You can anonymously buy things on the dark web with monero. I've been looking to buy gift cards so I can purchase things anonymously. I believe you can even pay for Mullvad with monero

To be fair, the SEC has only really gone after cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin, which is the only major blockchain that uses the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work. The things the SEC was trying to regulate, that it considered securities, are almost entirely running on Proof-of-Stake networks, which have negligible relative energy consumption.

This will almost certainly have a lot of other negative impacts, but I doubt it will have that much on the climate.

Assuming you can find a buyer who will process that crypto, without touching either of those payment processors. All the crypto evangelists seem to forget the major crypto payment platforms are in use because you can actually rapidly exchange your crypto for that thing you can actually pay your rent with - but those function largely on the backbone of big payment platforms to trade that crypto into cash for the merchant.

Proof of work is inherently ecologically flawed, but proof of stake is inherently socially flawed. It's literally "the people with the most money get to make the rules". While it's undeniably better for the environment, it doesn't seem like an improvement to me. If anything, it undermines crypto's greatest strengths, decentralization and equal access.

Ether has a market cap of $450 billion, and that doesn't count all the other tokens running on the Ethereum blockchain. It's been running since 2013. If you call that a "boutique coin" based on "pump-and-dump" then clearly you've either got a highly biased or highly ignorant view of cryptocurrency.

If that's not obsolete, I'm not holding my breath on Bitcoin.

There are technical flaws in Bitcoin that could literally crash it if they aren't patched out before they become exploitable, as in it's at zero value and will never recover. That's not something that can happen to gold.

Didn't Newegg have some kind of crypto payment option? Do they still have it?

I think it's early to call Bitcoin obsolete, it is still after all the dominant cryptocurrency by every measure.

Other blockchains have continued moving on.

So which systems do you see as offering real utility or innovation? Obviously there's etherium, and it has its own issues, but what else out there do you think is really more than a just gimmick or a scheme?

modernproblemsmodernsolutionsmeme.jpg

It's literally "the people with the most money get to make the rules".

No, it's not. Ether is not a governance token, Ether holders have no influence over the rules of the blockchain. This is a very common misconception and I can understand why it's easy to fall into, but consider it this way; when someone puts up a stake they are not buying "influence" over the blockchain, they are giving the blockchain a hostage. They're putting their money under the control of a contract that will destroy their money if they do anything that contravenes the rules of the blockchain.

So who gets to decide what rules the blockchain runs under? Everyone who uses it. They're the ones who are generating transactions, and those transactions are cryptographically signed to work on the particular version of the blockchain that they want to use. If they collectively decide to switch to a different version of the blockchain then they collectively change what version of the blockchain their transactions are going to. If the stakers don't go along with that transition then they're left holding Ether on a blockchain that nobody is using, which means that Ether is valueless.

This isn't hypothetical. Ethereum undergoes routine hard forks to upgrade the network, adding new features. Proof-of-stake itself was one such upgrade. There have been subsequent upgrades that did things to the network that the stakers probably weren't happy with - notably the one that added EIP-1559, a change that causes transaction fees to be burned rather than giving them to the stakers. It was a change that literally took money out of the hands of the stakers. But they went along with it because they had to. They were not in charge.

If anything, it undermines crypto's greatest strengths, decentralization and equal access.

How easily can you get into Bitcoin mining right now? Regular computer hardware doesn't cut it, hasn't cut it for a long time. You need a purpose-built ASIC, a piece of specialist hardware that is only manufactured by a handful of computer hardware companies. You'll also need extremely cheap electricity, which you won't be getting out of the wall of your house. You'll need an industrial power feed, probably located somewhere near a power plant with excess capacity where you can get it particularly cheap.

If you want to set up a solo Ethereum validator, all you need to do is buy ~$120,000 worth of Ether and make a transaction to stake it. You can do that anywhere. No special hardware is needed, no ongoing significant power cost. You do need a reasonably stable internet connection, but it doesn't have to be a high-speed one. You could probably do it from a cabin in the woods over Starlink. Nobody can stop you. Nobody will even know who you are.

If $120,000 is a bit much for you (it's still far less than would be required for a Bitcoin mining farm) and you don't mind a little bit of reliance on third parties, you could buy some liquid staking tokens. Spend as little as you want, they subdivide. Or wait a little while, Ethereum's devs are mulling a proposal to reduce the minimum stake from 32 Ether to 1 Ether. That'll reduce the price for setting up a solo validator to $3,683 at today's price.

It's a really good way to bribe politicians and public figures.

Finally, some good fucking news.

I don't care how much you hate it, start stocking up on BTC and ETH now. $1,000,000 BTC, here we come!

Its technology is obsolete. That doesn't mean it can't still dominate the market share.

For example, a case could be made that coal power is obsolete. There are still plenty of coal power plants on the grid. Windows 8 is obsolete, but you'll find plenty of computers still running it. And so forth. There's inertia in these things.

And Bitcoin's current "dominance" is 60%. That's not exactly an overwhelming position.

So which systems do you see as offering real utility or innovation? Obviously there's etherium

You answered your own question.

Ethereum's not just one token, mind you. There's an ecosystem on Ethereum with a lot of innovation that's not directly rooted in Ethereum's advances. That's the benefit of supporting smart contracts, it's a general purpose computer that other stuff can be run on. There are a lot of layer-2 blockchains running on Ethereum, for example Aztec which has Monero-like privacy built into it.

You had me in the first half, not gonna lie.

Fuck the haters—you don't have to pander to them. I like crypto too, and I don't give a flying fuck how many times I get downvoted for saying that.

Investing in BTC and ETH has made me thousands over these past 3 years or so (I can send screenshots as proof to any naysayers). All because I ignore the haters and keep stacking sats. So why the fuck would I listen to anyone who calls it a "sCaM"? But I digress; it's not my fault that people are stupid.

Sounds like another pump and dump scheme to inflate prices of popular crypto, which trump and his buddies already bought cheap, sell high, and then reverse the process after profits have been made. All this guy knows is money. It's not even the value, just getting a payday is his high.

The fact that scams persist on blockchain is an unfortunate side effect of the whole uncensorable thing...

Yes, Etherium is very cool and it can do a whole bunch of really cool things! But on the other hand, it can't replace Bitcoin. It's too heavy, transactions are too large, the network can't hope to handle the number transactions per minute that Bitcoin does. I think most people agree that the two systems compliment each other, they each work well in their niche, but couldn't do the others' job.

So yeah, I don't see Etherium replacing Bitcoin. Perhaps a layer-2 could, but I have yet to see any that offer the kind of tangible improvements that would really make it stand out.

the network can't hope to handle the number transactions per minute that Bitcoin does.

As of this writing, Ethereum is handling 21.1 transactions per second. Bitcoin is handling 4.9 transactions per second. So purely in layer-1 transactions per second Ethereum's got 4.3 times the capacity of Bitcoin.

Some of those Ethereum transactions are for running layer-2s, as you mention that greatly expands Ethereum's capacity. Ethereum is specifically designed to be able to handle layer-2s well, it has features that were added to make them easier to scale. Bitcoin, on the other hand, was never designed for layer-2s and what it does have are hacked-together bodges like Lightning that are going nowhere.

I think most people agree that the two systems compliment each other, they each work well in their niche, but couldn't do the others' job.

What "job" does Bitcoin do that Ethereum can't? And before you say "digital gold", there are literal gold-backed stabletokens on Ethereum if that's what suits your fancy.

This was a really interesting reply, thanks. I'd leave a longer response, but honestly I really need to be asleep right now.

If $120,000 is a bit much for you (it's still far less than would be required for a Bitcoin mining farm)

I will say though, even today the barrier for entry is lower than that for bitcoin mining. You can definitely get started for $1000. I wouldn't really recommend Bitcoin mining as a hobby at this point, but that's basically the low end for a single machine.

Personally, that's about as much as I ever spent on mining equipment, and it was fun, I learned a lot, and it was even lucrative in the end.

It's a good way to launder money. They used to sell coke to fund off-the-books CIA operations, now they can just give them shitcoins.

This was a really interesting reply, thanks. I'd leave a longer response, but honestly I really need to be asleep right now.

No problem. It's past my bedtime too, but I'm really pleased that I'm able to discuss this stuff and I'm not getting downvotes or called a shill simply for providing information. It's always been a big area of fascination for me, the technology is really neat.

You can definitely get started for $1000.

Sure, you could set up something that can process blocks. But there's no way you'd be able to make a profit with something that small. One of the fundamental tenets of cryptocurrency is that it doesn't rely on anyone acting altruistically, it assumes that everyone involved is in it for the money. It leverages greed to ensure that everyone "follows the rules", by making it so that if you break those rules you make less money. So I wouldn't consider a blockchain to be secure if it depended on miners who mined at a loss out of the goodness of their hearts. When people worry about centralization they overlook that Bitcoin has economies of scale that massively favors the bigger mining operations, the dollars-per-hash are much lower for the warehouses full of ASICs next door to a power plant than for the guy with a graphics card in a closet at home.

I did also mention that you could get involved in staking on Ethereum for much less than $120,000, at the cost of depending on third parties to handle the actual validation. You can do that either through staking pools or liquid staking. Essentially, you own a "share" of a single validator's stake and get a proportionate portion of the validator's rewards, minus a fee that the validator charges for actually running the validator.