how do people deal with the implications of the massive growth of power usage crypto requires?
Everything I've read on it always says "oh we'll solve that problem in the future, since we're gonna make so much money the market will figure it out" and the like, but that kind of thinking seems farcical.
Capital concedes nothing, and people making money aren't going to care about the environment when there's more money they can make off of it. Same thing we experienced in the oil boom, now decentralized and far lower barriers of entry. But the same sort of hand-waving motivations exist, and now we're well past all prior tipping points.

There are zero frames of references or sources listed on this, and none of this lines up with actual reports.
This kind of underscores the central problem of how Bitcoin is built around a need for further promotion, and there's been a tonne of memetic graphs like this, but most of them end up being poorly-sourced or sleight-of-hand bits of propaganda.
Like, I want to see a real reckoning with the impact that isn't just hand-wavey and dismissive.

I am curious to know how comparable blockchain techs that don't have the same kind of extended ledger rank in transaction energy costs.

"A handy comparison page shows that bitcoin represents 0.51 percent of global electricity production and 0.59 percent of total electricity consumption."

0.59% of GLOBAL electricity consumption? For a barely-embraced technology? that's absolutely massive and I was amazed that he tried to hand-wave that away. Currently 121.36 terawatt-hours annually, and growing at the rate that it is?

The article quickly goes into comparisons that don't hold up to scrutiny, like trying to compare it to the entire industry of gold mining.
I think he gives up the game when we see this line, "To slander crypto-mining as an inherently dirty business appears intellectually dishonest." which is a WEIRD thing to include in an analysis piece, so I'm guessing this is some kind of paid opinion piece?
and the weird line "Hydro companies in Washington and Canada, for example, practically give away electricity"

Anyways, I don't want to discuss that article, it reads like tobacco execs testifying. I would still love to see technical papers on scalability of Bitcoin versus some of the more up-and-coming blockchain implementations. I love blockchain innovations, I just want to read about the impact analysis of a world where Bitcoin was globally embraced, and the impact differences of future implementations instead.

Sigh, this is the sort of partisan cultist mentality that I don't want to bother with, and has no place in science. This is "see, here is this really bad article, and if you don't believe it, you're the problem". The article is objectively terrible in any scientific context and is scant in facts, and is fluffed up mostly by irrelevant arguments. If the article isn't the point, find better articles that know how to handle data. Like with the Big Tobacco example, if the arguments for something are purely given by sloppy sources, it effects the credibility.
I'll go research somewhere else if you're just going to be all in a huff just because your suggested article was poor.

Anyone see this NFT drama?

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has there been any accidents / tragedy around home mining setups? I know from police officers that home grow ops had a history of electrical issues and fires, so one small benefit of marijuana legalization has been the reduction there. (still more than enough meth/drug cooking accidents still, mind you)
Most mining stories I hear feel like urbans myths, and always hearsay.

considering the heavy-hitter mining operations developed in the last few years alone, I'd love to see a breakdown of the economics of making it actually profitable at the smaller scales.
But I can totally see the hobbyist allure of it.

if someone wanted to cash-out their Coinbase account, what would be the current turnaround time for selling your stock and getting cash safely in your bank account?

I'm always surprised when people try and seriously "time the market". (mind you, I get it for people where this is just fun-money and a hobby)
As any market grows in size the amount of huge investors involved ready to out-gun you with automated mechanics grows exponentially. One of my friends worked at one of the most famous/notorious High Speed Trading firms for about a decade, and damn, the level of intellect and analysis and sheer power they're employing to game the market and fleece every weakness they can find is just staggering.
(I'm not defending HST. They are a company that like so many others adds nothing of value to this world and exists to extract money from a system they can exploit.)
You're not going to beat them at the game they refined and lobbied for. We hear about the random few that make it big with crazy bets, the ultra-cheap bitcoin purchases that sat on a hard drive for 15 years, the Gamestop millionaires, etc, but this is all Survivor Bias.
We celebrate the few that strike it rich in Vegas, but their impressive winnings are a fraction of the rake.

Here's something I'm curious about: how many of these coins have been deemed failures? How many were shown to be coordinated cash grabs?
Everyone loves a good Confidence Scam anecdote.

is there a crypto equivalent of the S&P500 that people use for baseline tracking?

is there anything preventing someone else from making a different NFT of the exact same card picture?
Or is the card NFT you bought officially released by Topps or something like that?

see that at least makes sense, since the issuing is exclusive.

who made that NFT though? Unless it was made by twitter or Jack and people decide to "respect" that authenticity, there will never be consensus as to which NFT of the first tweet is actually legit and I think it's madness to even entertain the thought. If people want to say "my NFT of the first tweet is the most legitimate because my NFT existed first", and if that somehow lent validity, then the market reaction would be to instantly start NFTing almost every single tweet or utterance. It's the same blind market force that drives miners to extremes, that fueled the ".com" name market, etc etc etc

this I feel is the most useful aspect of the technology but it's lost in the noise and stupidity of so much of the other NFT news.

I would be hard pressed to find anyone in the NFT market that is there for "appreciating art".
For buyers, it's the next bitcoin so don't let the train leave the station.
For artists, it's potential for money.
sure maybe someone will do someone mildly interesting and kitschy with it for art purposes, like a Chris Archangel type, and maybe some buyers are serious collectors that aren't just laundering and offshoring their wealth, but those people will be the teeniest of fractions.

The art world has contended with conceptual art and digital art for decades already. Buying certificated "art ideas" and "digital editions" is old hat.
A huge chunk of the blue-chip art-world is just a sink for wealth into offshored accounts. So much art goes in to massive warehouses in countries different than the purchaser, thus not incurring importation costs.
So will NFTs help rich people launder money more easily and hide their capital from governments? Yes, but they were already doing that, with bitcoin, with art investments, with vanity "philanthropy orgs", etc.

I know since the dot-com boom investors have abhorred any growth that isn't exponential, but one of the more boring aspects of NFTs that might just be a fun development could be a flood of perpetually inexpensive digital art being forever collected and exchanged. Nothing really skyrocketing, worthy of the eye of the investors, but just small art communities with steady content creation.

As I said before, this is really an issue that should be handled with peer-reviewed science papers, not from industry boosters. It's a massive PR issue that can't be BigTobacco'ed through. If not dealt with in a serious-minded manner, more people will take crypto booster as snake-oil salesmen, and harsher regulations will be a side effect.

here is a great video by a musician, made for other musicians interested in NFTs. (It is by no means anti-crypto, yet addresses the environmental impacts)

the rest of his channel is great too, if you're a gear nerd or love electronic music.

get ready for some cringe bitcoin jokes from Elon on SNL causing the markets to wobble a bit

I regret to inform you that you are going to have to think about dumbass SNL skits in regards to your portfolio next week

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Welp, tonight is going to be a cringefest I'm sure (SNL is often poor and it's pretty much unwatchable when the host isn't a professional entertainer. I still remember when Wayne Gretzky hosted...) but it will be fascinating to watch the Doge and Tesla markets react to something so seemingly inane as thing.

Also, LMAO
https://twitter.com/jeremysmiles/status/1386040297289826307?s=19
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kind of shocked to learn people were still using Robinhood (for Doge!) after the whole GME thing

I don't trust a single thing out of that guy's mouth/twitter tbh. Nothing he does ever has any sincerity or sense of forethought.
I get the feeling this is board reprisals speaking through him via arbitration.

OK but what part of crypto ISN'T being used to launder money?

I have a funny feeling if Elon does try for his own Tesla-branded cryptocurrency, THAT will be a big red flag that gets the regulators churning.
For everyone HODL on Bitcoin right now, I would suspect it would be in your best interests if Elon didn't proceed in that way.

This whole scenario is truly absurdist comedy.

I mentioned it on a prior page, but I truly think if there will be crypto regulation coming to USA it will be in reaction to dumb-ass whales like Elon running their mouth to try and impress Grimes' cool friends.

shout out to everyone who understands crypto, like stocks, is basically gambling with your fun money.
LOL at everyone tweeting to Elon Musk that they believed him that they'd get free money and are very upset at losing their shirt.

oh sweet I had been waiting for the Qanon storyline to intersect

All of my money goes into real estate (my mortgage) and pinball machines
(OK, and art. But while my "art portfolio" has technically done extremely well, I have no interest in it as an investment, and no interest in selling)
There is definitely a way to invest in markets (long term especially,) with mitigated risk, but day-trading is essentially gambling for the majority of the people that approach it. The people who come to day-trading (whether crypto or stocks) should probably understand it as a gamble, especially with that exponential growth-adrenaline flowing. Every silly "rags to riches" story (like the guy who had "a measly" 250k and turned it to 2mil in a year) spurs those subconscious delusions of "free easy money", in the same way seeing someone cleaning up at the roulette table gets the dopamine flowing.

Seeing your posts in this thread, you might be an exception to the rule. The people posting their Ls from the latest dip (which I think we can hilariously somewhat trace to Elon's SNL appearance) are more common though. The FOMO and virality of crypto fuels a lot this. Stocks have been manipulated in parallel ways for a century, but nothing compares to the cargocult/MLM-style motivational social media world that crypto has fomented, and that has taken in a LOT of people. It's my fascination with that aspect of it that keeps me following this thread, tbh. Economics and corporations are by definition sociopathic, and it's amazing to see the psychology used to manipulate markets en masse, through a myriad of means (& memes!)

LMAO

A death in Cryptoland: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/bitcoin-gerald-cotten-quadriga-cx-death

When the CEO of Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange reportedly died in 2019, it left over a quarter of a billion dollars of customers’ funds in limbo. While authorities investigated, one online sleuth decided to dig deeper to find the money.

Apple is not the kind of company to kindly let you use BTC and ETH and that's it. Apple will most likely be pushing their own currency, no?
Apple is known for just dominating digital ecosystems. You want to use Apple? They want a large piece of every pie. They want to control what you can see and do so they can always be there to charge rent. They didn't get to where they are today by acquiescing and sharing.

speaking as someone who doesn't trade crypto, I can assuredly say: the benefit of Coinbase is that it is not Robinhood

If you followed the AMC saga, Robinhood are shite.

I would love to hear all of your thoughts on this idea:

Orica: https://orica.io/
Orica whitepaper: https://orica.io/media/orica_whitepaper.pdf

this, on the surface, is the kind of DREAM those of us in the arts industry might want: something centered around supporting emerging artists, minimization of environmental impact, decentralization that ACTUALLY disrupts existing toxic power structures, an openness on fees and dedication to minimize their overhead, all with the flexibility of crypto backend tool utilization.
If this could check my main boxes (minimized fees, artist control, direct support, low environmental impact) this would be the thing that draws me into the crypto fold.

BUT, I want to hear your most cynical hot takes of how this could actually be bad / abused / vulnerable.

I had to stop watching after putting up with 'anonymous' somehow cheering about space exploration in the age of climate collapse.
It's a bit frustrating that people are only now realizing Musk is shit just because he's messing with crypto markets. I'm glad people are coming around, but he's got a long track record of garbage.

the MLM angle has been a major thorn in crypto's side for a long long time.

It doesn't take a sinister genius to exploit vulnerabilities, just the will to take the risk and knowing how to look for the exploits, and paying for custom ransomware. Sometimes even paying for the exploits too.
When they call exploits "0 day" that is because it's the first moment they are known... publicly.

always the best way to invest imho, regardless of asset

please post stories of bitcoin whales moving to El Salvador as they come up

yup, this (spammy) site says they have a 10% capgains rate, which is already super low.
https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Latin-America/El-Salvador/capital-gains-tax

these essays always seem to hinge on "sure this takes a lot of energy, but we already do stuff that takes energy, so..."

I've brought this up in before, but it's something that the "modern art" marketplace has been dealing with for a few decades. In the world of "sound art" and "video art" and even "conceptual art" you can buy editions of art that you get as a digital medium, or perhaps (for conceptual art) as a series of instructions.
there is a certain trust in the issueing institutions, but even if they decided to do another "signed and limited" run, the first run would still have precedence. But it's not an issue that ever seems to come up.

I posted a video a while back, and the only substantial and functionally useful aspect of NFTs will be for helping to support art+creative projects in the manner where there is a properly defined legal share of the work.
(But also money laundering. The blue-chip investor world loves money laundering, but fine art has lots of overhead.)

EDIT: I'm curious to what you think of https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/cryptocurrency-and-decentralized-finance-defi/page/46#post-6320917

If anyone here is worried USA will start regulating bitcoin because of all the money laundering, take note that they are only JUST NOW starting to consider legislation for the laundering in the bluechip art market. So they're about 20 years behind the times, give or take. Breathe easy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/19/arts/design/money-laundering-art-market.html

Billions of dollars of art changes hands every year with little or no public scrutiny. Buyers typically have no idea where the work they are purchasing is coming from. Sellers are similarly in the dark about where a work is going. And none of the purchasing requires the filing of paperwork that would allow regulators to easily track art sales or profits, a distinct difference from the way the government can review the transfer of other substantial assets, like stocks or real estate.

-------

In these circumstances, the galleries rely on the integrity of the agents, with whom they have long done business. Sometimes the buyers and sellers are not individuals at all, but shell companies, opaque investment structures often designed to conceal identity.

“Very rarely is anybody buying a $5 million painting as a person because they don’t buy anything else that way,” said Cristin Tierney, a New York gallerist.

And once works are purchased, many of them, including some of the world’s most expressive and expensive, end up hidden away in cavernous, nondescript, tax-sheltered free ports, their whereabouts largely unknown.

“The variety of frauds in the art world is almost infinite and that is facilitated by the fact that the art world operates with a secrecy that no other investor would dream of operating in,” said Herbert Lazerow, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law.

Now the federal government is considering using a law designed to combat money laundering at financial institutions to further regulate the art market. The law, the Bank Secrecy Act, requires banks to report cash transactions of more than $10,000, highlight suspicious activity and understand the identity of their customers and where their wealth comes from.

Congress has already authorized Treasury officials to tailor the regulations to fit the antiquities market, which has long been burdened by worries about illicit artifacts trafficked from countries like Syria and Iraq. Now dealers of ancient treasures like Roman marble statues or Egyptian reliefs will be treated like financial institutions, and federal regulators will study whether the restrictions should be extended to the broader art market.

"operates with a secrecy that no other investor would dream of operating in" YOU SAY????

is this LOL because the government sucks at regulating things in a timely manner, or LOL because you don't think there's significant money laundering involved?

perhaps you know more about it than I do, but money laundering with USD is much harder than BTC, and the decentralized anonymous aspect of BTC makes it super easy to launder.
Like check all of the "investment fine art" articles I've posted, a huge chunk of the international "blue-chip art market" is founded on the desire to avoid taxes and launder money.
BTC lets people do that without having to construct clandestine fortresses to warehouse the physical art in offshored taxhavens.
There are many accounts and services dedicated to watching the whale transactions, and when you see the immediate value swapping around it's pretty eye-popping.

If I wanted to help fund munitions for a guerilla army to destabilize a Southern hemisphere region rich in lithium, normally that'd take a few abstracted steps. Now it's all a click away. (just spitballin' here, making up examples from the ether of course)

BRB redirecting my coup funds

https://www.justice.gov/legal-careers/job/trial-attorney-digital-currency-initiative

The Criminal Division, U.S. Department of Justice, is seeking a qualified, experienced attorney for a permanent position in MLARS located in Washington, DC. A remote location outside of Washington DC will be considered for qualified candidates. The incumbent of this position serves as a Trial Attorney for the Digital Currency Initiative in the Special Financial Investigations Unit of the Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS).

good luck getting a crypto-specialist trial attorney for just $172k/year

R.I.P.
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Anyone who has followed his exploits online knows he has "felt something coming" for decades now.
Frankly I'm impressed he lived that long.

LOL

we need a timeline for that prediction though. Life has a 100% fatality rate, after all

can I ask a potentially dumb question here? What does it look like from a tech standpoint when a cryptocoin "fails"?
Is there ever an end state? Or does it just essentially get valued so low no one bothers to mine it and/or process transactions of that type, and it enters a kind of "zombie" state? Or is there some infrastructure that gets disabled effectively ending it's existence? Given the distributed nature, is no coin ever "truly" dead?

the mea culpa from the Doge founder was really eye-opening.

Don't really think he needs to, given his position and experience. YMMV of course.

Far from me being a booster in this thread, you only have to go back 1 year to see how much ridiculously higher bitcoin is now. Last July 19th it was $9k, so we're still talking a price tripling the span of a year. If you believe in BTC go in for a 5 year timeframe.

this is going to be worse than that SNL thing

holy shitballs
do the forensic types have any clues?

If that doesn't cause a branch like the IRS to make some kind of regulatory statement then it's gonna be YOLO for next decade

I find these kinds of articles trickling in to "mainstream" news sites to be really irresponsible. It's the kind of clickbait you'd expect on deeper industry sites but come on Bloomberg.
If I was the editor I'd recognize this as a pump & dump opportunity because 100% them publishing rumours will cause a jump in price.

If I had a topic like this that I wanted careful consideration of I would not want it to become a partisan issue. I do not think it bodes well if it gets championed by those who "do politics like professional wrestlers".
Bring on the bean-counters and academics instead, please.

*REASONABLE* people don't publicly award themselves participation trophies as a passive-aggressive gesture.

anyways, back to the actual topic on hand: does anyone know what the next legislative push will be within USA? I fully expect it to guide Canada's eventual tact.

Would a sign that the USA Federal Reserve begins acquiring BTC be considered a "tipping point" for adoption?

I'm super curious about the upcoming Powell reports... https://www.reuters.com/business/feds-powell-says-stablecoins-need-appropriate-regulatory-framework-2021-07-14/
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/jerome-powell-promotes-cbdc-digital-dollar-warns-against-stablecoins.html

I don't see USA moving to ban crypto like some other countries do, but then I feel like there are two other primary outcomes:
1) Federal Reserve gives in and adopts status quo crypto, markets spike, y'all get NIBs
2) the Feds try their hand at CBDC and then use that as a piecemeal cudgel against other crypto coins

the Fed chief said the main incentive for the U.S. to launch its own central bank digital currency, or CBDC, would be to eliminate the use case for crypto coins in America.

feels weird to describe some DeFi as regionally blocked, but I get it

*wild applause*
Most everyone on the internet need to read #1-4 at minimum.

I still don't understand the reasoning behind (most) NFTs as a long term product. Not the idea of NFTs being inherently doomed, but that almost all of them seemingly have a relatively limited cultural lifespan, and then an NFT market burgeoning with growth will constantly mint more and more new ones. Random influencers of 2021 will be fully replaced by far more influencers of 2031, and the cultural churn will continue.
So give the current zeitgeist amongst people that love and promote NFTs, is there a cultural expiry almost built into each one (their specific cultural clout) thus making any specific NFT a very limited product for long-term holding?

How are dividends arranged and what kind of institutional liability is this online casino? Is this some kind of way of bypassing stock IPO regulations because at a distant glance it sounds like a dividend paying stock

And to comment on your daily gains, my thinking is of NFTs as long term products. Everyone seems hyped on them purely as short term assets, and the market design seems to reinforce that.
Contrast that with BTC investors in this thread that hold confidence on the asset for 10-20 year timespans

I am not trying to insult NFTs, just analyze them from a purely economic perspective. There a tonne of other critiques to make but that's not what I want to discuss. So looking at them purely as a financial instrument, are they (I'm talking any specific NFTs, not NFTs as a whole) purely a short-term investment vehicle?

Pogs are about to make a comeback and THEN we strike!

welp I had to see this awful comic and now so do you

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LMAO I hadn't even noticed that detail

every online company wants to get involved in your transactions and skim a percentage and I loathe it.

you're talking about gambling. Only the winners get celebrated. No one toasts the dude that loses $200k at the blackjack table.

Absolutely this. But I also wonder if the "big bully" corps like facebook / ebay / paypal and such will try and promote their own as a new "regulated gold standard" within the next year or two.
"meteoric" rises are never sustainable, infinite growth is never sustainable, but we have multiple examples of taking control by redefining the landscape, and (based on my lay understanding of American politics) legislators absolutely just bend to their donors whims.

Yes, it's a sign to get out while you can and/or invest heavily now.

this is so well done. 1.8 million views in 4 days, and it's over 2 hours long explaining many of the underlying issues in great detail:

His "In Search of a Flat Earth" video from 2 years ago is still amazing to watch:

a real masterclass in the video essay form

I'm really starting to wonder about the impact on Coinbase due to this, because I see many many similar sentiments. It would be ironic if their bankruptcy posturing actually caused a run on their holdings and led to bankruptcy

I would watch the hell out of a TV series based on that premise, truth or not.

Thanks, will do!

Also, to answer my own query about CoinBase... They are down 84% from last Nov. I can't imagine this recent news will help things along.
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We've crossed the Rubicon

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I can't in good faith recommend you sell your pins to Time The Market and Buy The Dip.

can anyone here comment on CoinBase dominance? Their stock was $53 yesterday and I just saw it dip to under $46.
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All of the conjecture&rumours about their bankruptcy clauses aside, I have 2 questions:
1) is there a critical turning point stock price where it might spell doom for a financial services company like this? I.e. they broker so many transactions for so many people, does the stock price REFLECT consumer confidence in their services in a direct way, and/or can the stock price DRIVE the consumer confidence down in a bit of a death spiral?

2) If CoinBase did hit some critical financial phase, is there sufficient capacity in similar services to pick up their slack?

3) What are the implications on Ethereum if we see a continued slump in the CoinBase stock price and people's confidence in the company?

I am trying to wrap my head around the implications.

can you please explain the dynamics of that for those of us unfamiliar? Is a margin call like a short, in the sense you make a public contractual gamble?

I get that they're a tabloid but the NYpost cover page rn is intense

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I was just going to joke BUY THE DIP but LOL

As someone who doesn't invest in crypto, I wish most people talked about crypto the way you do. We might have less need for posts of suicide hotlines.

I feel one of the things that doesn't get enough discussion is how this can readily attract/tempt people who are susceptible to gambling addictions. Has much been written on that before?
There are 3 main parts of cryptoland that interest me: I like emerging tech in general, I'm interested in the legal and sociological ramifications particularly in how they get reflected in policy, and it's fun to watch people gamble. I've watched people gamble in many ways for many years, and there's a LOT of people here for the gambling.
(I'm not a gambler, but I do collect esoteric gambling machines and love the evil psychology behind their design histories)

One thing that comes up amongst my infosec friends, but rarely elsewhere, is how the bitcoin revolution enabled ransomware entrepreneurs. An entire industry of criminality entered into an arms race to lock your machines until you send them a ransom in crypto.

I don't buy that at all. The ease of which the transactions can be executed have vastly opened up the accessibility of these scams. It's absolutely a darker downside of DeFi. It is not blaming a technology for criminal behaviour, they are rightfully pointing out how the tech has enabled and made accessible such criminal behaviour. (this is their job: they identify tech threats for major corporations & govs)

LOL ok, I'm thinking about them. They are all so much cooler.

please re-read my posts.
"the bitcoin revolution enabled ransomware entrepreneurs"
"vastly opened up the accessibility of these scams"
"the tech has enabled and made accessible such criminal behaviour"

If only there was a history of dismissing the impacts of emerging technologies on society. Ahh I guess there's nothing to be learned, alas. How silly of me to even bring it up.

Editing to add: you don't have to care about the impacts emerging technologies have. But that doesn't mean they aren't significant and of vast interest to the rest of society.
You can find all sorts of Oil fans that are only interested in it as an investment product, or as a chemical means to power an engine in a very satisfying manner. That doesn't diminish the other important topics that surround it.

anyways, on to something new: This is an interesting long read about the 18 year old Canadian student who pulled a complex scheme on Indexed Finance
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-05-19/crypto-platform-hack-rocks-blockchain-community

dude is legendary in so many ways!

nah that's well within it's wild daily fluctuations. The chart looks like a noisy square-wave generator

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I'm super curious about Ethereum's proposed Proof of Stake switch, and any predictions for its future.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/04/1046636/ethereum-blockchain-proof-of-stake/

There was some factoid floating around how in Texas' overburdened electrical grid something like 40% is used for Proof Of Work / BTC.
some of the quotes out there are wild...
"One cryptocurrency miner in Rockdale, Texas, uses at least 400 megawatts of energy. For context, that’s enough to power a large city." (via https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/texas/texas-crypto-miners-summer-power-grid-conditions-ercot-expects-record-demand/269-ca5a6aa9-b4d5-4920-801a-08fa635be481 )

"It’s too early to estimate how much Texans’ power bills could rise as a result of Bitcoin mining. But the city of Plattsburgh, New York, may provide clues. After power prices surged, Plattsburgh temporarily banned crypto mining in 2018 until it could pass measures to regulate the industry. Two counties in Washington state took similar steps.

Overall, Bitcoin mining cost residents and businesses in upstate New York about $250 million a year in higher annual electricity bills, a 2021 University of California Berkeley study concluded. Mining pushes up monthly electric bills about $8 for individuals, and $12 for small businesses, the researchers estimated."
(via https://www.governing.com/next/what-risks-does-crypto-mania-pose-to-texas-power-grid )

"Austin Energy, which powers the state capital, says investors want to build five mines just outside Austin that would need a total of 1,000 megawatts of electricity, equal to about two-thirds of the city's current demand. That may require the utility to build more transmission lines, said Erika Bierschbach, vice president of energy market operations."

So I know BTC is seem as the standard-bearer, and after the last month any dreams of rattling that seem to have been popped. But is there hope for a Proof Of Stake system to rise to dominance and upheave these electricity demands?
The demand for electricity is still vastly beyond what could be considered reasonable, and places with more rickety infrastructure will see risks rise, as the value of mining still vastly eclipses the cost of doing so. It also outpaces all of the "future hopium" that we were constantly fed about how Bitcoin would revolutionize energy generation through market pressure, because infrastructure does not move that quickly and engineering at that scale is HARD.

are there any papers on this line of argument that you recommend? I'd like to learn more of the PoS counterarguments. I feel like there are pockets of crypto-boosters who are just leaning into it as an inevitability, but yeah I'm skeptical. The arguments FOR it remind me of the "crypto is good for the environment in the long run, actually, because [insert future developments]".

As someone who invests in crypto, does this make you bearish on Eth?
(also I first read that as "sharting blockchains" and wow ain't that an image)

Challenge accepted!

Those peons will taste my rapier for their insubordination!! To the bean farms, away! Oh wait, they have crab dip samples excuse me

there's something amazing in this web2.0 world that we see time and time again: the rise of scammers who operate in the light of day and are able to keep doing their thing over and over again, seemingly with minimal consequences. They will always attract a lot of boosters because ooooo you're just full of FUD and are gonna miss out on getting rich.
A slow, more analog version of this was that guy who tried to pull a bunch of scams in the collectible coin world, and then set his sites on the collectible retro videogame world. Despite many many people in that community raising red flags from the outset, people were thrilled by the attention and dollar figures he rustled up, and so the charade continued far longer that it reasonably should have.
Digitally, we've vastly accelerated the speed and reach of players like that, and their exploits fill up pages like https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

Finally we have brought this topic full circle!

someone sent me this breezy legal analysis of NFTs and now I'm super curious about the class-action lawsuits against the celebs that promoted pump&dump schemes

I'm a systems analyst and I love SYSTEMS, and yes even messy legal systems.
will be interesting to see how that all shakes out.

I get that you're just stumpin' on your own account there, but this is the kind of thing that needs way more technical papers and hard analysis to discuss.

I can't even tell if this is real or satire

While that chart is amusing your friend would be correct to ignore it in regards to future investment predictions.

well y'all got your dream of sub $1500 ETH weeeeeeeeeeeee

I wonder who is overleveraged right about now
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there is only one consumer index we care about: how many Toy Story CEs does a bitcoin get you???

"In 1999, MicroStrategy, Saylor’s software firm, admitted to overstating its revenues and erroneously reporting a profit when it actually made a loss. The fiasco shaved over $11 billion off MicroStrategy’s stock market value in a single day."

fuck this guy, he should still be in prison. "White collar crime" goes unpunished and the perpetrators get to come back to the casino. It's all just low-level "cost of doing business" fines, with perpetrators cushioned by an army of lawyers and abstracting legal entities.
Just disgusting. This is what happens when we let kings write the rules for a century and then tell us to celebrate and emulate their genius.