The SEC has said that tokens are securities.
Old thread: Bitcoin - Front Row Crew Forum
To be fair, all currency only has value because people involved in its exchange agree that it has value.
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True of modern currency. Also true of old currency, but in some old currencies cases it also had value because it was delicious (I’m looking at you salt).
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US dollars also have value because the US government says so. Even if no one will give me goods for them, I can still use them to pay taxes. “Not going to jail” is some pretty good intrinsic value in my book.
Currency is just accounting.
The idea that currency needs to have any “intrinsic” value is ridiculous.
Currency is literally just a very large accounting book.
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My current complaint with cryptocurrency is people driving up the price of video cards buying them all up to mine Ethereum or whatever the fuck the current darkweb drugs and illegal porn money is. For what I just paid for a basic bitch 1060 I could have gotten a 1070 not three months ago if I’d had the dosh at the time.
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That doesn’t bother me. It means NVidia and friends are making mad bank. Mad bank that will be used to fund the development of even crazier video cards. They are paying to make my next computer faster.
Oooooor, they’re gonna see who their real customers are and start catering to them. I remember seeing that they were developing a new 1070 without an HDMI port or really any external port just for the miners. Maybe they’ll put some of that time and monies towards optimizing their instruction set for mining activities. I know I saw this talked about here a while back but my first google search didn’t yield anything and I wasn’t willing to look farther.
It doesn’t bother you because you have a very well paying job where if the price increases by 50% or better it doesn’t hurt you that much. Not all of us are high paid tech industry folks.
[quote=“panfriedmarmot, post:10, topic:869, full:true”]
It doesn’t bother you because you have a very well paying job where if the price increases by 50% or better it doesn’t hurt you that much. Not all of us are high paid tech industry folks.
[/quote]Computer tech is always subject to wild price fluctuations. Gotta be patient sometimes.
Even though I have money, if I wanted a video card now and didn’t need a 1080, I’d just wait for the 1070 to come back down in price. If I was cornered and forced to buy a card (e.g., mine died), I’d get a cheap refurbished POS to tide me over.
I did this with RAM back during the days of high RAM prices.
Well considering they’re now working on GPU’s specifically for mining hopefully that problem wont last much longer. I mean if they are just repwckaging 1070’s and 1080’s without video outputs its just a matter of production time. Here’s hoping they don’t charge a premium at all and create an incentive to still buy the normal cards.
As far as currencies not having intrinsic value, it always makes me laugh when the gold standard people say money is worthless because it isnt backed by gold anymore. Like, this isn’t bartering chickens, normal people don’t want gold for its practical uses.
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An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to “mine” more Bitcoins. That’s about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.
This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week. On a larger scale, De Vries’ index shows that bitcoin miners worldwide could be using enough electricity to at any given time to power about 2.26 million American homes.
Expressing Bitcoin’s energy use on a per-transaction basis is a useful abstraction. Bitcoin uses x energy in total, and this energy verifies/secures roughly 300k transactions per day. So this measure shows the value we get for all that electricity, since the verified transaction (and our confidence in it) is ultimately the end product.
It’s worth asking ourselves hard questions about Bitcoin’s environmental footprint
Shut it all down.
A bitcoin is supposedly worth $7000 right now. To burn it all down we need to figure out why there are people willing to pay $7000 in real money for.a worthless bitcoin. I think the obvious answer is that there is big time organized crime and money laundering going on. If the criminals are apprehended and/or removed from the system, the source of real money will be gone, and it will no longer be worthwhile for normal people to mine coins.
I think a good step would be to freeze the real world assets of anyone buying coins, especially large quantities of coins since odds are they are engaging in criminal activity. There’s not much else you can do with the coins that is worth it.
Cops do that in the US with regular cash, often without any real specific case for criminality. They then keep it forever and a lot of innocent people lose everything without ever seeing a trial.
Right now, it’s probably mostly
- People speculating on the bubble of the coins’ value
- People on the consumer-side of crime buying drugs
- Criminals laundering their drug money
I am aware of the issues pertaining to forfeiture. I didn’t say they should take people’s money. I said they should freeze their accounts, so they can’t move their money. At least not until we know they are legit. You see someone spending thousands on bitcoins, what are the odds that they are up to shady business? Pretty good, I’d say.
Also, just doing it to a few big players should in itself kill the value of the coins. What’s that you say? If I buy or sell coins I’ll have my accounts frozen? No coins for me thanks. Hopefully that alone could burst the bubble.
So guilty until proven innocent?
Just make using or mining coins a crime itself. Problem solved.