51–60 of 203 posts
corruption at work, in plain sight. stark analogies with the voucher privatization [0] of the collapsing Soviet Union that created the ruling kleptocracy.
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Is it cheaper factoring in the cost of transferring to crypto and then back again from a currency you can actually use most places?
It depends on how limited the international payments are for your particular country. Bank payment from Spain to Poland is cheaper than cryptocurrency; bank payment from Nigeria to Peru is likely to be more expensive than cryptocurrency; and a bank payment from USA to Iran is effectively impossible while cryptocurrency can work.
Go find out what the actual numbers are, then make the argument. Wishful thinking gets you nowhere.
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If climate change is finally taken seriously at some point, I hope they get clamped down on very hard. Unlike meth labs and "terrorists", a large mining farm can be traced by power usage. (Unless you're using solar, then go ahead and mine all you want.) Crypto fanatics are doing nothing of any practical value while greatly helping out with destroying our planet. We've been having rolling blackouts recently because of…
> doing nothing of any practical value while greatly helping out with destroying our planet Serious question, where does this line of thinking end? Gaming rigs use upwards of a thousand watts, no practical value in gaming. Watching sitcoms on a television has no practical value. Phones capable of doing things other than making calls have no practical value, but we charge them all the time. Honestly I think providing…
Humans have been playing games literally for thousands of years - there is a value in entertainment, especially with our busy lives of 21st century.
You can of course overdo it, turn it into an addiction and it can destroy your life - like many other things.
Crypto trading is as valuable as trading scraps of paper with a dollar sign scribbled on it - if it were done for fun or entertainment, then sure, whatever, but it's having major impact on our energy consumption and has to be curbed.
PS - also, a small side note - literally no gaming rig uses an "upwards of a thousands watts". Even fitted with the highest rated components currently available on the market(say a 12th gen i9 + RTX3090) you won't be using 1000W of power. Consoles use about 200-300W under full load, and that's a bigger gaming market than PC. And then the biggest gaming market is mobile - larger than PC and consoles combined, and the energy consumption there is tiny. So you're massively off base here.
>>Honestly I think providing an alternative financial system is more practical than most of the other energy intensive things we do these days.
And I honestly think that anyone who thinks crypto will become "an alternative financial system" and not just a pyramid scheme is lying to themselves.
The entire point of cryptocurrency is to bypass this stuff. If you're using a regulated exchange, just go and buy Apple shares or use a bank instead. It really is almost completely pointless.
Who's point? The whole point of Google, to some people at Google, might have been " don't be evil " at one point in time. Decentralisation was the whole point of the WWW. Different people have different goals. Largely, it's just about making money.
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I do think there is at least one problem that crypto currencies solve better than the status-quo: sending money internationally. It has less regulation than the official channels. Can have better privacy. Can be cheaper. Can be faster. Compared to Western Union, international wire transfers and the likes, sending money home for foreign workers (remittance), seems to be much better with Stellar, or other low-fee crypt…
>I bought some crypto early on as a hedge against global politics going to shit (US, Russia or China going into proxy wars) or economics taking a dive (and governments/central banks deciding to devaluate, ...). Genuinely asking as a newbie to this kind of thing, what's the advantage of using crypto over assets more traditionally used for this purpose such as gold?
In a stable, law-abiding society these advantages are a bit pointless, but enough people either see the future as unstable and lawless, or currently live in unstable and lawless places, that there is market demand for crypto as a store of value.
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Maybe it’s be like the dotcom bubble. It’ll burst in a big way, leaving many people broke, then from the aftermath good projects will emerge and will come to redefine the world.
Even before the dot com bubble burst, we saw businesses with practical value producing applications of the Internet. Today it’s over 10 years of crypto. I have only observed one application of crypto that touches the real economy - with a relatively obscure token. Everything else, seems to be just be playing financial games inside of crypto, money laundering, side-stepping regulations, speculative meme assets and of…
https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/7/22822410/ubisoft-nfts-qua...
total privatisation of the money system, sold as democratization
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Maybe it’s be like the dotcom bubble. It’ll burst in a big way, leaving many people broke, then from the aftermath good projects will emerge and will come to redefine the world.
Even before the dot com bubble burst, we saw businesses with practical value producing applications of the Internet. Today it’s over 10 years of crypto. I have only observed one application of crypto that touches the real economy - with a relatively obscure token. Everything else, seems to be just be playing financial games inside of crypto, money laundering, side-stepping regulations, speculative meme assets and of…
It's deeply harmful, but it is part of the real economy
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Even before the dot com bubble burst, we saw businesses with practical value producing applications of the Internet. Today it’s over 10 years of crypto. I have only observed one application of crypto that touches the real economy - with a relatively obscure token. Everything else, seems to be just be playing financial games inside of crypto, money laundering, side-stepping regulations, speculative meme assets and of…
The black market for pharmaceuticals are greatly touched by cryptocurrency, and that's certainly the "real economy". It's deeply harmful, but it is part of the real economy
The entire point of cryptocurrency is to bypass this stuff. If you're using a regulated exchange, just go and buy Apple shares or use a bank instead. It really is almost completely pointless.
Who's point? The whole point of Google, to some people at Google, might have been " don't be evil " at one point in time. Decentralisation was the whole point of the WWW. Different people have different goals. Largely, it's just about making money.
I agree that decentralisation is the whole point of the WWW and I use it in that manner, I think people who spend all of their time on one or two centralised platforms are bizarre.