• Jack Riddle@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    Please do remember that the banking industry provides banking for the entire world, instead of ~ten thousand people. It does cost a lot of energy, yes, but the energy per person is far less than with any cryptocurrency.

    • shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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      8 months ago

      The point of crypto is for everybody on earth to be their own bank and be part of the financial system, which is something the banks cannot do.Also, the bank’s banking system and governments have gotten us into the situation we are in now where the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. I don’t know who said it, but I heard a quote once that said something to the effect of, let me control what a man uses as money, and I care not who makes his laws.

      • szczuroarturo@programming.dev
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        8 months ago

        And yet most cryptocurrencies are mostly used as a investments instead of using them for their intended purpose which is transactions .

        • shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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          8 months ago

          Which I agree is a problem. I don’t see them as an investment. I see them as a way to get out from under the authoritarian rule of governments. Unfortunately, we have what we call the number go up crowd and we don’t like them very well.

      • Jack Riddle@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        The poor get poorer and the rich get richer because of the economical system we live under, not because of the banking industry. Crypto isn’t going to solve that.

        I agree that banks are not to be trusted, but a blockchain hasn’t proven to be a safe option either.

        You also just skipped over my comment. I take that means that you acknowledge that crypto is extremely wasteful and would never scale unless gigantic changes were made to how it functions?

        • shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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          8 months ago

          Not at all. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer due to inflation, which is caused by government spending and central banks creating money out of nothing and saying that it has value when it does not. Not all crypto is extremely power-hungry. Take Monero, for example, as it is mined with CPUs only, which everybody has access to. If cryptocurrency mining ends up using less power than the banking system, then that is a net positive instead of a net negative. The majority of cryptocurrency losses have not been because of the blockchain, but because of services built on top of it that should not have existed to begin with, such as exchanges, lending companies, etc. When you give your crypto to somebody else, it is no longer your crypto, and that’s where people have messed up by giving their crypto to places like FTX, Mt Gox, etc. There’s also quite a lot of mistakes made with two-factor authentication via SMS which is not secure to maintain a cryptocurrency account such as Coinbase. When somebody tries to explain that you should not hold your keys on exchanges, a lot of times you get feedback about, oh, that’s too much work. Well, if you’re not going to care about your money, nobody else will. One of the big major points of crypto is to eliminate the trusted third party.