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Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] Socsa 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Right, speculation is awful for currency and is the entire reason why real monetary policy seeks some small inflationary pressure. This was obvious from the beginning and I have eaten a lot of downvotes for pointing it out.

The intrinsic value of a crypto token is a function of the value of the underlying Blockchain application. The original thought was that a decentralized, anonymous payment processor would have a lot of intrinsic value, but unfortunately the Blockchain actually kind of sucks at doing that in real time, and it's already a pretty crowded application space in the first place

[–] mindbleach 2 points 9 months ago

Back in early days - since this is yet another Big Thing that whizzed right past me - the appeal of mining was to create necessary infrastructure. Participation trickled out rewards. Yeah, turns out an audience of engineers will instantly turn that into an optimization puzzle. In a heartbeat you have FPGAs, GPUs, and genuine ASICs shoving out the broad base of support in favor of a core with control over a majority of the network. "Satoshi" aimed for Tor and whiffed.

Anyway, the value of any currency is what it represents, and a currency that can't buy anything represents diddly over squat. Genuinely the entire market right now might be detached from reality. It's not just irrational - it's fictional. You can't even plant Bitcoin and get a pretty flower.