https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/china-supreme-court-sides-genesis-mining-gpu-battle
The sheer scale of it blows my mind.
The sheer scale of it blows my mind.
China Supreme Court Sides With Mining Operator in Battle Over 485,000 GPUs
- Thread starter Dalandius
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Man of Honour
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Humans will always find another way to accelerate our destruction of the planet. For invisible ‘gain’ too.
The interesting thing is, who is more to blame? The people who want the magic internet money or the people who create it?
It's only worth mining, because people have assigned absurd value to something that has no intrinsic value, worth or rarity (other than that which is artificially assigned)
But it does have worth.
It's a payment backend. Saying its worthless is like saying swift is worthless. Or shops are worthless
But anything that enables 150 trillion dollars of financial transactions a year obviously has value.
That's an insanely big pie to get a peice of
Good question, is the government to blame for making making magic fiat currency or the public that mine in order to get it?
At least cryptocurrency is fuelling human rights causes by freeing people from tyrannical governments and as long as the power comes from renewable and nuclear sources it doesn't damage the environment and doesn't contain animal fat either.
What stone age barter system would work instead of fiat?
It's the only way any modern payment system could work.
Soldato
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You could use gold in a ledger plain and simple but that would deleverage the whole system gigantically. It would actually work as a process of exchange of value same as it ever did. We dont do that because people want to believe in magic and politics and nonsense like that 
So we're agreed Tulips had a purpose, merely the price was wrong and over inflated. I never heard it explained why they had excessive liquidity at that moment such that people speculated on a price of a tulip beyond its aesthetic utility. It can happen to any asset if the background dynamics are there.
crypto has a purpose, it might be overextended and inflated but if anything its helping some adjust to conditions
Crypto is not to blame or a cause, its a symptom not the cause of obvious ongoing inflation in the monetary base. I dont mind tulips
So we're agreed Tulips had a purpose, merely the price was wrong and over inflated. I never heard it explained why they had excessive liquidity at that moment such that people speculated on a price of a tulip beyond its aesthetic utility. It can happen to any asset if the background dynamics are there.
crypto has a purpose, it might be overextended and inflated but if anything its helping some adjust to conditions
Crypto is not to blame or a cause, its a symptom not the cause of obvious ongoing inflation in the monetary base. I dont mind tulips
crypto might well be the iodine thyroid pill in a nuclear age. Is it a cure, likely not
Representative currency (which can't be devalued by printing to kingdom come).
I'm not the one making the argument against "magic" money here @Jono8 is. Ironically bitcoin is arguably a commodity with intrinsic value whereas fiat is more fictional.
Cryptocurrency proves otherwise.
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Whilst arguing that it's perfectly fine, nothing to see here, the planet is fine, just keep buying our internet fun bux.
Or "banks evil, crypto good" or some other crap.
Or the best one, and my personal fave: something else is bad, so you can't criticise crypto at all. Until there are no more bad things in the universe, crypto should be immune from any and all criticism. Just shut up and buy crypto, OK?
Said no one ever.
Not really.
When people point out how much energy crypto uses, the standard retort is that "fiat uses more", or "data centres use more" or "globally, people watching TV use more"... etc, etc.
There is so much deflection by people defending crypto that what I said isn't far from the truth
In any case there's no point arguing with the crypto zealots. They are quite happy to die on that hill. Convinced as most of them are that crypto is the future, that fiat is dead, that the crypto-bros will inherit the Earth.
e: An example, taken from a Reddit thread.
This is typical crypto-bro talk. "You can't be anti-crypto because there are other things bad for the environment. Until these other things are fixed you're a hypocrite and shouldn't unfairly target crypto."
This is utterly par for the course when discussing crypto with a crypto-bro.
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That's not saying you can't criticise crypto, at all. You need to have a monetary system so you need to compare it to something that currently exists.
The criticisms of crypto are usually weak, like "it's a made up currency", i.e. coming from people who have no knowledge of economics and think fiat is backed by gold or something.
My criticism of crypto would be that if it ceased existing tomorrow absolutely nothing would change for most people on the planet, the economy wouldn't collapse leading to mass death, there'd be a lot more graphics cards available to buy for the average Joe and at cheaper prices and you wouldn't have server farms in China and elsewhere with 500,000 GPU's consuming ridiculous amounts of energy for something that's entirely virtual.
LMAO. Fueling human rights causes? Its now just another vehicle for the rich to get richer and is massively manipulated by those that hold the lions share of it.
It's become no different to anything else market wise, and the notion that crypto is going to help the "little man" is ridiculous.
It's still a good opportunity to make some money trading etc (ie to sell it for fiat...), and countries will likely create their own government backed currency using similar tech and do away with cash etc altogether in the future. However crypto in its current form is nothing but a speculative ponzi scheme. The "scarcity" of bitcoin, for example, is totally artificial and imagined.
I dabble in it a bit, but I am under no illusions as to what it is. I therefore don't see anything inherently wrong with it when compared with all the other bonkers things going on in the global economy. Its just as stupid as most other things and no better.
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It doesn't matter if it's manipulated or not, the strength is in privacy features. Already is helping the "little man" even in the UK, massive darknet markets have sprung up which is enabling subjugated classes of people like drug users evade the government