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Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

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Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

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post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of stablecoins?

Yes, but I don’t trust these contracts in a long term. I’d say neither should you, but that is a personal choice. The biggest (afaik) of these ETH contract-based coins, USDT, is owned by a single company, which is partially backing it by their BTC and it maintains a list of blocked tokens, which is by design. Of course small money is relatively safe, but for large capitals it’s just a joke. Any smart contract with a…

You’re talking to the wrong person as I used to work on a stablecoin :P I think if anything the technology brings transparency and security

Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#292
post #256
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a distributed finite state machine, that anyone can engage with on equal footing. The biggest issue right now is just that the fees are still so crazy. But once they get L2/L3 chains properly into place, so that every interaction is just a fraction of a fraction of the new state, and you can deploy say a little chat room, or a game world, or a marketplace, a collection of router configs, etc, etc, and not have t…

I don't think I grasped any of the concepts you tried to expose as benefits of crypto. It doesn't make sense the jump from keeping state in a distributed, trusted store for a finite state machine to deploying chat rooms, etc., what do you mean? Synchronising those states through a blockchain just to enforce some kind of distributed trust? I really don't get it. I might be too stupid for this, bear with me. I've heard…

Oh ok!

So like, you want to make a chat room, and someone has a special power to ban people, and the chat room remembers who is banned. If the banning person doesn’t log in for a while, the power moves to someone else randomly. There’s also membership tiers, so people can pay a small fee to have fancier names if they really like the room, and there are little mini games in there with leaderboards. And there’s also no one in charge, it’s just a room with some rules that exists because the people in it sort of like those rules, and anyone in it can spool another one up with different settings if they want.

All of that stuff would take quuuiiite a bit of backend logic to code. But with smart contracts you can take basically all of it for granted, it might be like… a few pages at most of contract code. And then you can focus on writing a really good user interface instead.

Anyone can then just grab that front end code that just runs in a browser, chuck a tiny bit of crypto in to fuel it, and suddenly the backend exists purely on chain. Wherever there’s a group of people, and they have some kind of collaborative set of rules they’d like to agree to, like a marketplace or anything like that, crypto makes it really really easy

The biggest issue is really just the cost. Currently it’s ~$5 to transact which is… too high for any side project or toy. But with L2’s (rolling out now) it should come down to almost nothing, so I reckon we’ll start to see some pretty cool stuff popping up soon

Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#293
post #288
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I would support this as well. Let's get rid of all the non-contributive activities.

My plan is to take away the governments printing press which funds the destruction. What is yours?

Do you think cryptocurrency will eliminate the military industrial complex? What prevents the people who currently have most of the capital, many of whom are benefitting from the military industrial complex, from using their capital to dominate and control cryptocurrency?

Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#294
post #139

Nice, what other software I'm not allowed to run on my machine? Can I play high end games? Make scientific computations? Experiment with machine learning?

A totally valid point. It seems like the proposed ban is based on the fact that the computations costs a lot of energy, are “wasteful”, and only makes the miner in question happy. I don’t see how this differs from playing high-end computer games. Surely, you could argue that kids in the 70’s, only having access to board games, could get just as much enjoyment out of these as kids today get out of playing CoD, with the added benefit that you have to meet other people in person and that you’re not getting addicted to loot boxes. So, should we follow China in banning computer games?

Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider this. Crypo cannot create or destroy fiat currency. So if you sell your crypto and make a profit in dollars, it's exactly because someone else bought it at a higher price than you did. And they expect someone else will buy it from them, in just the same way... So every dollar that comes out of cryptocurrency is because a later investor put a dollar in. Doesn't that sound like the definition of a Ponzi scheme…

Actually it can create fiat currency... in a roundabout way... The core of the coin ecosystem are the stable coins, which are generally pegged to fiat, but are only backed by fractional reserves of cash. So the same USD can be recycled many times to buy Bitcoin. Not only that, but the stable coin operators are under no obligation to exchange their coins back to you for the pegged currency at face value. Tether is ess…

>Not only that, but the stable coin operators are under no obligation to exchange their coins back to you for the pegged currency at face value.

>but are only backed by fractional reserves of cash.

Maybe tether, but that isn't true of all, or even most stablecoins. Some stablecoins are overcollateralized rather than fractionally lent. As for the obligation, USDC for example is a fully audited system (by firm Grant Horton, who performs weekly audits), backed 1:1 by cash/cash equivalents and redeemable for $1 USD.

Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it can create fiat currency... in a roundabout way... The core of the coin ecosystem are the stable coins, which are generally pegged to fiat, but are only backed by fractional reserves of cash. So the same USD can be recycled many times to buy Bitcoin. Not only that, but the stable coin operators are under no obligation to exchange their coins back to you for the pegged currency at face value. Tether is ess…

>Not only that, but the stable coin operators are under no obligation to exchange their coins back to you for the pegged currency at face value. >but are only backed by fractional reserves of cash. Maybe tether, but that isn't true of all, or even most stablecoins. Some stablecoins are overcollateralized rather than fractionally lent. As for the obligation, USDC for example is a fully audited system (by firm Grant Ho…

USDC only has half the market cap of Tether. In fact, Tether has a higher market cap than all the other stable coins combined! So everything I've said is still true even if some operators are not as shady as the market leader.

https://coinmarketcap.com/view/stablecoin/

However, even USDC is still doing fractional reserve banking because an unspecified amount of its reserves are tied up in securities that have maturities up to 90 days, so they are still susceptible to a bank run. Though, granted they seem to be running a much more respectable operation than Tether.

The third biggest stable coin BUSD, looks pretty shady as well. They release monthly audited accounts (good), but they're terse as hell. What liabilities do they have? Have these reserves been used as collateral in loans? Which banks are they in? What steps have the firm taken to audit these funds? No way to know, we're just get a terse list of aggregate numbers.

https://paxos.com/attestations

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