Ah, okay. See, we are exactly the opposite in that case, because I have lost all faith in governments, and therefore have lost all faith in what they call money.
Edit: Tap the Publish button before I’m into.
You could give me a bunch of government fiat, and I would take it and turn it into crypto simply to have more crypto because there are still people who desire to have government fiat currency. And I am not one of them.
Fiat currencies are money by decree of a government. If you have lost trust in your government or your government is not trustworthy to begin with, then the Fiat currency is not worth the paper it’s printed on or the digits in your bank account. Your access to your bank account can be restricted at any time for any reason with just a simple push of a button and you have extremely small or no recourse to such an action. Cash is better in that regard, but even so your government or central bank purposely says they want to devalue your cash and other currency by a set target per year. Therefore making you have to work harder or become poorer. As an example, the U.S. Federal Reserve targets a 2% inflation target per year, which means if you put a $100 bill under your mattress today, in 2035, it would only buy you $80 worth of goods. I’m not that old, and yet, when I was a young kid, a $500,000 nest egg would work extremely well for a good retirement. Now, that is absolutely not the case. Not because of the goods getting more expensive, but because of the currency depreciating in value as you work for it.
Money of course. I have been paying my bills with crypto since 2023.
To be fair I’m not a huge fan of pure proof of stake because it makes validation more difficult because you have to have code for slashing somebody’s stake if they are malicious or bad and a malicious entity could just buy up a bunch of your tokens and tank them. Admittedly, not a lot of people would do so, but I could totally see a government buying up a bunch of tokens on a network and purposely crashing the network in order to rid themselves of a nuisance and calling it justified. Proof of work makes that much more difficult. Still doable for certain, but much, much more difficult.
That’s true. And personally, I stay away from all of that mess. And anybody I introduce, I take great pains to explain why I stay away from all that mess. But if they want to make their own mistakes, then that’s on them.
My first question to you would be, how much energy does the banking sector use to run bank branches, haul physical money back and forth, bring employees to and from work, etc?
Next, not all blockchains require extreme levels of computation power for proof of work. Take Monero, for example, which deliberately makes ASIC chips impossible to use and is therefore mined only on CPUs, which are extremely common.
I’d say you’re right for 99% of it, but there is 1% that’s genuinely useful.
Meshtastic on the moon… Moontastic!
What gives any currency any value other than human belief in it? After all, when fiat currencies become valueless, we as humans end up back at gold, which has been in use for millennia.