Inspired by a comment on my last post.

I feel like I never have a solution that allows me to control it while also being automated to such a degree that I don’t have a huge confusing backup if I don’t do finances for days or weeks.

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    42·
    9 days ago

    I’m old enough to know that governments should care about taxes and payment traceability.

    And cryptocurrencies (esp. the bigger ones) are perhaps the most traceable store of value and is highly regulated. At least in the US, cryptocurrencies are regulated like stocks, so any transaction needs to be properly reported as either a capital gain or loss or you’ll run afoul of the IRS.

    Also - all it does it raises energy prices for me and makes GPUs more expensive for me.

    It really doesn’t. Crypto mining is only profitable if energy prices are very low, especially if you do it at any kind of scale. Crypto mining in the US is estimated at 0.6-2.3% of total energy use, which is a drop in the bucket.

    And mining on GPUs isn’t very profitable, with profitability timelines at ~3 years assuming a very low energy cost of $0.10/kWh. So it’s not really a good option. The big miners have pretty much all moved to ASICs, which won’t impact your GPU prices at all, so the only ones buying GPUs for mining are hobbyists, which are a pretty small market.

    Why should I support that?

    There are a lot of good reasons to support cryptocurrencies, such as:

    • low cost international transactions - sending to my neighbor and sending across the world costs exactly the same
    • essential for people like journalists and minorities in repressive areas - this is also why you should support Tor
    • many parts of the world don’t have stable money, and crypto is easier to access and store than foreign currencies (like USD or Euro)
    • not impacted by inflation, so theoretically they can be a cash alternative to other inflation hedges like gold; fluctuation is a bit of a problem ATM though
    • sidesteps the massive payment networks like Mastercard and Visa, who charge something like 3% of every transaction; many cryptocurrencies have lower transaction costs

    I think there are a lot of good reasons to support cryptocurrencies for everyday transactions, I don’t see much point in supporting it as an investment option. So if a vendor supports transactions in cryptocurrencies, I’ll go out of my way to pay w/ crypto, but I’m not interested in trading cryptocurrencies as an investment.