Comment on Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption

• darthelmet@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  But this is actually why crypto isn’t a real currency: we haven’t collectively agreed to value it, or at least not in any way that makes it useful as a medium for exchange. Ironically it can’t possibly become a proper currency while speculators are making its price so volatile. The very act of investing in it is making it worthless.

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  • S410@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Anything can be a currency, if you use it as a currency. A currency is not defined by its ability to be exchanged for gas or used to pay taxes.

    If children in some school start to exchange pogs for junk food or video game cartridges, the pogs become a currency. By definition. The fact that the use is clearly limited and the value is a subject to rapid change or speculation is irrelevant.

    There isn't a single currency in the world the value of which is set in stone. There isn't a single currency in the world which is universally accepted. Just because there exist currencies linked to some of the strongest economies in the world, which are relatively stable and incredibly hard to affect the value of via speculation, doesn't mean they're immune to speculation. It also doesn't mean that any smaller currencies, be it currencies or small countries, crypto or pogs, are "not real".

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    • darthelmet@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I mean sure. Anything someone is using like currency can be called currency. But we’re talking practical terms here. Things we “collectively agree to value.” My WoW gold might be useful for buying potions, but it’s not generally accepted anywhere outside that narrow context. The fewer people who are willing to accept the currency, the less useful, and arguably less “real” it becomes, in so far as currency is defined by its value to others. I could print “me bucks” that I value at $1B USD, but that doesn’t mean much if nobody will give me a sandwich for it.

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      • S410@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        If you're in the US, it's not very practical to try to pay for things using Turkish liras either, for example. But it's not any less "real" because of it. There is still a market for that currency, even if you might need to look around for a bit to actually use it or exchange it for a different one. Same for WoW gold or crypto.

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• frezik@midwest.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  But there’s so few uses of actually buying things with crypto. People don’t use it as a medium of exchange outside of illicit goods and money laundering. We’re more than a decade into this and using crypto to buy a pizza is still a novelty.

  A major proof of this is that FTX collapsed and took a chunk of the crypto market out with it. The market at large shrugged this off. If it were actually linked in to the broader economy, then it would have had similar ripple effects to a major US bank failing.

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  • S410@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I, personally, use crypto to do art commissions (I'm an artist) and to pay my VPS's rent. Neither is an illicit good or related to money laundering.

    And, honesty, it's pretty great, compared to alternatives.
    Last time I've used PayPal, it decided to withhold the funds for a month, for whatever reason. Plus, the transaction fee was about a dollar.
    Transferring the same amount of money via Monero is guaranteed take only about a minute or two to process, since a transaction in that system would never get withhold, plus the processing fee would be about a hundred times smaller.

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    • honey_im_meat_grinding@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      In the EU they’re getting a digital euro which allows them to avoid bowing down to Paypal, Payoneer, and all the services interlinked with them (e.g. Patreon) - the ancillary services can even offer digital euro payouts instead, too. So as long as what you’re doing is legal, you can break the Paypal/Payoneer terms of service as much as you want and avoid their privately enforced authoritarianism that goes beyond the scope of the law for whatever reason.

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      • S410@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        The "Criticism and risks of the digital euro" section on Wikipedia outlines my concerns about such a system pretty well.

        Unless they are going to implement a cryptocurrency with centralized minting (essentially giving themselves both as much and as little control over the digital currency as they have over physically printed money), it doesn't seem that much different from what we have already. Just because it's going to be a new system, doesn't really mean it not going to have issues with false-positives suspending regular transactions or fees that are higher than they need to be.

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  • deafboy@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    One failed bank NOT causing an international disaster is a good thing imho.

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