zvaigzdelasas:

homeosloven:

orgasmic crash :)

kropotkindersurprise:

afloweroutofstone:

Crypto and NFT markets are in a state of freefall. Meanwhile, “meme traders”- those who thought they were taking on Wall Street by investing in AMC and Gamestop last year- have now lost all of their gains.

People need to understand that you can’t beat Wall Street at their own game. You cannot hurt them by expanding financial markets- you’ll either lose your money or just become another part of the institutional market. You can only beat Wall Street by definancializing: reducing the relative size of the financial industry and bringing it under greater public control. Until then you’re just playing their game.

So this is what they meant by “To the Moon!“

May 11, 2022

afloweroutofstone:

Crypto and NFT markets are in a state of freefall. Meanwhile, “meme traders”- those who thought they were taking on Wall Street by investing in AMC and Gamestop last year- have now lost all of their gains.

People need to understand that you can’t beat Wall Street at their own game. You cannot hurt them by expanding financial markets- you’ll either lose your money or just become another part of the institutional market. You can only beat Wall Street by definancializing: reducing the relative size of the financial industry and bringing it under greater public control. Until then you’re just playing their game.

So this is what they meant by “To the Moon!“

Sunday Reading!

* CFP: Folk Horror. CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2022.* Four Tiny Essays on SF/F.* The Future Is Black, Not Bleak: On Afrofuturist Poetry.

https://twitter.com/gerrycanavan/status/1483897412611678208

* Notes on Contemporary University Struggles: A Dossier.* The Great Faculty Disengagement: Faculty members aren’t leaving in droves, but they are increasingly pulling away.* Hustling…

View On WordPress

Financial Wellness is important, too! I’ve been making a habit of diversifying some of my assets, to make my investments more secure for the future. One of those diversifications is Cryptocurrency.

I’ve been using Coinbase which makes it really easy and safe to buy, sell, and store digital currency (like Bitcoin). We can get $10 each of free Bitcoin when you sign up with my invite link and buy or sell at least $100 of digital currency: https://www.coinbase.com/join/5a525eb98468e601e6ebcd62?src=android-share

hustlerose:

so, to sum up the last couple weeks:

• the NFT fad ended and several tokens that were supposed to be worth millions were sold for peanuts
• terra luna tanked and dragged terra’s stablecoin off its peg. terra was the 3rd largest stablecoin at the time
  
• meanwhile, people are starting to face legal consequences for stuff like fraudandmoney laundering
  
• terra freezes their blockchain to prevent a run on the bankstablecoin
  
• tether and dei also lose their pegs and tank
  
• a court is forcing tether to reveal its reserve records to the public, which will definitely show that they’re backed by significantly less money than they claim
• etherium and bitcoin both crash hard at the same time
  
• tether’s market cap has dropped by several billion in the past few days, which might mean that some of the people at the top of the pyramid scheme are cashing out in dollars. just scooping up handfuls of money from tether’s reserves and running for the hills

crypto is fucking dying lol

Part of the hubris around Bitcoin is that of decentralisation.

Question though — Is it …really ?

Or can it be ?

The question arises, because GHash failed. So did the SegWit (segregated witness) fork, because a community could not come to a consensus. In a truly decentralised model, (e.g. open source software ) an independent developer can create a hard fork and let it be - to be used or not - by subsequent members of the community.

In the case of GHash -  AntPool, BTC, ViaBTC, F2Pool all publicly demonstrated they owned 51% (i.e. majority).

In a true decentralised model, there is no concept of majority share.

The truth is,

• miners are smart and they do not want to show majority share aligned to a particular hash rate
• they mostly use the computing power of AWS (which again is not a decentralised platform).
• they also work within the confines of their nation states, which have complete control over them (taxpaying citizens)

As long as majority miners are concentrated in one country (in this case China),  and majority computing is being done over a single computing cloud (AWS) - owned by the US, can any cryptocurrency be truly decentralised, away from the control of a nation state?

Sure inside the blockchain, the ledger is decentralised, but the  blockchain can be changed by mining on empty blocks or by rewriting the history.

Obfuscation is not reality.

Yet.

PS: Lest we also forget that Bitcoin is about 2000 times slower than Visa in processing payments.

Yup. Mining Bitcoin sure is bad for the planet with an estimated 37 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year.

To put into perspective how much CO2 that is, we’d need to let grow 155 million mature trees for 10 years to suck out the carbon dioxide emissions caused by Bitcoin mining alone for only one year.

Half of all the crypto mining in the world is done in southwest China where power is provided through the burning of coal. The rest aren’t innocent either as most of the world still gets most of its energy from non-renewable sources that emit powerful greenhouse gases.

The fact that crypto mining is so energy intensive combined with the sources of this energy are what makes it a terrible choice for our planet. This could be prevented if renewables were used for meeting the energy demands.

Sources:

https://www.icos-cp.eu/science-and-impact/global-carbon-budget/2020

https://www.instagram.com/p/CKrCLRnFc6y/?igshid=1ce9kl0wf3ryu

https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2015/03/17/power-one-tree-very-air-we-breathe

Is there a crypto subculture on Tumblr? Dogecoin has been making moves the last week but specifically the last 24 hours.

cryptocurrency is the lottery for incels

bluejesting:

lastvalyrian:

erinptah:

trixxtersrat:

erinptah:

takerfoxx:

WTF is an NTF? No matter how many times I’ve had it explained to me, it still makes no sense. The best I can figure that it’s a form of cryptocurrency with personalized artwork made on a really environmentally unfriendly material being sold for ridiculous prices just so suckers can get unique furry artz

Wwwwwelp, let me take a shot at it. *cracks knuckles*

Okay, so: you know how there are people who collect currency (the traditional, paper-and-coins type)?

And for some people, the specific thing they collect is “bills with unusual serial numbers”:

https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills

So if you find a $1 bill with a serial number like “010101010″, a collector might be willing to pay $50 for that bill.

In general, currency is “fungible”, which just means interchangeable. If I loan you a $1 bill today, and you pay me back tomorrow with a different $1 bill, same difference, that’s an equal exchange.

But if you find a person who specifically thinks Bills With Weird Serial Numbers are a neat thing they like having – they’ll pay extra for the weird $1 bill. And they wouldn’t be willing to swap it for some other $1 bill with just any non-remarkable serial number. It is a Non-Fungible Bill.

…to the collector, anyway. Not to anybody else! You can’t take it to the grocery store and say “please give me $50 worth of groceries for this $1 bill because the serial number is interesting.”

(Although, hey…if you had a way to convince lots of people that (a) all of them should turn into collectors and (b) every single random serial number is a special one they should pay extra for…that sure would be a way to make a lot of money, huh?)

Non-Fungible Tokens are the same idea, but with cryptocurrency.

Bitcoins have ID numbers. (Same with any other crypto token – I’ll just use Bitcoin as our example here.) If you can find a collector who likes Bitcoins with weird ID numbers, maybe they’ll pay you 50 Bitcoin for it?

…okay, it turned out nobody cares about Bitcoin ID numbers for their own sake.

But! The ID can be used in a URL.

This is where the art comes in.

You upload an image to that URL. Then you tell people “look, if you buy this token from me, it’s like you’re buying the image! Art collections are fun and interesting, right? Someone give me 50 Bitcoins now.”

Note that the file doesn’t needto be personalized, or unique, or anything like that:

• You can upload literally any file at that URL
• You can upload someone else’s art
• You could upload the same file to 20 different URLs, and sell 20 different NFTs of the same art
• You could load the page for a token someone else owns, download the file, and directly re-upload it to the page for a token youown
• The whole server could go down, and the URL from your token could be a 404 error for the rest of forever

So if you’re thinking “this sounds like a stupid deal that makes no sense” – you’re right! You are understanding the situation perfectly. This is total stupid nonsense. For the buyer.

For the person who owns some Bitcoins, and would like an easy way to turn them into even more Bitcoins? This is a fantasticracket.

Pay me a ton of tokens – or, preferably, the US$ equivalent of tons of tokens – for this single token I have! It’s totally actually worth that much, I promise.

Also, go ahead and Venmo me $50 for every random $1 bill in my wallet. This is a great deal for you.

And if you believe all that…I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Sidenote: the “environmentally unfriendly” part isn’t about material, it’s about energy. Producing and exchanging cryptocurrency takes an obsceneamount of computing power, which uses an obscene amount of electricity. And it’s not a special thing about NFTs – it’s how all cryptocurrency works.

(A comparison I saw recently is, at the current rate, “people mining Bitcoin” for 1 day uses about the same amount of energy as “powering every commercial building in the United States” for 2 months.)

Sidenote 2: pretty sure the reason so much NFT art is ugly is, most of the Actual Artists have thought about it for 5 seconds and realized it’s a big racket. (Or been warned off it by other Actual Artists.) And the people who want to buyActual Art are commissioning the artists directly, same as always.

So the people left in the NFT-buying scene are mostly people who…don’t care about the art quality at all. They just want in on the hype.

This is an absolutely amazing explanation! But it leaves me with another question, how does “mining” for cryptocurrency use more energy than normal internet use?

Whoo boy, let’s dive into this one…

Short answer: because it was designed that way. On purpose.

Long answer: for a currency to have any useful value, the amount and production has to be limited somehow.

(Which makes sense, right? If we tried to pay people in leaves, nobody would go to work for 15 leaves an hour, not when they could go for a hike and pick 15 leaves off the trees in 15 seconds.)

Precious metals – gold, silver, copper – have been popular for all of recorded history, because the limiting factor is “this material is physically difficult to dig out of the ground.”

With US dollars, the limit is part “bills are printed with complicated techniques that you need special equipment to pull off” and part “it’s illegal to for anyone except the government to print new dollars, and we will take you to jail if we catch you at it.”

With cryptocurrency, it’s all digital, so there’s no naturally-rare mineral involved. And it’s decentralized, so nobody has the authority to claim “we are the Bitcoin Police and we can take you to jail if you do this wrong.”

If you want it to work, you have to come up with some artificial limit, and then build that directly into the base code.

I’m not any kind of expert in the technical details here, so please nobody get too picky about it…but the general idea is, the blockchain will only spit out a new coin in response to a computer running calculations.

And for every new coin, it demands more calculations than the last one.

If you could still get a new Bitcoin by, say, “not using the internet for a day, have your computer use that power for mining instead,” then nobody would spend thousands of dollars to exchange for one Bitcoin, right? Anybody who wanted one would just take a day off Tumblr to mine it themselves.

Basically, there’s no reason to buya Bitcoin for a dramatically higher price than it would cost you to minea Bitcoin.

And the mining process keeps requiring more power, so:

• First you can’t do it with just spare processing power from your main device, you need to buy a new one that’s fully dedicated to mining if you want to keep up
• The extra power usage is enough to put a notable spike in your electric bill
• One computer won’t do it anymore, you need two
• Then four
• Then eight
• You have a warehouse full of computers
• You have the electric bill that it takes to power a warehouse full of computers
• Plus the storage rental costs of the warehouse space
• The internet bill to keep all your computers in touch with the blockchain
• The air-conditioning bill that it takes to keep the warehouse from just flat-out melting
• Ongoing maintenance costs
• Replacement parts
• Not just any parts, you are buying up high-quality graphics cards and computer chips that can do the fastest processing
• So much that it’s contributing to a global computer-chip shortage (this is not an exaggeration; Wall Street Journal source, Tech Republic source)
• And the power demands are so high that defunct power plants are being re-activated to fill them (also not an exaggeration; Ars Technica source)
• And the processing requirements just keepgoing up and up and up….

When the exchange rate for Bitcoin is at $10,000, that implies “the cost of the equipment, maintenance, and power bills to mint 1 Bitcoin is now sohigh that people would rather pay $10,000 cash than deal with it.”

…okay, this is a little oversimplified – there’s also gambling and speculating involved. Say, you think oil prices are about to go up, maybe you pay a little more than the current rate, figuring the power costs of mining are about to get more expensive and you’ll come out ahead. Or say Elon Musk said something mean about a coin you have, maybe you sell all your tokens for a lower price, figuring it’s better to get out now than wait for it to crash even farther.

But you can see how they’re generally connected. Nobody would pay around $10,000 if the production cost was around $10.

One more link (which explains some of the same things in different words, in case mine aren’t working for everyone):

Here Is The Article You Can Send To People When They Say “But The Environmental Issues With Cryptoart Will Be Solved Soon, Right?”

And, finally, let’s tie this back to NFTs:

Another thing you need for your currency to work: it has to be usefulfor something other than “gambling on the price.”

It can’t just be something you endlessly swap for other currencies and hope the exchange rate works in your favor! There have to be places that say “we will take this in exchange for Tangible Goods And Services.”

Bitcoin has this, at least a little bit. Most places aren’t lining up to accept it, but it’s been around long enough to build up some credibility, so there are a few.

If I started a new cryptocurrency tomorrow where the cost of mining the firsttoken was $10K, nobody would bother. Because it has no credibility, no staying power, no way to ever convert that currency into actual stuff.

To be clear, people are launching new cryptocurrencies all the time.

Most of them aren’t even tryingto be useful, they’re just pump-and-dump schemes. Meaning the founders pump up people’s interest with “ScamToken will be the next Bitcoin, don’t miss this amazing opportunity, convert your $$$ into ScamToken now while it’s cheap!” Then they dump all theirtokens, selling them to all the people they’ve convinced to buy. It isn’t long before the hype fades, the cold reality of “we can’t do anything with this” sets in, and the buyers are left with wallets full of tokens nobody newwill buy, while the founders walk away with the $$$.

But some people are playing a longer game. They don’t want their currency to get “an afternoon’s worth of excitement from hyped-up crypto speculators” and then immediately flop. They want it to be useful for actually buying something, so it has a legitimate basis for getting some actual, stable value in the long run.

Or, failing that…they want it to appearto be useful for buying something. So it looks more credible. So the excitement lasts longer. So you reach outside the circle of “people who follow crypto for its own sake” and get the attention of “people who don’t care about crypto at all, but who do care about whatever Something you’ve convinced them your token will buy.”

So, hey: how big, do you think, is the market of people who care about digital art?

Now start paying attention to how many press releases for “an amazing opportunity to buy some cool new Non-Fungible Tokens” include “by the way, the specific Tokens we’re selling are from a cryptocurrency you’ve never heard of, let alone bought.”

This explanation is fairly concise and still gets to the point. I don’t think you could cover all of these facets that are relevant to the topic with meaningfully less text. And the post is still that long.

That’s another aspect of the crypto/NFT scam: you need to understand how cryptography and economics works and all the connecting parts between them. If someone levels a critique against them, crypto bros can always come out of the woodwork with another level of this whole construct and likely catch the complainer off guard with something they don’t know about or aren’t confident in.

The thing is though, most crypto bros are marks and also don’t understand how this works, instead they are psychologically committed to think that crypto is great because otherwise they lost a house worth of money for nothing but an ugly lion picture. The rest of them are true scammers, know exactly how this works, and rely on the complexity of it all to keep their marks in the dark.

That’s really dangerous! Almost nobody knows how this works! Legislators don’t know how crypto works, these people still don’t understand how facebook could possibly make money! And we expect them to regulate it?

It’s even worse though. Crypto exchanges are currently going mainstream, and wallstreet people are thinking about expanding their portfolios into crypto as well. I mean, why not? Bullshit investment instruments that serve no real purpose, that no normal person can understand and that are woefully underregulated is their whole deal! As soon as that happens the current crypto bro scammers will probably be edged out by the entrenched scam industry, i.e. the international financial sector.

Once that happens, it will practically be impossible to regulate crypto in any way. If finance has a tool to make money off, it will use its considerable influence over the political system that is stays that way.

That’s why I think it’s so important to make fun of crypto and NFTs now. It’s not just because it’s fun to laugh at those idiots (even though it really is fun). The narrative on crypto still hasn’t solidified. The average person has basically only heard of it and probably thinks it’s some kind of new techy invention that will revolutionise the economy (just like previous techy inventions that revolutionised the economy - at least that’s what the story is) and that some people got really rich off it. That might be good, right?

If instead the prevalent association with the term NFT is some losers with purple lion icons losing their shit because they paid 200k for an ugly image and then someone downloaded it from twitter, the whole “industry” suddenly loses a lot of its cool factor.

I’d just like to add some notes here in defence of the TECHNOLOGY. Not in defence of the use cases ect above.

There are other versions and methods for implementing Crypto-currency blockchains. These do NOT require GPUs. And are much like the above question about how is Crypto/NFTs different from general internet.

Etherium the second biggest Crypto-currency is currently in the transition to completely dropping GPU mining.

You can look up Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake to learn about their new implementation.

Bitcoin was the first implementation of a new technology and that’s basically always going to be the WORST the technology will ever be. Bitcoin does suck and it does need to either rapidly change or die.

And that goes for the points I’m making below too. There is room for improvement and development just like any new technology.

NFTs for Art? Yeah they suck and are dumb.

NFTs for online games? Potentially amazing.

Store game items/loot data in an NFT and give it to the user. The user now owns a copy of that data, and it exists inside AND outside the game. They can trade it outside the game, gift it, destroy it, whatever. It’s theirs.

When the game shuts down forever? You still own your items, your NFTs, as collectibles.

Your efforts and achievements don’t die with the game. Sure they might not be worth anything to anyone but you. But I know there are items I’ve earned I’d like a more permanent copy of. Also as they are collectibles at that point they may become worth money to others at any point in time and allow you to cash in on your hard work earning them.

The decentralized nature of Crypto-blockchains also has advantages but I don’t know if I can make them clearly valuable to anything above except as long as people, any random people, want to keep them alive they basically can without corporations or over large controlling bodies in control. And with the hell scape of capitalism we live in, that might become more and more important.

Check out WAX / WAX cloud for a carbon neutral blockchain all about games

Print game items/loot data on a trading card and mail it to the user.

The user now owns a copy of that data. They can trade it, gift it, destroy it, whatever. They still own it as a collectible if/when the game shuts down. If it ever becomes worth money to someone else, they can re-sell it.

And any random person can keep their trading card indefinitely, no corporation or government controlling what you do with it. For no ongoing energy costs at all!

So can we stop pretending any of these things are Amazing Revolutionary Advantages of Blockchain Tech?

They were all possible with the tech we had before the invention of the internet.

Also: let’s stop talking up proof-of-stake until it actually happens.

• “Ethereum “has been moving” to proof of stake for almost as long as it has existed. It has been so long that “Eth 2.0 PoS Coming Soon!” is something of a running joke. In all that time, any time the ecological cost of PoW is brought up, PoS is touted as the redemption just over the hill.”
• May 2021 article claiming it would happen “in the upcoming months”
  
• February 2020 article claiming it would happen by December 2020
  
• January 2019 article saying it was planned by the end of 2019
• Article saying it’s “finally starting to come to fruition” from November 2015
• That’s 6 years and counting of “hey, don’t worry so much about the environmental issues, they’re going to be solved Any Day Now”
  

Also also: proof-of-stake “requires users to leverage their existing cache of ether as a means to verify transactions and mint new tokens.”

So…the bigger account balance you already have of a currency, the more control you have over the network? Power is literally, directly centralized in whichever people/groups are the richest?

Thisisn’tescapingcapitalism. This is reinventing it.

And on some level – if you dig deep enough into who’s promoting this – I guarantee you’ll find a pack of shameless grifters, who know perfectly well that their realgoal is “suck a critical mass of open-hearted idealists into a new system of capitalism where we’re the ones with the capital.”

trixxtersrat:

erinptah:

takerfoxx:

WTF is an NTF? No matter how many times I’ve had it explained to me, it still makes no sense. The best I can figure that it’s a form of cryptocurrency with personalized artwork made on a really environmentally unfriendly material being sold for ridiculous prices just so suckers can get unique furry artz

Wwwwwelp, let me take a shot at it. *cracks knuckles*

Okay, so: you know how there are people who collect currency (the traditional, paper-and-coins type)?

And for some people, the specific thing they collect is “bills with unusual serial numbers”:

https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills

So if you find a $1 bill with a serial number like “010101010″, a collector might be willing to pay $50 for that bill.

In general, currency is “fungible”, which just means interchangeable. If I loan you a $1 bill today, and you pay me back tomorrow with a different $1 bill, same difference, that’s an equal exchange.

But if you find a person who specifically thinks Bills With Weird Serial Numbers are a neat thing they like having – they’ll pay extra for the weird $1 bill. And they wouldn’t be willing to swap it for some other $1 bill with just any non-remarkable serial number. It is a Non-Fungible Bill.

…to the collector, anyway. Not to anybody else! You can’t take it to the grocery store and say “please give me $50 worth of groceries for this $1 bill because the serial number is interesting.”

(Although, hey…if you had a way to convince lots of people that (a) all of them should turn into collectors and (b) every single random serial number is a special one they should pay extra for…that sure would be a way to make a lot of money, huh?)

Non-Fungible Tokens are the same idea, but with cryptocurrency.

Bitcoins have ID numbers. (Same with any other crypto token – I’ll just use Bitcoin as our example here.) If you can find a collector who likes Bitcoins with weird ID numbers, maybe they’ll pay you 50 Bitcoin for it?

…okay, it turned out nobody cares about Bitcoin ID numbers for their own sake.

But! The ID can be used in a URL.

This is where the art comes in.

You upload an image to that URL. Then you tell people “look, if you buy this token from me, it’s like you’re buying the image! Art collections are fun and interesting, right? Someone give me 50 Bitcoins now.”

Note that the file doesn’t needto be personalized, or unique, or anything like that:

• You can upload literally any file at that URL
• You can upload someone else’s art
• You could upload the same file to 20 different URLs, and sell 20 different NFTs of the same art
• You could load the page for a token someone else owns, download the file, and directly re-upload it to the page for a token youown
• The whole server could go down, and the URL from your token could be a 404 error for the rest of forever

So if you’re thinking “this sounds like a stupid deal that makes no sense” – you’re right! You are understanding the situation perfectly. This is total stupid nonsense. For the buyer.

For the person who owns some Bitcoins, and would like an easy way to turn them into even more Bitcoins? This is a fantasticracket.

Pay me a ton of tokens – or, preferably, the US$ equivalent of tons of tokens – for this single token I have! It’s totally actually worth that much, I promise.

Also, go ahead and Venmo me $50 for every random $1 bill in my wallet. This is a great deal for you.

And if you believe all that…I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Sidenote: the “environmentally unfriendly” part isn’t about material, it’s about energy. Producing and exchanging cryptocurrency takes an obsceneamount of computing power, which uses an obscene amount of electricity. And it’s not a special thing about NFTs – it’s how all cryptocurrency works.

(A comparison I saw recently is, at the current rate, “people mining Bitcoin” for 1 day uses about the same amount of energy as “powering every commercial building in the United States” for 2 months.)

Sidenote 2: pretty sure the reason so much NFT art is ugly is, most of the Actual Artists have thought about it for 5 seconds and realized it’s a big racket. (Or been warned off it by other Actual Artists.) And the people who want to buyActual Art are commissioning the artists directly, same as always.

So the people left in the NFT-buying scene are mostly people who…don’t care about the art quality at all. They just want in on the hype.

This is an absolutely amazing explanation! But it leaves me with another question, how does “mining” for cryptocurrency use more energy than normal internet use?

Whoo boy, let’s dive into this one…

Short answer: because it was designed that way. On purpose.

Long answer: for a currency to have any useful value, the amount and production has to be limited somehow.

(Which makes sense, right? If we tried to pay people in leaves, nobody would go to work for 15 leaves an hour, not when they could go for a hike and pick 15 leaves off the trees in 15 seconds.)

Precious metals – gold, silver, copper – have been popular for all of recorded history, because the limiting factor is “this material is physically difficult to dig out of the ground.”

With US dollars, the limit is part “bills are printed with complicated techniques that you need special equipment to pull off” and part “it’s illegal to for anyone except the government to print new dollars, and we will take you to jail if we catch you at it.”

With cryptocurrency, it’s all digital, so there’s no naturally-rare mineral involved. And it’s decentralized, so nobody has the authority to claim “we are the Bitcoin Police and we can take you to jail if you do this wrong.”

If you want it to work, you have to come up with some artificial limit, and then build that directly into the base code.

I’m not any kind of expert in the technical details here, so please nobody get too picky about it…but the general idea is, the blockchain will only spit out a new coin in response to a computer running calculations.

And for every new coin, it demands more calculations than the last one.

If you could still get a new Bitcoin by, say, “not using the internet for a day, have your computer use that power for mining instead,” then nobody would spend thousands of dollars to exchange for one Bitcoin, right? Anybody who wanted one would just take a day off Tumblr to mine it themselves.

Basically, there’s no reason to buya Bitcoin for a dramatically higher price than it would cost you to minea Bitcoin.

And the mining process keeps requiring more power, so:

• First you can’t do it with just spare processing power from your main device, you need to buy a new one that’s fully dedicated to mining if you want to keep up
• The extra power usage is enough to put a notable spike in your electric bill
• One computer won’t do it anymore, you need two
• Then four
• Then eight
• You have a warehouse full of computers
• You have the electric bill that it takes to power a warehouse full of computers
• Plus the storage rental costs of the warehouse space
• The internet bill to keep all your computers in touch with the blockchain
• The air-conditioning bill that it takes to keep the warehouse from just flat-out melting
• Ongoing maintenance costs
• Replacement parts
• Not just any parts, you are buying up high-quality graphics cards and computer chips that can do the fastest processing
• So much that it’s contributing to a global computer-chip shortage (this is not an exaggeration; Wall Street Journal source, Tech Republic source)
• And the power demands are so high that defunct power plants are being re-activated to fill them (also not an exaggeration; Ars Technica source)
• And the processing requirements just keepgoing up and up and up….

When the exchange rate for Bitcoin is at $10,000, that implies “the cost of the equipment, maintenance, and power bills to mint 1 Bitcoin is now sohigh that people would rather pay $10,000 cash than deal with it.”

…okay, this is a little oversimplified – there’s also gambling and speculating involved. Say, you think oil prices are about to go up, maybe you pay a little more than the current rate, figuring the power costs of mining are about to get more expensive and you’ll come out ahead. Or say Elon Musk said something mean about a coin you have, maybe you sell all your tokens for a lower price, figuring it’s better to get out now than wait for it to crash even farther.

But you can see how they’re generally connected. Nobody would pay around $10,000 if the production cost was around $10.

One more link (which explains some of the same things in different words, in case mine aren’t working for everyone):

Here Is The Article You Can Send To People When They Say “But The Environmental Issues With Cryptoart Will Be Solved Soon, Right?”

And, finally, let’s tie this back to NFTs:

Another thing you need for your currency to work: it has to be usefulfor something other than “gambling on the price.”

It can’t just be something you endlessly swap for other currencies and hope the exchange rate works in your favor! There have to be places that say “we will take this in exchange for Tangible Goods And Services.”

Bitcoin has this, at least a little bit. Most places aren’t lining up to accept it, but it’s been around long enough to build up some credibility, so there are a few.

If I started a new cryptocurrency tomorrow where the cost of mining the firsttoken was $10K, nobody would bother. Because it has no credibility, no staying power, no way to ever convert that currency into actual stuff.

To be clear, people are launching new cryptocurrencies all the time.

Most of them aren’t even tryingto be useful, they’re just pump-and-dump schemes. Meaning the founders pump up people’s interest with “ScamToken will be the next Bitcoin, don’t miss this amazing opportunity, convert your $$$ into ScamToken now while it’s cheap!” Then they dump all theirtokens, selling them to all the people they’ve convinced to buy. It isn’t long before the hype fades, the cold reality of “we can’t do anything with this” sets in, and the buyers are left with wallets full of tokens nobody newwill buy, while the founders walk away with the $$$.

But some people are playing a longer game. They don’t want their currency to get “an afternoon’s worth of excitement from hyped-up crypto speculators” and then immediately flop. They want it to be useful for actually buying something, so it has a legitimate basis for getting some actual, stable value in the long run.

Or, failing that…they want it to appearto be useful for buying something. So it looks more credible. So the excitement lasts longer. So you reach outside the circle of “people who follow crypto for its own sake” and get the attention of “people who don’t care about crypto at all, but who do care about whatever Something you’ve convinced them your token will buy.”

So, hey: how big, do you think, is the market of people who care about digital art?

Now start paying attention to how many press releases for “an amazing opportunity to buy some cool new Non-Fungible Tokens” include "by the way, the specific Tokens we’re selling are from a cryptocurrency you’ve never heard of, let alone bought.”

CEEK VR × Playing for Change Foundation

CEEK VR × Playing for Change Foundation

CEEK VR is excited to partner with the incredible Playing For Change Foundation. As partners, CEEK will exclusively premiere the Official Formula 1 Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix after party and Impact Awards show in the CEEK VR METAVERSE.

Playing for Change Foundation held its premier concert, the Official Formula 1 Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix After Party, on May 4, 2022 at DAER Hard Rock…

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What can be the impact of Bitcoin on the advertising sector of Paris?

What can be the impact of Bitcoin on the advertising sector of Paris?

The impact of Bitcoin on the advertising sector in Paris could be far-reaching, as this emerging new form of currency has already begun to disrupt the financial markets. As more businesses begin to accept Bitcoin for their goods and services, they will likely begin to advertise their products and services using this new form of payment. It could create a shift in the advertising landscape. Just…

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Effect of Bitcoin on the Nokia market

Effect of Bitcoin on the Nokia market

Bitcoin has had a profound impact on the market for Nokia stock. While the company’s share price has been volatile in recent months, it appears that Bitcoin-related activity is having a positive effect on the stock. In particular, it seems that Nokia’s association with blockchain technology is helping to boost investor confidence in the company. Platform like Oil Profit also using bitcoin.

It is…

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