Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The long-awaited Ethereum Merge is happening next week, and it's one of the most important days in cryptocurrency history. Arcane as it sounds, the Merge matters whether or not you're a blockchain believer or a crypto critic. If it's successful, the process will lower ethereum's massive electricity requirements by over 99%.
That is of huge consequence. Skeptics of cryptocurrency typically argue that coins like bitcoin and ether are useless, and that they consume enormous amounts of electricity. The first point is polarizing and subjective, but the second is unequivocally true. In an era when more people than ever view climate change mitigation as society's highest priority, the carbon emissions of bitcoin and ethereum are too conspicuous to ignore.
In the Merge, ethereum will adopt a system known as proof of stake, which has been planned since 2014, before the blockchain's creation. Because of its technical complexity, and the increasingly large amount of money at risk, it has been delayed multiple times. The Merge is part of what in the past was called "ether 2.0," a series of upgrades that reshape the blockchain's foundations.
"We've been working on proof of stake for about seven years now," ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin said at the Eth Shanghai conference in March, "but finally all of that work is coming together."
The Ethereum Merge is scheduled to occur between Sept. 13 and Sept. 15. [...]
Say you wanted to mine cryptocurrency. You'd set up a powerful computer -- a "mining rig" -- to run software that attempts to solve complex cryptographic puzzles. Your rig competes with hundreds of thousands of miners around the world trying to solve the same puzzle. If your computer unscrambles the cryptography first, you win the right to "validate" a block -- that is, add new data to the blockchain. Doing so gives you a reward: Bitcoin miners get 6.25 bitcoin ($129,000) for every block they verify, while ethereum miners get 2 ether ($2,400) plus gas, which are the fees users pay on each transaction (which can be huge).
It takes a powerful computer to have a chance in this race, and people typically set up warehouses full of rigs for this purpose. This system is called "proof of work," and it's how both bitcoin and ethereum blockchains run.
[...] The system is secure. Though scams and hacks are common in crypto, neither the bitcoin nor ethereum blockchains themselves have been compromised in the past. The downside, however, is obvious. As cryptographic puzzles become more complicated and more miners compete to solve them, energy expenditure soars.
Lots and lots. Bitcoin is estimated to consume about 150 terawatt hours a year, which is more electricity than 45 million people in Argentina use. Ethereum is closer to Switzerland's 9 million citizens, eating up about 62 million terawatt hours.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 08 2022, @09:28PM (29 children)
IMO, this Ethereum merge is only important because it is a social experiment on a massive scale with significant value already invested and attributed to what they are doing / have done.
There are other ways [mangocats.com] to use PKE (public key encryption, the basic tech underlying Bitcoin, Ethereum, et. al) which can also be a method of value exchange, they just need people to use them, and believe they have value, and then they will have value. Burning massive amounts of electricity to "prove something" that people might think is linked to value - that's a kink that should be shamed into oblivion, IMO.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 09 2022, @01:48AM (28 children)
The elephant in this room is fraud. A mature understanding of that is what drives the proof of work concept. We'll see what proof of stake does, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a spectacular failure due to the fraud elephant. Notice that the US is demonstrating such a problem with the US Dollar now which is inflating at 8-9% annually right now.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 09 2022, @02:06PM (22 children)
>A mature understanding of that is what drives the proof of work concept.
would include the literal waste of energy as "proof" of anything.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 09 2022, @02:23PM (21 children)
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 09 2022, @02:40PM (20 children)
>cheap energy.
Energy with externalized costs, you mean?
Fossil fuels: CO2 and other pollution
Solar and wind: heavily subsidized at the moment, and still resource intensive in the manufacture and as yet to come to roost: disposal (or recycling, which I hear almost nothing about) of power generation materials
Hydro and to some extent geo-thermal: destruction of habitat, including historical sources of excellent food: migratory fish.
Energy is good, but traditionally we have ignored the true costs of our sources of energy.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 09 2022, @05:26PM (19 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 09 2022, @08:06PM (18 children)
Fraud are bad actors who need to be stopped, regardless of what they are using. There are FAR more efficient ways to stop those (relatively small number of) bad actors than to run ALL transactions through a system that basically says: "See, I must be genuine, nobody would be stupid enough to waste the resources required to fake this."
Also, when the energy of Proof Of Work scales down to anything within three orders of magnitude of reasonable, it is easily fooled as happened to Bitcoin Gold and friends back in the day when "real" Bitcoin was so massive by comparison that a small Bitcoin miner could pass the 51% attack threshold on Bitcoin Gold with their regular BTC gear.... so if you're using Proof Of Work as your method, only the very largest few proof of work systems will be safe from attack (fraud) by the larger mining groups.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 10 2022, @01:57AM (17 children)
Like what? A normal financial system has huge complexity and the control freaks have banks reporting any significant transaction.
Increase the attack threshold. How about 99.9% threshold?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday September 10 2022, @02:17AM (16 children)
>Increase the attack threshold. How about 99.9% threshold?
Fake is a binary question, true or false? The 51% attribution is a technical laziness, the true threshold is anything over 50%
You have an algorithm that isn't vulnerable to a 50.00001% attack? That would be new in this world, you should publish.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 11 2022, @01:59PM (15 children)
The approach is hideously complex and lengthy, but it shows solutions exist in situations far more defective than anything you'd see in an active crypto market.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 11 2022, @02:37PM
Check the impact on energy consumption: it's like throwing thermite into the reactor core of Three Mile Island.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 11 2022, @02:54PM (13 children)
And, on a more serious note: if one can achieve 50% of the Bitcoin Gold mining capacity with X resources, one can achieve 90% of the mining capacity with 9X resources (90 vs 10), or 99% of the mining capacity with 99X resources, 99.9% witth 999X resources etc.
Today's market cap of Bitcoin Gold (one of the more respected "alt coins") is roughly 1 / 800 th of Bitcoin proper. Lesser known issues like Bitcoin Diamond are an order of magnitude smaller still, around 1 / 12500 th of BTC's "market cap" yet still register over $34M USD.
Point being, you can't issue a small proof of work "coin" that isn't absolutely wide open to fraud attack from bigger players. Like the traditional banking world, they don't often perpetrate these fraudulent attacks - it would be bad for the value of the assets they are holding and devastating for the value of the assets they might steal, but like the real world: it can and does happen occasionally.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 12 2022, @11:20AM (12 children)
The obvious rebuttal: ROI.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 12 2022, @01:19PM (11 children)
The obvious rebuttal: energy costs of non-proof-of-work schemes are a trivial (1/millionths) fraction of proof-of-work scheme. Hard to beat their ROI when your I has a huge term that makes a trivial difference in R. Evidence of trivial: current fraud rates of credit cards which have essentially zero real security against the bulk of transactions processed through them.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Monday September 12 2022, @01:50PM (10 children)
And fraud can cause vastly more cost than those energy costs.
You do realize that there is considerable fraud rate for those credit cards? The cost just happens to be mostly spread among a bunch of merchants rather than the credit card users.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 12 2022, @02:18PM (9 children)
>The cost just happens to be mostly spread among a bunch of merchants rather than the credit card users.
Yes, and it's adjusted based on the type of merchant and their typical fraud rates for the type of transaction they are trying to do (chip vs magstripe present vs numbers typed in).
And what are those rates? Well, they vary from below 1% for the best cases to almost 4% in the worst with an average around 1.5%, and then they also "reward" card holders who typically cost them less than average with 1% and up "cash back" - so you're looking at a worst case of about 4%, but an average closer to 0.4%.
And what is the cost of a BTC transaction? It varies a lot, but right now it's running about $114: https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_cost_per_transaction [ycharts.com]
Remember back in the day when it "cost too much to do a CC transaction for a sale less than $10"? Yeah, to beat a 1% transaction fee with bitcoin, today the minimum transaction size is running around $10,000 - and the trend is that those fees go UP when BTC trading becomes more popular.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Monday September 12 2022, @03:03PM (8 children)
Cons to Bitcoin:
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 12 2022, @04:02PM (7 children)
> Vastly lower infrastructure cost - basically a few white papers and some programming created the present system
You call that infrastructure? I call the vast network of dedicated GPUs and FPGAs, the compute centers built up in low electricity cost areas (incidentally, transforming many of those to higher cost electricity areas), and of course the internet itself - that's the infrastructure. How much internet bandwidth does a single BTC transaction consume? As compared to a typical CC transaction (many of which are relayed from point of sale through satellite link, because the bandwidth is so trivial...)
> No one controls or reports your transactions.
True statement, but have you really shown it to be a "Pro"?
> No paperwork aside from keeping track of gains and losses for tax purposes.
I'm agreeing less with this one, there's a huge info-audit trail involved in "proving" a BTC transaction, one which (due to the previous point) needs to be checked if you care about protecting yourself from fraud. Now, I like the transparency of it, you don't just stop at "Because Visa told me so", you can actually dig in to the whole thing, but... it's also quite a bit more complex than a CC statement (many of which have been "off paper" for over a decade now).
> Credit card companies can refuse to permit various sorts of payments
Yeah, but do I have you pegged wrong? I thought you liked most of that authoritarian bullshit? Or is it just the authoritarian bullshitters you periodically defend? Again, pro for some, con for others.
> casual transfer of large amounts of money or payment to targets that are blocked by the powers that be
Yeah, that's something that I do, on average, about twice a decade, and it works pretty damn well through the wire-transfer system with a $10K transaction incurring a $35-ish fee, or 0.35% - the bigger concern is how well you're doing with cross-currency translation which the better providers will keep sub 0.2% if you just keep an eye on the fees and walk away when your favorite bank has decided to jack their currency exchange rates too high. And, I suspect I do those kinds of transfers more than the average bear does. People who do more than me would tend to be "top 2%ers" in the wealth scale, or have relatively rare overseas ties to family/business.
Niche case: granted, for those who don't mind the occasional 20%+ haircut on their transaction if they happen to hold their BTC too long during a downtrending day. So far, there is no end in sight for volatility of these types of relatively unregulated cryptocurrencies, and any regulations will steer them back towards those restrictions on transfer of funds to: rogue states, identified terrorist organizations, and the occasional bleeding heart who gets labeled "enemy of the state." Yeah, Wikileaks deserves more defense against "the man" than they're getting, but... talk about niche cases...
Cons:
- negative economies of scale - the more that get involved the more expensive the transaction and it's already too slow for lightweight transactions.
Granted.
- consumes more electricity than JoeMerchant would like. And I am not alone. A straw poll of randomly selected buffoons on the internet should find at least 10:1 people who think that the waste of energy on proof of work exceeds the benefits listed in "Pros" above. Granted, you're going to have to filter out the overwhelming noise of buffoons who think BTC is their lotto ticket out of monetary misery, but that's easier to do when BTC is off-peak and falling, as it has been for a while now.
- Credentials even easier to lose or get stolen than credit cards. No mechanism for recovery.
Welllll.... since it's not really useful as a transfer of value for anything under about $10K, or in very unusual situations, I'm going to say that it's actually easier to lose your CC# which flies around all kinds of places out of your control (let's start with when you hand it over to pay for a sit-down meal at a restaurant...) No mechanism for recovery, yep: that's the game, and it's not really palatable for most people for large sums of money, oh, but wait, that's all it's good at is moving large sums of money....
- We all know Bitcoin is routinely used for naughty things. Well, things we can all agree are naughty.
As is cash. I'm going to throw a pro to you: as cash slowly strangles under regulation, devaluation, etc. it is nice that we have something that can somewhat replace a briefcase full of bills, because: wouldn't the world be a boring place if you couldn't write believable stories involving briefcases full of bills?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 12 2022, @11:37PM (6 children)
I sure do! It's near trivial to construct a new cryptocurrency - just copy/modify existing code. The internet and existing computers will do a good enough job of mining. Now try starting your own credit card. You'll need either to use existing credit card infrastructure or brew your own. I think it'll take more than a few nights of coding and reading white papers to do that.
A single BTC transaction doesn't consume much in the way of bandwidth (remember that ~$100 in transaction costs are used up in proof of work computation not in communication!). I wager a chip and pin transaction uses more.
Actually, now that I think of it, we could bypass all that with a credit card that uses bitcoins instead of fiat currency. It doesn't even need to hit the block chain until the issuer feels like it.
So what?
U serious? I sure don't. And I'm defending authoritarian bullshitters against other authoritarian bullshitters. Unless, of course, you don't think it's authoritarian bullshit to just decree someone guilty of a heinous crime without bothering to put together a serious argument?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 13 2022, @12:51AM (5 children)
>Now try starting your own credit card. You'll need either to use existing credit card infrastructure or brew your own.
You don't get out much, do you. You know what it takes to open a new bank? Investors, a little market research, a little advertising, and boom: you've got a new bank. Same for credit cards, but most new CC brands choose to go with the "big two" underlying payment processors. You are saying that new bitcoin clones will be more competitive against the original BTC than Discover was against Visa and MC? Over a decade of experience seems to say: nope. There's BTC, Ethereum, and tiny players that haven't been viable for much beyond speculation: lotto tickets in a less-than-zero sum game.
>I wager a chip and pin transaction uses more.
I'll take that bet. A chip and pin transaction goes from the point of sale to the payment processor. A crypto transaction is bundled into a block and communicated to ALL NODES IN THE MINING NETWORK. Anyone who audits the transactions (and there are thousands the currently do) will not only look at the bundled block signatures but will actually get copies of all the individual transactions that make up the blocks, searching for whatever is interesting to them. I applaud the transparency, but efficient, it is not.
>Actually, now that I think of it, we could bypass all that with a credit card that uses bitcoins instead of fiat currency. It doesn't even need to hit the block chain until the issuer feels like it.
I've got one of these in my wallet. All the disadvantages of the bankster CC network plus the volatility of the underlying cryptocurrency, and trust placed in a company called Coinbase - whom I have entrusted exactly $0 of my own money, they gave me a $30 credit and the card in exchange for watching their edutainment videos.
>So what?
So: currency really only works when it's accepted by the masses, for whatever reasons. If you have a Bitcoin wallet (without a Coinbase style bridge to accepted by the masses payment systems) you know exactly how much you can buy in this town? You might find 0.01% of the merchants willing to accept BTC directly. But that wouldn't include gasoline sellers, or taxi services, or landlords... if you want to buy a house with BTC you'll be paying a huge premium for it because: most people don't want / trust / care about your lunatic fringe ideas of what makes a good currency. Have fun "trading value" with your 0.001% of the world's population who are willing to deal with the hassles of cryptocurrency transactions after the power wasting regulations make life as tough for miners as it was for MJ grow houses 10 years back.
>to just decree someone guilty of a heinous crime without bothering to put together a serious argument?
Sic et semper pro peons.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 13 2022, @01:09AM (4 children)
I refer to the payment processors not the surface layer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 13 2022, @01:59AM (3 children)
And I point to the fact that no new technologically superior, more evolved, whatever you want to call the new or alternative underlying payment system has gained market share over the original dinosaur Bitcoin. Ethereum is significant, but only due to massive investment of cash, promotion and development by its founders. I'd wager Discover payment network was cheaper and significantly easier for Sears to setup when they tried to be #4 in a market of 3.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 13 2022, @12:06PM (2 children)
Which proves my point. And keep in mind that one doesn't need a huge size to get something viable.
And nearly invisible compared to those big three: just from my day-to-day experiences with credit cards, Visa has about 60% of my company's credit card-paid business, Mastercard and America Express split almost all of the rest with Mastercard usually edging ahead of American Express, and Discover is a rounding error at a few percent.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 13 2022, @03:13PM (1 child)
>And keep in mind that one doesn't need a huge size to get something viable.
I think I have already established that proof of work schema are only viable (against fraud) when they are huge sized. If you disagree, simply say so instead of pretending like I haven't stated that clearly, recently, repeatedly.
>Discover is a rounding error at a few percent.
As far as I know, Discover took a Chapter 11 type of reorg well before the Sears retail stores all died and now lives on as a brand remnant much like Radio Shack, Pan Am, Bitcoin Diamond, etc...
Random Google dribbles:
It was introduced by Sears in 1985.
Sears sold its financial businesses in 1993 and began to accept MasterCard and Visa in addition to its store credit card and Discover.
In 2005, Discover Financial Services acquired Pulse, an electronic funds transfer network, allowing it to market and issue debit and ATM cards.
Discover was part of Dean Witter, and then Morgan Stanley, until 2007, when Discover Financial Services became an independent company. Novus was once the major processing center that partnered with the company. The Novus logo was retired, replaced by the Discover Network logo.
Hmmm... must be a faulty memory of the Discover crisis, unless it was somehow conflated with the Morgan Stanley $107 billion bailout around the same time they sold Discover.
Comparatively, Discover only cost Sears less than $30M per quarter in losses to go through its growing pains. If we ever open the true books on Ethereum, they surely have soaked more than that much from "market enthusiasm" invested in their issue. And, ultimately, Discover had to turn to the courts to unlever Visa and MasterCard's competitive advantages - that's something that a global issue with little regulation won't be able to do.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Wednesday September 14 2022, @12:49AM
I'm not pretending.
Doesn't sound like spending $30 million per quarter to me.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday September 09 2022, @04:43PM (4 children)
The elephant in this room is fraud.
To be more precise, Ponzi Scheme. All crypto is fraudulent. It has no real world value whatever. Buying stocks is buying part of a physical business with real assets, bonds are loans to businesses or governments, and cash is backed up by governments.
Bitchcoin, etcetratherium and the rest of the copycats are based on absolutely nothing. Nothing but hopes, wishes, and fairy tales. Fools rush in where wisdom fears to tread.At best, it's a gamble, no different than a slot machine.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 10 2022, @02:01AM (2 children)
So what? Even if that were true, I speak of even more mundane fraud, such as trading stuff you never had.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday September 11 2022, @05:53PM (1 child)
I don't quite understand, "trading stuff you never had"? If you're talking about stocks, you own a piece of a real, non-subjective business. What are you referring to?
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 12 2022, @11:35AM
Except, of course, when you don't. Almost all corporate bankruptcies, for example, are cases where owning stock is owning a piece of nothing.
And even if crypto is a pure Ponzi play, having random hackers create infinite crypto out of nothing would instantly destroy the con. When the fraud is heavily competitive, even they have to offer some sort of value and protect against competitors honing in.
(Score: 3, Funny) by kazzie on Saturday September 10 2022, @08:09AM
What about my mint-condition NFT of a tulip bulb? Don't say that's a scheme too!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Barenflimski on Thursday September 08 2022, @11:07PM (2 children)
Maybe I'm reading this wrong. 150 Terawatt hours a year for Bitcoin vs. 62 million Terawatt hours for Ethereum? Sounds like Ethereum is about 61.8 million times more of an energy hog?
It will be interesting to see if there is a noticeable reduction in the energy usage when this happens? Maybe all of these rigs get pointed to Bitcoin and the like right after the switch?
(Score: 5, Informative) by vux984 on Friday September 09 2022, @12:37AM
You are reading right. They definitely wrote it wrong though. Here's another article that makes more sense:
(Score: 2, Informative) by shrewdsheep on Friday September 09 2022, @01:39PM
This is a mistake. Total primary energy production of the world seems to be ~16PWh (peta watt hours)/yr.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Friday September 09 2022, @01:04AM (9 children)
I liked the original idea of distributed mining for Bitcoin (and MANY others) when mining didn't take special hardware. Now you need a million bucks to set up a mining shop -or- to stake for Ether.
It's not exactly decentralized anymore.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 09 2022, @01:36AM (8 children)
Purpose built mining equipment and outrageous energy usage were easy predictions for Bitcoin at $10k+ per coin.
I doubt the inventor(s) ever envisioned it going this far. It certainly was hard to imagine when Bitcoin was $4 each to buy and basically impossible to exchange for anything other than drugs or cash.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Friday September 09 2022, @07:38AM (7 children)
Wait, you can get something but drugs and cash for it now?
Right, hitmen. Forgot about that investment opportunity.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 09 2022, @02:24PM (5 children)
Cyberattack ransom, pizzas from certain shops... the possibilities are endless, but cash seems to be the primary thing.
Actually, I have a Coinbase card in my wallet (they charged it up with $30 in exchange for me watching some videos), which I can use through the Visa network to access that $30 they gave me - anytime somebody asks me for a CC # that I don't want to give, I give them that. In theory, I could trade all kinds of cryptocurrencies in and out of that Coinbase account- which is what the videos were promoting. Kind of like a free buffet at a Casino, between the roulette wheels and the craps tables.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by zion-fueled on Friday September 09 2022, @02:54PM (4 children)
In theory you could. Just the IRS wants it's cut from every transaction because crypto is an "investment" and not the currency it was meant to be.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday September 09 2022, @04:11PM
If it's a currency, a lot of different places want a sales tax. You don't win that way.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday September 10 2022, @09:07AM (2 children)
So if you speculate with currencies, the IRS does not want its cut?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by zion-fueled on Thursday September 15 2022, @01:10PM (1 child)
When you buy a pizza with dollars the government doesn't come back and say the value of them went up so you owe us taxes for their "rise". If I change my dollar to GBP and go buy a widget they don't demand I pay tax on the exchange rate, even if I held them a year.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday September 15 2022, @04:29PM
Speculating with currencies is not buying a pizza with your dollars. Speculating with currencies is when you exchange e.g. dollars to euros and later back. Basically the same that most people do with Bitcoin.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Friday September 09 2022, @04:08PM
I've used BTC to pay for things, e.g. a backpack from Overstock, crypto miners, make donations to sites or people, etc. It takes a bit of work to use it for trade, and you more-or-less have to be specifically looking for a vendor that accepts bitcoin.
As a side note, taking advantage of "sky high" $30USD/1BTC exchange rates to buy Ag and Au bullion was not one of my wisest investment decisions. :) :(