468
Texas paid bitcoin miner more than $31 million to cut energy usage during heat wave
(www.cbsnews.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
468 points (98.0% liked)
News
23328 readers
3174 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Actually, yes, you DO own crypto. If you hold the private keys to your crypto, you OWN that crypto.
To own is to have something that you control. If you have the private keys and nobody has the seed phrase or the spend address to your wallet, literally no one can take it from you.
Everything you just said applies to any form of currency. Don't tell me you actually believe FIAT is backed by anything.
Stop. You're already fucking up there. Cryptocurrency as a concept is not meant to be a stock. Yes there are people who treat bitcoin and shitcoins as such, that doesn't make it a stock. That is the mistake that many people and so many others make on a daily basis. This is why I don't support shitcoins, the only currency you should support is one with a purpose, such as the many time aforementioned monero.
If the Japanese yen had the volatility that it could go from now to worthless to 3x it's current value in a week, would you not put money into it at the dip and cash out at the peak? Yet yen is not a stock, it is a currency. Currency is something you exchange for goods.
The word pyramid scheme does not apply to bitcoin, it applies to RUGPULLS, but nobody controls bitcoin.
Crypto is not backed by anything. The US dollar is backed by the credit of the US government. Crypto is not backed by anything.
That is literally nothing. It's worth what they say it is worth.
Bitcoin and monero is worth the efforts of the community to support it. Pretty much nothing backs FIAT, that is LITERALLY what fiat is, fiat is Latin for "let it be done".
You can argue that without FIAT currency, crypto has no value, but in reality that is not the case because they have their own value. That value is determined by the community as well as the difficulty and abundance of coins. It is literally more stable than real world cash, you just have to USE it as such. ACTUAL COINS, not shitcoins.
The US government has an entire country it could liquidate if it really had to. It just is not linked to gold. There is nothing to liquidate for bitcoin. It is pure speculation. It is simply not backed by any physical value - and never will be.
I simply cannot wrap my head around how you are still not understanding this.
What exactly do you think would happen if the government liquidated all of its assets? Police, military, tax offices, literally everything that it does to be able to extract money from the public?
The US dollar is not backed by anything. It only has value because a large body says it does. They mint more money when they want to, which means that they can always just pull more money out of their ass when they want to.
Bitcoin and other actual coins require you to actually put in work to acquire them. They are agnostic of any body, person or government. They are still assets at the end of the day, they are just not backed by a governing body, they are instead backed by a community.
It sure ain't looking good for fiat, almost seems like fiat is a tool for the government to conduct a pyramid scheme while actual coins have no one pulling the strings.
Police, military, tax offices are NOT assets that can be liquidated.
The US can cede high-value land, lease ports, etc. to back the US dollar with something physical. The US dollar is not backed by a metal, that much is true. However, it is backed by the entire US now.
Blockchain is essentially a huge, decentralized database (or ledger) that says who owns what. The big issue with crypto is you can manipulate who owns what if you own a majority of the coin available. The other big issue is that nobody accepts bitcoin. Therefore, people are using exchanges and getting absolutely fucked by malicious smart contracts.
You keep talking about the fall of fiat, but you fail to prove that crypto is a valid replacement
They already do the second thing, and answer this, what EXACTLY is on that high value land you're talking about?
This is a blatant lie. I don't know who told you that. The closest thing to what you are describing is a 51% attack in which you have +51% of the network hashrate, in which you try to insert an alternate blockchain because everyone will have to do confirmations on you. This allows them to:
block transactions
double spend coins
prevent the creation of new blocks
It does not allow them to steal crypto from confirmed transactions. At most, it will allow them to spend a coin somewhere and then yoink it to another address.
You may point your finger and be all like "See! You just admitted it right there, that's PROOF"
Nuh uh uh, not so fast buddy
If you are using a reputable coin, this is prohibitively expensive to perform, and the thing about this is, you get ONE SHOT to do this.
The thing that is comical about this, is that the government's mint has the exact issues you are describing right now.
And who's fault is that exactly? Besides, that's not even accurate to begin with. Some of the largest companies on earth accept bitcoin. Tesla for instance accepts bitcoin. Many smaller vendors accept multiple cryptocurrencies, hell, I've bought real world goods including food off of MoneroMarket.
Lol. Do you think I got my crypto from an exchange? Don't you think the idea of KYC defeats the entire concept of a CRYPTO currency? A currency based around cryptography? One that allows for privacy and anonymity on different levels based on which one you choose (which should always be monero or its forks)? Also, what do you mean smart contract? None of that shit matters if you transfer your coins to a wallet you own and get confirmations.
If you are buying crypto from robinhood, first off you're fucking retarded, but second off that's not an exchange, that's a stock broker who is using crypto (that they likely are not even holding) as a stock.