All money is a grift. Its nothing more thsn s way to bypass the value of bartered and traded commodities with real value. As so we can live in a class dictatorship where our surplus labor value is stolen so a few sociopaths can live in extreme opulent luxury at our expense
Comment on Buying a $250 Residency Card From a Tropical Island Let Me Bypass U.S. Crypto Laws
fpslem@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It’s just grift all the way down with crypto, isn’t it? Scams layered on scams layered on scams.
exploitedamerican@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Maggoty@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yup. They have the exchange operators on record saying they actively trade against their customers. It’s a club and if you’re not in it you don’t get to win.
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 day ago
Yeah that’s why the Grifter in Chief is all over it.
reiterationstation@lemm.ee 2 days ago
Yeaaaa
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
I’d say you’re right for 99% of it, but there is 1% that’s genuinely useful.
fpslem@lemmy.world 2 days ago
That’s probably a fair assessment, but still a rather damning indictment of the industry writ large.
There are definitely better versions of cryptocurrency that I think could be more useful, but the industry is definitely not headed in that direction. Instead, it’s all pump-and-dumps, rug-pulls, and other schemes that render them nothing more than highly speculative asset classes in which the underlying asset has no intrinsic value.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
That’s true. And personally, I stay away from all of that mess. And anybody I introduce, I take great pains to explain why I stay away from all that mess. But if they want to make their own mistakes, then that’s on them.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Yup. There are a handful of useful coins, and a handful of legit exchanges. Hold your own keys in FOSS wallets, keep backups of your keys, and don’t expect to get rich quick (and instead find a use outside of investing). Do that, and you should be fine.
I’m super interested in privacy coins like Monero, so I go out of my way to find merchants that accept it. It’s reasonably stable, has very low transaction fees, and it’s fairly popular among privacy advocates, so I doubt it’ll go away anytime soon. That said, I only keep what I’ll spend, so make a couple hundred at a time.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 2 days ago
Please elaborate on what this magical 1% that you feel is useful and worth expending the same amount if energy as Australia
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
My first question to you would be, how much energy does the banking sector use to run bank branches, haul physical money back and forth, bring employees to and from work, etc?
Next, not all blockchains require extreme levels of computation power for proof of work. Take Monero, for example, which deliberately makes ASIC chips impossible to use and is therefore mined only on CPUs, which are extremely common.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 2 days ago
So you don’t have an actual use cases then.
ayaya@lemdro.id 2 days ago
Or any proof of stake coin like Ethereum, which doesn’t require any mining at all. The electricity argument is extremely out of date for most coins besides Bitcoin itself.
As far as I know GPU mining is pretty much completely dead because after Ethereum switch the yields on everything else tanked.
jdeath@lemm.ee 2 days ago
drugs of course. i thought everyone had heard of it already!
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 day ago
I’m not a crypto expert but once crypto is mined, it’s mined. And I don’t think hardly anyone is mining it anymore. And not all crypto requires so much energy in the first place.
itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
That’s not correct. “Mining” is a reward structure for people processing transactions. Every transaction costs a lot of energy
Evotech@lemmy.world 2 days ago
More like 0.01