bit¢oin$

this whole "chia" thing is so funny. it's a shitcoin designed to ruin hard drives. imagine if you got paid to put your car on a kickstand and just floor the engine until it caught on fire. that's what this is https://t.co/qFBYkYmEyj

— going beast mode in Joe Biden's replies (@stdlib) May 21, 2021

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-firm-revives-zombie-fossil-fuel-power-plant-to-mine-bitcoin/

Proof of
Stake
Is
Coming soon so

Few bitcoin projects illustrate the cryptocurrency’s enormous climate impact better than the Greenidge power plant in upstate New York. The once-abandoned power plant was bought by private equity firm Atlas Holdings and retasked. A significant portion of Greenidge's electricity no longer powers nearby homes or businesses; rather, the plant's smokestacks are increasingly pouring pollutants into the atmosphere in the service of mining bitcoin.

Now, Greenidge is on the verge of ramping up its bitcoin ambitions. By the end of this year, it plans to have 18,000 specialized machines mining bitcoin, and with the recent approval of its data center expansion plans, it will add 10,500 more. When the project is complete, the miners will be using 79 percent of the power plant’s capacity, or 85 MW.

Greenidge’s operations aren’t affected by PSC decisions, though. Their mining happens “behind the meter,” meaning it's not affected by grid-level prices. And those operations appear to be fantastically profitable. Between February 2020 and February 2021, the company mined nearly 1,186 bitcoin at a cost of $2,869 per bitcoin. Today, one bitcoin is trading at $57,475.

lol this shit is so out there

as the world explodes, congress will pass HR3104 to require bitcoin miners to register with the SEC or something, the very first legislation on cryptocurrency in the entire universe

isn't the federal government supposed to discourage the use of illegitimate tender or something
this tends not to end well

yeah, i don't expect or hope for them to do anything, on anything, at least in the US. and it's a global problem (like climate change) that requires a global solution, so, looooooooool at us

Increasingly every time I read something about crypto I can't really think of anything to say/think about it except for "Goddamn, clown fucking world. What a stupid world."

usa could prob take the crypto ecosystem down via regulation if they felt like it

and maybe they do idk, takes a while to turn the big ship and so forth

and if you wait 5 years, the who cryptothing will have even more hooks into everyday life and normal people (defined as "not a cryptofuck"). who knows what it will be. "you can't regulate turdcoin! i shifted 40% of my 401K to it a few years ago and it's up 350% in that time! that turdcoin is paying for my kid's college!"

i think crypto is too complicated for the government to address properly. and on top of that, it's complicated and it's tech. fuuuuuuck

oh yeah, and one side of the "debate" just made a shit ton of money

holy shit at that Greenridge piece

Did this already get posted? https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons

the shit that really makes this weird for me is that the entire "value" of crypto is based on the idea of total societal & economic collapse, right? like there's no other use case for it, no real business is gonna accept this shit, and even if their dreams come true and everything goes down the tubes I think they're gonna be in for a rude awakening when they expect to become the "new elites" and find that a currency that 99.99% of the planet has zero of is essentially worthless.

Society collapses yet somehow continues to have really good high speed internet available everywhere

the entire "value" of crypto is based on the idea of total societal & economic collapse, right?

this is where Q and evangelical white christians come in to support. they all depend on that

go, go, go, go!!!

https://i.imgur.com/1zESZlm.png

i think crypto is too complicated for the government to address properly. and on top of that, it's complicated and it's tech. fuuuuuuck

― Karl Malone, Friday, May 21, 2021 11:24 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

they already regulate many very complex markets, and crypto schemes wont hold up under that scrutiny, i dont think the tech part particularly matters, i think its mostly a question of whether they care enough to put pressure on global systems to make a lot of the bad stuff hard enough to do that retail investors ie the suckers get out of the game

but thats just the taking care of the investment scamming side, the thing they prob really want to do away with is the ransomware payoffs which they prob cant do anything about, cause youre not going to be able to totally stamp out crypto, someone will prob always be able to run exchanges in pariah/tax haven states, tho idk maybe they could make even that too much trouble

if you outlaw crypto, only outlaws will have crypto

in seriousness though, I don't think it's that complicated. If the US really wanted to end (or at least cripple) crypto, they could just ban it. Conduct raids on some high profile owners/traders, seize their computers or whatever. Shut down exchanges. Ban businesses from accepting it. No, it won't completely disappear, yes some of it will move overseas, but it will become untenable for most people to get involved in it.

I mean, if a government can't ban crypto, someone tell the market, bc people sure seem scared of China right now.

kinda think they would not do that but it certainly would work

china would tho lol

something like that kind of already happened

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-01/bitmex-founders-and-executives-are-indicted-in-new-york

yeah i mean theyve been regulating this stuff all long, there are rules that apply to crypto just like anything else, but it doesnt seem like the government has put big effort into the particularities of crypto... yet

on the other hand, you can just openly buy a fucking power plant right now and then successfully seek permission to expand it, purely for the purpose of mining. meanwhile congress is busy trying to figure out if they're cool with being fascists now

but after that, definitely cryptocurrency

the usa gov doesnt always do the most important stuff first

have a feeling there may be a number of very large corporations calling their fairly paid for representatives in government telling them to do something about the crypto right about now, were only hearing about a fraction of ransom wear attacks that have been paid off

I highly suspect the reason why they arrested the Bitmex guys is not because they thought it was "funding terrorism" or whatever but rather because they don't get a cut

honestly surprised theyve let it go on this long what with its stated intent of democratizing the worlds money

I highly suspect the reason why they arrested the Bitmex guys is not because they thought it was "funding terrorism" or whatever but rather because they don't get a cut

― frogbs

otm

regulation in this sphere seems like it will go as well as the war on drugs

as in, everyone's in on it and profiting, including the govt

will be interesting if that goes to a jury trial, cuz there's no way 12 randomly selected people are gonna understand a thing about it

tangentially related to all of this:

Roblox fans are buying digital Gucci bags for thousands of dollars

by the time a kid is old enough to get their first cryptowallet, they will be very accustomed to the idea of spending money that isn't really theirs on things that aren't real

Sometimes in federal juries in places like the SDNY you get pretty sophisticated jurors. But it's also a problem of many finance-related jury trials -- I once watched David Boies defend Hank Greenberg (AIG) in a civil lawsuit trial and shit was confusing as hell even for me, and I'm pretty sure that Boies was making it that way on purpose.

honestly, all this is just pushing my inevitable "go to the woods permanently" life outcome up several years. i kind of imagined being a bit older when i did that, but now i think i should be chopping down trees, making siege weapons and using them to destroy buildings with crytpo servers

i will become a wood elf

I can't stop watching the BTC price fall.

One of the weird things about BTC trading 24 hours is that the % drops are kind of meaningless.

I just want crypto to die so bad. It's a fucking plague.

all i've got is: don't let your friends be cryptofucks. if they do, yell at them and move to the woods with me. there are several open positions on this battering ram we've got going. we need 12 strong people to push this thing into the bitcoin factory

I'm more of a bard type

I still very much believe that there's a ceiling on the price of any crypto. IDK where that ceiling is, but there is always only so far that speculative money can take something. You eventually just run out of dumb money.

I just want crypto to die so bad. It's a fucking plague.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Friday, May 21, 2021 12:15 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think it will, at least the investing part, scams dont last forever

Yeah, that's correct, but they can last a really long time, cf Madoff.

then we will see a golden age of gaming where top of the line graphics cards can be had for five dollars

Also since it's kind of a meta-scam, I wonder how long it can be kept going by rolling money into new sub-scams of the scam (like now we have NFTs)