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.

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.

So. Which one would you advise? To use for the purposes described.

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

I funded my entire gaming pc with bitcoin, I believe they still accept it

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.

Bitcoin has become a reserve currency like gold, without the heavy weight

If things go as they do, then it'll be your only option soon to pay for porn.

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.

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.

the Ethereum blockchain

Ah, yes. The fine folks that gave us NFTs.

No pump and dumps to be found over there

Currency has stable and usable value.

Bitcoin has neither of those.

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.

Yes. Can you imagine my surprise when my drug money suddenly became mainstream? You could also buy weapons and order an assasin online.

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.

Ready for another crash.

It's easy to transfer to other countries. Ever tried to send $20 to another country like Kazakhstan? It's a nightmare

You mean the value that crashed like 30% over two years? At least bitcoin went back up

You can easily mine from home in a country like China that has $0.08 per kwh energy cost. Not everyone lives in California