Cryptocurrencies are a massive fraud

...and how come there is absolutely no instance to shut it all down once and for all?

'Mining cryptocurrencies' (aside from killing elephants, that is, and, oh well, a few other side activities) must be the pinnacle of human greed and stupidity. If it was for me to decide, I'd ban the whole f*cked up endeavour.

I mean, doing these activities just adds up to a not-so-far-fetched belief that human race is simply incapable of preserving itself in the long run.

money printer go brrrr

People can trade in anything they agree upon, including, apparently, digital bits arbitrarily assigned a value in another fiat currency. If you can achieve a critical mass of people willing to believe that their digital bits will continue, with no real basis, to increase in that arbitrary value, then that value will increase. A self-fulfilling prophecy, if you will. The question is, when does it reach the point of saturation? When do the tulip bulbs suddenly cease to be "worth" incredible amounts of Guilders?

And with the tulips, when you lost your fortune, you could at least look at the pretty flowers. ='[.]'=

Paper money is just paper.
Gold money is just metal.
Digital-bit money is just digital bits.

Currency is based off the collective belief that it has value. So long as enough people believe it has value, it does.

Hey look completely unrelated, but I invented a machine that wastes ridiculous amounts of energy for no reason. If you pay me money, I'll tell you that some of it was wasted on your behalf. Who wants in?

I should've been more specific with my reference: it's an environmental crime, pure and straight. Mining bitcoins alone uses up as much energy as my home country does in whole. And to what purpose? There is none. Zero. Absolutely nada.

I wouldn't care a rat's ass if people believed in Santa Claus and Jewish space laser (at least latter, they do!), if their magical thinking didn't have some very real, dire consequences.

It's a travesty government officials even dare speaking of climate crisis as long as the most trivial waste isn't taken care of. Sure, people are irrational, that's not new. So what is this religion of freedom, which allows them still impose the consequences of their irrational thinking upon our deteriorating environment?

These are boundary conditions which must first be met if anyone wants to convince me human race is capable of preserving living conditions on Earth. That's how incredibly stupid, to put it mildly, I regard so called data mining. Or maybe they are evil -I've actually never quite found how you can reliably define whether a person is evil or just astoundingly stupid, aside maybe some outliers such as getting their pleasure from pain of others.

It´s like watching TV, one converts energy into intelligencereduction.

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vmt80 wrote:

It's a travesty government officials even dare speaking of climate crisis...

are people still putting any stock into the whole climate crisis bullshit? honestly? still?

well i guess i shouldn't be surprised. this is the era where so many people thought the world was going to end because computers clocks were going to change to the year 00.
Y2K. anyone remember it? LOL

crytocurrencies, just like all other "currencies" are junk. doesn't mean you can't profit off of them. you can take advantage of peoples assumption that anything has value.

i first heard of bitcoin when it was a fraction of a cent. i first could have invested into it when it was about 30 cents per bitcoin.
hindsight is 20/20, don't live in the past.

The value of the dollar is just a scam and based on power politic.

As for whatever OP is saying about Mining and climate, I feel like he would need to go off internet if he was very serious about that angle because the whole internet if terrible for climate.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/12/carbon-footprint-internet

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xMustard wrote:

crytocurrencies, just like all other "currencies" are junk. doesn't mean you can't profit off of them. you can take advantage of peoples assumption that anything has value.

Sure, which is why I added my notion of how distinction between malicious intent and stupidity is often hard to make.

In the end, that's what currency miners are doing: producing absolutely nothing of extra value in order to take advantage of peoples assumptions, and in doing so causing significant waste and harm. So in ethical terms, is that just mere stupidity or should we attribute it to a malicious intent?

To lolozori, nope, communicating isn't detrimental by definition. There is value to it, like exchanging ideas. There's even value with entertainment and games, albeit getting closer to gray territory there. With cryptocurrencies, their instrumental value is wholly dependent on what xMustard said about taking advantage of other people.