• @[email protected]
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    166 months ago

    Cryptocurrency with Tor has unironically done more for drug safety than most administrations worldwide. I hate the framing “fake money for criminals” because while there are despicable crimes, not all of them use cryptocurrency, in fact USD was the most common last time I checked, OTOH what constitutes a criminal can be an arbitrary rule. Woman in Texas having an abortion paying with crypto? Fits the definition but I’m not sure people here would condemn it.

    I’m not happy with how cryptocurrency turned out with the huge speculational bubble, NFTs, not even a huge fan of smart contracts but I think the idea of a decentralized and maybe even anonymous ledger is very much in the spirit of the fediverse.

    • @[email protected]
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      106 months ago

      I’m gonna pile on the “not happy” side with environmental concerns. You see, with Bitcoin, if crypto mining was as easy as just verifying the next block in the chain, it would be easy and the market would flood. You’d have hyperinflation. The system controls the rate at which new bitcoins are minted by artificially increasing the computational difficulty of the problem. And the end result is that crypto mining intentionally wastes power output comparable to that of a country.

      • @sep
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        -66 months ago

        Calling hashing “mining” was probably the most stupid thing in bitcoin. Since it have nothing to do with minting new coins. It is tru that miners get a bonus in addition to the fees of the block when successful. But that bonus is reduced regularly and will eventually go away.
        The power consumption used by hashing became quickly insane by companies chaseing a quick buck.

      • Victoria Antoinette
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        -96 months ago

        the whole Blockchain could be run by two raspberry pis, and the cap is still limited to 21million. I suspect you don’t know what you’re talking about

        • @[email protected]
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          106 months ago

          It could be. I explained why it isn’t. Why don’t you offer an alternative hypothesis for why so much power is used?

          • Victoria Antoinette
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            -36 months ago

            it’s used because because more machines areining than 2 raspberry pis

              • Victoria Antoinette
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                -36 months ago

                three raspberry pis would also use more power than 2. it doesn’t mean that Bitcoin is designed to waste power. it means people are willing to spend energy on mining

                  • Victoria Antoinette
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                    -26 months ago

                    not for a common good, but the other two can hardly be said to be altruistic either.

    • littleblue✨
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      36 months ago

      That’s not even touching on the glaring fact that this anti-crypto sentiment is propped up by those who stand to benefit from downplaying its utility - until they’ve got all their plans ready to fire, of course. The same is true of cannabis these days, and (for those that read) was the same for alcohol only a little while ago, and tobacco before that. There is nothing in this current timeline that will be allowed to attack the economic power dynamic, much less correct it. This hype is as much a pre-packaged and deftly engineered product as the military-sports complex is, but where is the conversation on that, citizens? 🤷🏽‍♂️

    • @Zealousideal_Fox900
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      36 months ago

      Crypto massively helped me when the banks wanted 45 bucks for an international transfer for my buddy to send me money for something I made him. Fuck banks