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.
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?