SEC says it will deregulate cryptocurrencies with 'Project Crypto'
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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?
If things go as they do, then it'll be your only option soon to pay for porn.
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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!
Fuck that buy xmr.
Not because you should invest, but because you'll need a way to pay for mullvad and diy E, considering everything else.
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So. Which one would you advise? To use for the purposes described.
I'd use ethereum with a USDC token for anything that didn't need to be ethereum specifically. Then you're not subject to the volatility of the crypto itself, but still gain the ability to pay for things or transfer money globally. Unless you actually want the crypto exposure of course.
If you wanted stronger privacy, you could put the ethereum/usdc through Tornado Cash first. The SEC tried to sanction it and lost in court.
Also staying in USDC is easier for tax purposes.
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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.
the Ethereum blockchain
Ah, yes. The fine folks that gave us NFTs.
No pump and dumps to be found over there
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Bitcoin has become a reserve currency like gold, without the heavy weight
Currency has stable and usable value.
Bitcoin has neither of those.
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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?
Yes. There are a few legitimate non gambling non crime uses. But those are typically very minor transactions. The problem is that it is somewhat anonymous and not refundable. It turns out that we really do want those features for almost all medium-high price purchases. Otherwise the thieves and scam artists will jack our shit.
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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?
Yes. Can you imagine my surprise when my drug money suddenly became mainstream? You could also buy weapons and order an assasin online.
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Currency has stable and usable value.
Bitcoin has neither of those.
Honestly this is bullshit. In 1880s China they'd sometimes use thousand years old coins to pay for stuff. Coins of fucking non-standard weight and value! With symbols of sometimes dead writing systems (like Tangut). And still that was currency. EDIT: I mean, BTC is volatile, but not that bad.
BTW, I once had an idea of a truly decentralized electronic currency without proof of work and all such, with plenty of emitters, signed transactions and coins of different emitters and parties or partitions having different value, determined via market mechanisms. Like automatic haggling on every transaction, a bit the way MMORPG markets have it, except, eh, they still have some fixed currency, and here it would all be relative.
For all the inconveniences it would have two very good traits - no blockchain and no power effect (like the majority of the network deciding something or premined coins). But this isn't important because GNU Taler people have made basically a similar, but far better, system than what I imagined, and theirs actually exists.
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In a Thursday speech, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Paul S. Atkins announced “Project Crypto,” an initiative to modernize the country’s securities rules and regulations to move financial markets on-chain.
“Under my leadership, the SEC will not stand idly by and watch innovations develop overseas while our capital markets remain stagnant,” he said at an America First Policy Institute event in Washington D.C. His plan includes measures to reshore crypto businesses that have left the country and to ensure that “archaic rules and regulations do not smother innovation and entrepreneurship in America.”
Ready for another crash.
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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?
It's easy to transfer to other countries. Ever tried to send $20 to another country like Kazakhstan? It's a nightmare
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Currency has stable and usable value.
Bitcoin has neither of those.
You mean the value that crashed like 30% over two years? At least bitcoin went back up
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You can easily mine from home in a country like China that has $0.08 per kwh energy cost. Not everyone lives in California
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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.
That's not true if your home electricity cost is low. You will be still making a profit. Last I checked hardware pays for itself after a year if your electricity is very cheap. Then it's very slow profit and then it gets too old to make a profit.
With very cheap electricity you can expect 2x return after a few years and then it becomes garbage when the difficulty is too high
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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.
A lot of bitcoin transactions are opening lightning channels so second layer is working there too
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hopefuly not, the IRS needs some way to track income based on the fluctuating value of crypto. yall gotta pay taxes like the rest of us.
When you change btc into eth the IRS considers it realizing your capital gains. Even though you don't have USD to pay extra taxes with.
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A lot of bitcoin transactions are opening lightning channels so second layer is working there too
The comment you're responding to linked to a page giving statistics about the Lightning network. The number of channels peaked in 2022 and has been going down ever since then.
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Honestly this is bullshit. In 1880s China they'd sometimes use thousand years old coins to pay for stuff. Coins of fucking non-standard weight and value! With symbols of sometimes dead writing systems (like Tangut). And still that was currency. EDIT: I mean, BTC is volatile, but not that bad.
BTW, I once had an idea of a truly decentralized electronic currency without proof of work and all such, with plenty of emitters, signed transactions and coins of different emitters and parties or partitions having different value, determined via market mechanisms. Like automatic haggling on every transaction, a bit the way MMORPG markets have it, except, eh, they still have some fixed currency, and here it would all be relative.
For all the inconveniences it would have two very good traits - no blockchain and no power effect (like the majority of the network deciding something or premined coins). But this isn't important because GNU Taler people have made basically a similar, but far better, system than what I imagined, and theirs actually exists.
1 Bitcoin used to be with less than a dollar.
Now it's thousands of dollars.
It's also lost thousands of dollars in value.
It hasn't even been 2 decades.
There's never been ANYTHING that volatile and unstable aside from maybe fucking tulips.
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You mean the value that crashed like 30% over two years? At least bitcoin went back up
It rebounding and crashing by hundreds in value like a meth head on caffeinated cocaine laced with LSD is what doesn't make it a currency.
No one wants a shit currency where one day a donut costs 1000 and the next 2000 and on the weekend it's either 599 or 3999.
That's why it's at best a speculative asset, except it's dumber than that because it's intangible. It's like the long term stupidity of fiat mixed with insane instability, all while using way more resources.
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Yes. Can you imagine my surprise when my drug money suddenly became mainstream? You could also buy weapons and order an assasin online.
Where tf do you order an assassin online? It's an FBI agent on the other end for sure.
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1 Bitcoin used to be with less than a dollar.
Now it's thousands of dollars.
It's also lost thousands of dollars in value.
It hasn't even been 2 decades.
There's never been ANYTHING that volatile and unstable aside from maybe fucking tulips.
Well, it should have went to some value from no value. So initial volatility was to be expected.
While the current volatility - I don't know, I guess it's because a transaction is expensive and takes some time. If transactions would cost almost nothing and were almost instantaneous, I'd expect the volatility by now to not be very big. And if there were no premined coins, of course.
And if there were inflation built into the system. BTC proponents boast how it having no such artificial mechanism is good.
They, 1) don't understand that having inflation stabilizes a currency, because there's a stimulus to spend practically and not as part of speculation, 2) don't understand that what they would want to imitate, gold, has inflation too.
So - inflation and cheap and fast transactions are what would make BTC less volatile. It would be a less lucrative speculative asset.