I keep trying to understand crypto-currencies, and especially now that Wall Street is starting to embrace it (anyone remember the 2008 crash?). Here comes trouble!
Even President Handsome Joe Biden has signed an executive order about it.
Anyway, this blog post from Stephen Diehl is fairly short and deeply informative, and here’s the short version: it’s a pyramid scheme.
Mock Paper Scissors 
A pyramid scheme but instead of using bricks made from playing cards it’s bricks made out of VR representations of playing cards and the only winners (other than the self-proclaimed pharaohs) would be the people renting them server space.
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A pyramid scheme but instead of using bricks made from playing cards it’s bricks made out of VR representations of playing cards that will burn down the planet.
FTFY.
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Don’t they burn down the planet by using excessive amounts of server space to heat things up?
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The energy used just for mining Bitcoin world wide (not to mention all the other coins, which, to be fair, most do have more efficient algorithms) is more than the energy used by many countries.
Plus bitcoin is designed so that a) there are a fixed number of bitcoins that can ever exist (“can you say ‘deflation’, boys and girls?” ) and b) it gets progressively (in fact I think it’s exponentially!) harder to mine new ones by solving the stupid useless equations they require. This, for example, is why you cannot buy a high-powered graphics card for love or money, because all the miners snap them up to do the calculations.
In fact, nVidia was just hacked by a ransomware group. Their demand? That nVidia change the firmware of their new (inexpensive) gaming video cards because they have been deliberately programmed to be bad for cryptomining.
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There should be a way to require these boys have to use carbon credits commensurate with their bs gambling costs.
Alternately, maybe someone could but a bug in Betsy Devos’s ear about this crowd horning in on her racket. She has connections, the only drawback is she’d probably just want to join that boy’s club if she knew about it.
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Bitcoin is Mary Kay Cosmetics for bros.
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