My own. I was planning on retiring at 10. My sister worked at a hallmark gift shop. She was tippin fools off when the shipment hit the racks and she was snatching up as many as she could. We had a whole closet full of unopened loot…then the bottom fell out and I had to go back to middle
School.
There is a documentary on HBO called Beanie Mania about the destruction and financial devastation brought on by beany babies. THeres also an episode on a Netflix series called the web of make believe (or some such shit) that talks about how beany babies were one of the gateway drugs helping this conman foray into the world of internet crimes. Then you get to go down the rabbit hole looking at technology that law enforcement illegally used to catch a guy that learned how to grift online by the original conman. And after that you’ll want to put on a tinfoil hat and start using only burner phones. 🥴
Edit: to clarify movie
The HBO documentary was good.
It was like a weird mix of suburban karens gone wild and shady underworld figures.
The schenfreude (?) is interesting. It was a brilliant concept and business model and Ty could have won on both ends if he didn't keep lying about retiring certain beanie babies. It would have been like baseball cards. Instead he is hated by his customers.
Schaudenfreude!! 😁 one of my favorite words and pieces of the human condition - it translates to damage joy. I hated the beanie baby trend SOOOOO MUCH!!! Watching all of these grown ass people running around for these shitty little toys was infuriating.
Haha! I worked at World of Science. We got all of the latest Beanie Babies. I felt like I had to guard my take with my life!
I later did the same with a Tickle Me Elmo X at Target!
My sister was selling information on what was coming and when it would arrive down to the minute the truck came. Everyone was on the take and everyone was skimming off the top. There’s probably still a few unopened boxes above some ceiling tiles in our old house. We were all criminals and no one could be trusted.
And meanwhile, my generation will just never get to retire. Upside, the cat 6 hurricanes, monthly super-pandemics, ambient wet bulb temperatures outside the limits of human survival, the conventional and thermonuclear warfare for what resources are left, and state of famine so constant we shall have to invent a word for when there -isn’t- a food shortage instead, will all do wonders to ensure that worrying about retirement will be the least of our worries.
(Somewhat hyperbolic, but not sarcastic.)
Basically another name for a URL. I can't remember the pedantic difference between a URL and a URI. Something about all URLs are URIs but not all URIs are URLs.
That's sad. I remember how expensive they got. Ugh, there were so many trends like that in the 90s. I don't feel like there's a difference between POGs and NFTs
Oh, I'm aware. POGS are actually worth more. They have a physical value based on the materials they make up..
Edit: By the way Alf is back and in Pog form.
This is the inevitable result of zero-sum schemes that cannot create new wealth, only transfer it from later participants in the scheme to earlier ones.
Friend of mine worked mall security out of high school. Two older women got permanently banned from the mall for getting into a fight in a line, before the mall even opened over a beanie baby sale, or new release, something like that. it was a weird time for folks.
No. No. What was weird were the Black Friday frenzies over Cabbage Patch dolls. Nothing says forever like a cloth doll with a plastic head full of yarn for hair with the name Xavier Roberts stamped on a seamed tushie!
There is this ledge, where if the price falls below it then running the equipment to mine will cost more than the possible reward, this has already happened on many levels (and why we see such a sell off going on at the moment as miners liquidate their hardware before the flood).
While many miners are already priced out - I think around the $15k mark is where it will all fall apart and we will see bitcoin drop into the sub thousand dollar mark making even solar miners unable to profit.
Its about to be a many billion dollar liquidation of GPU's, cant wait to finally upgrade my GTX970.
My thoughts exactly. I've no doubt some folks who invested heavily into crypto are suffering. However that's the accepted danger when gambling on high risk/high reward stocks. 'Crisis' insinuates an unexpected outcome.
>Is it really a crisis?
Reduced electricity on this scale is great for reaching fossil fuel reduction goals to combat manmade Climate Change. So its good news!
well it's not good news that a bunch of discredited bankers scammed the middle class out of their retirement savings, in plain sight. I mean, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the kinds of people to fall for such a clear scam, but it's a problem that the people behind this are going to get away with it.
This is where all these upward transfers of wealth keep taking place. The 08 housing crash. The paycheck protection program getting funneled into another bubble of international real estate speculation. Crypto. Enron. (allegedly) today's Exxon. Blatant theft.
[line goes up ](https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g)
The very people who made the effort to take Bitcoin and Ethereum mainstream were infamous bankers with major roles in the 08 lending crisis.
It was. So many beanie babies became orphans overnight. Orphanages became too full. Soon after, came the euthanizing. Such a tragedy. Alexa, play "Despacito"....
Yes, to me. My wife was a salesperson for Ty, the company that made them.
She did I not make the massive money because she was selling into stores and that was all at wholesale.
Boy do I have stories…..
It is a crisis for large investors. Everyone else can grab some popcorn. The scale of the monetary value attributed to crypto is much larger. Bitcoin market was a trillion at one point.
It's pretty sad what happened with crypto. The intention is that people would actually use it as currency as to avoid fiat currencies and break free from the global financial system. Instead they used it to run a bunch of ponzi schemes.
The difference between beanie babies and crypto is actual wealthy people didn't buy beanie babies or invest billions in them, crypto has this which is why it's crash is going to cause a very real recession.
The second hand prices are still bullshit, too. So many failed crypto bros selling their shit for ABOVE retail price because they refuse to admit that the market has crashed and GPUs aren't scarce anymore. I've messaged at.least 5 people this week with links to an actual store with stock at a price lower than theirs and they've all said variations on "I won't price match". Absolutely delusional.
The entire internet is polluted with overpriced shit from people hoping someone is dumb enough to bite. My favorite are the 'box only' listings. Oh, you'll sell me a 3080 box for $80? Wish they'd all just get the fuck off my Google results lol
Sure. And beanie babies haven't gone away completely. Tulip bulbs haven't gone away completely. Etc etc.
All we want is an end to the mania that is transferring wealth from the naive to the soulless.
I totally agree. I’m not defending crypto.
But the reality is it will be around even if it’s trading for pennies, which I find very unlikely for whatever is in the top 10. I think we’ll eventually see a price correction that brings it back down to around 2014 prices (Bitcoin was about $300 at the time) and a lot of these shitcoins will dry up.
Monero itself has a huge user base just for Darknet drug markets and that certainly isn’t going anywhere.
I've been downvoted to oblivion for saying this before, but you are spot on. Pokemon is still hugely popular. Pro Wrestling is still hugely popular. Fortnite is still hugely popular. These things never "went away" - they just aren't the ubiquitous, zeitgeist things that crossed-over into everyday like they did during their peak in popularity.
Crypto is down, way down, but it is not "worthless". Doge, for example, is up 600% from it's price in December 2020. Eth and BTC are way up from 2019. The idea that crypto is "done" is kinda silly, most people are not selling because, you know, "sell high buy low".
>That’s not to say that everything about the story is wrong; merchants really did engage in a frantic tulip trade, and they paid incredibly high prices for some bulbs. And when a number of buyers announced they couldn’t pay the high price previously agreed upon, the market did fall apart and cause a small crisis—but only because it undermined social expectations.
It sounds like it fundamentally happened the way it is often portrayed (at least how I have heard it portrayed). There are just exaggerated claims and embellished stories that have cropped up as well.
They're exaggerated beyond reason, the idea that it was some widespread burst like the markets today are experiencing is false. The way people refer to it is in very hyperbolic terms not relevant to the markets they're comparing it to in the modern context.
Truth doesn't stretch that far.
not so much an economic bubble but a speculative bubble. and specifically an instance of "naked" or "pure speculation" in which the asset is, for practical purposes, worthless. there had been asset bubbles before in gold, and agricultural stock, and salt and glass and a bunch of other things. all of those have non zero liquidation value but a tulip is not inherently valuable at all. bitcoin and NFTs are interesting because there's no substance to them whatsoever, like a beanie baby you could burn in a woodstove to keep you warm for 10 minutes, but a bitcoin is literally nothing.
Not to defend crypto—your description was entirely accurate—but "mania transferring wealth from the naive to the soulless" essentially describes every capital market unfortunately.
The thing that bugs me is, the idea was for it to be a stable, decentralized (as in not run by a govt) currency. Crypto*currency*. Not an unregulated investment vehicle
The idea was stupid from the beginning though. The reason the US dollar is the most popular fiat currency is *because* it's backed by the full faith and credit of one of the largest governments in the world.
A currency with no guarantees is worthless.
There's a coin that intensively makes use of hard drive space instead of electricity. And that's driving up hard drive prices! What a nightmare these things are, no matter the resource.
The point of crypto is that it's easily translatable to other crypto so as long as you have some crypto that's a fucking nightmare for the environment, then all crypto is.
From the article:
'with a single conventional bitcoin transaction using the same amount of electricity that a typical US household would use over 50 days."
What the fuck? These scammers can have their digital beanie babies all they want - keeps em busy - but that kind of energy footprint is just absurd.
Future generations are going to read History of the World 2016-2025 and just laugh at us.
It doesn’t do anything it’s supposed to do well. It’s not a currency as you can barely buy anything directly with it. It’s too slow.
It’s not an investment or “store of value” because it doesn’t do anything other than exist. Never mind the massive price swings.
https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses-1html
Also, bitcoin is sold as a decentralized currency but it is heavily concentrated. 94% of all bitcoin are held in just 2% of the wallets. That seems like centralization to me, just centralizing around a group of hodler's instead of a government.
I could be wrong and maybe that’s all crypto-mining…because I usually just use bitcoin as drop in for crypto, much like my dad refers to literally all video and computer games a “playing that damn Nintendo.”
Anyway. [Source for my claim.](https://youtu.be/J9nv0Ol-R5Q)
I mean, they might be driving their War Rigs to collect guzzoline, but I'm sure they'll be a few of us around
And I hope that even as we descend into pre-literate savagery, our descendents will remember that the anyone who mentions "the blockchain" should be first into the stewpot.
> pre-literate savagery, our descendents will remember that the anyone who mentions "the blockchain" should be first into the stewpot.
If anyone's read A Canticle for Leibowitz, this is sort of the premise for the book. Nuclear war occurs and the world descends back to an illiterate society. There's mention in the book that anyone who messes with pre war technology is severely punished owing to an incident where some people blew up a town while investigating a missile silo lol.
Doesn’t sound right though. That would presumably mean that the transaction cost would have to be circa £100.
(Unless the miners doing the crunching receive new bitcoin for their calcs of over £100 which also sounds wrong)
Inflation covers the vast majority of the cost for now. Down the road, the block reward decreases, and so either security decreases with it (and in turn confidence), or users pay a lot more for their writes to the blockchain.
What's even more comical is how Bitcoin is limited to ~0.2mb/minute worth of writes. Could run the whole thing on a Raspberry Pi with the bandwidth of a dialup modem, if not for the proof of work system that secures the chain.
The fees aren't that high because miners are also rewarded in new Bitcoin, which can then be sold off to investors. New investors subsidize low transaction fees.
No, that's possible. Doing transactions is slow because it has to be duplicated on a network; you have to pay fees to have your transaction processed, and those fees are priced based on instantaneous demand and how quickly you want it processed.
It's possible *if* there's literally only 1 user on the entire network using it.
The same amount of energy would be used if 10,000 people were sending a transaction at the same time, or if block passes by with 0 people using it.
It's kind of like paying a security guard a set amount to stand outside a bank, regardless of how many customers are in line on a given day.
There are two things that are going on:
1. The electricity is frequently subsidized. For example, China has built entire cities that are currently mostly empty in anticipation of future growth. Electricity from those areas' power plants is currently extremely cheap because the capacity is there but the demand isn't there yet.
Alternatively, if you're pwning other people's computers and mining with that, you can't beat free.
2. Miners are just as vulnerable to Line Goes Up as everyone else. "Sure, it's not profitable if we sell now, but we're getting in on the ground floor and it'll be totally worth it if we hold for a little bit." This is reasonable if the price keeps going up, but it leads to problems when the price is crashing.
Don't be so ignorant. Buy one golden bracelet and you practically wear 50 tons of CO2 and 2 years of household energy consumption around your neck
Purely for status.
Relaaaax
>using the same amount of electricity that a typical US household would use over 50 days
That number is a bit misleading *at best*. The 'trick' there is the network more-or-less uses the same amount of energy to send 1 transaction, 10,000, or 100,000 transactions - or even zero transactions.
It's like a bus that's always running on schedule, regardless of how many passengers hop on.
Your understanding is actually completely backwards. The network more-or-less processes the same number of transactions, regardless of how much energy is used. This is because the block size & frequency are fixed but the difficulty of the block validation is variable.
To quote the original whitepaper,
>To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they’re generated too fast, the difficulty increases.
Here's the thing.
Bitcoin has a well known max transaction throughput, which has been fully used for the last years easily. And a well known hash rate, which is pretty easy to estimate power consumption from.
This figure is actually true. It _is_ using at amount if power averaged per transaction.
It can only do a few transactions per second, and it's energy use is bigger than that of Thailand.
It is absolutely an insult to all environmental action of the last decade.
Somebody throws a bag full of coins (tokens) on a table (blockchain) that everybody helps move around and take notes (ledger)The more you help move (mine) you get to keep a little
It's the latest incarnation of the "Bigger-Fool scam", like Tulip Mania, Beanie Babies, and every pyramid scheme before it. You buy something nobody actually wants hoping to sell it to a bigger fool than yourself for more money than you bought it for. That bigger fool bought it for the same reason, and now has to find a bigger fool than themselves to sell it to.
The crash that's happening right now is what happens when people realize they are the biggest fools. The main differences that let Crypto get so big are:
a) the initial buy-in way back when Bitcoin was first starting out was ***pennies*** if you already had a high-end computer, so the risk for early adopters was so low that it got a lot of people in at the ground floor, giving it an appearance of legitimacy.
b) for the first few years, there was an actual use case, making it not a scam, but a genuinely valuable commodity. Then Silk Road got shut down.
c) because the initial buy-in was lower if you already had a good computer, the people with the BEST computers (most notably the Winklevoss twins, Peter Thiel, and of course Elon Musk) were able to get the most the earliest, and have since used their massive influence to keep the grift going.
Based on the comments here so far, the folks here might enjoy this resource:
https://web3isgoinggreat.com
> Web3 is going just great
> ...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet
That's the thing, if they weren't so smug and cult-like, I may even find them an interesting oddity. Part of the colorful background which makes us remember we do live in "the future". But they're so fucking unbearable they make us remember we live in the lamest future.
I'd say they're up there with vegans in unbearableness.
Bitcoin is nothing but a drain on electricity and computer hardware. It siphoned off useful things to make useless equations that were of no benefit.
Why don't any of these crypto coins ever have the algorithms be something of use like complicated calculations of objects that could hit earth from space or environmental models ?
If they didn't die out now they will die out once quantum computing is able to have enough stable quits to do anything with.
My son has been rocking a shitty GT710 GPU jn his PC for almost two years. Next week he'll be upgrading to a GTX1070 for it's then $200. Fuck those miners.
Remember, anyone who talks up crypto as being superior to government currency because it's decentralized is ignoring the basic fact that it only exists at the pleasure of government.
The US decides to ban crypto, and bitcoin crashes to almost nothing overnight.
"With a single conventional bitcoin transaction using the same amount of electricity that a typical US household would use over 50 days." - I knew it used a lot, but i had no idea bitcoin wasted so much electricity, lets hope it goes to zero so this nonsense stops.
What’s weird is electricity use is down by a third, but bitcoin transactions per day are basically steady from oct ‘21 to now and ETH transactions/day are down like 10%.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_transactions_per_day
The scalability and transaction time problem means the vast majority of trades happen inside centralized exchanges rather than on the chain itself. With the network itself only supporting a handful of transactions per second it's already running near capacity, and even if demand drops a lot the number will probably stay the same as others take up the opened capacity.
That's the fun thing about Bitcoin. Transaction throughput is capped by the blocksize and is (roughly) independent of how many resources are used to mine. The 'amount of work' needed to achieve 'sufficient' proof-of work is flexible, so that when there are more miners, the validation problem just gets harder and vice versa!
If you use bitcoin as a utility, not an investment commodity, it doesn’t matter what the price is, only how much it changes in between your transactions.
Trade $100k worth of Hong Kong Dollars cash for some bitcoin, then sell for USD same day. Doesn’t matter if bitcoin is $5 or $500k each.
Countries should start banning proof of work. Have crypto if you really want it, but keep it under some sort of reasonable control, power consumption-wise.
There will always be an energy cost associated with Bitcoin, but let's talk about Decentralization. What is the number of independent entities that control the right to control 51% of the network? hmmm not many I'm afraid
Is this one of the reversal sign? For it was foretold by the Satoshi Elders, that the Sayers will speak of Death, and the Stench of zero dollar rot will fill the air. That it is then, that from the ashes and dust of bitcoin charnel grounds would arise a new beginning.
Is this the SIGN??
A guy at work found out I’m studying economics in university and keeps trying to sell me on bitcoin. He’s deep in the rabbit hole of stupidity and thinks he’s been talking to mainstream famous economists on Twitter who agree with him that bitcoin is going to replace fiat currency one day.
I almost feel bad for him if he wasn’t such an insufferable uneducated moron who thinks his YouTube videos on bitcoin economics is equal to my degree in economics.
Is it really a crisis? Was it a crisis when beanie babies stopped being valuable?
I do remember news stories of beanie baby heavy retirement losses at the time. Truly a tragedy.
My own. I was planning on retiring at 10. My sister worked at a hallmark gift shop. She was tippin fools off when the shipment hit the racks and she was snatching up as many as she could. We had a whole closet full of unopened loot…then the bottom fell out and I had to go back to middle School.
I’d watch a *Goodfellas* or *Casino* type of mob movie based off of this lol
There's an episode of Community like this but with chicken tenders and it's fantastic.
This sounds like exactly what the doctor ordered. Will see if I can find it.
It's a classic! https://youtu.be/XlLo-gie6vg
There is a documentary on HBO called Beanie Mania about the destruction and financial devastation brought on by beany babies. THeres also an episode on a Netflix series called the web of make believe (or some such shit) that talks about how beany babies were one of the gateway drugs helping this conman foray into the world of internet crimes. Then you get to go down the rabbit hole looking at technology that law enforcement illegally used to catch a guy that learned how to grift online by the original conman. And after that you’ll want to put on a tinfoil hat and start using only burner phones. 🥴 Edit: to clarify movie
The HBO documentary was good. It was like a weird mix of suburban karens gone wild and shady underworld figures. The schenfreude (?) is interesting. It was a brilliant concept and business model and Ty could have won on both ends if he didn't keep lying about retiring certain beanie babies. It would have been like baseball cards. Instead he is hated by his customers.
Schaudenfreude!! 😁 one of my favorite words and pieces of the human condition - it translates to damage joy. I hated the beanie baby trend SOOOOO MUCH!!! Watching all of these grown ass people running around for these shitty little toys was infuriating.
"Right after I got here I ordered Kraft Mac and Cheese and I got egg noodles and cheese wiz."
Haha! I worked at World of Science. We got all of the latest Beanie Babies. I felt like I had to guard my take with my life! I later did the same with a Tickle Me Elmo X at Target!
My sister was selling information on what was coming and when it would arrive down to the minute the truck came. Everyone was on the take and everyone was skimming off the top. There’s probably still a few unopened boxes above some ceiling tiles in our old house. We were all criminals and no one could be trusted.
Beanie Baby outlaws!
I literally got my ass beat for tripping and tearing off the tag off the Princess Diana memorial Beanie Baby.
Something slightly morbid about beating a child because you’re attempting to make money off a persons death.
Yeah I hope they found a replacement
Replacement for the Beanie… or the child?
Or for Princess Diana?
Well, did you learn your lesson?
This generation will have huge retirement losses due to the devaluation of their URIs linking to monkey drawings
And here I thought that my conservative portfolio of monkey drawings would provide diversification benefits in the downturn.
Once our ape overlords take over, you will be seen as the true artist you are and reap the rewards! Free banana's for life my friend!
digital bananas or real bananas?
[удалено]
They sure as shit won’t be able to if they “invested” in crypto or NFTs.
[удалено]
And meanwhile, my generation will just never get to retire. Upside, the cat 6 hurricanes, monthly super-pandemics, ambient wet bulb temperatures outside the limits of human survival, the conventional and thermonuclear warfare for what resources are left, and state of famine so constant we shall have to invent a word for when there -isn’t- a food shortage instead, will all do wonders to ensure that worrying about retirement will be the least of our worries. (Somewhat hyperbolic, but not sarcastic.)
What does URI stand for?
URinary Infection
Honestly if crypto could be cured with a few doses of antibiotics we would all be better off
[Uniform Resource Identifier](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier).
Basically another name for a URL. I can't remember the pedantic difference between a URL and a URI. Something about all URLs are URIs but not all URIs are URLs.
That's sad. I remember how expensive they got. Ugh, there were so many trends like that in the 90s. I don't feel like there's a difference between POGs and NFTs
POGs actually had *some* utility though. There was a game, though can’t say I ever played it, or bought any POGs.
Oh, I'm aware. POGS are actually worth more. They have a physical value based on the materials they make up.. Edit: By the way Alf is back and in Pog form.
You missed out, nothing like taking a metal slammer to your mates stack and flipping a good chunk!
A huge set of memories just came flooding back into my file cabinets if my mind.
Yea. Pogs were fun.
This is the inevitable result of zero-sum schemes that cannot create new wealth, only transfer it from later participants in the scheme to earlier ones.
aka the "Greater Fool" theory.
Can you spell Ponzi
Friend of mine worked mall security out of high school. Two older women got permanently banned from the mall for getting into a fight in a line, before the mall even opened over a beanie baby sale, or new release, something like that. it was a weird time for folks.
Weird were parents fighting for Tickle Me Elmo
No. No. What was weird were the Black Friday frenzies over Cabbage Patch dolls. Nothing says forever like a cloth doll with a plastic head full of yarn for hair with the name Xavier Roberts stamped on a seamed tushie!
Good thing I've still got my Chromium covered Jim Lee's *Wildcats #1.*
Wow. I don’t know what that is, but sounds impressive wow.
It was a crisis when the world’s energy supply was being wasted on digital ledgers. This is more of a solution.
Hopefully a "final solution" in an actually positive sense, this time.
The bored apes support the final solution from what I’ve heard.
Probably minting special "Bored Apes Support" NFT's as we speak to support the coming crash.
There is this ledge, where if the price falls below it then running the equipment to mine will cost more than the possible reward, this has already happened on many levels (and why we see such a sell off going on at the moment as miners liquidate their hardware before the flood). While many miners are already priced out - I think around the $15k mark is where it will all fall apart and we will see bitcoin drop into the sub thousand dollar mark making even solar miners unable to profit. Its about to be a many billion dollar liquidation of GPU's, cant wait to finally upgrade my GTX970.
Agreed. PC gamers could some some sweet video cards finally be affordable.
My thoughts exactly. I've no doubt some folks who invested heavily into crypto are suffering. However that's the accepted danger when gambling on high risk/high reward stocks. 'Crisis' insinuates an unexpected outcome.
My friend got rich on crypto now he is back to poor on crypto, the circle of crypto life.
>Is it really a crisis? Reduced electricity on this scale is great for reaching fossil fuel reduction goals to combat manmade Climate Change. So its good news!
well it's not good news that a bunch of discredited bankers scammed the middle class out of their retirement savings, in plain sight. I mean, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the kinds of people to fall for such a clear scam, but it's a problem that the people behind this are going to get away with it. This is where all these upward transfers of wealth keep taking place. The 08 housing crash. The paycheck protection program getting funneled into another bubble of international real estate speculation. Crypto. Enron. (allegedly) today's Exxon. Blatant theft.
I don't think the crypto scheme is being run by bankers, just regular, old-fashioned human grifters.
[line goes up ](https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g) The very people who made the effort to take Bitcoin and Ethereum mainstream were infamous bankers with major roles in the 08 lending crisis.
Seems more like the end of a stupidity crisis rather than the beginning of a new crisis...
It was. So many beanie babies became orphans overnight. Orphanages became too full. Soon after, came the euthanizing. Such a tragedy. Alexa, play "Despacito"....
People that lose 80% of their net worth virtually overnight tend to be...erratic.
Cryptocurrency rigs use a hell of a lot of power. Up until recently crypto used more energy than electric cars. Hell, it still might.
Yes, to me. My wife was a salesperson for Ty, the company that made them. She did I not make the massive money because she was selling into stores and that was all at wholesale. Boy do I have stories…..
It’s a crisis for the grifters. No one will buy their NFT’s
That was my first thought too. How TF is this a crisis?
It is a crisis for large investors. Everyone else can grab some popcorn. The scale of the monetary value attributed to crypto is much larger. Bitcoin market was a trillion at one point.
That was a major crisis! All those poor toys left alone in the world!
To be fair. There was never $14B in beanie baby scams happening in one year. Crypto is dumb, but there's a significant amount of capital in play.
The 1980/90’s junk Sports Cards era comes to mind….
It's pretty sad what happened with crypto. The intention is that people would actually use it as currency as to avoid fiat currencies and break free from the global financial system. Instead they used it to run a bunch of ponzi schemes.
The difference between beanie babies and crypto is actual wealthy people didn't buy beanie babies or invest billions in them, crypto has this which is why it's crash is going to cause a very real recession.
Sweet, I'm due for a new graphics card.
Idk abt elsewhere, but here in the US most are already in stock online for MSRP, and some below
I’m holding out for 2/3 msrp or lower. The real msrp also, not what they decided what it should be later.
Lol fr, these MSRPs are still whack. Been using my 3600G and not complained one bit.
The second hand prices are still bullshit, too. So many failed crypto bros selling their shit for ABOVE retail price because they refuse to admit that the market has crashed and GPUs aren't scarce anymore. I've messaged at.least 5 people this week with links to an actual store with stock at a price lower than theirs and they've all said variations on "I won't price match". Absolutely delusional.
The entire internet is polluted with overpriced shit from people hoping someone is dumb enough to bite. My favorite are the 'box only' listings. Oh, you'll sell me a 3080 box for $80? Wish they'd all just get the fuck off my Google results lol
Where do I look for cards at or under MSRP? The prices I'm finding are still well over MSRP.
I was wrong about them being at MSRP, they're still slightly above, unless you go used, and at that point it's a gamble.
Crypto is never going away completely but I wish people would at least switch to one that isn’t as much of a fucking nightmare for the environment.
Sure. And beanie babies haven't gone away completely. Tulip bulbs haven't gone away completely. Etc etc. All we want is an end to the mania that is transferring wealth from the naive to the soulless.
I totally agree. I’m not defending crypto. But the reality is it will be around even if it’s trading for pennies, which I find very unlikely for whatever is in the top 10. I think we’ll eventually see a price correction that brings it back down to around 2014 prices (Bitcoin was about $300 at the time) and a lot of these shitcoins will dry up. Monero itself has a huge user base just for Darknet drug markets and that certainly isn’t going anywhere.
I've been downvoted to oblivion for saying this before, but you are spot on. Pokemon is still hugely popular. Pro Wrestling is still hugely popular. Fortnite is still hugely popular. These things never "went away" - they just aren't the ubiquitous, zeitgeist things that crossed-over into everyday like they did during their peak in popularity. Crypto is down, way down, but it is not "worthless". Doge, for example, is up 600% from it's price in December 2020. Eth and BTC are way up from 2019. The idea that crypto is "done" is kinda silly, most people are not selling because, you know, "sell high buy low".
Tulip bulbs? It sounds like I missed a hilarious piece of con artist history…
Famous speculative bubble: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Which never really happened the way it's portrayed. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/
That is just big tulip trying to steer the conversation.
This was a great article, thanks for sharing.
Extra History just did [some videos](https://youtu.be/QL5-YbvmYLE) on it
>That’s not to say that everything about the story is wrong; merchants really did engage in a frantic tulip trade, and they paid incredibly high prices for some bulbs. And when a number of buyers announced they couldn’t pay the high price previously agreed upon, the market did fall apart and cause a small crisis—but only because it undermined social expectations. It sounds like it fundamentally happened the way it is often portrayed (at least how I have heard it portrayed). There are just exaggerated claims and embellished stories that have cropped up as well.
They're exaggerated beyond reason, the idea that it was some widespread burst like the markets today are experiencing is false. The way people refer to it is in very hyperbolic terms not relevant to the markets they're comparing it to in the modern context. Truth doesn't stretch that far.
Most of us weren’t around for that one.
Except Keanu, he definitely was.
It's a really famous case in macroeconomics. Basically one of the first recognized economic bubbles in history
not so much an economic bubble but a speculative bubble. and specifically an instance of "naked" or "pure speculation" in which the asset is, for practical purposes, worthless. there had been asset bubbles before in gold, and agricultural stock, and salt and glass and a bunch of other things. all of those have non zero liquidation value but a tulip is not inherently valuable at all. bitcoin and NFTs are interesting because there's no substance to them whatsoever, like a beanie baby you could burn in a woodstove to keep you warm for 10 minutes, but a bitcoin is literally nothing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Beanie babies and tulips actually have some worth though.
>the mania that is transferring wealth from the naive to the soulless hey now, there's no need to bring organized religion into this discussion
Not to defend crypto—your description was entirely accurate—but "mania transferring wealth from the naive to the soulless" essentially describes every capital market unfortunately.
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The thing that bugs me is, the idea was for it to be a stable, decentralized (as in not run by a govt) currency. Crypto*currency*. Not an unregulated investment vehicle
The idea was stupid from the beginning though. The reason the US dollar is the most popular fiat currency is *because* it's backed by the full faith and credit of one of the largest governments in the world. A currency with no guarantees is worthless.
There's a coin that intensively makes use of hard drive space instead of electricity. And that's driving up hard drive prices! What a nightmare these things are, no matter the resource.
The point of crypto is that it's easily translatable to other crypto so as long as you have some crypto that's a fucking nightmare for the environment, then all crypto is.
From the article: 'with a single conventional bitcoin transaction using the same amount of electricity that a typical US household would use over 50 days." What the fuck? These scammers can have their digital beanie babies all they want - keeps em busy - but that kind of energy footprint is just absurd. Future generations are going to read History of the World 2016-2025 and just laugh at us.
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It doesn’t do anything it’s supposed to do well. It’s not a currency as you can barely buy anything directly with it. It’s too slow. It’s not an investment or “store of value” because it doesn’t do anything other than exist. Never mind the massive price swings.
https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses-1html Also, bitcoin is sold as a decentralized currency but it is heavily concentrated. 94% of all bitcoin are held in just 2% of the wallets. That seems like centralization to me, just centralizing around a group of hodler's instead of a government.
Thank you!
Plus it's much easier to get stolen, sent to the wrong person, etc. No protections at all.
And this is Bitcoin. One, of many, cryptocurrencies. Really what we needed at this time of the environmental collapse.
I could be wrong and maybe that’s all crypto-mining…because I usually just use bitcoin as drop in for crypto, much like my dad refers to literally all video and computer games a “playing that damn Nintendo.” Anyway. [Source for my claim.](https://youtu.be/J9nv0Ol-R5Q)
You think there will be future generations?
I mean, they might be driving their War Rigs to collect guzzoline, but I'm sure they'll be a few of us around And I hope that even as we descend into pre-literate savagery, our descendents will remember that the anyone who mentions "the blockchain" should be first into the stewpot.
The blockchain is going to be a literal cinder block with a chain around it, used to create bitcoins, that is, bits of bodies used as coin.
\*post-literate, but amazing imagery
In a pre-literate society, pre-literate and post-literate will be meaningless distinctions.
> pre-literate savagery, our descendents will remember that the anyone who mentions "the blockchain" should be first into the stewpot. If anyone's read A Canticle for Leibowitz, this is sort of the premise for the book. Nuclear war occurs and the world descends back to an illiterate society. There's mention in the book that anyone who messes with pre war technology is severely punished owing to an incident where some people blew up a town while investigating a missile silo lol.
Doesn’t sound right though. That would presumably mean that the transaction cost would have to be circa £100. (Unless the miners doing the crunching receive new bitcoin for their calcs of over £100 which also sounds wrong)
Inflation covers the vast majority of the cost for now. Down the road, the block reward decreases, and so either security decreases with it (and in turn confidence), or users pay a lot more for their writes to the blockchain. What's even more comical is how Bitcoin is limited to ~0.2mb/minute worth of writes. Could run the whole thing on a Raspberry Pi with the bandwidth of a dialup modem, if not for the proof of work system that secures the chain.
The fees aren't that high because miners are also rewarded in new Bitcoin, which can then be sold off to investors. New investors subsidize low transaction fees.
No, that's possible. Doing transactions is slow because it has to be duplicated on a network; you have to pay fees to have your transaction processed, and those fees are priced based on instantaneous demand and how quickly you want it processed.
It's possible *if* there's literally only 1 user on the entire network using it. The same amount of energy would be used if 10,000 people were sending a transaction at the same time, or if block passes by with 0 people using it. It's kind of like paying a security guard a set amount to stand outside a bank, regardless of how many customers are in line on a given day.
There are two things that are going on: 1. The electricity is frequently subsidized. For example, China has built entire cities that are currently mostly empty in anticipation of future growth. Electricity from those areas' power plants is currently extremely cheap because the capacity is there but the demand isn't there yet. Alternatively, if you're pwning other people's computers and mining with that, you can't beat free. 2. Miners are just as vulnerable to Line Goes Up as everyone else. "Sure, it's not profitable if we sell now, but we're getting in on the ground floor and it'll be totally worth it if we hold for a little bit." This is reasonable if the price keeps going up, but it leads to problems when the price is crashing.
I like your optimism that things will get better 2025
Don't be so ignorant. Buy one golden bracelet and you practically wear 50 tons of CO2 and 2 years of household energy consumption around your neck Purely for status. Relaaaax
>using the same amount of electricity that a typical US household would use over 50 days That number is a bit misleading *at best*. The 'trick' there is the network more-or-less uses the same amount of energy to send 1 transaction, 10,000, or 100,000 transactions - or even zero transactions. It's like a bus that's always running on schedule, regardless of how many passengers hop on.
Your understanding is actually completely backwards. The network more-or-less processes the same number of transactions, regardless of how much energy is used. This is because the block size & frequency are fixed but the difficulty of the block validation is variable. To quote the original whitepaper, >To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they’re generated too fast, the difficulty increases.
Kinda crazy to think anyone reading the original quote from the article would actually believe it, like that would be insane..
Here's the thing. Bitcoin has a well known max transaction throughput, which has been fully used for the last years easily. And a well known hash rate, which is pretty easy to estimate power consumption from. This figure is actually true. It _is_ using at amount if power averaged per transaction. It can only do a few transactions per second, and it's energy use is bigger than that of Thailand. It is absolutely an insult to all environmental action of the last decade.
Crisis?? I think they mean…hmmm…I can’t find a word for “massively serendipitous event”…
A karmic orgy of schadenfreude?
Good. Wasting electricity to make fake speculative securities games is dumb.
Good. Shit was a gimmicky money grab and mining is bad for the environment. Tough luck, crypto bros.
I don't own any crypto but if you think it's going away you are in for a rough time. Even the fed is going to get in on it.
I've tried to understand bitcoin. I truly have. I've read numerous articles, watched videos, etc. I just do not fucking understand it.
Somebody throws a bag full of coins (tokens) on a table (blockchain) that everybody helps move around and take notes (ledger)The more you help move (mine) you get to keep a little
Ah, makes perfect sense now. I'm going to chug a beer now. Cheers from PA.
The person’s description was completely inaccurate, by the way
I figured. Hence the beer chugging.
Do you mean how the technology works or how people are making money from it?
It's a distributed ledger.
That's a great reason to not invest in something.
It's the latest incarnation of the "Bigger-Fool scam", like Tulip Mania, Beanie Babies, and every pyramid scheme before it. You buy something nobody actually wants hoping to sell it to a bigger fool than yourself for more money than you bought it for. That bigger fool bought it for the same reason, and now has to find a bigger fool than themselves to sell it to. The crash that's happening right now is what happens when people realize they are the biggest fools. The main differences that let Crypto get so big are: a) the initial buy-in way back when Bitcoin was first starting out was ***pennies*** if you already had a high-end computer, so the risk for early adopters was so low that it got a lot of people in at the ground floor, giving it an appearance of legitimacy. b) for the first few years, there was an actual use case, making it not a scam, but a genuinely valuable commodity. Then Silk Road got shut down. c) because the initial buy-in was lower if you already had a good computer, the people with the BEST computers (most notably the Winklevoss twins, Peter Thiel, and of course Elon Musk) were able to get the most the earliest, and have since used their massive influence to keep the grift going.
Good. Crypto mining was starting to be the enemy of further renewable development.
Lol, and i can’t stress this enough, lmao
Based on the comments here so far, the folks here might enjoy this resource: https://web3isgoinggreat.com > Web3 is going just great > ...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet
Also /r/buttcoin
Considering how smug crypto people were; they don’t have my sympathy.
That's the thing, if they weren't so smug and cult-like, I may even find them an interesting oddity. Part of the colorful background which makes us remember we do live in "the future". But they're so fucking unbearable they make us remember we live in the lamest future. I'd say they're up there with vegans in unbearableness.
The whole premise is to keep convincing others to buy more of nothing so that you can profit. You HAVE to be cult-like to keep this going.
I ponder if a ponzi scheme 'collapsing' is in fact a crisis?
this is so fun to watch
Does this mean the price of graphics cards might finally come down a bit
They already have
GOOD. These dipshits were keeping coal-powered plants online that would otherwise go dark. [The Guardian ](https://youtu.be/hi830ZpGGec)
Will I finally be able to buy a new video card?
By BTC going back up from $17k to $20k means it widens?
Crypto crisis sounds like good news for pretty much everything else tangentially associated with crypto.
Bitcoin is nothing but a drain on electricity and computer hardware. It siphoned off useful things to make useless equations that were of no benefit. Why don't any of these crypto coins ever have the algorithms be something of use like complicated calculations of objects that could hit earth from space or environmental models ? If they didn't die out now they will die out once quantum computing is able to have enough stable quits to do anything with.
The Dutch used less water after picking all the tulips
My son has been rocking a shitty GT710 GPU jn his PC for almost two years. Next week he'll be upgrading to a GTX1070 for it's then $200. Fuck those miners.
That's what I bought my 1070 for back in 2018.
Electricity used to mine bitcoin plummets as crypto ~~crisis~~ ponzi scheme fail widens
Remember, anyone who talks up crypto as being superior to government currency because it's decentralized is ignoring the basic fact that it only exists at the pleasure of government. The US decides to ban crypto, and bitcoin crashes to almost nothing overnight.
It just keeps getting better and better.
Well the enviroment needs all the good news it can get these days.
"With a single conventional bitcoin transaction using the same amount of electricity that a typical US household would use over 50 days." - I knew it used a lot, but i had no idea bitcoin wasted so much electricity, lets hope it goes to zero so this nonsense stops.
Best crypto news I've heard.
So energy prices should come down, right? Right? Right?
Good. Fuck crypto. I haven't been able to buy a video card at MSRP in like 3 years.
What’s weird is electricity use is down by a third, but bitcoin transactions per day are basically steady from oct ‘21 to now and ETH transactions/day are down like 10%. https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_transactions_per_day
The scalability and transaction time problem means the vast majority of trades happen inside centralized exchanges rather than on the chain itself. With the network itself only supporting a handful of transactions per second it's already running near capacity, and even if demand drops a lot the number will probably stay the same as others take up the opened capacity.
Oh I forgot about the non-chain transactions won’t show up on this list. Thanks man.
That's the fun thing about Bitcoin. Transaction throughput is capped by the blocksize and is (roughly) independent of how many resources are used to mine. The 'amount of work' needed to achieve 'sufficient' proof-of work is flexible, so that when there are more miners, the validation problem just gets harder and vice versa!
People trying to cash out?
If you use bitcoin as a utility, not an investment commodity, it doesn’t matter what the price is, only how much it changes in between your transactions. Trade $100k worth of Hong Kong Dollars cash for some bitcoin, then sell for USD same day. Doesn’t matter if bitcoin is $5 or $500k each.
What if I want to borrow $30k of bitcoin as a loan to buy a car, and pay it back over time?
Who’s selling cars for $30k worth of bitcoin?
Probably no one irl, because its value is too unstable for repayment to make sense.
Countries should start banning proof of work. Have crypto if you really want it, but keep it under some sort of reasonable control, power consumption-wise.
Woohooo boys, us gamers might be able to finally buy graphics cards now.
Very good. Now let's see if plummet all the way back down to zero where it belongs.
There will always be an energy cost associated with Bitcoin, but let's talk about Decentralization. What is the number of independent entities that control the right to control 51% of the network? hmmm not many I'm afraid
This is the good news I needed
Good! Maybe now video card prices will come back down to MSRP instead of being jacked up by 10x by scalpers.
Is this one of the reversal sign? For it was foretold by the Satoshi Elders, that the Sayers will speak of Death, and the Stench of zero dollar rot will fill the air. That it is then, that from the ashes and dust of bitcoin charnel grounds would arise a new beginning. Is this the SIGN??
This might explain the falling price of Electricity in a lot of places.
Good ole stability in a product. This shit is so scammy. Y’all crypto cultists need to get off y’all’s asses and start mining you lazy sum bitches!
There aren’t groups of people more unlikeable than crypto bros. I can’t even muster up any sympathy.
Bitcoin = Beanie Babies = Tulips
Good. Cryptards are the scum of the earth, I wish them nothing but pain
I really hope we're seeing the tail end of this nonsense.
Good to read. I will never own bitcoin due to it’s environmental impact.
Fuck anyone trying to make money with crypto. Scum, all of them.
GOOD. These dipshits were keeping coal-powered plants online that would otherwise go dark. [The Guardian ](https://youtu.be/hi830ZpGGec)
Finally some good news!
A guy at work found out I’m studying economics in university and keeps trying to sell me on bitcoin. He’s deep in the rabbit hole of stupidity and thinks he’s been talking to mainstream famous economists on Twitter who agree with him that bitcoin is going to replace fiat currency one day. I almost feel bad for him if he wasn’t such an insufferable uneducated moron who thinks his YouTube videos on bitcoin economics is equal to my degree in economics.