this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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No, people just don't like crypto because it's a huge waste of energy that has no use for the average person at the moment and is only used by rich people to get richer without much regulation. Don't get me wrong, it might definitely be useful when used correctly in the future. Not wasting as much energy by ditching proof of work, becoming actually useful for normal transactions, etc. But right now it's just an overhyped technology for obnoxious cryptobros.
I mean...I'll go one further. I know there have been many historical "aged like milk" quotes, like about how much RAM computers need, but I'm still saying this in confidence: I don't think that cryptocurrency or blockchains will ever have a useful purpose. Their design is built to solve societal problems, but introduces worse problems in implementing them. This goes well beyond just taking too much electricity.
They already have a useful purpose. Sending crypto is much easier than sending different currencies into different countries. The services exist, but they are prohibitively expensive if you're sending like $50
Send Monero or something and it's far easier and faster. You can exchange it for your own currency locally or just sit on it.
Just gonna copy/paste this from someone else's comment in this thread: https://www.reuters.com/technology/california-dmv-puts-42-million-car-titles-blockchain-fight-fraud-2024-07-30/
So... whoops. That didn't take long, huh?
Every time one of these articles is posted, I predict a very very short investigation into the technical workings of the project will find that the same could’ve been done with a much simpler central database. Or, that they were actually using a database at the backend and wasting their whole crypto approach.
And we all know technology never changes or improves over time. Good catch.
Technology absolutely improves.
But blockchain is worse. And it's not close.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/california-dmv-puts-42-million-car-titles-blockchain-fight-fraud-2024-07-30/
I can almost see the monk smacking an orphan for holding the spoon in the wrong hand :D
Bitcoin ≠ cryptocurrency.
Ethereum lowered it's power consumption by over 99% after switching to Proof-of-Stake.
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency and we don't even fucking know who came up with it.
How about we don't throw away the possibility of 5.1 Surround Sound Blu-Ray Audio, because wax cylinders sound like shit?
"Computers are cool and all, but they take up entire rooms and only do simple calculations! It's a complete waste of time and money to invest in such a technology!"
^That's you
This is actually part of government propaganda to discredit cryptocurrencies.
Lemmy servers consume energy too and half of the content is memes, i don't see anyone complaining about it.
You can't begin to imagine just how much energy cryptocurrencies use. A web server can never come close.
but AI model training can.
Pretty sure people have been shitting on AI pretty heavily as well, partly for those reasons (but also for several others).
I'm sure meta or google energy usage is up there but i've yet to see someone complaining about mr.beast or cristiano ronaldo wasting energy with their videos.
Maybe because people value entertainment more than invisible money that won't help them anyway.
or more like because the government doesn't have problems with people keeping themself busy on entertainment vs them using a decentralized and open currency that can bypass financial institutions
I'm pretty sure the government isn't forcing people to watch YouTube and neither of the people you mentioned are government employees, unless you're concocting some elaborate Alex Jones-level conspiracy theory.
You seem to have same comprehension problems or to be in bad faith. Read carefully what i wrote, it's nothing of what you said.
Trying to label everything as a conspiracy theory is something the government and propaganda have been doing excessively over the past years. You may not like it to hear it but every time cristiano ronaldo appears in state media and gets paid for it they are indeed working for the government. When the government put restrictions on youtube competitors such tiktok or when they use it to broadcast official events, they are indeed forcing you to use youtube.
That's not the point of the discussion anyway: cryptocurrencies aren't controlled by the government and hard to control by design, there lies the government interest to boycott them.
Maybe if it was controlled, it wouldn't constantly fluctuate in value and would actually be worth buying things with without hoping for a day when it's worth more and you're richer.
Countries currency fluctuate in times to.
I can go to the supermarket next week and milk will cost about the same in dollars as it did this week because the value does not change that rapidly.
Not true with Bitcoin.
If you live in america and you are lucky the price of thing stopped increasing perhaps it will cost the same. If you live in any other part of the world that use a different currency the price may be different
I do live in America and why you think milk costs significantly more from one week to the next I don't know. Even if the price rises, we're talking pennies per week. Far less than Bitcoin fluctuates.
I have no idea why you're even trying to argue that the dollar fluctuates as much in value as Bitcoin because that's just demonstrably false. This is the current fluctuation of Bitcoin value. If the value of a dollar changed by one percent in a day, that would be huge. Seven percent? That would be a disaster.
JPY to USD +6.70% (1W)
Cool. You found the one currency the dollar had a lot of fluctuation against in the past week. Good job. Too bad it's the dollar and the euro whose values are the ones that generally match each other and how it's usually measured.
Also too bad I gave you lots of weeks and you gave me one.
Go ahead and let me see your source though. Here's mine:
https://www.investing.com/crypto/bitcoin/historical-data
It's already significantly changed percentagewise since I posted that screenshot from less than an hour ago. It's now +1.9%. Even the dollar vs. the yen did not change that much in less than an hour.
This is a ridiculous hill to die on. This is such a known problem with Bitcoin that stablecoins had to be invented.
Yeah because they have a lot of servers. The problem is each individual web server does not use a lot of energy whereas each individual server running a crypto currency blockchain uses a lot of energy for that one server.