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Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

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Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#181
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Likely"? Go find out what the actual numbers are, then make the argument. Wishful thinking gets you nowhere.

You're trolling, right? Everyone knows that there are generally no "actual numbers" available for this kind of transfers unless you're a BigCo or a private banking customer. You'll send $1000 from your Nigerian bank to the Peruvian bank, $937.65 will arrive after a week+. Most likely nobody will be able to explain where the money went.

No, I really am asking a person to provide facts to back up their claims. I was not aware this was considered trolling.

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Likely"? Go find out what the actual numbers are, then make the argument. Wishful thinking gets you nowhere.

"Likely" because for the scenarios/markets where international payments work poorly there's no "actual numbers" in this situation, the pricing is highly dependent on circumstances, the specific institutions involved, the currencies involved (there may be multiple, and for some countries a currency conversion may be mandatory), the payment scheme involved (depending on the country/bank pair there likely will be multiple payment channels with different price/speed/reliability tradeoffs) and who is paying (which affects a lot the prices you may get). For such deals the sending institution will generally refuse to quote a fixed generic price, because the price will be different depending on all kinds of factors that, in some cases, will be revealed only after the payment is delivered or returned.

An bank payment from Nigeria to Peru might reasonably cost $20-$100, and I wouldn't be that surprised if in a particular situation it would come out to $10 or $300 (like, making a typo in some field of a non-validated foreign payment, or having an unclear tax situation on the goods for which the payment is held - that can easily cause e.g. a $100 extra unexpected processing fee for the payment). Also, you may get amount-proportional fees, and a 0.5% fee can potentially be huge for larger payments. On the other hand of the comparison there is also significant variability for the extra costs of the cryptocurrency payment - as the original question stated, including the cost and exchange rate variation of buying crypto for fiat in the sending country and selling crypto in the receiving country.

So it's likely but not certain that it's more expensive than an equivalent crypto payment + the to-crypto and from-crypto conversion, it depends on unknowable circumstances, and the variability and unpredictability of such fees is a big drawback on those types of international payments - unlike e.g. the intra-EU case where the fees would be predictable and low - perhaps zero, depending on your bank.

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just careful not to make any absolute statements. I'm not a crypto advocate. I also tried not to pass judgement. I understand that less regulation leads to more crime (and I think we are seeing evidence of that). What I'm trying to say is that this solves a problem for people who want less regulation. With respect to simplicity and fees; If I want to send money to a family member in Botswana, I can do that in abo…

Definitely not seeing any 0.1% fees on https://www.binance.com/en/fee/fiatFee .

I was thinking about trading commission to convert XLM to EUR. Those are 0.1%. Withdrawing via SEPA was €1.0~1.5, but I see that's suspended now. If you were transferring €1000~1500, that would have been 0.1%.

Withdrawing to GBP is only £0.5.

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The second this changes, and we have a cryptocurrency that is actually used as money and not a plaything, I'll happily stop complaining about it. I won't: we still have proof-of-work to get rid of (and generally, the unreasonable energy consumption and chip usage).

Is there any other unreasonable use of energy consumption than proof of work? Solana (using proof of stake) uses similar energy as hosting a website. If this tiny energy usage is also problematic then we would need to start also shaming people for uploading Youtube videos or scrolling through Instagram.

If this low energy consumption confirms itself at scale, that will be a huge progress. Possibly not quite there (there’s still the Ponzi problem to contend with), but at least that’d get rid of most of the externalities.

Now we need to nuke the Bitcoin farms. (Half serious: I wonder whether launching tactical nukes on those farms would generate less pollution in the long term than letting those farms be.)

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#185
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're trolling, right? Everyone knows that there are generally no "actual numbers" available for this kind of transfers unless you're a BigCo or a private banking customer. You'll send $1000 from your Nigerian bank to the Peruvian bank, $937.65 will arrive after a week+. Most likely nobody will be able to explain where the money went.

No, I really am asking a person to provide facts to back up their claims. I was not aware this was considered trolling.

There are no useful facts to provide, outside of strictly regulated markets banks pull these fees out of their asses. The receiving bank might charge various mystery fees, so even if your bank is playing nice they won't be able to tell you how much will actually arrive.

It's just almost impossible to know the answer to the fee question beyond "probably a lot"

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Miners are securing the only censorship-resistant, permissionless hard money we have. The only people who don't see any practical value in this either don't understand Bitcoin or hate freedom.

Cryptocurrency has essentially reminded us that "a censorship-resistant, permissionless hard money" is a far greater enabler of "the bad guys who would take away our freedom" than it is an enabler of "the little guy trying to secure his own freedom".

This is the bitter lesson every anarchist learns — by tearing down the establishment, you're not creating "actual anarchic freedom" — you're creating a utopia for pimps and thieves. It provides a huge raft of new freedoms for organized crime, being a massive catalyst for money laundering and the like. It provides surprisingly few freedoms for the little guy, since nothing's protecting you from theft by the same mobsters. Seriously — if your BTC wallet gets stolen/exchange gets hacked, you're basically fucked. And it's at its worst in exactly those countries we'd naively think would be helped by some underground currency, because there's nothing to stop the mob from robbing the little guy in a place like Russia. We moved away from gold for the exact same reason.

This is to say nothing of all the scams, ponzi schemes, environmental damage, etc, etc, which are several additional shitshows on top of what I just described.

---

Anarchy is always a more powerful tool for the bad guys than it is for the good guys. It's an iron law of history. The bad guys will always capitalize on the inherent power-differential of organized groups versus a disorganized group of individuals. As soon as the good guys try to fight back by banding together —— then they've violated the principles of anarchy. At that point they've simply created a new government, with censorship and granting of permissions.

Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi.

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> especially now that many have moved to proof of stake. For tiny values of many. There is no major cryptocurrency using anything other than PoW. Ethereum has plans to start moving to PoS in 2022, but isn't there yet. And related to gaming: Bitcoin alone consumes more power than entire European countries - including all the gaming, smelting, heating, industry, finance, data centers etc in those countries. There is no…

> There is no major cryptocurrency using anything other than PoW 7 of the 10 largest chains use PoS.

By volume traded per day, there really are only two major cryptocurrency chains: Bitcoin and Ethereum. Both are PoW. As near as I can tell, the 3rd largest blockchain by volume is XRP and its an order of magnitude smaller than BTC or ETH.

Volume traded is admittedly an imperfect measure of activity, but its better than market cap.

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economics are fully at work in every market, including renewables. If it's more profitable to... I'm not even sure what your alternative would be but I'll say feeding the energy back into the grid, then miners would do it. It's definitely not up to you to decide what people can and can't do with their energy, especially off-grid renewables, just because you perceive their use to be "wasteful"

> It's definitely not up to you to decide what people can and can't do with their energy It absolutely will need to be if we are going to avoid frying the fucking planet. The free market is the enemy of humanity.

We're talking about renewables? How is that frying the planet?

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like two projects: One offering decentralized computation and the other one offers the most efficient/cheap transfer of value ever created. I expect both projects or some incarnation of their UVP to radically change the world.
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