Big Crypto Is Spending More on US Elections Than Any Other Industry
The crypto industry is making its mark on this year's elections to the tune of some $119 million.
The funding has largely come from two companies — Coinbase and Ripple — which are funneling money into super PACs like Fairshake PAC, which is dedicated to "elevating pro-crypto candidates and attacking crypto skeptics," according to Public Citizen.
At the 2024 bitcoin conference in Nashville in February, Trump — who called bitcoin "highly volatile and based on thin air" in 2019 — said he'd lay out a plan "to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world." Trump has already won the backing of several crypto enthusiasts, including his running mate JD Vance, who owns at least $250,000 in bitcoin.
Say what you want about cryptocurrency, but to address the energy problem, The reason for this is the exact same reason the fediverse also uses a shit ton more energy than the centralized alternatives like reddit and extwitter.
Decentralization usually comes at a cost of performance or energy.
It's not good that so much energy is used to sustain it, but the only reason it is needed is so that it can stay fully decentralized.
Some blockchains use proof of stake for this reason, which greatly reduces the energy needed to less than .01% of what proof of work requires, but instead more money = more voting power.
There’s a huge difference.
Fediverse uses almost no energy compared to Reddit and Twitter. This is because few people are using fediverse alternatives.
Bitcoin uses more energy than entire countries, despite few people using it.
And also the fediverse serves a purpose. Crypto is just a shortsighted pyramid scheme fueled by greed.
Crypto is bound to attract scammers like flies are attracted to shit.
Crypto is not all about short-term gains and it does have utility. It's just not an answer to everything, and we should stop treating it like a speculative asset.
If it were to stop acting like a speculative asset more people might take it seriously.
If it were to stop acting like a speculative asset, nobody would be using it.
It is all just perpetrated by tech bros who try to get rich from it. Their crypto portfolio is directly connected to the amount of people they can convince to buy in.
Exactly, and if somehow it became impossible to instantly convert crypto to USD, crypto would be worthless. Crypto doesn’t have enough actual utility on its own besides gray/black market purposes.
I literally only buy crypto for utility.
Are you allowed to tell us what you do with that crypto?
Yes.
Pay for VPN and other services, transfer money to other people that I can't reach with fiat, and keep a stash.
You have to compare by energy per user or per interaction. Lemmy would cost a ton more and consume a lot more energy than reddit if they were the same size. I don't think Lemmy instances would even be able to handle federating with other large instances at that size and the fesiverse would get split. It would start needing sharding and replication, and some kind of consensus algorithm to choose where to get most data, and you'd have the same problem cryptocurrency has.
No, you don't. The same way I don't have to justify using nextcloud vs gdrive because nextcloud uses a lot more energy per user since it's self hosted.
Bitcoin uses an absurd amount of energy for its popularity and use. Period.
No, that’s not going to happen. The reason why cryptocurrencies must rely on a consensus algorithm is because the order of transactions matter. One transaction can make another transaction impossible depending on which one comes first.
Fediverse doesn’t have this strict condition. No post and comment can make another impossible. It’s also not the entire world if a post is lost.
The consensus would come in at the replica sharding. One replica can invalidate another replica.
Wouldn't that just need to happen within the infrastructure of an instance?
Decentralization isn't the reason, and conflating it with fediverse services is disingenuous.
The reason many cryptos use a lot of power is because of proof of work.
Proof of stake and proof of work have the same effective result for voting power. In order to effectively mine, you need a large capital investment and in order to stay competitive in mining you need to continue spending capital, the same is true for proof of stake as the larger overall stake the lower the payouts, so it requires more capital investment.
Can’t tell if this is shill, but I dislike cryptocurrencies and anyone who defends them. Not that you did, per se, but it’s close.
I think that 99% of Cryptocurrencies are unnecessary and shouldn't exist.
But I also think that if I want to buy a private VPN, any payment method except monero completely invalidates the VPN because now your credit card is linked to the VPN instead.
And I think that transferring money to family members abroad with some ethereum l2 curency is a 100 times cheaper and faster than any other method. I had to pay student loans in another country, but my bank blocked the credit card transactions because they were foreign. The only other way was cryptocurrency with a tiny fee, or a bank transaction with 10% plus 50$ fees. Guess which one I picked.
You can buy a gift card in cash which works just like a debit card and not have to worry about cryptocurrency.
For gifts maybe, but not for paying student loans. But gift card locations can be tracked to the store and be used to narrow down your location.
Also, aren't gift cards the biggest modern vehicle for scams?
I thought this was about VPNs?
Which bank accepts crypto to pay back student loans anyway?
they didn't say a bank specifically,
Gift cards that act like credit/debit cards are harder to get than they used to be. I think all of the mainstream ones require identification or linking to a previous bank account per regulation now
To your point about money transfers, this is only true because crypto exchanges are dodging regulations. The cost and time involved in international transfers is primarily red tape, because no one likes wire fraud, money laundering, or people funding terrorism.
If crypto ever "succeeds" as it hopes to, it will become more and more regulated, and the value you see in it will increasingly diminish.
I wonder whether a travel notification could have solved your issue with paying a foreign merchant.
Ok?