Buying a $250 Residency Card From a Tropical Island Let Me Bypass U.S. Crypto Laws
U.S. traders are buying 'digital residency' in Palau to skirt restrictions on the amount of cryptocurrency they can withdraw and the exchanges they can use. Major exchanges have already banned the ID, fearing abuse.
My first question to you would be, how much energy does the banking sector use to run bank branches, haul physical money back and forth, bring employees to and from work, etc?
Next, not all blockchains require extreme levels of computation power for proof of work. Take Monero, for example, which deliberately makes ASIC chips impossible to use and is therefore mined only on CPUs, which are extremely common.
Or any proof of stake coin like Ethereum, which doesn't require any mining at all. The electricity argument is extremely out of date for most coins besides Bitcoin itself.
As far as I know GPU mining is pretty much completely dead because after Ethereum switched the yields on everything else tanked.
To be fair I'm not a huge fan of pure proof of stake because it makes validation more difficult because you have to have code for slashing somebody's stake if they are malicious or bad and a malicious entity could just buy up a bunch of your tokens and tank them. Admittedly, not a lot of people would do so, but I could totally see a government buying up a bunch of tokens on a network and purposely crashing the network in order to rid themselves of a nuisance and calling it justified. Proof of work makes that much more difficult. Still doable for certain, but much, much more difficult.
So a government is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to get enough Ethereum to disrupt it, before accounting for the price going up by purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars of Ethereum, and then they're going to destroy the hundreds of billions of dollars they invested to take the network down, temporarily. Like sure, it's possible, but once established, it's not happening.
It would be more cost effective to do a supply chain attack and introduce exploits/weaknesses to try and make people doubt using it, attack the infrastructure and steal coins from exchanges and other off chain services or smart contracts with bugs, and pass laws to restrict it.
edit: Oh and there's also the queue to activate a valid staker. It will take a lot of time to even begin to be able to do this, instead of hoarding/renting asic hardware and turning it on out of the blue.
Edit: Sorry I'm also wrong, it's 66% of staked ETH, it's not half the market cap. So we'd be talking probably upwards of a hundred billion (not hundreds) by the time we account for price increases from having to buy to even start to initiate the attack.
Edit: I also wonder if the future change to allow a staker to stake up to 2048 eth instead of 32 could quicken the attack (as it's 1 validator in the queue instead of 64) or if they'll delay larger validators longer, maybe based on its eth amount? I'm not up to speed on that. But in theory the queue would be 64 times quicker if they can join as quick.
Ethereum could literally roll back their chain to negate the attack, anyway. They've done it before.
Whats also likely is people see the attack coming due to the large validator queue, and they implement some sort of counter measure before the attack can even happen. Unless they let a 2048 eth validator in as quickly as a 32 eth validator, were talking many many months as there's a massive influx of validators.
Imagine buying all that eth, and the community seeing the attack coming in advance, and instead saying, were going to lock out new validators after XYZ date, and force them to exit instead.
It would cause problems no doubt, but there would be a lot of options before an attack and after if they get that far to address it.
edit: They could also dramatically reduce the allowed validators per day if it was suspected, making the attack take years to even be possible.
So you don't have an actual use cases then.
Well the use case for monero is usually buying drugs on the internet. As long as the war on drugs continues, it'll be useful for that
Only people relying on random public nodes. Better to run your own. Monero GUI is pretty clear about the risks when setting up wallet.
Money of course. I have been paying my bills with crypto since 2023.
And i have been using my bank account and cash to pay all my bills since i have had bills to pay. What's the advantage of using something that is less convenient, less secure, and more resource intense than a normal checking account with direct deposit? You keep dodging the question on what use cases you think crypto currencies have an advantage over fiat currency.
Fiat currencies are money by decree of a government. If you have lost trust in your government or your government is not trustworthy to begin with, then the Fiat currency is not worth the paper it's printed on or the digits in your bank account. Your access to your bank account can be restricted at any time for any reason with just a simple push of a button and you have extremely small or no recourse to such an action. Cash is better in that regard, but even so your government or central bank purposely says they want to devalue your cash and other currency by a set target per year. Therefore making you have to work harder or become poorer. As an example, the U.S. Federal Reserve targets a 2% inflation target per year, which means if you put a $100 bill under your mattress today, in 2035, it would only buy you $80 worth of goods. I'm not that old, and yet, when I was a young kid, a $500,000 nest egg would work extremely well for a good retirement. Now, that is absolutely not the case. Not because of the goods getting more expensive, but because of the currency depreciating in value as you work for it.
A small bit of inflation encourages people to spend their money and keep the economy moving. Because if your currency is going to be worth more tomorrow than it is today, your incentive is to hoard it and mever soend a dime unless absolutely necessary.
Way more people have lost everything because where they keep their cryptocurrency went under than their bank freezing their accounts. Banks only close your account if they suspect you are doing highly illegal and fraudulent stuff. And of i forget my credentials, my bank has a process where i can access my money again after 5 minutes of KYC. If someone DOES fraudulently access my account without my authorization, the bank will fully restore my account and go after the fraudster.
I dont trust the US goverment any more than you do, but Uncle Sam isn't interested in what his greenbacks are worth compared to other currencies. All he cares about is that i pay my taxes in USD.
You posted all that text, and still haven't given an actual example of where cryptocurrency out performs USD for someone just going about their daily life.
I trust governments with fiat currency a hell of a lot more than I trust anything that has to do with crypto.
Ah, okay. See, we are exactly the opposite in that case, because I have lost all faith in governments, and therefore have lost all faith in what they call money.
Edit: Tap the Publish button before I'm into.
You could give me a bunch of government fiat, and I would take it and turn it into crypto simply to have more crypto because there are still people who desire to have government fiat currency. And I am not one of them.
I understand the inflation argument, but what gives crypto any value other than a) a relative value which is based on fiat currency anyway and b) the faith of the userbase in it?
What gives any currency any value other than human belief in it? After all, when fiat currencies become valueless, we as humans end up back at gold, which has been in use for millennia.
I'm not saying that governments are the most trustworthy institutions in the world, but as someone who tried to be an early adopter of blockchain from both a tech and a financial perspective, I immediately assume that anything that has the word "crypto" in it is deeply flawed and inherently untrustworthy. I've unfortunately learned this from experience.
And you keep demanding a use-case like the other commenter is proselytizing.
If were just going to ask people questions they have no responsibility to answer: Do you know why BTC was developed?
I'd say you're right for 99% of it, but there is 1% that's genuinely useful.
I asked what that 1% of useful applications are and he gave a whole dog and pony show to avoid giving any examples. He said that there are times where cryptocurrency is better than your government's currency (assuming you are in a stable country with a stable currency).
Bitcoin was developed by dudes upset by the 2008 financial crash who wanted to be the ones on top the next time everything imploded. Bitcoin is 100% useless at anything other than speculation.
Bitcoin is 100% useless at anything other than speculation.
And buying drugs online.
I just know where to buy the drugs i want here in town, and then i offer cold hard cash that can't be traced back to me, even if the dealer rats me out. Much safer and more secure than buying them online.
Yobs like this always come out the woodwork when Bitcoin hits an all time high, talking about how cryptocurrency isn't all bad, but once you push them it's the same tired old talking points. They don't want to help you financially. They just want you to hold their bag while they cash out.
Edit: if you are familiar with the Alt-Right Playbook series by Innuendo Studios, Crypto Bros use the exact same strategies he points out. That's why it shouldn't surprise anyone that crypto firms were the largest donors to Republican campaigns this election season. Just something to think about as people keep espousing how crypto is gonna change the world...
he gave a whole dog and pony show
No, they responded to your argument that crypto uses tons of electricity, and responded that the one they use, Monero, doesn't do that. Then later responded and said they pay bills with it.
What more do you want?
There are a number of services that take crypto, such as:
Btw, all of those take Monero. If you look, you'll find more.
