The anti-crypto thread

[BFG10K]

Great news, crypto's collapsing across the board: https://www.techpowerup.com/282380/...ions-in-less-than-24-hours-did-the-bubble-pop

Also China's banned crypto, though individuals can still have it: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinese-financial-payment-bodies-barred-122712260.html

The sooner this cancerous parasite is wiped out, the better.

 

[Mopetar]

Some small controlled small inflation is actually the goal of any health economy. Deflation simply doesn't work as people would resort to spending as little as possible sending the economy downhill (of course this would be great for the environment as consumption goes down and hence pollution).

This really isn't true in the sense that you present. Investment in a good business is almost always a better return than what could be expected from increased value of the currency over the same time. Unless you had a government ensuring a currency always deflated as economic activity slowed the currency would naturally start to inflate.

This should be intuitive since if you imagined a fixed amount of money and absolutely no production of new goods or services because no one wanted to spend their money it would eventually mean we're eating into existing supply which increases the value of the remaining quantity and results in inflation. You'd need a government that would collect taxes and just burn the collected money to ensure continued deflation.

The reality is that we just just more conservative investing since not investing gives some return automatically due to deflation. Assuming a low rate it's all money acting as though it were in a savings account regardless of whether it's in a bank or under a mattress.

The real problem currently, which really started in the mid 90ties if not earlier, is the fact that salaries aren't increasing anymore together with inflation. So ultimately people have less purchasing power (=poorer). This effect is now really noticeable because inflation is bigger than normal due to the insane money printing and because the pandemic was yet another great excuse to keep wages even lower which is especially ironic in public traded companies for which you can simply see the figures yourself.

That's simply not true either. If you look at real median income across time it's gone up since 1990. We just haven't seen exponential growth which was observed earlier in history. There are a lot of factors that go into this so if you're looking for a simple explanation, there isn't one. However one of the reasons is that the rest of the world is now enjoying the same economic development we previously had and have seen those exponential gains, but that growth naturally comes at the expense of ours to some degree because a free market will undergo something similar to osmosis as it works towards an equilibrium.

 

[dank69]

This really isn't true in the sense that you present. Investment in a good business is almost always a better return than what could be expected from increased value of the currency over the same time. Unless you had a government ensuring a currency always deflated as economic activity slowed the currency would naturally start to inflate.

This should be intuitive since if you imagined a fixed amount of money and absolutely no production of new goods or services because no one wanted to spend their money it would eventually mean we're eating into existing supply which increases the value of the remaining quantity and results in inflation. You'd need a government that would collect taxes and just burn the collected money to ensure continued deflation.

The reality is that we just just more conservative investing since not investing gives some return automatically due to deflation. Assuming a low rate it's all money acting as though it were in a savings account regardless of whether it's in a bank or under a mattress.



That's simply not true either. If you look at real median income across time it's gone up since 1990. We just haven't seen exponential growth which was observed earlier in history. There are a lot of factors that go into this so if you're looking for a simple explanation, there isn't one. However one of the reasons is that the rest of the world is now enjoying the same economic development we previously had and have seen those exponential gains, but that growth naturally comes at the expense of ours to some degree because a free market will undergo something similar to osmosis as it works towards an equilibrium.

There are some well known contributing factors:

The Impact of Reagan: Good for the Rich, Bad for Most

No belief is more firmly held in Republican dogma than that the Reagan “Revolution” turned the US economy around from perpetual stagnation to strong growth, with consequent benefits for…

aneconomicsense.org

 

[ultimatebob]

Wow.... when did the video card forum turn into P&N?

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Wow.... when did the video card forum turn into P&N?

- When GPUs, Digital Currencies, and Capitalism smashed into each other at warp speed sometime late last year...

 

[DrMrLordX]

Yeah this is rapidly turning into a bad P&N thread. LOL @ anyone who thinks a specific President had anything to do with the stagnation of wages vs. productivity though.

 

[Mopetar]

There are some well known contributing factors:

The Impact of Reagan: Good for the Rich, Bad for Most

No belief is more firmly held in Republican dogma than that the Reagan “Revolution” turned the US economy around from perpetual stagnation to strong growth, with consequent benefits for…

aneconomicsense.org

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make since you just linked a bunch of images. The graphs seem to suggest that the reason wages didn't keep up with productivity is union membership. That really doesn't make sense since even when wages were tracking productivity increases most workers weren't in a union and if you wanted to show union membership actually being beneficial you could just do that directly by comparing wage growth between union and non-union members. Or you'd just look at other countries where union membership is considerably higher.

Of course if you do that the argument largely falls apart. The wage growth in other western democracies is similar over the same time period despite almost all of them having a much larger percentage of workers being union members and being disconnected from U.S. political and economic policies. Denmark has more workers in unions than not (about 66% from recent figures), but have seen the same low rates in nominal wage increase over roughly the same period as the U.S. Other European countries I looked at (specifically Germany and Sweden) had similar numbers for wage growth in that period.

Wages fall off right as China and other asian countries started to open up their markets. The Open Door policy was started in '78, which is when China opened the country to foreign investment and created a massive supply of cheap labor. That's probably not the only explanation. Computers and robotics also saw a lot of advancement and adoption over that timeframe as well and completely changed many industries. Women also started to enter the workforce in larger and larger numbers which substantially increased the labor supply.

Our labor is more productive than at any point in history, but it's almost entirely a result of computers, robots, and other industrialization. Of course the flip side of this is that thing things we produce are now less expensive, which is why even if wages were completely flat (excluding inflation) people would still have more purchasing power than previously.

 

[esquared]

OK, everyone.

Keep this to the topic of the thread.
This isn't P&N.

<------------------------------------------P&N



esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

 

[ultimatebob]

I like the location of that arrow, esquared! When I think of P&N, you're going to be first person who comes to mind now

Oh, and to stay on topic... Buy and Mine Dogecoin! Much coin, very wow!

 

[Magic Carpet]

Yeah. Dogecoin IS the future, sadly I didn't believe in it in 2014 when I sold 100K of mined coins for nothing.



Now, the next big thing will be Chia. You just have to believe 😂

 

[BFG10K]

Dogecoin creator says all Crypto is a scam:

The creator of Dogecoin says all crypto is a scam

Software engineer Palmer, who created the payment system with Billy Markus in 2013 as a joke based on the "doge" meme, has been absent from Twitter since...

www.techspot.com

The cryptocurrency industry leverages a network of shady business connections, bought influencers and pay-for-play media outlets to perpetuate a cult-like “get rich quick” funnel designed to extract new money from the financially desperate and naive.

Ouch.

Also:

UK detectives seize a record $250 million in crypto

The Metropolitan Police announced that the seizure was made by the Met's Economic Crime Command. It comes a few weeks after it confiscated $157.8 million worth of...

www.techspot.com

One of the largest hauls of criminal Crypto laundering ever seized. But...but...Swiss Banks.

 

[BFG10K]

If you can't sell a bitcoin, would you ever mine it?

Excellent point. We're repeatedly told Crypto is the "path to utopia for greater things"(tm) and has nothing to do with money.

But show me a single miner that at the end of the day says "well, I've improved humanity today a little, time to delete all my earnings and start from scratch tomorrow!"

Doesn't happen, because there's not a single miner out there that doesn't expect $FIAT in return. And as we've repeatedly seen, a lot of the large facilities steal power and displace the local population from using it.

This is in contrast to something like Folding @ Home where the volunteers truly sacrifice their time, money, and they pay for extra power to help humanity. They also don't steal from anyone or create technology shortages that disrupt the livelihoods of others.

 

[beginner99]

One of the largest hauls of criminal Crypto laundering ever seized. But...but...Swiss Banks.

It's funny you don't get the irony. blockchain is open. So it's actually easier to catch and track people than say Swiss banks (at least 10 years ago now their bank secret doesn't really exist anymore . Better of in panama if you do money laundering). you don't even need a warrant or other legal hurdles. I think you greatly underestimate the amount of criminal activity that happen in good old cash globally and that is how we need to compare if you pick random global events. Should we ban cash because of that?

 

[DrMrLordX]

Dogecoin creator says all Crypto is a scam:

Considering how and why Dogecoin was created in the first place, I'm not surprised he's saying that. As to whether or not people would mine crypto if it couldn't be sold? Well that would depend WHY it couldn't be sold. If there were an artificial government embargo on exchanging it directly for legal tender, then yeah people would still mine it for direct barter, which is often what people are doing with XMR anyway (despite the fact that you can sell XMR for fiat if you like). If you can buy things directly with your crypto, you don't need to exchange it for USD or EUR. BTC's colossal failure is in how slow is its blockchain. The txn times are atrocious, as is the txn rate. If BTC had been designed well enough to scale into the tens of thousands of txns/second, then it's highly probable that people would just go ahead and use it as "real money" directly instead of trying to cash it out for USD. And no, LN doesn't count because it's not what it's cracked up to be, so don't go there.

 

[ultimatebob]

Dogecoin creator says all Crypto is a scam:

The creator of Dogecoin says all crypto is a scam

Software engineer Palmer, who created the payment system with Billy Markus in 2013 as a joke based on the "doge" meme, has been absent from Twitter since...

www.techspot.com

Ouch.

It has to suck to be that guy... he had millions of Dogecoin back when it was worth fractions of a penny, only to sell it all to buy a used Honda Civic.

If he had held onto it when it got up to 70 cents and sold it then, he would now be set for life.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Dogecoin creator says all Crypto is a scam

He's not far off, take Chia for example, interesting tech, but how many millions of coins already pre-mined? *hint*

What's more, look at this price chart. Purely speculative asset as it is and if Musk decides to pump it, he can easily do so with a single tweet, lmao. Easy money! After all, this is far greener than BTC.




@DrMrLordX

Good points, but the main problem with all crypto is high volatility. You never know when it goes up or comes down. I have yet to see any service that takes crypto for payment without FIAT conversion. It is a great asset for trading, if you know what you are doing, though.

NB. The US government will never give up control over money, this will have its niche and be likely regulated at some point, but never become a dominant force. That is of course my humble prediction.

 

[Magic Carpet]

If he had held onto it when it got up to 70 cents and sold it then, he would now be set for life.

I am following this story, very amusing. I wonder, why Musk won't help this poor fella, lmao. Nice challenge.

James Howells, an IT engineer who accidentally threw away the hard drive of an old computer containing 7,500 bitcoins back in 2013, has not given up his quest to retrieve his coins. The 35-year-old from the city of Newport in the U.K. has shared with The Sun publication his 12-month plan to search the city landfill using x-ray scanning devices and AI technology.

 

[ultimatebob]

I noticed that Dogecoin is below 20 cents now, though. It still seems to be on it's steady march back to a penny, and it seems that even the mighty Elon can't save it now.

Ethereum is also back under $2,000 as well. I wonder how low it has to get before it become unprofitable to mine with a GPU, and eBay will start getting flooded with "lightly used" video cards selling under MSRP?

 

[DisarmedDespot]

It's funny you don't get the irony. blockchain is open. So it's actually easier to catch and track people than say Swiss banks (at least 10 years ago now their bank secret doesn't really exist anymore . Better of in panama if you do money laundering). you don't even need a warrant or other legal hurdles. I think you greatly underestimate the amount of criminal activity that happen in good old cash globally and that is how we need to compare if you pick random global events. Should we ban cash because of that?

Your argument is bad. I'm willing to bet the percentage of cash used in crimes vs legal uses is significantly lower than crypto because, well, you can use cash to actually do things besides speculation and ransomware.

But hey, there's a third use case! I can now say speculation, ransomware and money laundering!

Considering how and why Dogecoin was created in the first place, I'm not surprised he's saying that. As to whether or not people would mine crypto if it couldn't be sold? Well that would depend WHY it couldn't be sold. If there were an artificial government embargo on exchanging it directly for legal tender, then yeah people would still mine it for direct barter, which is often what people are doing with XMR anyway (despite the fact that you can sell XMR for fiat if you like). If you can buy things directly with your crypto, you don't need to exchange it for USD or EUR. BTC's colossal failure is in how slow is its blockchain. The txn times are atrocious, as is the txn rate. If BTC had been designed well enough to scale into the tens of thousands of txns/second, then it's highly probable that people would just go ahead and use it as "real money" directly instead of trying to cash it out for USD. And no, LN doesn't count because it's not what it's cracked up to be, so don't go there.

Honestly I think any chance of a cryptocurrency actually being adopted as a currency on any sort of scale is long gone. Even if blockchain managed to work, it's just too clunky for day-to-day use for 99% of people compared to something like a credit or debit card. And to get it into something like that you need a trusted third party, which just defeats the purpose of using a cryptocurrency.

 

[jpiniero]

Ethereum is also back under $2,000 as well. I wonder how low it has to get before it become unprofitable to mine with a GPU, and eBay will start getting flooded with "lightly used" video cards selling under MSRP?

I used a profitability calculator and the 3080 would still get roughly $4.60/day after electricity (at 15c/kwh).

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Yeah. Dogecoin IS the future, sadly I didn't believe in it in 2014 when I sold 100K of mined coins for nothing.

View attachment 47113

Now, the next big thing will be Chia. You just have to believe 😂

Quick and simple artcle from the creator of Dogecoin

Why Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Etherium Crashed Today (msn.com)

 

[fleshconsumed]

Ethereum is also back under $2,000 as well. I wonder how low it has to get before it become unprofitable to mine with a GPU, and eBay will start getting flooded with "lightly used" video cards selling under MSRP?

Depends on electricity costs. My 3070 still gets me about $100 per month, it's undervolted and uderclocked for about 130W, assuming 15 cents per kW it costs about $15 per month to run. Strictly speaking assuming no changes in difficulty and payouts ETH would have to fall to $300 or so before it became unprofitable. Larger mining farms would sell before it gets to that point, but I still do not expect any large GPU dumps unless ETH goes below $700-900. I know a lot of people are predicting crypto collapse, and it may be true, but I seriously doubt ETH will go way below $1000. If it does get to the $300 point I'll be buying a bunch in anticipation of ETH 2.0 PoS.

 

[Mopetar]

I am following this story, very amusing. I wonder, why Musk won't help this poor fella, lmao. Nice challenge.

Technically all remaining BitCoin are worth more as a result of these being lost. It's not really in anyone else's interest to help him out unless they're getting paid.

Quick and simple artcle from the creator of Dogecoin

Why Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Etherium Crashed Today (msn.com)

Conflating all of the scams going on that are explicitly designed to defraud people with cryptocurrency as a whole is a bit disingenuous.

I'll let people do what they want with their own money. It's theirs after all. If they make poor choices then they've purchased a learning opportunity.

I think the biggest problem with cryptocurrency is that almost no one understands it (not that many people really have a good understanding of regular currency anyways) even at a surface level. Naturally this leads to bad decision making by many individuals. However, I'm not even quite sure anyone really understands the full implications of what it means, even economists. It's too new and too alien.

 

[amenx]

Police Destroy 1,069 Bitcoin Miners With Big Ass Steamroller In Malaysia

Authorities in the city of Miri in Sarawak, Malaysia seized 1,069 rigs from miners alleged to have stolen electricity for their operations, per a report from local publication The Star. The devices were seized in a joint operation between Miri police and Sarawak Energy Berhad between February and April, and have an estimated value of RM5.3 million ($1.25 million USD), according to the outlet...

 

[Mopetar]

Why not just sell them to help pay for the cost of the stolen electricity?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Why not just sell them

Exactly. WTF?

Edit: Oh, I get it now. Make a public spectacle to dissuade anyone else that might have that idea...

Edit: Is bitcoin mining explicitly illegal in that jurisdiction, though? Thought bitcoin mining was profitable; why not just set up legit and actually pay for the electric.