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SEC says it will deregulate cryptocurrencies with 'Project Crypto'

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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

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

    Currency has stable and usable value.

    Bitcoin has neither of those.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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

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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

    Monero is good for completely private and secure transactions. People often use it to buy drugs online... From what I've heard.

  • 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.

    Monero absolutely is untraceable

  • 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.

    I could be wrong, but I believe most exchanges use ACH to directly deposit into a person's bank account.

    I'm no expert, but I believe ACH is separate from your Visas and MasterCards

  • X Stuck Paying Fees to Arbitrate With Laid Off Twitter Workers

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    X Stuck Paying Fees to Arbitrate With Laid Off X Workers
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  • We're Not Innovating, We’re Just Forgetting Slower

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    … /results. I'm....not quite understanding you reply. I think you're trying to add on "results" to my statement of "cost/effort", but I covered "results" with my first statement of "features or functionality". So if I understand your post properly, I think your addition is simply duplicative of what I already included. Have I misunderstood what you're trying to communicate?
  • Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3 million peers

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    Yeah i suppose any form of payment that you have to keep secret for some reason is a reason to use crypto, though I struggle to imagine needing that if you're not doing something dodgy imagine you’re a YouTuber and want to accept donations: that will force you to give out your name to them, which they could use to get your address and phone number. There’s always someone that hates you, and I rather not have them knowing my personal info Wat. Crypto is not good at solving that, it's in fact much much worse than traditional payment methods. There's a reason scammers always want to be paid in crypto if you’re the seller then it’s a lot better. With the traditional banking system, with enough knowledge you can cheat both sides: stolen cards, abusive chargebacks, bank accounts in other countries under fake name/fake ID… Crypto simplifies scamming when the seller, and pretty much makes it impossible for buyers What specifically are you boycotting? Card payments, international tranfers, national transfers taking days to complete, money being seizable at all times many banks lose money on them Their plans are basically all focused on the card you get. Pretty sure they make money with it, else many wouldn’t offer cash back (selling infos and getting a fee from card payments?) if you think the people that benefit from you using crypto (crypto exchange owners and billionaires that own crypto etc.) are less evil than goverment regulated banks, you're deluded. Banks are evil anyways, does it really change anything? The difference is that it technically helps everyone using crypto, not only the rich. Plus P2P exchanges are a thing You'll spend more money using crypto for that, not less That’s just factually false. Do you know the price of a swift transfer? Now compare it to crypto tx fees, with many being under $0.01
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    If AI constantly refined its own output, sure, unless it hits a wall eventually or starts spewing bullshit because of some quirk of training. But I doubt it could learn to summarise better without external input, just like a compiler won't produce a more optimised version of itself without human development work.
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    It's one of those things where periodically someone gets sanctioned and a few others get scared and stop doing it (or tone it down) for a while. I guess SHEIN are either overdoing it or they crossed the popularity threshold where companies become more scrutinized
  • Meta is now a defense contractor

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    Best decision ever for a company. The US gov pisses away billions of their taxpayers money and buys all the low quality crap from the MIL without questions.
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    Online group started by a 15 year old in Texas playing Minecraft and watching extreme gore they said in this article. Were they also involved in said sexual exploiting of other kids, or was that just the spin offs that came from other people/countries? It all sounds terrible but I wonder if this was just a kid who did something for attention and then other perpetrators got involved and kept taking it further and down other rabbit holes. Definitely seems like a know what your kid is doing online scenario, but also yikes on all the 18+ members who joined and participated in such.