I still run multiple Hawaii cards in mining rigs. Most of them are 290s. Those cards are getting on 5 years old, and I've been mining with them since . . . August 2016? Anyway, they still make bank. Not like my Vega FE, but they still put out for me, and they keep a few rooms nice and warm during the winter (and rather uncomfortable in the summer, bleh, whatever).
Incorrect. Fiat currency is nothing but a unit of barter, which itself is only backed by <insert anti government sceed here>. Only a few cryptos out there - such as Bitcoin - operate under the same model.
Most subsequent projects have been focused on blockchains that actually have some utility value.
A classic and easy-to-understand example is Monero (XMR). It is a "darkcoin". The entire selling point of XMR is that it masks whatever you're doing. There is no public record of how much XMR anyone has, how much they have sent to anyone else, how much they have received from anyone else, or even how much they have mined.
How much would you pay to mask all your financial transactions? You ever heard of the Panama Papers? How much do you think *they* would pay to have the ability to never get caught again? Think about it.
Bitconnect, sure. Others, not so much.
I don't see why. Mining typically does not use much more power than gaming. Those GPUs in the Xbone and PS4 are made to work, and they have GDDR5 to boot. It might take some voltage/clockspeed mods to make it truly feasible in the existing chassis, but hell if you can mine on a 290 you should be able to mine on an Xbone.
Clearly you have not read many whitepapers. Some are FUD and lies, or copy/pastes of other whitepapers. Others actually describe fiduciary responsibilities and such. Example:
https://atlant.io/assets/documents/en/Atlant_WP_publish.pdf
I ask myself this every day. The answers I get do not improve with time.