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Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

economist.com

171–180 of 203 posts

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#171
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 see you're using the word "can" a lot to cover up the fact that it is not actually doing those things. And less regulation means more crime - the only reason the ransomware epidemic exists is cryptocurrency. Remittance is also not actually cheaper with cryptocurrency if you actually count all the fees, but most likely more expensive than Western Union. Cryptocurrency delivers none of what it promises. It only deliv…

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 about a minute with something like Stellar. The transaction fees are negligible (<1 cent). Converting to fiat to actually use it, does carry some fees (roughly 2 x 0.1% on Binance). I couldn't get an exact quote from Western Union, but I remember it being a lot more expensive and a lot more hassle (granted, it's been over a decade since I last used them)

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#172
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Money isn’t supposed to sit in a bank feeling “safe;” it’s supposed to be running around, acting young and risky, learning new things and creating new opportunities. Money is supposed to go into Capex and Opex - those are proof that people are producing things. When money is put into a bank, or stock, or a Blockchain, the company who put it there is not doing anything useful with it. Sure, it's possible that someon…

Unless you have a birds’-eye view of the entire global economy and all uses of crypto in the market right now, there is no way you can make such a blanket statement with such certainty.

The same is true for the original claim.

Unless we have a bird's eye view of the entire economy, the only direct measure of money getting converted to useful economic activity is Capex (and Opex).

The volume of BTC, or bank deposits/lending, or stock markets - they are all hard to correlate with economic activity.

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans have also been gambling for thousands of years (which is just playing games with the added component of money on the line), so by this logic there's value in it too. I would also be interested to see the worldwide energy consumption of all gaming devices in comparison to the worldwide energy consumption of all crypto mining, especially now that many have moved to proof of stake. Considering the explosion in th…

> 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…

> Bitcoin alone consumes more power than entire European countries - including all the gaming, smelting, heating, industry, finance, data centers etc in those countries.

EU nations may be a poor comparison, as it has many tiny nations as members as well as a few big ones.

The first Google hit I got said Bitcoin uses 80 TWh/year which puts it around Belgium (9th in EU) for pure electricity, the second said Bitcoin was using about 177 TWh/year (bit more than Poland, 5th in EU, again just for electricity).

I don’t have exact figures for game consoles or power usage per console or gaming PCs, so I will do a Fermi estimate: 1 billion active gaming devices (PCs and all consoles combined), 200 W per device, each used for 3 hours per day. This is 219 TWh/year. As a Fermi estimate, take with a grain of salt.

(I don’t accept the general claim that BTC actually has real value; conversely I think most gaming does, including gambling although for gambling the value is much less than the cost, but that’s not the focus of this comment).

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners and exchanges were proponents of big blocks, since that would have centralized power in their hands and reduced decentralization. Bitmain, Coinbase, many others. This makes sense to anyone with a tech background. You don't want to use censorship-resistant, decentralized currency which is used every day to settle billions to buy coffee. That would be an overkill. Instead, you use LN which allows to trustlessly…

LN doesn't really work either - it can't really guarantee that funds have been transferred until you close a channel (you commit the transaction on the Bitcoin chain). So, unless you trust the other end of the channel not to fraudulently close the channel, you can't actually consider the transaction settled. And of course, in the case of routes, there has to basically be end-to-end trust for this to work, or someone…

No, that's not how LN works. If the other party suddenly closes the channel at an old state that is beneficial to them, the funds will get locked for 2 weeks and you will have enough time to publish a transaction with a more recent state, which will reward you with whole balance of the channel [0].

[0] https://blog.bitmex.com/lightning-network-justice/

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Gaming rigs use upwards of a thousand watts, no practical value in gaming. 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 scribble…

> Humans have been playing games literally for thousands of years - there is a value in entertainment, especially with our busy lives of 21st century. Who gets to decide that? You see value in entertainment derived from a gaming rig, a person in Argentina sees value in mining a unit of make-believe currency which they can then sell on a speculative market. Should we form a global committee to decide on which types of…

Having a committee decide what’s allowed is generally how law is made, and the need for such committees is that what’s good for any individual is often different for what’s good for groups of people even though the latter contains the former (tragedy of the commons, prisoner’s dilemma) so: yes.

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#177
post #4

I can't wait for this bubble to burst so I never have to hear about these tulips again.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“Serious question, where does this line of thinking end?” It ends at the last pyramid scheme.

That line doesn't mean anything - should we make any type of computation that contributes to a pyramid scheme illegal? How do you even define a pyramid scheme in a way that doesn't also cover traditional financial institutions and academia?

> How do you even define a pyramid scheme in a way that doesn't also cover traditional financial institutions and academia?

These places have already got laws against pyramid schemes, so I’d start by asking a lawyer to explain the various existing laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pyramid_Scheme_Illegal_Ma...

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans have also been gambling for thousands of years (which is just playing games with the added component of money on the line), so by this logic there's value in it too. I would also be interested to see the worldwide energy consumption of all gaming devices in comparison to the worldwide energy consumption of all crypto mining, especially now that many have moved to proof of stake. Considering the explosion in th…

> 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.

Re: Crypto lobbying is going ballistic

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you're using the word "can" a lot to cover up the fact that it is not actually doing those things. And less regulation means more crime - the only reason the ransomware epidemic exists is cryptocurrency. Remittance is also not actually cheaper with cryptocurrency if you actually count all the fees, but most likely more expensive than Western Union. Cryptocurrency delivers none of what it promises. It only deliv…

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.
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