• Fishnoodle@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Ummm, wait what. It costs 88k to mine a bit coin?

    So then Bitcoin mining only makes sense if you also heavily invest in the energy company you’re paying, and even then, it’s just a modified human centipede transaction

    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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      4 hours ago

      So then Bitcoin mining only makes sense if you also heavily invest in the energy company

      Correct. Buying your own solar panels or wind turbines. Your mining rig only makes sense when your expected return from the rig is greater than the return you could get from backfeeding the grid.

      Or if you can somehow make use of the “waste” heat, perhaps by heating your home, or preheating water before it reaches your water heater.

    • socsa@piefed.social
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      1 day ago

      The idea behind using distributed compute nodes for blockchain was that the blockchain itself would carry applications with commercial value, and the token itself would represent a share in that commercial value which would scale accordingly. There would be no reason to mine coins if those applications never materialized, so effort would always track alongside the intrinsic value of the network itself.

      Bitcoin never developed any real applications, and the entire value was speculation. This meant people raced to mine coins as fast as they could, well beyond the intrinsic value of the app stack (which doesn’t exist). So now the network has effectively collapsed for all intents and purposes, but it is still needed for moving Bitcoin around, so the people who have huge investments already basically have to keep throwing money at mining in order to preserve the “liquidity” of their current stash.

      • musicalphysics@discuss.online
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        3 hours ago

        Bitcoin was created to enable payments based upon cryptographic proof rather than trust, and doesn’t need additional applications. Mining has always been a race which is why long ago people figured out how to mine on GPUs - it was faster than mining on CPUs. Then onto ASICS. If people mined less than difficulty would adjust downwards and mining has nothing to do with liquidity.

            • a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world
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              2 hours ago

              I’m pointing out that while global society has already agreed on the value of goverent issued currencies, they already function as one.

              At best crypto has two use cases:

              • illegal activities
              • gambling

              That is it. I can’t use it as Any sort of real currency because the vast majority of people/enterprises don’t recognize it. For something to be a real currency it must be usable as such.

              What we have is pretend money that destroys the environment for no real reason.

              • musicalphysics@discuss.online
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                2 hours ago

                Bitcoin runs on electricity, not internal combustion engines. Bitcoin’s use of energy is no more or less damaging to the environment than any other electricity user in the same area.

              • musicalphysics@discuss.online
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                2 hours ago

                Bitcoin uses a public ledger making it a terrible choice for crimes. While not everyone wants to directly accept bitcoin there are exchanges throughout the world happy to exchange it for local currency. Bitcoin is not backed by violence like state currencies. It takes time for a new form of value to gain widespread acceptance.

                Gold was used as a currency for thousands of years but you can’t use it at a local grocery store either.

                Bitcoin’s value is backed by math and computers and that is somehow worse than the energy and violence used by governments?

    • thisisonlyatest@midwest.social
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      1 day ago

      Between this and the AI bubble, there has been a tremendous flight of capital from the middle and lower classes to the parasite class.

      And you’re dead on with the human centipede corollary - once money enters the vortex it stays there until it gets excreted in some unholy fashion. Like private armies and rape islands.