Please elaborate on what this magical 1% that you feel is useful and worth expending the same amount if energy as Australia
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shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 month agoI’d say you’re right for 99% of it, but there is 1% that’s genuinely useful.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 1 month ago
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 month 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 1 month ago
So you don’t have an actual use cases then.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Money of course. I have been paying my bills with crypto since 2023.
Revan343@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Well the use case for monero is usually buying drugs on the internet. As long as the war on drugs continues, it’ll be useful for that
ayaya@lemdro.id 1 month 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 The electricity argument is extremely out of date for most coins besides Bitcoin itself.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.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
To be fair I’m not a huge fan of pure proof of stake because it makes validation more difficult because you have to have code for slashing somebody’s stake if they are malicious or bad and a malicious entity could just buy up a bunch of your tokens and tank them. Admittedly, not a lot of people would do so, but I could totally see a government buying up a bunch of tokens on a network and purposely crashing the network in order to rid themselves of a nuisance and calling it justified. Proof of work makes that much more difficult. Still doable for certain, but much, much more difficult.
jdeath@lemm.ee 1 month ago
drugs of course. i thought everyone had heard of it already!
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 month 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 month ago
That’s not correct. “Mining” is a reward structure for people processing transactions. Every transaction costs a lot of energy
Evotech@lemmy.world 1 month ago
More like 0.01
fpslem@lemmy.world 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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.