Just when we need to get our shit together as a species along comes this bollocks. How much fooking damage to the planet and social coherence is going to be done before this bullshit finally dies? Hedge funds in the US are reopening closed coal plants just to provide power to their crypto mining FFS. It's a catastrophic market failure.
The global installed base of PlayStation 5s alone consumes more power than the whole Bitcoin network. Funny how we don’t hear media FUD about the need to ban all PS5s or console gaming because the PS5 makes money for the corporate owners and advertisers and Bitcoin doesn’t.
how much energy does the global gold industry use? That’s what Bitcoin is competing with and I guarantee it’s a lot more than Bitcoin
"Funny how we don’t hear media FUD about the need to ban all PS5s or console gaming because the PS5 makes money for the corporate owners and advertisers and Bitcoin doesn’t"
Yeah, nobody powerful is making money out of crypto. And we never see any adverts for it. And I've certainly never read any idiotic client journalism puff pieces about it.
"how much energy does the global gold industry use? That’s what Bitcoin is competing with and I guarantee it’s a lot more than Bitcoin "
1) The estimates I've read put it at about 100-150 TWh for each.
2) The comparison is bogus anyway. "Mining" has completely different meaning and significance between the two cases. Gold's utility as a store of value does not depend on new gold being mined, indeed it increases as new mining decreases.
Maybe I was a bit ambiguous. Put it this way, if you stop mining gold it doesn't stop anyone buying or selling their existing holding. If you stop mining bitcoin...
Theoretically yes - if you stop mining Bitcoin then the network will stop running. But it’s nearly impossible to stop mining Bitcoin. You don’t *need* thousands of nodes and miners - you only have that because of pure free market competition. But you literally only need one miner to keep the network going - the chance of at least one miner surviving somewhere in the world is pretty much 100% imho (I mean in 2009 Satoshi was the only guy mining on his laptop - it could happen again).
Unless the Internet itself goes down, in which case we have much bigger problems..
Struan - so if everyone capable of mining were to act selflessly, what computer resources would be needed in order for BTC transaction processing to keep up with demand ? More than one 2009-standard laptop, right ?
Anyway, the point stands that you can't excuse bitcoin mining energy consumption by saying "gold mining consumes more", when the use of gold as a store of value or means of payment doesn't depend on gold mining.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Bitcoin network works. It’s a very common misconception because most media descriptions of it are awful.
The Bitcoin network has a fixed max rate of about 7 transactions per second (aggregated into a block Every ten minutes). This has been in place right from the beginning and has never changed.
transaction processing for this level of transactions is ridiculously easy - forget a laptop, your phone could probably do it.
All the big numbers and high processing costs and stories about using super computers to mine Bitcoin have to do with mining and increasing overall net work security , not transaction processing - it’s the arms race to get more Bitcoins.
if tomorrow 99.99% of miners disappeared, and there were just two laptops left mining (or one), the network would work just fine and those one or two miners would just share all the Bitcoin rewards (instead of the thousands of miners who currently share it).
so my point remains - you are technically correct in a narrow sense but it’s basically a meaningless point because the chance of the Bitcoin network reaching a point where not even one laptop is left mining is basically zero.
Gold has intrinsic uses. Bitcoins and their ilk are entirely artificial. More like those elements created by scientists from existing elements just for fun but don’t actually have any uses.
Crypto - gold’s intrinsic uses (jewellery, industrial Etc) only Cover something like 15% of all gold in existence today. The vast, vast majority of gold in the world is sitting in Vaults as a store of value in central bank reserves etc. This is the market Bitcoin is disrupting.
Also: the £20 note in your hand has no intrinsic value either and people are happy enough to hoard it and spend it..it has value because people believe it has value.
"I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Bitcoin network works. It’s a very common misconception because most media descriptions of it are awful.
The Bitcoin network has a fixed max rate of about 7 transactions per second (aggregated into a block Every ten minutes). This has been in place right from the beginning and has never changed. "
Guilty, well, part guilty. I did indeed assume the network could process, and indeed was already processing, far more transactions per second than that. How can it be a useful means of payment with that kind of maximum ? Mrs Eeyore's store cards alone take that kind of punishment.
"Also: the £20 note in your hand has no intrinsic value either and people are happy enough to hoard it and spend it..it has value because people believe it has value."
And because I can pay my tax bill with it. Which is almost as important as being able to buy heroin, child porn or a Tesla.
I did indeed assume the network could process, and indeed was already processing, far more transactions per second than that. How can it be a useful means of payment with that kind of maximum ?
OH AND HOW MANY TRANSACTIONS PER SECOND DO YOU THINK BITCOIN SHOULD BE ABLE TO PROCESS IN ORDER TO BE A USEFUL MEANS OF PAYMENT: 8?!?
And they can all compete with gold, because they will all be limited in supply ! No matter how many new ones are created, the supply of each one will be limited. Or might be. Or something.
Eeyore- you’re right that Bitcoin cannot be used directly to buy coffee etc with the current transaction rate. Visa alone does something like 50,000 transactions per second.
the solution is two fold - first, Bitcoin won’t need to be used for that for the same reason that you don’t hand over a nugget of gold at Starbucks - it’s more likely to be the backing reserve asset for other currencies like gold than to be a currency itself (a “Bitcoin standard” to replace the old gold standard). Secondly there are faster “Layer 2” networks built on top of the main network which have much faster and cheaper transactions - the main chain will be used in future for fewer but bigger clearing type transactions. You can also directly upgrade the 7 TPS limit on the main chain but for reasons I won’t bore you with, that is politically toxic in the Bitcoin community.
As for the tax thing - you can already pay taxes with Bitcoin in a bunch of places and I guarantee more are coming (off the top of my head: a Swiss canton - Zug I think, a couple of US States, the city of Miami, and the country of El Salvador).
the “you can have an infinite number of currencies” argument is common but holds no water. Yes you can trivially copy Bitcoin’s code (in fact it’s been done many times) - but you can’t copy the community, the users, and the overall brand and legitimacy. Same reason it’s trivially easy to copy Facebook’s product and launch an identical site . Not so easy to copy the 2 billion users and trillion dollar valuation..
PP - don’t get me started on POW v POS. That’s a whole ‘nother thing..
Bitcoin is now in El Salvador’s central bank reserves. Soon in Paraguay. 2 countries down, 194 to go (and North Korea if you count them, and there are persistent rumours about Russia). Not bad for 12 years..
“The Internet is just speculative bollocks isn’t it? Why are all these “dotcoms” worth so much? Why would you type out an ‘email’ to someone when you can call??” - RR, circa 1996.
Stru, I was actively using the internet and loving it from the minute I could get my hands on a dialup connection and kick my sister off the landline. I am an early adopter of loads of new tech. This is why I can say with some confidence that bitcoin (not blockchain) is a load of bollocks.
In the 12 years after the internet was invented it changed the world completely. In 12 years of bitcoin we have neckbeards hodling and pretending to buy lambos to drive to the moon or whatever. That two of the dodgiest countries on the planet are getting into it and perhaps Russia, is not convincing me of anything.
Refunds and Buybacks. If you’re entitled to a refund or a buyback, we can refund to you either (1) the exact Bitcoin amount that you entered when you made the purchase or (2) the original U.S. Dollar price of the purchase. And it’s up to us which one happens; you don’t get to choose (we might choose one option over the other to try to get you your refund quicker). But that also means the risk is all on you if the Bitcoin value changes between the time you made the purchase and the time you get the refund (in the form we choose). So, for example, if we refund you in Bitcoin, the value of that Bitcoin amount might be a lot less than it was when you paid it to us; and if we refund you in U.S. Dollars, that U.S. Dollar amount might be a lot less than the current market value of the Bitcoin amount you used to make your payment.
Has anyone actually bought a Tesla with bitcoin after reading those? I accept that some people are rich enough not to care. Great way to launder money I guess.
Bitcoin is literally the worst way to launder money. All transactions are visible on a globally accessible public ledger. Like having Everyone’s bank account balance and transactions published online. Governments can and do data mine this to catch criminals and tax evaders.
Ok - I guess you are the expert. TBF getting bundles of actual cash from a bush sounds like the sort of thing a really cool alternative currency would involve.
"Bitcoin is literally the worst way to launder money. All transactions are visible on a globally accessible public ledger"
This is my understanding, but then I wonder why the guy who emailed me recently to say he had shocking video of me enjoying certain adult websites wanted me to pay him in bitcoin ?
RR - I was there too. On the Internet from 1993 and a 2400bps modem. I remember the excitement and the feeling of “oh wow, this is so cool” from them and it’s the same feeling I had when I got into crypto a few years ago (to be precise, with Ethereum, the second biggest after Bitcoin - actually the second biggest in market cap, but biggest by all other metrics).
Perhaps you haven’t looked into it enough?
I completely agree Bitcoin etc is a speculative bubble btw. That doesn’t mean there is no value in the technology- most major new technologies are created out of speculative bubbles and when the bubble ends, some useful tech remains. It was true after the end of the dotcom bubble and even the 19th century railways bubble.
PS - the Internet was created in 1969 - I’m not sure it had accomplished much by 1981. You’re probably thinking of the invention of the Web (late 80/early 90s at CERN) which made the Net user friendly enough for the general public. I don’t think crypto has reached its Web moment yet.
You can easily find charts online mapping the growth of the number of websites over the years to the growth of Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets. It’s not a perfect proxy but it is instructive - crypto wallets are growing at a faster rate.
Beg to differ on that. Don't get me wrong, I wish that I had bought a load back when I first heard of it and made a fortune, but I seem to remember buying a beta version of minecraft instead so it must have been 2011ish. Some colleagues did invest back then so I will look them up and see when they sold (if they sold).
As for money laundering, kind of what Chimp said. It was used a lot for illicit stuff a lot in the early years simply because it was obscure and police weren’t paying much attention and tools to track payments etc didn’t exist and volumes were a lot smaller.
Now every major government is looking at the Bitcoin and Ethereum chains closely and that kind of easy opportunity is gone. Some shady stuff still happens of course but very small statistically and shady stuff happens even with HSBC online banking - it’s never going to be zero.
Serious criminals now use a coin called Monero which has genuinely private and uncrackable transactions (I mean the NSA or GCHQ could probably do it but they can’t check everything - forget about PC Plod- or even the FBI or SFO doing it).
As to Chimp’s point, yes - in general you can see that Wallet A sent 10 coins to Wallet B or something but it is not immediately obvious who owns each wallet. But there is a huge amount that can be learned by doing big data/machine learning analytics stuff on this kind of blockchain data and you can make some good guesses about identity (I’ve seen big tenders issued by both HMRC and the IRS in the USA for this kind of tech a couple years ago - and that’s just the public stuff). Also, the most common tactic in addition to big data analysis is that eventually criminals need to cash out their coins and it is a lot easier for governments to crack down on the exchanges where that happens and force them to hand over KYC details etc).
This is what governments do with Monero btw. They can’t do any on chain tracking but they discourage exchanges from listing it so criminals can’t easily cash out. Then of course criminals go to shadier exchanges offshore etc and the arms race continues but that’s no different to traditional money laundering and shady offshore banking etc
RR - don’t look at Bitcoin. I talk about it because that’s what most people have heard of but it’s basically a one trick pony (albeit good at that one trick). The real innovation and cool stuff is happening in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Stru - You're not a lawyer are you? You seem to have jumped into the internet roughly the same time as me (early/mid 90s) and you got into cryptos far earlier than me.
Genuine question as a crypto fan (not BTC fan btw!). Do you honestly believe ETH is the future coin for the more mundane transactions including NFT's, DeFi and other future cases which haven't been programmed as of yet. I'm of the opinion that whilst BTC was the first kid on the block it wont be the king when there is mass adoption (IBM,Blackberry,Nokia,Myspace,Friends Reunited, Alta Vista, Yahoo come to mind ;) ). ETH may not be as slow as BTC but by god the gas fee's make it an unusable layer 1. Layer 2's on ETH don't really help much.
Are you at all concerned about what will happen to the ETH network post merge (closer to when sharding goes live) and after staked ETH is no longer locked in? A fair few miners are speculating ETH's security will nosedive.
Are you topping up in this bear market ready for the Q2 2024 BTC halving?
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Wanna know.
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I’ve never worked in a mine, no.
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Just when we need to get our shit together as a species along comes this bollocks. How much fooking damage to the planet and social coherence is going to be done before this bullshit finally dies? Hedge funds in the US are reopening closed coal plants just to provide power to their crypto mining FFS. It's a catastrophic market failure.
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The global installed base of PlayStation 5s alone consumes more power than the whole Bitcoin network. Funny how we don’t hear media FUD about the need to ban all PS5s or console gaming because the PS5 makes money for the corporate owners and advertisers and Bitcoin doesn’t.
how much energy does the global gold industry use? That’s what Bitcoin is competing with and I guarantee it’s a lot more than Bitcoin
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Whatabout
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"Funny how we don’t hear media FUD about the need to ban all PS5s or console gaming because the PS5 makes money for the corporate owners and advertisers and Bitcoin doesn’t"
Yeah, nobody powerful is making money out of crypto. And we never see any adverts for it. And I've certainly never read any idiotic client journalism puff pieces about it.
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AND YET YOU CAN’T EVEN BUY CHILD PORNOGRAPHY WITH A PLAYSTATION 5!
BITCOIN IS EFFICIENT!!
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"how much energy does the global gold industry use? That’s what Bitcoin is competing with and I guarantee it’s a lot more than Bitcoin "
1) The estimates I've read put it at about 100-150 TWh for each.
2) The comparison is bogus anyway. "Mining" has completely different meaning and significance between the two cases. Gold's utility as a store of value does not depend on new gold being mined, indeed it increases as new mining decreases.
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As does Bitcoin.
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Maybe I was a bit ambiguous. Put it this way, if you stop mining gold it doesn't stop anyone buying or selling their existing holding. If you stop mining bitcoin...
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HAVE YOU EVER TRIED BUYING CHILD PORNOGRAPHY USING GOLD?!?
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Theoretically yes - if you stop mining Bitcoin then the network will stop running. But it’s nearly impossible to stop mining Bitcoin. You don’t *need* thousands of nodes and miners - you only have that because of pure free market competition. But you literally only need one miner to keep the network going - the chance of at least one miner surviving somewhere in the world is pretty much 100% imho (I mean in 2009 Satoshi was the only guy mining on his laptop - it could happen again).
Unless the Internet itself goes down, in which case we have much bigger problems..
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Struan - so if everyone capable of mining were to act selflessly, what computer resources would be needed in order for BTC transaction processing to keep up with demand ? More than one 2009-standard laptop, right ?
Anyway, the point stands that you can't excuse bitcoin mining energy consumption by saying "gold mining consumes more", when the use of gold as a store of value or means of payment doesn't depend on gold mining.
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I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Bitcoin network works. It’s a very common misconception because most media descriptions of it are awful.
The Bitcoin network has a fixed max rate of about 7 transactions per second (aggregated into a block Every ten minutes). This has been in place right from the beginning and has never changed.
transaction processing for this level of transactions is ridiculously easy - forget a laptop, your phone could probably do it.
All the big numbers and high processing costs and stories about using super computers to mine Bitcoin have to do with mining and increasing overall net work security , not transaction processing - it’s the arms race to get more Bitcoins.
if tomorrow 99.99% of miners disappeared, and there were just two laptops left mining (or one), the network would work just fine and those one or two miners would just share all the Bitcoin rewards (instead of the thousands of miners who currently share it).
so my point remains - you are technically correct in a narrow sense but it’s basically a meaningless point because the chance of the Bitcoin network reaching a point where not even one laptop is left mining is basically zero.
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blockchain is good
crypto probably is bollocks tbh
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IT'S THE FUTURE OF CURRENCY!
I CAN'T IMAGINE THAT VISA AND MASTERCARD COMBINED CAN HANDLE ANY MORE THAN 6
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Heh.
Gold has intrinsic uses. Bitcoins and their ilk are entirely artificial. More like those elements created by scientists from existing elements just for fun but don’t actually have any uses.
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Shh im buying the missus a necklace made of bitcoin for her birthday
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Soooooo... harking back to the original post... that's a "no", then?
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Crypto - gold’s intrinsic uses (jewellery, industrial Etc) only Cover something like 15% of all gold in existence today. The vast, vast majority of gold in the world is sitting in Vaults as a store of value in central bank reserves etc. This is the market Bitcoin is disrupting.
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Also: the £20 note in your hand has no intrinsic value either and people are happy enough to hoard it and spend it..it has value because people believe it has value.
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"I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Bitcoin network works. It’s a very common misconception because most media descriptions of it are awful.
The Bitcoin network has a fixed max rate of about 7 transactions per second (aggregated into a block Every ten minutes). This has been in place right from the beginning and has never changed. "
Guilty, well, part guilty. I did indeed assume the network could process, and indeed was already processing, far more transactions per second than that. How can it be a useful means of payment with that kind of maximum ? Mrs Eeyore's store cards alone take that kind of punishment.
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"Also: the £20 note in your hand has no intrinsic value either and people are happy enough to hoard it and spend it..it has value because people believe it has value."
And because I can pay my tax bill with it. Which is almost as important as being able to buy heroin, child porn
or a Tesla.0
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OH AND HOW MANY TRANSACTIONS PER SECOND DO YOU THINK BITCOIN SHOULD BE ABLE TO PROCESS IN ORDER TO BE A USEFUL MEANS OF PAYMENT: 8?!?
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I've just had a great idea. Let's have lots of cryptocurrencies, then the 7 transactions per second ceiling won't matter !
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And they can all compete with gold, because they will all be limited in supply ! No matter how many new ones are created, the supply of each one will be limited. Or might be. Or something.
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... still no, then, right?
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p.s. of course I am not crypto-mining on my phone. Don’t be daft. What the fvck do you think this is.
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Shooty: you read this ?
https://research.aimultiple.com/pi-network/amp/
"Mining" on your phone without additional battery use. Yeah, right...
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Or they can switch to a proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work consensus protocol. (I admit I don't really know what that means ...)
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Isn’t good at all an all time high price and still sitting in national reserve vaults?
not sure how Bitcoin has disrupted that market at all tbh.
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Eeyore- you’re right that Bitcoin cannot be used directly to buy coffee etc with the current transaction rate. Visa alone does something like 50,000 transactions per second.
the solution is two fold - first, Bitcoin won’t need to be used for that for the same reason that you don’t hand over a nugget of gold at Starbucks - it’s more likely to be the backing reserve asset for other currencies like gold than to be a currency itself (a “Bitcoin standard” to replace the old gold standard). Secondly there are faster “Layer 2” networks built on top of the main network which have much faster and cheaper transactions - the main chain will be used in future for fewer but bigger clearing type transactions. You can also directly upgrade the 7 TPS limit on the main chain but for reasons I won’t bore you with, that is politically toxic in the Bitcoin community.
As for the tax thing - you can already pay taxes with Bitcoin in a bunch of places and I guarantee more are coming (off the top of my head: a Swiss canton - Zug I think, a couple of US States, the city of Miami, and the country of El Salvador).
the “you can have an infinite number of currencies” argument is common but holds no water. Yes you can trivially copy Bitcoin’s code (in fact it’s been done many times) - but you can’t copy the community, the users, and the overall brand and legitimacy. Same reason it’s trivially easy to copy Facebook’s product and launch an identical site . Not so easy to copy the 2 billion users and trillion dollar valuation..
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Bitcoin is a load of planet killing speculative bollox isn't it, let's be honest.
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PP - don’t get me started on POW v POS. That’s a whole ‘nother thing..
Bitcoin is now in El Salvador’s central bank reserves. Soon in Paraguay. 2 countries down, 194 to go (and North Korea if you count them, and there are persistent rumours about Russia). Not bad for 12 years..
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“The Internet is just speculative bollocks isn’t it? Why are all these “dotcoms” worth so much? Why would you type out an ‘email’ to someone when you can call??” - RR, circa 1996.
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Stru, I was actively using the internet and loving it from the minute I could get my hands on a dialup connection and kick my sister off the landline. I am an early adopter of loads of new tech. This is why I can say with some confidence that bitcoin (not blockchain) is a load of bollocks.
In the 12 years after the internet was invented it changed the world completely. In 12 years of bitcoin we have neckbeards hodling and pretending to buy lambos to drive to the moon or whatever. That two of the dodgiest countries on the planet are getting into it and perhaps Russia, is not convincing me of anything.
Planet killing bollox.
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Interesting article re el Salvador:
https://www.ft.com/content/c36c45d2-1100-4756-a752-07a217b2bde0
As ever with the ft, much of the value is BTL.
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Heh. I had never seen the Tesla Ts&Cs before.
Has anyone actually bought a Tesla with bitcoin after reading those? I accept that some people are rich enough not to care. Great way to launder money I guess.
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Heh. What the actual fvck.
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Bitcoin is literally the worst way to launder money. All transactions are visible on a globally accessible public ledger. Like having Everyone’s bank account balance and transactions published online. Governments can and do data mine this to catch criminals and tax evaders.
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I am enjoying this thread though. Appreciate struan's measured responses to my deeply sceptical digs.
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Guess Elon really is a genius if he can persuade people to sign up to that.
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Ok - I guess you are the expert. TBF getting bundles of actual cash from a bush sounds like the sort of thing a really cool alternative currency would involve.
The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of bitcoin
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"Bitcoin is literally the worst way to launder money. All transactions are visible on a globally accessible public ledger"
This is my understanding, but then I wonder why the guy who emailed me recently to say he had shocking video of me enjoying certain adult websites wanted me to pay him in bitcoin ?
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RR - I was there too. On the Internet from 1993 and a 2400bps modem. I remember the excitement and the feeling of “oh wow, this is so cool” from them and it’s the same feeling I had when I got into crypto a few years ago (to be precise, with Ethereum, the second biggest after Bitcoin - actually the second biggest in market cap, but biggest by all other metrics).
Perhaps you haven’t looked into it enough?
I completely agree Bitcoin etc is a speculative bubble btw. That doesn’t mean there is no value in the technology- most major new technologies are created out of speculative bubbles and when the bubble ends, some useful tech remains. It was true after the end of the dotcom bubble and even the 19th century railways bubble.
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Isn’t that all transactions are visible but not who is actually transacting
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Isn’t it*
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PS - the Internet was created in 1969 - I’m not sure it had accomplished much by 1981. You’re probably thinking of the invention of the Web (late 80/early 90s at CERN) which made the Net user friendly enough for the general public. I don’t think crypto has reached its Web moment yet.
You can easily find charts online mapping the growth of the number of websites over the years to the growth of Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets. It’s not a perfect proxy but it is instructive - crypto wallets are growing at a faster rate.
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Beg to differ on that. Don't get me wrong, I wish that I had bought a load back when I first heard of it and made a fortune, but I seem to remember buying a beta version of minecraft instead so it must have been 2011ish. Some colleagues did invest back then so I will look them up and see when they sold (if they sold).
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As for money laundering, kind of what Chimp said. It was used a lot for illicit stuff a lot in the early years simply because it was obscure and police weren’t paying much attention and tools to track payments etc didn’t exist and volumes were a lot smaller.
Now every major government is looking at the Bitcoin and Ethereum chains closely and that kind of easy opportunity is gone. Some shady stuff still happens of course but very small statistically and shady stuff happens even with HSBC online banking - it’s never going to be zero.
Serious criminals now use a coin called Monero which has genuinely private and uncrackable transactions (I mean the NSA or GCHQ could probably do it but they can’t check everything - forget about PC Plod- or even the FBI or SFO doing it).
As to Chimp’s point, yes - in general you can see that Wallet A sent 10 coins to Wallet B or something but it is not immediately obvious who owns each wallet. But there is a huge amount that can be learned by doing big data/machine learning analytics stuff on this kind of blockchain data and you can make some good guesses about identity (I’ve seen big tenders issued by both HMRC and the IRS in the USA for this kind of tech a couple years ago - and that’s just the public stuff). Also, the most common tactic in addition to big data analysis is that eventually criminals need to cash out their coins and it is a lot easier for governments to crack down on the exchanges where that happens and force them to hand over KYC details etc).
This is what governments do with Monero btw. They can’t do any on chain tracking but they discourage exchanges from listing it so criminals can’t easily cash out. Then of course criminals go to shadier exchanges offshore etc and the arms race continues but that’s no different to traditional money laundering and shady offshore banking etc
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Obliged, Eeyore. Thank you. Interesting reading.
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RR - don’t look at Bitcoin. I talk about it because that’s what most people have heard of but it’s basically a one trick pony (albeit good at that one trick). The real innovation and cool stuff is happening in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Maybe try this as an example of a real use case:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEPx-iS7sz8
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Just checking back in with the El Salvador government to see how their bitcoin experiment is going:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/25/el-salvador-bitcoin-experiment-not-savi…
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still no obviously
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You can literally watch the Harmony one hacker laundering the funds with tornado cash and the money disappearing.
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Get back in my mine, people.
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Am I the only one who has no idea what Bitcoins are or how the whole system works ?
another South Sea Bubble or Dutch tulip thing in the making?
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I love that El Salvador's former currency was the "colon".
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Stru - You're not a lawyer are you? You seem to have jumped into the internet roughly the same time as me (early/mid 90s) and you got into cryptos far earlier than me.
Genuine question as a crypto fan (not BTC fan btw!). Do you honestly believe ETH is the future coin for the more mundane transactions including NFT's, DeFi and other future cases which haven't been programmed as of yet. I'm of the opinion that whilst BTC was the first kid on the block it wont be the king when there is mass adoption (IBM,Blackberry,Nokia,Myspace,Friends Reunited, Alta Vista, Yahoo come to mind ;) ). ETH may not be as slow as BTC but by god the gas fee's make it an unusable layer 1. Layer 2's on ETH don't really help much.
Are you at all concerned about what will happen to the ETH network post merge (closer to when sharding goes live) and after staked ETH is no longer locked in? A fair few miners are speculating ETH's security will nosedive.
Are you topping up in this bear market ready for the Q2 2024 BTC halving?
Join the discussion