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.

 

[VirtualLarry]

At least mcD's cares about those that lost their shirt in crypto...

 

[Shmee]

Pizza is good, or can be. Soda is not great, but can be fun. Same with whisky

You may be spot on with your assesment, though there are still new crypto projects which look quite promising. Some people just don't like going to the moon I guess. But now is when you refuel on the dips for future moon visits!

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Yeah I agree it is just if you are not building a new machine that power supply is kind of useless.

I have no less than 4 extra PSUs at any given time. Test bench and back ups for existing systems. They all get used here and there, to make certain they don't die from sitting in a closet. Felt good knowing I had no worries when the supply dried up not long ago, and prices spiked.

 

[biostud]

In a functional democracy the government is representing the people and thus the rules regarding financial institutions are based on peoples will. Bitcoin is anarchy, and thus the strongest dictates the rules.

 

[Shivansps]

Im sorry but i need to jump in here. As a Argentinian i understand inflationary economy very well because ive expended over 30 years (and counting) of my life dealing with it.

Politicians LOVE inflation (you buy votes with public funds, in diferent ways, all financed by a printer), thats like a drug to them. It is bad long term = forcing people to consume now means no saving, no saving means no investments, what means a poor person will be always be poor, they cant progress. What is great for the politicians, that means cheaper votes.
It is good to deal with old debts, yet, banks arent dumb, inflation means higher interest rates for new debts = less investments.
Less investments means less private jobs, what increases the need for more public jobs, what increases the need for printing more money and/or more taxes what means less private jobs once again. All results in more people living off the goverment = yeay more votes.

People get used to it over time, thats the worse part, it starts to spiral out of control, and you reach a point were your country cant live whiout it and there is no way to fix it whiout killing half of the population. Thats were Argentina is right now. So be carefull when thinking that "its fine"...

Now crypto does not fix ANYTHING, crypto is inflationary by design, the only diference is that WE ARE THE ONES "printing" the money, not the politicians, so WE ARE the ones feeling the power they have. If you replace fiat for crypto it is going to have the exact same effect.

 

[Leeea]

Yay!

Now lets outlaw it here also!

We need to criminalize cryptocurrency everywhere!

 

[Shmee]

Yep, after all that, four extra power supplies did the trick. Graphics cards will be falling from the sky any day now.

Edit: heh, seems I can unmark other peoples' "solutions".

Haha I think I solved it again. ROFL

 

[Ninjak]

This is so wrong...
You get stiffed if your the seller, yes.
But buyer, you have an insane buyer protection that pisses off the sellers half the time on how unfair it is for the seller.

I use paypal for just that.
Its so the seller doesn't even think twice to screw me over, because if its even the slightest bit off from description, which a lot of sellers tend to kindly miss or overstate, I can try to first mediate, and if the seller doesn't like it, i can then just report it to paypal and get a full refund.

Also if your friend is doing 15MM he would be going though ESCROWS on some of the sales, unless its very small sales at large vol.
You think paypal is bad.... wait til you see ESCROWS and fee's associated with ESCROWS.

So please don't tell people that paypal is all evil, the buyer is heavily protected, the seller is exposed, and if the seller wont accept, good luck getting the buyer to trust.

This is a real example, I'm not making this up. The guy has a well-known YouTube channel (in this collectable niche), he makes money by buying large volume of product wholesale, breaking it down, and selling it off to hundreds or thousands of patrons in order sizes around a few hundred dollars. There is absolutely no need for buyer protection, this guy is not going to lose his name, his business, his empire trying to stiff you over a few hundred dollars. His buyers themselves are semi-vetted as he only sells to his Patreon subscribers, they know what they are getting, they don't need Paypal hand-holding. Paypal provides almost no value in this transaction, it's a perfect application of cryptocurrency.

 

[Rebel_L]

That's utter foolishness. I would buy GPUs from a Pro miner / outfit, as long as they were returned to stock BIOS and appropriately cleaned and refurbished / repasted, rather than an abused overclocked garbage card from a single user gamer.

It's prejudice like that, that stems from demonization and misunderstanding of other parties, that leads to problems like in other domains, where people are anti-science, because of "beliefs".

I expect a miner card to have been running for 24/7 I would expect a gamers card to run far less than that. I wouldn't buy any used cards myself but I would suspect that mid range cards from a gamer would likely not have had any significant overclocks with far less hours of used time than a mining card.

The majority of people never go beyond whatever basic software overclocks can be done with what downloads with their driver package. For miners its whatever drives profit, and while this often lower power usage it can also mean other things which would mean having to keep up to date on things from the mining world. When it comes to things like using custom bios's or what unusual stresses whatever coin mining is putting on cards its too much research on my end to be informed about, its easier to just opt out. I am sure that with how popular mining is you are just as likely to buy a used card from a ridiculous overclocker as from a inexperienced miner who is abusing cards just as badly.

 

[DrMrLordX]

People can blame miners all they want but even once mining isn't a factor, GPU manufactures will keep prices high because they can and because gamers by and large will pay them.

Miners are "the other guy". It's easy to blame them. Without that scapegoat, what can you do? Blame yourself? Perish the thought.

 

[nosurprises]

A laptop RTX 3060, for example, was un-gimped, whereas the desktop ones were nerfed.

And you can't blame "miners" for higher prices, without first blaming scalpers and less-than-scrupoulous vendors, willing to go over MSRP and almost up to ebay scalper prices.

Likewise, the only reason that miners were willing to pay scalper prices higher than MSRP, was due to lack of supply / availability (@ MSRP), which is due to GPU mfgs, which is again due to the Pandemic.

There is no way a laptop can be used to mine more cost efficiently than a regular desktop GPU. The GPU in a laptop is nerfed by nature of being in a laptop. Also, miners would be paying for a bunch of stuff that doesn't contribute to mining (a display, RAM, keyboard, mouse, cpu, MB -- the whole computer). I guess some would still try.

I'm blaming crypto mining that is creating artificial demand for computing resources. I guess you can say I'm hating the game, not necessarily the player -- though I don't like some of the miners that spin up a coal plant dedicated to mining.

In April of this year, in the middle of a pandemic, you can get 14TB HDD for $200. Then Chia crypto that uses HDDs showed up; the HDD prices immediately triple -- there is suddenly not enough supply, and scalpers are showing up. Now 6 months later, Chia has crashed and HDD price is coming back down to what it was.

 

[UsandThem]

Yep, miners caused the world-wide COVID-19 Pandemic, and all of the supply-chain snafus that we've seen since. So simple! Just blame miners!!!

Larry, Larry, Larry......

I know you are pro-mining. And I know that the current availability of many components/items is largely due to Covid issues.

But to not believe that mining profitability over the last 18 months has no impact on GPU availability/pricing is a little disingenuous. All we have to do is look at 2018 when it happened, and we had same issues (although not on the scale we have this time because of Covid).

GPUs were next to impossible to buy, many businesses began bundling the GPUs with other components (B&H Photo did since I bought one from them), and scalpers/flippers were making money off of it (I made a few bucks doing this).

 

[beginner99]

Nice to hear there is some justice left in the world. And it's a felony, so it's got teeth.

Not really. Monero is 100% private. There is no way of proving who and how much someone has been moving around. So you can funnel all your crypto through it and then trade on a "no KYC" exchange or a DEX.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

So use a different interface? This is one instance where dedicated wallet software does the job better than a web interface.

My admittedly amateur point is the web being safe until it isn’t to a normal person.
How would someone of normal ability know a safe web interface vs an at risk web interface.

 

[BFG10K]

There's a difference between accessing a wallet and mining.

Is there? Show us how to access a Crypto wallet without electricity or internet. Specifically, show us how to make a payment or otherwise extract value from it.

The blockchain's still working, to the extent that it works at all.

22% drop in value overnight. If that's "working" then so is the Zimbabwean dollar.

"Crypto is the solution to fiat's inflation!". LMAO.

Fortunately I do not think that people in the West will ever experience that problem. It's more of a someone-else's-problem kind of thing.

Yep, that's why the Cryptobros don't care if the likes of Kosovo experience power cuts because of their parasitic behavior.

 

[Mopetar]

Best estimates are that 60% of that hashrate are ASICs. Time to re-calculate?

I'm saying, that miners don't pay scalper prices. Gamers do. Gamers feed the scalping beast, and their bots, which is what is really fuelling the price rise.

Source for those estimates?

Look at the forums and all the people grumbling about prices who are holding out. Those are the gamers and they aren't paying the scalper prices. The only people who can are those who will use the GPU to mine and break even on the purchase price after some number of months.

What you're suggesting doesn't make any sense. If it did you'd have to explain why scalpers haven't done this before when it's clearly so easy and profitable. Don't tell me it's shortages. Nvidia posted recorded revenue in their last quarter. To quote their financial statement "Record Gaming revenue of $3.22 billion, up 42 percent from a year earlier."

You'd also need to explain why gamers will pay double MSRP for a GPU, but the console prices aren't approaching the same levels. In some cases the market price is higher for a GPU that's no more powerful than what you could get from one of these next generation consoles. I just checked eBay and the PS5 and Xbox consoles getting bids are rarely more than 25% over MSRP.

Like I said, I don't care if miners want to pay triple MSRP because a GPU is worth that much money to them. It's their money and no one else has any more right to a GPU than they do, but don't try to feed me a load of nonsense. I'm not sure if I should respond to it or use it to fertilize my garden.

 

[Leeea]

Looks like the crypto collapse has begun

Things are looking good!

 

[ultimatebob]

pics?

It's black on black, so it definitely looks better in person.

 

[ultimatebob]

I was super into crypto when it first came out. But as time went on, I found that more people were talking about how they are making money with it as opposed to its utility. At that point I pretty much wrote it off as another way of just trading other currencies.

Yeah... cryptocurrency doesn't seem to work well as an actual currency. The transaction times are slow, the transaction fees are high, and you're supposed to report every purchase transaction to the IRS because it's being treated as a security instead of a method of exchange.

I think that's why the Bitcoin folks pivoted to promoting it as a store of value like gold... because frankly, it's become as much of a hassle as buying stuff with actual gold.

 

[DisarmedDespot]

It has much higher use potential in countries with poor financial infrastructure. In the US if I needed to send a family member $100 I could go to my bank and know with 100% certainty it would be sent to my family member no problem, with a clear paper trail of the transaction. That's much harder to do in a 3rd world country or if the recipient or sender doesn't have a bank account. Anyone can create and maintain a crypto wallet for FREE. You don't need to go to a bank to do it, you don't need an appointment, you don't need an ID. All you need is an internet connection and a piece of paper. Once coins are in your wallet you never have to worry about the bank collapsing or a government seizing your funds.

Nah. Those areas can be served in other ways. Look up SMS banking in Nigeria for an example.

So, here's the thing: If you lose that piece of paper, your money is irrecoverably gone. Heck, when I bring up that risk here, people always say to buy a hardware wallet, so add that to the list someone in sub-Saharan Africa needs. You also need to convert that crypto into actual money to buy things. And let's be honest, in a lot of those areas you can't guarantee a connection everywhere in the third world, so if there's no wifi and a bad signal wherever you're at, you can't use your crypto at all. And let's not forget how insanely inconvenient crypto is to use.

Crypto's claim that it will 'bank the unbanked' failed years ago.

 

[Zorba]

Well, even crypto fanboys should recognize that the Bitcoin process for processing block chain transactions consumes an unnecessary amount of electrical power (and, no, those miners running 7/24 are not consuming just 'green' energy). It should make sense for everybody to be in favor of changes to reduce our consumption of energy whatever it is being used for. I haven't heard anything to suggest that Bitcoin will be moving to a less energy intensive proof of service as Etherium is. I hope Bitcoin follows that route soon.

I am not anti-crypto any more than I am anti-gold, anti-diamonds, anti-lottery tickets or anti-tulip bulbs. However, the value of all of these things seems to be more in the eye of the beholder than in their intrinsic usefulness. The more steps I have to go through to turn something into a loaf of bread, the less confident I am in its value. That is one of the main reason I haven't bought into Bitcoin as an investment.

The advisors who support crypto investing still generally recommend allocating only a very small percentage to crypto and warn that it is a very risky investment that may deliver big gains or big losses. This doesn't sound like a 'storer of value' to me.

In some ways, the very things that enthusiasts put forward as the advantages of crypto are the same things that make me suspicious of it. Perhaps time (another decade of it) will prove me wrong.

Even if it was all green power, that is green power that isn't being used elsewhere. Until we have widespread, cheap fusion power we need to focus on efficient use of power.

 

[BFG10K]

Beanstalk cryptocurrency project robbed after hacker votes to send themself $182 million

“We are fucked,” the founders posted in Discord.

www.theverge.com

...the Beanstalk attacker used a flash loan obtained through the decentralized protocol Aave to borrow close to $1 billion in cryptocurrency assets and exchanged these for enough beans to gain a 67 percent voting stake in the project. With this supermajority stake, they were able to approve the execution of code that transferred the assets to their own wallet.

Imagine getting a loan at your local bank, then using that as collateral to "vote" yourself access to other peoples' money at the same bank. LMFAO.

Since the attack, the hacker has been moving funds through Tornado Cash, a privacy-focused mixer service that has become a go-to step in laundering stolen cryptocurrency funds. With much of the stolen money now obscured, it’s unlikely to be traced and returned.

"Blockchain is the secure future utopia underlying digital currency, complete with full auditing!" - The Internet Cryptobros.

 

[BFG10K]

Like clockwork the collusion cartels kick in and block transactions due to "extreme market conditions" and "stuck on-chain transaction", whatever the fuck that even means. Imaginary phrases making excuses for imaginary things failing.

Bitcoin tumbles below $21,000 in crypto crash. This chart shows how much worse a selloff could get.

The week has started off rough for cryptocurrencies, with bitcoin tumbling and troubles for some cryptocurrency platforms as U.S. inflation rattles investors.

www.marketwatch.com

It's funny, a few pages ago cryptobros told us exchange closures weren't intentional but rather caused by "network overloading", lulz.

"Crypto is the future utopia because no central authority controls your assets!" - The Internet Cryptobros

 

[dullard]

Ethereum now up 100% from its low. Even if you're a crypto hater, you cannot deny the non-leveraged trading opportunities (or gambles) are best in the crypto space.

You are correct that their are short-term opportunities. But why the need to play with fire in an attempt to get rich quick? I much prefer the almost iron-clad method of getting rich slowly.

 

[MrSquished]

Didn't pony0 the Elon cultist say he was putting a bunch of money into Bitcoin and Doge before Elon helped tank Doge and when Bit was near 60K?