Comment on Buying a $250 Residency Card From a Tropical Island Let Me Bypass U.S. Crypto Laws
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 2 days agoMy 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.
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 The electricity argument is extremely out of date for most coins besides Bitcoin itself.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.
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.
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.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 2 days ago
So you don’t have an actual use cases then.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Money of course. I have been paying my bills with crypto since 2023.
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.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Fiat currencies are money by decree of a government. If you have lost trust in your government or your government is not trustworthy to begin with, then the Fiat currency is not worth the paper it’s printed on or the digits in your bank account. Your access to your bank account can be restricted at any time for any reason with just a simple push of a button and you have extremely small or no recourse to such an action. Cash is better in that regard, but even so your government or central bank purposely says they want to devalue your cash and other currency by a set target per year. Therefore making you have to work harder or become poorer. As an example, the U.S. Federal Reserve targets a 2% inflation target per year, which means if you put a $100 bill under your mattress today, in 2035, it would only buy you $80 worth of goods. I’m not that old, and yet, when I was a young kid, a $500,000 nest egg would work extremely well for a good retirement. Now, that is absolutely not the case. Not because of the goods getting more expensive, but because of the currency depreciating in value as you work for it.
nomy@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
And you keep demanding a use-case like the other commenter is proselytizing.
If were just going to ask people questions they have no responsibility to answer: Do you know why BTC was developed?
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
BakerBagel@midwest.social 1 day ago
And authorities are snatching up people using Monero to do crime.
kat@orbi.camp 1 day ago
Only people relying on random public nodes. Better to run your own.