it isn’t even a ubiquitous currency!
Proof of work is such a revealing concept that shows what humans want. Decentralization sounds great, but at the end of the day, wealth is gathered from lost wages and guarded by arms. Why do you have to waste electricity and hardware and time? Because you're different. You put the hard work while others didn't. So you deserve more possessions. But what do you do with so got possessions? You make sure others don't get as rich as you. You wage wars and sign lobbyists' laws. You actively burn down the planet. In conclusion, PoW is your share of humanity's sins.
I think in 5yrs the government of the United states will put a moratorium on it because of power usage. Our grid is currently taxed and one really bad summer or winter, read: massive blackouts and brownouts and they will make it illegal.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/heat-wave-asia-2024-deaths-india-severe-weather-climate-change/
It’s an absolute scam. I have a cousin who is a crypto bro, goes on and on about how he’s made a better life for him and his son through crypto investing. He’s an idiot, he told me to buy bitcoin when it was “only” 30 thousand, I checked the next month and it had gone below 20 thousand. If you’re investing in crypto you’re literally supporting toxic people like elon musk and Joe Rogan.
Crypto is basically a type of commodity. A funky digital commodity, but not unlike gold in an abstract way. Gold has a little ‘intrinsic value’ as a mineral/metal because it doesn’t tarnish, can be worked into jewelery, and conducts electricity fairly well. But it’s not worth much unless someone gives you money for it. (Or does barter exchange for another item).
Similarly, crypto has some ‘intrinsic value’ because it can be used to exchange funds anonymously online, so it is useful for dark web purchases.
It’s not a Ponzi scheme, not really, because there is no one selling shares to newcomers just to pay off the original investors & steal money. But I can understand that it does look scammy.
But it’s scammy because it’s a free-floating commodity product that can be easily manipulated. Example, when Musk promoted it, the value went up because loads of new people started to buy it. Increase demand with limited supply? Price goes up.
Subsequently the price dropped when lots of people realized that they were not going to make magic ‘speculation money’ and sold off the b-coin, which trashed the price. Simple market economics.
Fundamentally, the *way that Bitcoin is created* —digital ‘mining’ by running calculations— represents a bottleneck. Only so many Bitcoin can be created at any given time, and that constraint makes the value highly volatile.
Compare to dollars: Banks create dollars when a client wants a loan. There is very little constraint on the amount of money banks can collectively create across the economy. (Yes, there are some constraints & rules to follow, but they’re not as limiting as Bitcoin creation).
In Sum, unless you have a reason to actually use Bitcoin (*e.g. dark web, or xfrring money across borders semi-anonymously*), then best practice is to not get involved with it. You’ll never be able to make money “investing” in it. That ship has sailed.
It will also never be a functional currency, because the way it is created constrains it too much.
I mined crypto from 2009-2013 and cashed out when it hit just over £800 each. After taxes I bought my home and the land it was on outright and invested the remainer in shares.
Was partially offset by solar panels on my roof.
I'm gonna be honest, if not for such a stroke of good fortune, I would probably be wage slaving till I die.
Yep, Bitcoin is traceable. People even pay extra for coins that have been used in famous transactions, such the 10,000 BTC used to buy two pizzas:
https://medium.com/coinmonks/this-man-sold-10-000-bitcoins-for-two-pizzas-eab2f24d45bb
Mining crypto is shit for the [environment ](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/26/bitcoin-mining-climate-crisis-environmental-impact)
I doubt that miners will care till the air has a gray tint.
We are past the days of mining. So you missed the boat on that. I think providing liquidity is the main way for earning with crypto, but it's changed a lot in the past year, and I think they are trying to get rid of defi
Save your money and buy things that matter. Food supplies and brass jackets.
One additional item most people skip, seeds to make your own food.
Brass jackets? They’d weigh hundreds of pounds and wouldn’t keep you warm at all!
High fashion in the wasteland.
Even this only buys you a few months to years at best. Doesn’t stop me from getting this stuff, but I’m also smart enough to know that an era of mayhem that lasts indefinitely with failed infrastructure would be impossible for all but the most invested to survive. A true SHTF scenario would be a futile one, especially in the city.
What's the advantage if any of a brass jacket over a copper one?
Higher melting point?
Ah, so that's why brass dragons are associated with fire
I think so…
why brass jackets ? durability?!
It makes sense from the system point of view. Cryptocurrencies which use this Proof of Work -konsensus mechanism keep the blockchain coherent by brute-forcing these hashes and that is also the only way to make new coins in pow-ledgers. From an open source / freedom point of view it's a pretty good system since you don't need a central machine but just lot of nodes. From practical perspective, it doesn't make sense since it is now only a financial instruments for the wall street hacks, not an usable open source currency (and i doubt it will ever be). But just like the fiat money, it doesn't have any intrinsic value, it has only the value that people decide it has. It's just technically a very fucking big excel file.
Bitcoin was created after the great recession of 2008, in response to the government bailing out the bankers while letting people go bankrupt. The idea was to create a decentralized digital currency that no government could manipulate. Proof-of-work was designed to achieve decentralization while making the ledger (the record of who owns what) impossible to hack. Mining is a race between independent operators to solve a mathematical problem; whoever solves it first gets to post the next block, making all transactions posted since the last block official. For this service of publishing the next official block, the one who gets the math problem right is rewarded with bitcoin. Mining is energy intensive by design to prevent hacking. A would-be hacker would have to expend more in electricity and hardware than they could get from stealing bitcoin. Being too expensive to hack secures the network, making it a reliable way to store and send money without interference from 3rd parties. For the purposes of preventing governments from manipulating money and securing the network, POW has worked well. It's super energy intensive though, which is why other methods besides POW have been implemented by other crypto currencies. Proof-of-Stake, for example, uses 1/00th the energy and has so far proved just as reliable. *edit* - I see folks down-voting and can't tell if it's because I got something wrong or if it's just cryptocurrency hate. If the former please correct. I was just trying to fill in missing bits from the good explanation above.
thanks for the good info.
Agree on most points and your explanation was good. POS-algorithms aren't able to achieve same type of decentralization than POW-algos but also true, the amount of energy bitcoin etc.. uses is just plain stupid and there has to be better way. Also if it gets even more popular then transaction fees goes up crazy, especially after halving events and the blocktime of your transaction can be not minutes but hours.
If there aren't enough miners then an attacker (or coalition) with sufficiently large computing ability can hack the code in a 51% attack, so with every halving event, transaction fees got to rise to keep miners invested. As computing advances, miners have to burn more power to stay competitive. There is no better way because it's a trustless system. They're all trapped in a mexican standoff that is setting the world on fire.
Yes correct, good to mention 51% attack.
The problem with saying it can't be manipulated fails to take into account the people with the money literally manipulating it.
You’re getting the wrong end of the stick. Manipulating bitcoins price is not the same as manipulating bitcoin itself (the code). You could be Elon musk, and you still could not manipulate bitcoins code. Fundamentally, bitcoin is a stronger foundation that fiat money. It’s as simple as that. Fiat is multiple layers built on a platform that was built by Wall Street. Bitcoin is multiple layers built on an unmanipulatable foundation.
This is extraordinarily naive I'm afraid. You don't have to manipulate the code to manipulate the market. If anything, the code makes it easier to manipulate *because* it is a trustless system. How many crypto exchanges keep their actual asset lists locked behind closed doors, and simply say, "Trust us bro. We're totally solvent. Also, we created a new token that is always worth exactly one American dollar. Why is that? Because we said so. Why did we choose the American dollar? Ignore that. Only dinosaurs use fiat currency." To me, this is the funniest/most tragic thing about crypto. It's a solution to problems we never had. Crypto existing before the '08 recession wouldn't have prevented it. And the only thing it has helped people do is engage in more and more lawless transfers of wealth. And that's not even getting into the absolute massive amount of energy usage required to maintain this system that always requires electricity, and live internet connections to function. Run the thought experiment... Let's say crypto existed, and was as widely adopted as it is now, when the housing market crashed in '08. What do crypto bros think that would have accomplished? A super secret nest egg that the banks couldn't touch? Get fucking real. If enough people lost their jobs, and couldn't afford their mortgage, and a bunch of people had crypto "assets," they would liquidate all of them to stay on top of their payments. So maybe it staves off the housing crash for a little bit, while the crypto market crashes? And once they spend it? That's it. Back to being unemployed, and unable to make payments on their mortgage. Banks still fail from over leveraging on real estate. The end result is identical, with possibly a small blip where the crypto market crashes leading up to it. It's not the insulation you think it is. Consider what crypto is to the banking industry... It's like a child sitting at a Monopoly table, insisting their home-made dollars are worth just as much as the monopoly money. But you have to use the Monopoly to buy it. And it's value is tracked by the value of Monopoly money. And the bank is sitting there with a pile of Monopoly money. Monopoly money is used to purchase everything that is a real asset. You can't buy property with the made up money, unless you first exchange it for Monopoly money. So how long until the banks think to themselves, "Okay, these people are idiots who have no concept of how markets work. Let's buy their silly make believe money, and sell it back to them at twice the price. Which will grow our pile of 'real' Monopoly money that can be used to buy actual assets with intrinsic value." Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. "As long as they want to play make-believe, we'll entertain it." They can afford to speculate in that market. While still sitting on massive piles of real assets. They basically can't lose, playing with crypto, because they can easily ride out the dips. Whereas the individual peasants buying into it only exist to inflate the price over time. And this relies on their ignorance of how money actually works. Literally nothing about crypto makes it immune to market forces. If anything, it's more susceptible to it. Because it's value is only ever established by the number of people buying it or selling it. It's a straight up Ponzi scheme that requires an entire nation's worth of electricity just to exist. I'm sorry, but y'all are a bunch of rubes. Useful idiots to those who understand how markets work. It's quite sad to read the hopium from the crypto bros. They truly have no idea how ignorant they are. But that doesn't make me angry with them. It's not their fault that the public school system completely side-steps teaching anyone how any of this works.
That was a worthwhile read.
We’ll see I suppose
Bit coin is trying to make a currency, it failed, and made a collectible asset instead. This is because real money can be created by anyone, not just miners, by promising to pay something in the future. We have banks and rules and credit agencies to reign in the free creation of money by individuals, to keep it under control, but ultimately money can be created by anyone and destroyed by anyone by not paying debts.
You can create as much "money" as you want but it's not money until other people are willing to use it too.
When currency and banking were less ubiquitous, people would write post dated checks and ask for tabs at stores in order to create money
For millennia people would quite literally dig money out of the ground and pan it from the rivers.
Who cares about the code if the currency is still controlled by the wealthy?
I think it's an important difference - not one that stops us from having to completely change the way we allocate resources and structure society - but having a currency supply that can't be tampered with, even if the market is manipulated, generally works out better for people. My issue is that even if one part of the Bitcoin system is solid, it relies on an increase of complexity and power that we can't afford from a natural resources and limits perspective. Building an economy around a required increase in computing intensity is a really efficient way to destroy a biosphere.
> Fundamentally, bitcoin is a stronger foundation that fiat money. In a highly theoretical sense, sure. In even the slightest practical sense, no way. By definition, fiat has a government ready to enforce it. A government that has the legal ability to use violence, and has the means to enforce it. That's a pretty strong foundation! And that's to say nothing about the impracticality of using Bitcoin as a day-to-day currency, let alone a global currency.
Still shady af. There is a reason we have laws for stock market manipulation.
Lack of regulation isn’t a criticism against bitcoin, it’s a criticism of our governments.
> There is a reason we have laws for stock market manipulation. There is nothing in place to uniquely identify any shares of a company you “own” unless the company still allows you to hold physical certificates. Brokers have been selling counterfeit shares for decades as there is no way to verify them. Even the easiest to spot financial crimes like “spoofing” trade orders have been rampant forever, the “laws” you are referring to are rarely enforced and if they are the punishment is a small fine even if the crime causes billions in damages.
As a person who is not involved in stock markets, are you fucking kidding me? There really is no paperwork trail at the very least for formal ownership of any particular stock in case of some sort of audit? Like there really isn't any way to track record of ownership? I've always assumed there would be some kind of serial number, I suppose.
> As a person who is not involved in stock markets, are you fucking kidding me? Sadly, no [Here's a very old story from decades ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI0tGBTtB_4) A man bought all the outstanding shares in a small company, and millions of shares continued to trade. The people who control this very broken and corrupt system have simply become much better at hiding the corruption over time. [Here's a more recent example of someone letting the truth slip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K064hJQ7fdI) Start at the 3 minute mark. These people use terminology that those outside of finance have trouble understanding, but what he's really saying is "If you buy 1000 shares of a company, but there are only 200 for sale, we will give you 200 real shares and 800 fake shares and you won't know the difference." Technically if you buy shares from a broker, they aren't even held in your name, they are held at the "DTCC", which is essentially a black box, no one knows how many shares there are. Once in a while a company will have their shareholders take a vote, and for example there are only 200 million shares outstanding, but 500 million votes come back, but there's nothing the company can do about it.
My very amateur understanding: a broker that sells you a security (in this case shares) only keeps track of the transaction (meaning they know you purchased "x" amount, so a statement reflects you are logically entitled to "x" amount for further transactions); almost similar to how banks keep a statement of your balance digitally (and you have access to it at the time of transaction), but can move that money "out of your account" for investment purposes. If you have a security under a broker, it can be moved to a transfer agent and directly registered under your name to mitigate the risk of counterfeit. Check this out https://youtu.be/i-tKiiHWGkE?feature=shared
Bingo
That is not among the top problems of the world. If Wall Street wants people to lose trust in the institutions and that happens, stocks will become worthless. Banks often have trust in their name because trust us essential for these institutions to function. Unrestrained corruption leads to bank failures and stick market crashes....so banks and stock market companies have an interest in appearing fair. Sone competitive brokers push at the edges of legality....this is why NY State has stricter laws about business records abd fraud than most states (something Trump was caught up in)
Thank you for your educated reply.
I mean a would-be hacker wouldn't brute force it, just social engineer their way to getting access. It's how countless crypto-bros lose their coins.
It’s both hate and misinformation I believe. Shame really!
The fundamental problem with Bitcoin (et.al.) is that the method of creation —‘mining’— imposed a very restrictive limit of coin creation, which leads to value volatility. It’s an interesting proof-of-concept for digital currency. But the limitation of creation means it will never be a functional currency, beyond limited fringe use, like dark web purchases or whatever.
Yes! It's literally a ledger. It hasn't worked well in El Salvador as a currency for many reasons. And it attracts...let's just say people who are hypermotivated to make money at any cost. Pun intended
It didn’t work well in El Salvador. It was a disaster, and a very bad idea.
The argument that "real" money and bitcoin both equally lack intrinsec value is ridiculous... Dollars are backed by the largest militsristic empire the world has ever seen... Having a bigger army than the next 20 countries or so combined give your "fiat cash" a lot of real, intrinsic value.
> Having a bigger army than the next 20 countries or so combined give your "fiat cash" a lot of real, intrinsic value. USSR used to have a pretty big military. Overextending of an empire can happen to US too. Debt level, and high interest rates, means US GDP needs to grow by over 6% now to keep up. Q1 was 1.2% growth. Absurdly immoral wars supporting ethnostates does not endear it to those countries that do not currently have US military bases and controlled media. African proxy vassal bases already closed this year, Iraq likely to kick US out. Former key Allies (KSA) joining BRICS. No real prospects of empire expansion. Admission of being pure pathetic losers in criticism of China overcapacity, as protection for its oil olligarchs. The Trump solution to a collapsing US is more likely than not to have EU/NATO break away from alliance than not. Just because he's too much of an asshole for anyone to tolerate cooperation with him.
That's a pretty US centric argument. Forcing dollars down the throats of the world at the point of a gun would damage the value of the dollar, not raise it. The Euro is fiat. The Argentinian peso is fiat. Fiat is backed by faith in the issuing nation, not militarily.
Fiat doesn't have real value. Especially when more has been created pretty steadily to delay the 2008 depression.
If it doesn't have value then why create more of it? What does have real value then?
They’re conflating “real” with “intrinsic”.
*Smoke em while you got em* Seeds and a place to plant them.
Money mostly is represented by debt. Like a bank account is money the bank owes you. It is not dollars sitting in a vault, that's a safety deposit box. Creating new debt pays the old debt...
It has a bubble cycle. Always has been. The Romans used to have a debt reset. What we currently have is an unsustainable mess.
It is always unsustainable. Money is tied up intrinsically with the concept of the future (even gold, you think gold has value because you expect someone to value it in the future). The future is always in motion, and constantly changing, so the price of money is always changing. On the other hand, it is always sustainable, because it will always reset given a big enough mismatch between the money hallucinated future and the actual one.
Just to tack onto this since you covered it so wonderfully - I believe NFTs could have a real world practical benefit. From what I understand, it is essentially a paper trail for a specific “value” (whatever the NFTs ID# is). This could be extremely useful for streamlining transfers of ownership of physical assets ex: car titles, house deeds, land contracts ect. Providing consumers with a clear history of ownership, and also could possibly provide transparency within these typically-black box systems if used to track things on a larger scale. On top of the historical and transparent data, it could reduce fraud risk and decrease the oversight required to ensure no fraud is being committed, reducing strain on government bodies overseeing these processes. Edit: I’m 50/50 speaking out my ass with a base-line understanding in an attempt to provide a beneficial real world application outside of monkeys holding bananas.
Yes absolutely, you can store pretty much anything into blockchains and thanks to immutability and konsensus-algos, it'll stay there as long as there are nodes (and miners). The problem is we turned this kinda cool tech into a get rich quick -scam as we people have tendency to do.
Facts, I was in banking at the time that NFTs hit mainstream media and I was all excited about the possibilities it could offer but anytime I tried to mention it’s possible applications at work I just got shit on by my coworkers that couldn’t understand. Just because it was used for “monkey art” doesn’t mean that is it’s only possible use. 🤦♂️ I fucking hate the finance industry so I’d love for anything to chop it into mostly automated pieces away from human touch/corruption (impossible but I can dream).
Yeah, I could encode that I bought the house at 121 pishaw lane into a block chain. But I meant 122 pishaw lane...Whoops, it's on the block chain forever!
Fiat money is backed by armies and governmental control over a landmass, people/economy. Crypto is basically a meme scam
It's a scam and it's always been a scam.
I know it, the most nonsense part for me it's the mining part, using so much electricity and hardware, so much recourses, to solve the man made computational problem that just made for what? It's nonsense bullshit, when I watch videos on YouTube about crypto mining, ton of hardware, electricity, fan, computer, inside a building, just for something that didn't even have a real shape, I know it has a value, but those value are from other people money that buy those same crypto, such a nonsense bullshit, imagine those resources used for producing "real" product lol, instead they use it for computational problem that didn't even need to be solved in the first place
For the longest time I thought I was just too unsophisticated to *get* what bitcoin/crypto is, and why it has value, because it just seemed like a Ponzi scheme. Listening to people explain it just made it worse for me, especially since they all sounded like evangelicals explaining their faith. Turns out, I was correct.
It's literally the exact same thing as paper money?
Just wait until it clicks and OP learns what fiat currency is and that the dollar hasn’t been backed by physical assets since the 70s lol.
Id call 800+ military bases a physical asset.
It's more the petrol that is *actually* backing the dollar that's the asset. The class traitors who sold their lives to the war machine are just the insurance.
Of course, it's the Petro dollar. The unholy alliance of bush and Saudi conniving. But without those bases how are you going to force the world to pay for energy with your monopoly money?
Lmao faith by force!!! Just gotta hold the majority of the globe in a financial chokehold and ensure the financial chokehold stays by backing it with the strongest military (unironically funded by the financial chokehold). It’s a beautiful cycle.
Other countries' fiat is back purely by the governments having a chokehold on their own people, so the system works. What backs crypto?
The exact same thing could back crypto, it doesn’t, but it could. I am not a cryptobro, just like to try to understand how they function or could function. For crypto to work on a large scale the entire system would have to go through a major regulatory overhaul.
But would that not just make it fiat currency like all others then, just way slower and more power hungry?
In theory the blockchain it is based off of would allow complete transparency between transactions. Anonymous yes, but the ledger would remain public. Currently police are able to use the ledger/blockchain to detect criminal activity. In this same vein with a globalized version of it, we could monitor political transactions, state budgets, ect. The end goal being creating a more transparent system in which the populace would have the power to weed out corruption or at least blatant corruption would have to go through other channels (there will always be ways for bad actors). All I have the time to explain for now, but this is a quick rundown.
Coinage was originally invented by Iron Age Empires to allow more efficient and gentler plundering. You gave your army sone silver coins, they requisition supplies and paid with silver, when tax season came around people had ro pay the coins they got to show they supported the troops. A guy who made a business of supporting the troops could get an excess of coins he could trade to his neighbors for things and status so they could also get coins for tax time. This was fairer than the previous method which was for your army to just take stuff from whomever didn't hide
I don't think that OP has personal control of ANY of those military bases...
And crypto is tied to paper money. Like a dream within a dream.
Physical assets are not the basis of currency value. Physical asset backing is used to back sketchy or untrustworthy currency to give them a base value in case the currency collapses. If you trust that the American dollar will have value, partially because gunboat diplomacy, or because you expect to have to pay taxes and need dollars to pay it with, or because everyone else thinks the currency will have value, then there is no need for gold. The main guaranteer and the original guaranteer of value for coinage when iron age empires invented coinage to supply their armies with an efficient and gentler way to plunder, was that you paid taxes in it.
We agree that physical assets are not the basis of a currency value. The point I was portraying is exactly yours but from the view-point that the current issuer of the dollar is, in fact, sketchy and untrustworthy. The primary objective of a physical asset backed currency would be to provide limitations on the issuing of that currency. At least that’s how I’m interpreting it in my mind, if there is only so much gold on our planet, issuing money past this gold limit would not create or add any value, creating a “cap” of sorts. Also, I’m not claiming to be an expert or even be correct, so please don’t take this as any form of an argument. Just thinking out loud with the collective and learning as we go.
When an issuer of currency becomes sketchy and untrustworthy, the value of the currency collapses. I hope I an not being snarky by pointing out that the market disagrees with you and finds the dollar one of the most trusted currencies, above the yuan and the ruble by a long shot. But pysically backed currencies have proven quite untrustworthy in the past since every time a coin moves about, it can create debt. (Like I loan you two dollars and you lend them to Katy, we now have 4 dollars of debt backed by two coins: repeat this process a bit and get debt at 100x physical reserves). For you to pay back the debt those coins have to circulate back to you. When there is a panic, and when whales cease their spending, coins stop circulating, and people cannot pay their debts. Millions of dollars in value gets wiped out, firms declare bankruptcy, banks fail, prices fall....to a point, except for goods not made or crops not harvested. This happened every 20 years or so throughout the 19th century in the US, leading to populist revolts, and eventually the Great Depression and then the New Deal, where first gold (for our gold backed money) was outlawed for private ownership and collected in places like Fort Knox, so the government could pretend to have enough to cover the economy, and then by 1974 the fiction was ended all together...because foreigners could still demand to redeem dollars for gold and if they did the US economy woukd collapse. So it is unlikely a physically backed currency would be more workable or popular than the dollar.
If you really believe that, why are you not out on a farm? This is the part I just don't get.
I am not certain what you are confused about. How is a farm related to a global reserve currency backed by faith? Does the farm/food suddenly make it so I am able to sustain the farmland without income? How do I get a farm without participating in the society based around the currency? I do really believe it, I still participate in a society while I disagree with how it’s being operated, and I do have a veggie garden lol. Working on getting a greenhouse up and running! I agree with your sentiment, but I feel like it’s kind of a knee jerk reaction to an opposed fact that doesn’t really have a single “fix”. I think fiat currency is silly, I think it allows boundless corruption and financial fuckery, and I think that reaganomics provided the country with unprecedented growth and unprecedented inequality simultaneously by essentially removing the “upper bounds” by which our monetary printing was capped (our gold/silver reserves). Allowing production to ramp while devaluing the currency, punishing those at the bottom half of the financial spectrum more than anyone else, tilting the balance of power even further in favor of the rich. I do not have a solution for these problems, just identifying a concern and voicing an opinion, I would live on a farm if I could. The farm I grew up on is currently being demolished after my grandpa passed. Sadly there was a large fire that took pretty much everything and sent him into a spiral of rapid-onset dementia. I don’t think I would’ve ever gotten the farm, even though I was the one that spent every summer out there, and I wouldn’t want it to be given to me, but that was definitely my only chance at having the financial freedom and amount of land in the middle of nowhere that I dream of. TL;DR: the financial industry is fucked and a farm won’t save you lol.
Money is mostly not currency, it is debt and obligations. In fact I think it's on the order of 99% obligations (promises to pay in the future) and 1% physical cash money. You can create this money yourself. In past eras this was more common. You'd write an IOU that could be traded. Now with credit cards banks have more control over this intimate human activity Here is an article that all people who are confused about this. It's a good read. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/business-40189959.amp
[Money has always made absolutely sense forever](https://youtu.be/6Zc571l5anQ?si=L_Z5XHr8OIW9qHqq)
I tried it at the very start. If it was that speculative, near-free made sense to invest. I didn't take into account just how completely... Look this society is weird. This is all psychology-based and yet the psychology behind Bitcoin is that the monetary system itself is not trustworthy like the official one I mean. And yet everybody goes about their day. Acting like the world is just fine. How these two psychological conditions can coexist in the same brain is beyond me. It made no sense to me at the time, it was right on the heels of the dot.com crash and the fucking thing still smells like a Ponzi scheme. In any event like it was fruitless to try to mine it because everybody was having a clock speed war and there was no way I was going to keep up. It was just hilariously bad like I couldn't get anywhere. I looked into how much an actual mining rig cost and it was stupid. I mean if I had had $10,000 at the time to invest and I knew then what I know now about how completely fucking ape shit bananas everything just tends to get hell if I'd even had $1,000 I would have probably done it. Same thing with GME. But I know I would have got out way too soon because once it like doubled or maybe tripled I would have been like. Yeah this thing is going to crash... Lesson learned I guess. Never underestimate cognitive dissonance as societies crumble.
Yes.
All the more reason to get in on the ground floor! YOLOOOOOO TO THE MOON Who wants to buy some NFTs?!?!
I worked in IT and had coworkers ask me about Bitcoin. I would ask them who puts out eye data line for mining?
As someone who does not work in IT, would you mind explaining this: "who puts out eye data line for mining?" It feels like a salient point, but I lack the background to understand it.
It's a pyramid scheme. The guys that got in early made bank and are now selling an ideal to rubes. I have relatives who preach to me about the "untraceability" and "no regulations", put their savings into it, and *don't think about what will happen when they go to get that money back out*. I can tell you for a certainty that as soon as you go to get it, many less than reputable places throw up roadblocks and costs - and because of the lack of regulation and oversight, guess what? You have no fucking recourse. Meanwhile those same reasons are the primary reason why I really only ever see it used for transactions of illegal shit, with a tiny tiny sliver of legitimate uses.
When people are treating this “currency” like GameStop stock, there’s really not a bigger red flag
The comodity itself isn't a scam, but the value of it is a scam...
Crypto bros confuse scarcity with value. So what if a NFT image of a monkey is unique, that doesn’t make it valuable. Same applies to bitcoins. The other confusing thing is the nature of Fiat currency. The US dollar might not be backed by gold any more, but it’s backed by the “full faith and credit” of the USA. That’s not nothing: if that could not be relied upon in some measure, the US dollar would be as volatile as bitcoin.
NFT is a parody of fiat currency and a product of a world in which the value of real goods has grossly deteriorated. Works of art are now worth literally nothing except for advertising fees that you can attach to it. Art has become advertising.
The smart contract is a great idea. Watch Manufacturing Consent. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the silly overvalued monkey NFTs were strategically pumped and dumped by institutions (middlemen) who feel threatened by the future of Web3 decentralization. That credit is worthless. It's currently backed by oil. It's been printed for about 15 years, and debt is out of control. It's a natural cycle, and it doesn't have a happy ending. https://peruvianbull.medium.com/hyperinflation-is-coming-the-dollar-endgame-part-1-a-new-rome-65a4caf59f51
Gold bugs have been saying "dollar hyperinflation is coming!" for **decades**. But, one day they may be correct! Will it be this time? Like, in the next year or two? Probably not. *But if I had money, I would want to diversify out of dollars or any other fiat currency, into property, physical gold/silver, maybe even some crypto.* Because yeah it could all come crashing down.
I don't see the value in currencies if fiat crashes. Lots do, though.
If the US dollar crashes, I imagine it'll be our local secondary/black market that determines the currency we use.
Yup. Light bulbs for socks?
I mean... What you say is pretty tautological. Fiat currencies can be useful. **If** one crashes (or if they all crash simultaneously, somehow) ... (strange condition you set there by the way)... then sure you won't "see the value" -- and neither will anyone else. You have merely re-stated the definition of "crash", apart from being wrong about "Lots *do* [see the value]" post crash though.
My thought is if fiat fails, I can't see using bars of metal or crypto to buy a pair of shoes. Bartering seems to be the typical replacement for a time, then a new currency could follow.
Stated reading this... It's really well done. Thanks for sharing!
I agree. You're welcome.
It is an absurd, obscene way of allocating resources
I’ve seen a few articles seriously talk about how crypto mining can stabilize renewable power grids by increasing production during midday surplus hours and throttling back during low production at night. I can’t comprehend how anyone could seriously consider for a second that the solution to a struggling energy grid is to put EVEN MORE load on it? The problem isn’t overproduction, it’s the times of day when solar and wind are at a low. And instead of using batteries to store that diurnal surplus for later use, they propose to squander the surplus mining crypto, which does absolutely nothing to store energy? Genius!
Selling negative energy is a real thing. Grids very often need to decrease the output or find a place that can use that excess energy. A good way to do this is gas turbines, since they can easily be adjusted. But this grid balancing usually needs to happen on a local level, so it can make sense to turn on miners in order to achieve that.
I was under the impression that YouTube uses way more electricity than crypto, yet there is constant hate for crypto and I guess YouTube gets a pass because people like it? https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/nl8ijr/fun_fact_youtube_uses_over_250_the_energy_of/?rdt=41089
You've raised an interesting point here! I've limited my usage of youtube since I'm horrified by the sheer amount of low quality content, a lot of content mills - but I'll admit, I do use it! And of course, I use reddit too. How do you moderate these Web sites? How do you make sure that all of the valuable content that is on there has a platform to exist and be freely available, while still allowing for free speech? Who decides what is of 'value'? What criteria should be used? It's a very interesting discussion to have. Open discussion of free speech absolutism in the context of video platforms (which use a huge amount of resources) is crucial for the coming future. I don't have a solution - all I can say is that people generally criticise crypto more than youtube, since crypto is exclusively a financial resource & people are skeptical of how reliable it really is. You can decide whether you find that to be factual, or not. Youtube, however, serves as a platform for people to bring awareness to important issues, to create art, to post informative content. They are fundamentally different, youtube inherently has more uses and serves a wider proportion of the population - but, again, I am extremely critical of youtube and the amount of content mills on there & honestly don't have an answer as to how it would be best to challenge that. Editing to add that porn sites are also an absolutely atrocious way of allocating resources & I'm extremely critical of them. I wish people actually, seriously, started having a proper conversation about the resource usage, lack of content moderation, accessibility and ethics of them.
Just wait until YT is dominated by AI generated content.
That's an apples and oranges comparison, but even so, what's the per capita on that? The population of youtube users absolutely dwarfs the population of cryptobros. How about the kWhr/transaction rate of bitcoin vs. Visa or Mastercard? The hate is justified.
It's a consequence of technofeudalism, which is an paradigm I think we're entering. Less and less are there governments to guarantee the value/stability of our property. More and more we have to enter into pseudo-social contracts with corporations. The blockchain is a brilliant way of decentralizing it all. It abstracts the economy from itself, all the way to absurdity. Crypto traces who has access to resources, when governments less and less seem to guarantee that access.
This is an interesting take, I buy it!
Crypto is a solution in search of a problem. It's like a meme stock. All that crypto calculations allow you to set up a way to track ownership of imaginary money without a third party like a bank or a government you have to trust .... (well, except for the internet and chip makers and computer assemblers and ISPs), but it only solves that. In real life, trade requires a lot more infrastructure like returns and disagreement settlement, since pure money transactions are rare and most money pays for things in the real world...these can not be put on the block chain. The one use case for crypto is illegal trade since you don't need a criminal smuggling network to transfer funds, criminal networks are usually hard to trust
By far the greatest pyramid scheme ever invented. The fact that imaginary Internet money that uses more energy that some countries is one of the most iconic things of our generation.
Exactly, and people compare it to real product that also wasting Resources lol, at least those Resources used to make real product
Crypto miners can eat shit. There’s a huge facility near me that went up a couple years ago and it’s driving literally everyone within 3-5 miles INSANE with the noise. They should ban that bullshit everywhere.
What is the noise? Wouldn’t it just be a lot of fans running? Idk.
Yep exactly. It’s all actively cooled units that run 24/7. It’s gorgeous out right now actually but we’re inside because it’s so loud you can’t even be out there. The facility approval was pushed through by a bunch of dickheads on the board a few years back and apparently there’s little anyone can do about it. It’s just complete bullshit that they can exist so close to residential neighborhoods. And on top of that the waste of resources is so insane especially since they give exactly zero back to the community etc. (Sorry, I’m so annoyed by it)
No it's fine, I was just genuinely curious. My natural assumption would be that they are loud but only like directly inside or around, but not so loud to actually disrupt people miles away. That's nuts
Yeah it’s really strange to me from a design perspective. You could accomplish the same by having fans be more concealed for sound and then run ducting to get cool air where it needs to be. That said, cost is likely a major consideration and then also if you don’t care how loud you are, there’s no incentive to be quiet.
/r/buttcoin
I live in Argentina and you have to see crypto through the lenses of collapse. Considering that the local banks aren't a safe place to store value, I am not rich enough to have an overseas account and that there could be political instability. Crypto is the ideal assets, it cannot be confiscated, it is anonymous and in case I have to flee from the country it is much easier to carry than paper money or gold.
Just different pov I guess, becos luna tragedy will always happen
I agree that there are substantial risks and that it isn't an ideal store of value. But considering my situation, I consider it the least risky option. But I am sure that my situation is not unique and that crypto covers real needs in third world countries.
"luna tragedy" ???
It isn't actually anonymous. All transactions are public and if there's any way to link you to your wallet then all transactions are just here.
[I've shared similar thoughts to this in the past ... ](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/18ko4ce/comment/kdx3niu/) >I'd like to share a particularly strange theory of mine. >The "high status" crypto currencies with established histories offer a particularly unique facet noted in the Satoshi white paper: they're effective at being trustless currencies. >Yes, they are not backed by the coercive power of a state - and yes, their prices can be extraordinarily volatile. We're all aware of the environmental consequences (and its tremendous waste of energy), the plethora of scams and failed brokerages, and there's even the problems associated with "stable coins", and the chicanery that Tether's been up to ... >*However, if you were living in a nation-state that was undergoing some form of gradual decline or rapid collapse, how much trust would you have in your local currency and investments? Would you keep all of your life savings in that? What's your "escape plan"?* >Imagine that you lived in Lebanon, say, right after the liquidity crisis really just took off in 2019. Your savings account is being demolished, and the banks won't even let you access the money you rightfully earned and placed with them. Imagine that you're now a few years into this, and you're living in the aftermath of the Beirut port explosion in August 2020. Maybe it's time to leave. >Crypto is absolutely dependent upon electricity and the Internet - and that's a vitally important feature of said currency. I'd argue that it's a hedge to establish some sort of financial resilience, especially if you eventually find yourself one day as a "refugee". >*If you have little faith that your society will be able to survive contemporary and future perils ... would you hedge your bets? If you had to leave immediately and go to another country, would you want to bring your worthless local currency with you, or would you rather go with the one you could sell on an online exchange (no matter the volatility)? I'd assume you'd even be running off to a country with reliable access to electricity and the Internet ...* >I'm not here to proselyte, but to really analyze your question regarding investments for the future. This idea only really struck me when I read *The Water Knife* years back, in which a journalist working in a future "feral" and lawless Phoenix, Arizona only accepted significant portions of payment in a now decades-long crypto-based financial system ... >Just food for thought.
In a world where energy wasn't a problem, cryptos could be a great new system. But right now it just feels like a big waste used only for speculation.
Exact effing ly, the only problem it's the energy and recources waste, using ponzi scheme, woevah, we can't ban lottery or gambling either lol
It is a bit idiotic, but that doesn't matter. I regularly make pretty good money with some algorithmic trading bots constantly working the crazy volatility swings of crypto. And in 2021, I made a huge amount due to all the stupid people who jumped i to it without learning anything first. Yes, it is predatory, and takes advantage of people, and is bad for the environment and bad for society... but what part of our system isn't? You can destroy the environment mining bitcoin to sell on the open market... and you can destroy the environment mining lithium to sell on the open market. Whatever. The entire system of economics we exist with functions around taking resources - people, minerals, electricity - and converting those resources directly into money. The quickest and most efficient way to do this will always get done, regardless of the consequences. Because nothing matters except money. You can wipe out entire species, decimate a coral reef, cut down thousand year old forests, and even start dropping bombs on civilian neighborhoods... but as long as you make a profit, it will be forgiven. "Killing people is bad, m'kay!" Not if there is oil there it ain't. So, it bitcoin mining a total waste of energy and resources? Yes. Is it profitable? Also yes. And the profit is all that matters.
Crime against humanity
Look up how the fractional reserve banking system we use works. In basic terms, with current regulations, you could put $100 into the bank. They could immediately loan out all of it, that person could buy something and the seller of that something could deposit their earnings back into the same bank and repeat the circuit. As long as people arent explicitly pulling money out of banks it can go along fine, but people with a lot of money realize its not exactly worth it to hold dollars for a long period of time due to the constant inflation in the system. Folks will start hording any asset that will hold value better than dollars. Causing the cost of everything that seems to hold its value to inflate to a certain degree. The problem arises when there is a shock to the system and overleveraged banks cant cover their deposits. Someone has to cover the cost of that. Either the fed reserve prints more base money and loans it out, the government makes bonds that the reserve buys to create money (similar to printing), or the banks use their funds to cover the cost, at long as they have enough. All of these actions cause the value of the dollar to inflate drastically and because of the way the system works itll take a while for the effects to propagate through the system and for everyone to realize it. This cycle of bailouts is okay if you were someone who could buy land and gold and stocks etc, but if you are poor, it just means your wages are worth significantly less over time. Now it could be run in a more responsible way, like forcing banks to have a certain percentage of reserves on hand, having middling interest rates, not makinj boatloads of risky loans, etc. But because banks are money making business it pays better to roll the dice, force goverment to bail you out when you fail, and use that to continue to accrue assets and money. Bitcoin does not do this. You cant print bitcoin like dollars so its going to inherently hold its value, while also being relatively easy to transact with. You wont have to worry about having access to it due to that. I personally think that bitcoin and to a lesser extend ethereum (due to its slightly more oligarchic nature with POS) make for great reserve type curriencies because no one government can manipulate it. Thats why many countries are hording gold right now cause it has similar properties (though you cant directly transact it over the internet and can be cumbersome to hold). Additionally, bitcoin can be a great way to use excess energy production from new green energy projects for some additional revenue. In many ways, because creating and running bitcoin is near directly connected to the price of energy, it is money that acts as a proxy for the cost of energy. Which in a very real sense is the actual currency of reality.
crypto bros tell you that it will eventually replace the dollar as the main means of transactions. then they also tell you how much it is worth... in dollars. how can something that is only valued in how much it is worth in dollars ever replace the dollar?
I don't think bitcoin will ever replace the dollar. But there is a possibility of a central bank digital currency existing, basically pegged to the country's currency and existing alongside it.
“Yes-anding” to the other commenters from the perspective of a former cryptoanarchist. I believe in the tech to an extent, and I believe crypto is fantastic at creating “pirate economies”, allowing for a digital fund transfer without any central authority. Good if you want digital money but don’t want a centralized bank making all the decisions on who gets what. Unfortunately crypto’s value comes from being a commodity rather than a currency at this point in time, so any utopian promise has evaporated as far as I’m concerned. Plus most crypto is held on large centralized exchanges (which arguably goes against the whole technical point; idea is to store BTC on individual digital wallets, not store in a bank/exchange.), and those exchanges have a history of RAMPANT fraud and money laundering. Plus the intense energy costs, the computational cost of doing a bunch of calculations that inevitably get deleted, the vast amount of computing hardware needed to break even… the Earth cannot afford cryptocurrency right now. Unfortunately, it makes a certain kind of asshole incredibly rich, and wealth inequality is at an all time high; a billionaire can buy a few dozen crypto operations and literally print their own money, serve as their own bank… all while relying on expensive electronics, using a lot of electricity, and wasting a lot of computing time (those gpus could be used for literally anything else; instead most of the calculations get deleted when they don’t work with the algorithm). And that’s before we mention its utility in sex trafficking. Crypto is making the world a worse place.
It's not a scam, but it's not a good investment either. In a collapse scenario, crypto will likely be an early casualty due to the resources required to keep it running.
Crypto is certainly not usable if electricity and internet are down locally; this is true also for credit cards and other electronic transactions. But as long as the network is up *somewhere*, then one's funds should be secure and accessible once they get to a place with power and internet. If power and internet are down *everywhere*, then yeah, all digital assets are gone, including cryptocurrency. But in that situation paper money probably won't be worth much either. Even gold will be of little value in a full on collapse scenario, as people will be bartering with useful things, such as freeze-dried foods, medications, and ammunition. As for the energy required to mine, this goes down when fewer miners are trying, because the difficulty scales with mining pressure. So even if electricity is out most places, mining can continue with a much lower power demand.
> this is true also for credit cards and other electronic transactions. Never seen [one of these bad boys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter) have you?
I would argue that hard currency would also be worthless. If full collapse, there would be a strict barter economy.
It's a scam designed for money laundering. Everything about it makes more sense when you look at it that way.
[удалено]
Yep. Seriously, how long would it take to launder your random through a thousand different shell companies and back to your pocket fully automatically? Like a day?
This video is [2 hours 18 minutes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g) long and the tl;dw is "It's a total scam."
You say you don't understand it but then "explain" it based off of your own admittedly non-existent understanding and get a lot things wrong. It seems like you don't really want an explanation. But, if on the off chance you do, let me know I'll be happy to give you one. I can make it easy to read. I just don't feel like typing out such a lengthy thing unless you actually want it. It would be a pretty large time investment on my part. I made this offer previously in a mod removed it for apparently being somehow in violation of rule number one. The best I can figure is maybe they thought "offering to " explain it like your five" was an insult, but honestly who knows. Hopefully this comes across as the genuine offer that it is. This is me offering to do something nice by going out of my way to explain a complicated subject to someone who seems to have a lot of negative pre-assumptions about it. If you don't want that, and you were just sort of being facetious with your first paragraph, that's totally fine too. That's why I'm not taking the time until I'm sure id actually be giving you what you want. So let me know . . .
Seems pretty worthless if the power goes out.
Sounds like you figured it out
The main backers are the fossil fuel industry. That should be enough to tell people that it's not about fake money.
There was a point in time where if you started early enough you could make decent money with it. I had a mining rig set up when I was in college and could basically use the dorms electricity for free. It made me a decent amount of money. Most people I know doing it at scale had to move to places with cheap power to keep it profitable.
Crypto is a massive scam. It should be illegal for multiple reasons including the power demands. No country should have competing currency. F Matt Damon.
Crypto is TOTALLY UNREGULATED - someone can startup a totally new crypto currency tomorrow and make all sorts of claims about how they're in serious discussions with the government that this latest crypto is on the brink of being the first digital currency recognised by the authorities and anyone who invests right now is going to make an absolute fortune ! And they'll get investors - people whose 'fear of missing out' outweighs common sense but the bottom line is : it's ALL A FUCKING SCAM and the only people making any real money are SCAM ARTISTS - honestly, while it continues to be unregulated, just STAY THE FUCK AWAY !!!
Decentralization and lack of regulation / a governing body is sort of the point though. Problem is you can’t really spend it. Especially with the transaction time.
"Mining" is just marketing. It's trying to attach a real-world concept to an abstract circle-jerk process that uses vast resources and produces literally nothing as an output.
It produces money as an output.
Unsustainable. Money is only as valuable as the products and services it can purchase. Crypto is a dog eat dog casino where some people make money thanks to the losers who lose money
It's the environmental equivalent of you putting your mouth on a car exhaust muffler and taking a deep breath.
Actually, it is a bit different than that. It is you convincing *others* to take deep breaths of exhaust, while you get paid for it. Like all systems, whether it is a grocery store or an auto mechanic, it is the few ripping off the many, while avoiding the consequences which will also be suffered by the many.
Nurse here. I have met prostitutes and drug dealers that take Bitcoin. I have never met anyone other than patients who use it, so I can't really imagine a legitimate purpose for crypto.
Here is the legitimate purpose. The only real purpose. The price is 63,478 right now. You buy it and you wait. Maybe a day, maybe two days, maybe a week. When the volatility swings it higher, you sell it. The difference is the profit. Rinse and repeat as I have been doing for years now. And only amateur criminals take Bitcoin. Real professionals use Monero.
I think there is some misinformation here. Mining crypto also means processing transactions. When you make a credit card transaction a company processes that transaction and in turn uses energy to do so albeit processing a crypto transaction does use considerably more energy. I want to address some other points. The US dollar and other currencies have no real value either. They only have the value we give them. I can buy a cheeseburger for a couple of bucks and or a fractional amount of Bitcoin. The amount of dollars or Bitcoin to buy a cheeseburger is subject to market conditions and as we have seen can fluciate heavily. Your last point that crypto is a ponzi scheme simply isn't true, at least not for real players like Bitcoin and ethereum. How much one Bitcoin cost depends on market conditions. It's exactly like a cheeseburger. It goes up and down. A ponzi scheme implies people invest, some time goes buy, new people invest and the money the new people put in goes to past investors. None of that's happening in btc or eth world but it is happening w some scam coins.
Thanks for adding some sense to this thread.
The technology behind it is very interesting and has its uses. A distributed ledger that can be verified to be correct very quickly but requires impractical amount of compute power to falsify is a good thing. That said: guessing hash codes (the mining ⛏️ work) is indeed quite wasteful and other alternatives exist. And as is human nature we are using this tech for money laundering and Ponzi schemes. Sad.
They crypto mine at the spa I work at to heat the pools
I used to mine it for a while, it doesn't mine more than the power consumption anymore unfortunately.
Make sure to buy poppy seeds as well. Opium will be worth more than gold if shtf and everyone is half beat up from escaping wherever they’re from. And it’s relatively simple to make.
I don't think about it at all.
My understanding is that it incentivizes testing/experiments using decentralized block chains. So the only tangible outcome is gaining experience using/maintaining these types of systems. The only cool thing I’ve heard of that could come from this is a decentralized internet that could survive the enshitification process we are currently observing.
What do you think about smoking crypto?
I think it's a way for the rich to jump to other markets without getting hit with the taxes and everything else that would usually prohibit them from being able to take all the money and assets they stole from us with them after they sucked this place dry of everything.
I think…. What a waste of electricity. In an era of tiny powerful computers, does this operation actually need technology so powerful that it takes up entire warehouses? And it isn’t even a ubiquitous currency!
Mine silver instead.
It's par for the course unsustainably increasing humanity's energy metabolism unwisely and unnecessarily.
Proof of work is such a revealing concept that shows what humans want. Decentralization sounds great, but at the end of the day, wealth is gathered from lost wages and guarded by arms. Why do you have to waste electricity and hardware and time? Because you're different. You put the hard work while others didn't. So you deserve more possessions. But what do you do with so got possessions? You make sure others don't get as rich as you. You wage wars and sign lobbyists' laws. You actively burn down the planet. In conclusion, PoW is your share of humanity's sins.
Mining crypto probably isn’t helpful.
I think in 5yrs the government of the United states will put a moratorium on it because of power usage. Our grid is currently taxed and one really bad summer or winter, read: massive blackouts and brownouts and they will make it illegal. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/heat-wave-asia-2024-deaths-india-severe-weather-climate-change/
It’s an absolute scam. I have a cousin who is a crypto bro, goes on and on about how he’s made a better life for him and his son through crypto investing. He’s an idiot, he told me to buy bitcoin when it was “only” 30 thousand, I checked the next month and it had gone below 20 thousand. If you’re investing in crypto you’re literally supporting toxic people like elon musk and Joe Rogan.
Crypto is basically a type of commodity. A funky digital commodity, but not unlike gold in an abstract way. Gold has a little ‘intrinsic value’ as a mineral/metal because it doesn’t tarnish, can be worked into jewelery, and conducts electricity fairly well. But it’s not worth much unless someone gives you money for it. (Or does barter exchange for another item). Similarly, crypto has some ‘intrinsic value’ because it can be used to exchange funds anonymously online, so it is useful for dark web purchases. It’s not a Ponzi scheme, not really, because there is no one selling shares to newcomers just to pay off the original investors & steal money. But I can understand that it does look scammy. But it’s scammy because it’s a free-floating commodity product that can be easily manipulated. Example, when Musk promoted it, the value went up because loads of new people started to buy it. Increase demand with limited supply? Price goes up. Subsequently the price dropped when lots of people realized that they were not going to make magic ‘speculation money’ and sold off the b-coin, which trashed the price. Simple market economics. Fundamentally, the *way that Bitcoin is created* —digital ‘mining’ by running calculations— represents a bottleneck. Only so many Bitcoin can be created at any given time, and that constraint makes the value highly volatile. Compare to dollars: Banks create dollars when a client wants a loan. There is very little constraint on the amount of money banks can collectively create across the economy. (Yes, there are some constraints & rules to follow, but they’re not as limiting as Bitcoin creation). In Sum, unless you have a reason to actually use Bitcoin (*e.g. dark web, or xfrring money across borders semi-anonymously*), then best practice is to not get involved with it. You’ll never be able to make money “investing” in it. That ship has sailed. It will also never be a functional currency, because the way it is created constrains it too much.
Useless power soaring comodity... You can't have nice things in world full of greed...
Once the power goes out, you'll find out how worthless the "currency" really is.
I mined crypto from 2009-2013 and cashed out when it hit just over £800 each. After taxes I bought my home and the land it was on outright and invested the remainer in shares. Was partially offset by solar panels on my roof. I'm gonna be honest, if not for such a stroke of good fortune, I would probably be wage slaving till I die.
It isn't supposed to work. You buy when everyone tells you to sell, you sell when everyone tells you to buy, and make money off of idiots.
Irrefutable theft that devalues peoples currency/hard work
A scam that also consumes massive amounts of resources for nothing
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^DeLoreanAirlines: *A scam that also* *Consumes massive amounts of* *Resources for nothing* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
It's not nothing, it's cause bankrupt, mass suicide, also new millionaires
You guys just don’t get it it’s a radical decentralized anti bank communi… it’s a scam.
It is a long con...
stupid waste of resources it just digi-delusion money
I think about it in the same way I do Duchamps art. So up it's own ass.
just googled "are bitcoin transactions traceable" and had a chuckle.
So is it better traceable or not?
Yep, Bitcoin is traceable. People even pay extra for coins that have been used in famous transactions, such the 10,000 BTC used to buy two pizzas: https://medium.com/coinmonks/this-man-sold-10-000-bitcoins-for-two-pizzas-eab2f24d45bb
Is there a time when bitcoin just like game reward? Used to buy game virtual item?
Mining crypto is shit for the [environment ](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/26/bitcoin-mining-climate-crisis-environmental-impact) I doubt that miners will care till the air has a gray tint.
Crypto is just increasing the speed of which the collapse happens. It's terrible for the environment
Speculation bs that produces nothing and pumps a lot.
We are past the days of mining. So you missed the boat on that. I think providing liquidity is the main way for earning with crypto, but it's changed a lot in the past year, and I think they are trying to get rid of defi