now we get to see what happens with AI running wall street too!

Only if Bitcoin remains predominant. The rest of the ecosystem largely moved on to proof-of-stake validation years ago, which doesn't require significant amounts of energy expenditure.

Genuine question, is crypto good for anything other than gambling at the moment? I don't ever hear of anyone buying anything with crypto, only exchanging it out for USD. NFTs are basically a punchline now... what is it actually good for?

Maybe if you want to buy something visa, Mastercard, and Christian nut jobs don’t want you to have. Otherwise it’s a total scam.

Wouldn’t it be funny if it got special protections because it was declared a religion?

Suckas bouta get took.

It was supposed to be the very thing that Paypal become (probably why Elon hedged his bet on it after getting kicked) but it became so inefficient with expensive transaction fees that everyone turned it down. As a consequence, it became a worse version of the stock market.

Mind you, this was before we even before we knew about the environmental damage.

Oh no, I meant the regular market. So both markets basically.

Fair enough. xD

You say that now, but wait for the US economy to completely shit itself.

COVID and the Great Recession were both spectacular for reducing emissions.

Shit, lets fucking do it. What is J.R. "Bob" Dobbs' stance on the issue?

The rest of the ecosystem largely moved on to proof-of-stake validation

Eh. Bitcoin mining alone accounts for about 0.7% of 2024 global CO₂ emissions annually, with 40% of that mining happening in US and Canada. 130.50 Mt is nothing to sneeze at.

The crypto industry was supposed to decarbonize by 2025 – how’s that going?
There's evidence the industry has started putting plans into action, but the energy consumption of Bitcoin networks is still higher than countries like Norway and Sweden

Far too little and too late.

Religion [Evil Islamic] not Religion [Glorious Christian]

It's not untraceable, but it's way more anonymous for routine purchases than CC. Also with all the nonsense the CC companies are pulling lately, it's a nice example of why de-centralized, unbanked fiat has real value. Personally I use it for search engine subscriptions and paying VPN fees with at least a layer of "hey, you can't sell my demographic data or send me junk mail" privacy. Also if you want to send money to someone without using venmo type garbage, it's super easy and flexible even if you don't have the same type of crypto as the person you are sending to. It's huge for sending money internationally as there are big fees associated with international money brokers when involving traditional fiat.
The mantra of crypto as a scam is wrong. It's just seriously overvalued and has been turned into scam as an investment commodity. The technology itself, at least modern scalable versions that don't require AI level nuclear power plants to scale, is not flawed. The fact that the archiac unscalable bitcoin prototype is still the most valued is a great example of the mismatch between real world value and the fucked up crypto marketplace.

I literally just said:

Only if Bitcoin remains predominant.

Yes, Bitcoin still uses proof-of-work. That's because Bitcoin is itself a fossil, its userbase and developers have consciously decided to not adopt new blockchain technologies and remain locked in the current protocol. Other blockchains have continued moving on. Alas, Bitcoin has name recognition and inertia on its side, which will keep it around for a long time. But at some point I expect its obsolescence will catch up with it and overcome that inertia.

Other blockchains have continued moving on

Sure. But they're relegated to the realm of highly sketchy pre-mining schemes and pump-and-dump market gambits. There's no serious third party mining community for these boutique coins.

I expect its obsolescence will catch up with it and overcome that inertia.

We still have people digging yellow rocks out of the ground and shoving them in big vaults to store fiscal value.

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

Sui specifically is a unique horse in this race, as they are trying to really push for zero knowledge/trust models as well as what is known in cryptography spaces as multi party computation.

What this all effectively means long term is several things

• moving between one cryptocurrency on one chain to another can be done without trusting a 3rd party 'bridge'
• you still retain control of your assets on cryptocurrency exchanges utilizing the tech instead of trusting some 3rd party like Coinbase or Charles Schwab to fulfill their end of the bargain
• with the raise of the bs porn ID laws, this tech coupled with the unique dynamic NFTs sui has could generate you a proof token that has your personal info hidden after verifying with some trusted company handing these token out and being able to use them at sites to prove you are an adult without revealing your name.

The problem with all of this of course is it is very new tech, and it's hard to break into a space that's littered with scammers running pyramid schemes or just pulling the rug out from under people and running with the money.

The tech is there to eliminate a lot of unnecessary middle men in the financial world, but like all shiny new things, it is still lacking mass adoption and formal govt rules around it. This greatly limits the utility of this for the common man to just sending money to friends who have an exchange to cash them out or just paying for things visa won't let you, like Pornhub or something.

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.