At least the Internet has some redeeming social value.
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Obligatory
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Digital dollar would have downsides for sure, but it won’t have an environmental impact. The only reason bitcoin has environmental impact is because it requires miners to consume a proportional fraction of the worlds resources to create global consensus. A regulated / controlled digital currency does not require proof of work.
It won’t necessarily go away completely as long as people can have small home mining rigs, but if a handful of nations (mostly US and China) ban major financial institutions from holding or participating in bitcoin transactions, shut down commercial bitcoin exchanges, and ban industrial scale mining, bitcoin will basically go away. Which is to say it will turn it into the “decentralized” fantasy that it hasn’t been for years. It will still exist, but it will be basically irrelevant.
For what it is worth, the Internet is the same way. It is hard to censor content within the internet, but if the government wanted to cut you or your city off from internet access it would be (technically) easy. But that would be dumb because the internet has a lot of positive uses. There aren’t really any positive uses of bitcoin.
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I never slept - there were always lots of interesting people in line to talk to!
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The only thing I can say for sure about the price of bitcoin is that it fluctuates.
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remember, no matter what happens, “this is good for bitcoin”
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This is a good thing. I’m tired of the miners swarming GPU sales. And I’m tired of the crypto-hoarders who keep making the prices for crypto so friggin high and volatile. The sooner they all leave, the sooner actual use for them as a transaction medium can expand.
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Probably not. The shortages there started before the crypto run up, and before the new parts everyone is looking for were released.
There’s still a general semiconductor and component shortage going down. Car manufacturers aren’t cutting production cause they can’t get GPUs.
It might tamp down scalping/resale a bit. But there’s still a general shortage.
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I’ve talked to someone who’s mined crypto because they genuinely needed the heat, and figured the energy might as well have some side benefit besides simply forcing electrons through long coils. So at least they weren’t increasing pollution with it. But man, are there a lot of other calculations that computer could be doing that the answer would actually be useful to have.
Not that bitcoin is some garbage way for speculators to make money at the expense of all humanity or anything…but you know, we can tell what’s happening is good because it’s let some speculators make money at the expense of all humanity. 
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“There aren’t really any positive uses for bitcoin”…without going into too much detail, me and my bank account would politely disagree with you. 
pretty much, yes. 
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I just want crypto to go back to meaning cryptography rather than dunning-krugerrands. Right now it feels like I will have more success at having libertarian go back to meaning only socialism.
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Maybe we can have it mean cryptozoology? People have fun with that stuff, and I feel like there is something to be said for associating bitcoin with Mokele-mbembe, the chupacabra, and other things with the same level of “no, I promise you it’s legitimate!” to them.
Meanwhile, speaking of libertarianism, I see we have already had someone reinterpret “useful” as “profitable to themselves” here. Maybe I’ve been misinterpreting bitcoin mining as an analogy to digging up minerals, and it’s actually short for fuck-you-I’ve-got-mine-ing. 
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Bitcoin specifically is not, and never will be a transaction medium. It is completely defectively unsuited for use in commerce, and because it is so heavily centralized the few big players who the current system benefits are unwilling to entertain making changes that would help. It is basically a playground for speculators to make money off of extortion, trafficking, money laundering while pretending “its just bits.”
The other crypto-currencies like Ether (where the GPUs go) are not as bad as bitcoin from an environmental standpoint, and could theoretically process enough transactions to be usable, but still have no real value, and again are just platforms for speculation.
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I get why poor people have to care about bank accounts. What the hell is the problem with well-off people that they think this socially constructed number is so much more important than physical reality?
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