Comment on Buying a $250 Residency Card From a Tropical Island Let Me Bypass U.S. Crypto Laws

• 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.

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  • BakerBagel@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    So you don’t have an actual use cases then.

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    • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Money of course. I have been paying my bills with crypto since 2023.

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      • BakerBagel@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        And i have been using my bank account and cash to pay all my bills since i have had bills to pay. What’s the advantage of using something that is less convenient, less secure, and more resource intense than a normal checking account with direct deposit? You keep dodging the question on what use cases you think crypto currencies have an advantage over fiat currency.

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    • Revan343@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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

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      • BakerBagel@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        And authorities are snatching up people using Monero to do crime.

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  • 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 The electricity argument is extremely out of date for most coins besides Bitcoin itself.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.

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    • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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.

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      • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        So a government is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to get enough Ethereum to disrupt it, before accounting for the price going up by purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars of Ethereum, and then they’re going to destroy the hundreds of billions of dollars they invested to take the network down, temporarily.

        It would be more cost effective to do a supply chain attack and introduce exploits/weaknesses to try and make me doubt using it.

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• jdeath@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  drugs of course. i thought everyone had heard of it already!

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• 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.

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  • 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

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