SEC says it will deregulate cryptocurrencies with 'Project Crypto'
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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.
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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.
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.
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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 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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yep just like all the AI regulations they're deregulating.
It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday […] it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.
I hate how words don't mean anything to these people, and their shitbrained followers eat it up.
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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.So. Which one would you advise? To use for the purposes described.
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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?
Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency worth owning really. All the pump and dumps/rugpulls you hear about are about “shitcoins”.
Plus word is Square and PayPal will start to implement bitcoin payments to their services very soon
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Didn't Newegg have some kind of crypto payment option? Do they still have it?
I funded my entire gaming pc with bitcoin, I believe they still accept it
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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.
It’s not about avoiding taxes, it’s having to submit every single transaction you make in crypto on your tax forms. One year I had to manually compile hundreds of transactions. Only for the irs forms to show their of a net loss and no taxes needed to be paid.
I wasn’t using it as an investment, so I didn’t care about the loss, which was under $10 anyway.
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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?
Bitcoin has become a reserve currency like gold, without the heavy weight
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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
