Aliens: "Um, so... yeah, we were more interested in trading novel technologies and refueling our ships. But seeing as you all look like you're starving to death and have destroyed your system's resources, how about we just donate a few universal constructors and a bunch of feed stock for them. We've got enough fuel to make it to Proxima Centauri, so we're good for now. Oh-- we're hard coding the universal constructors to "food" only though because your life choices have been... well never mind that, our philosophy is not to judge."
For those who haven't read it yet, it's available for free on the author's website: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
An intergalactic network of wormholes enables rapid travel and communication between worlds, but the collective energy output of the universe's stars is devoted entirely to bitcoin mining, ultimately accelerating the heat death of the universe.
That's the way it keeps getting described to me.
However, where does the hard currency come from? Who is providing the USD for ChiaCoin, and why?
This applies to any other of the cryptocurrencies that pop every day. Mining alone is about as useless as owning a printing press for your own currency $FOO. Unless someone is willing to give you hard currency for $FOO, it's just worthless strips of paper.
Who's trading hard USD for every new fad coin?
unfortunate souls who are speculating on it since they don't know better.
Also a huge % is probably held by a small amount of early adopters who whale that coin up so it seems more valuable and has more perceived trading traffic
Yes, but its seems that every day, it's some other coin. At some point, the money has to run out.
> Also a huge % is probably held by a small amount of early adopters who whale that coin up so it seems more valuable and has more perceived trading traffic
This sounds far more likely.
That only applies to usefull things, like infrastructure and industry. When it comes to speculative s financial assets, oyr capacity to fund them is virtually unlimited
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-07/peter-thi...
China's digital yuan and accumulation of bitcoin hashing power could lead to their dominance in the online dark/gray markets
Why wouldn't they want to dethrone USD as the reserve currency?
You can destabilize the finance system by creating free money, in fact, according to exogenous money theories, it was always possible to create money out of thin air. But until cca 1980s, the creation of new money was confined to financial institutions (not just government) and heavily regulated.
The regulation was gradually lost (that's why we are having these asset bubbles and financial crises), and Bitcoin democratized the money creation even more.
But regardless whether you believe or not that Bitcoin can destabilize financial system, ultimately, if things go south, China can actually react and pull the plug on the financial industry, limit its power in the economy at large, because it owns big chunk of it (or can make sure it owns it). In the West, however, this is a political issue, and governments can only watch the financial system fail and cause another big recession (or at least, huge misallocation of resources, for example in real estate).
So why would China care? Geopolitically, they have the upper hand. We should care, though!
The Chinese government is not usually in the business of recommending specific investments. (However, they might discourage people from investing into known scams.)
The source of this claim seem to be remarks on cryptocurrency that the People's Bank of China's vice president, Li Bo, made at the Boao Forum for Asia: http://www.cs.com.cn/yh/04/202104/t20210419_6158938.html
Specifically, he said that stablecoins would have to subject themselves to the same strict regulations as banks if they want to become widely used payment channels, and that cryptocurrencies aren't per se currencies, but a different kind of investment, and that, like other countries, they're currently investigating how to regulate them to manage the associated risks.
How that turned into an "endorsement" I don't know for sure, but I suspect hype factories trying to sell bitcoin using whatever story works.
There are many countries where the governments have failed to secure property rights appropriately, mismanage their currencies, embezzle public funds, and abuse their citizens in so many other ways. It's disgusting.
Citizens of those countries can opt-in and benefit from Bitcoin and security guarantees it provides.
Billions, quite literally billions, of such people live in such situation today. They have no economic security. No property rights. Even the land they live on gets confiscated every now and then.
....how is granting strong property rights to the less fortunate of the world is not one of the most valuable things in the world?
Bitcoin is a freedom technology, disguised as get-rich-quick scheme.
1) it was launched fairly by a person who uniquely had no reasonable expectation of profit when doing so,
2) it was launched first, giving it first-mover advantage, and
3) its proprietors made the very wise choice from 2015-2017 of censoring their populist opponents pushing for Bitcoin to become PayPal 2.0, and instead euphemistically refering to Bitcoin as “digital gold” — the speculative store of value to end all speculative stores of value
The very fact you’ve asked this question in full knowledge of owning both BTC and altcoins whilst also alluding to altcoins being more valuable, and the fact readers can only possibly act on your narrative by investing in the coins to which you allude — obviously only as a speculative store of value — just goes to show why Bitcoin is #1. Cryptocurrencies are simply nothing more than speculative stores of value, there are no exceptions.
I think you'll find that it's much much easier to repossess a house, rather than repossess a bitcoin address with billions.
Here's a detailed analysis by a law professor from a reputable law school on Bitcoin as a property rights system: https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1676...
Give me a rubber hose and $5 wrench and I'll start working on it:
Once it's transferred what recourse does he have to revert it?
> Here's a detailed analysis by a law professor from a reputable law school
Ah yes, the William & Mary Law School. The same law school that birthed the idea that the US Second Amendment was an individual right…
If the govt knows about your properties than they would also know about your digital activities as well.
Bitcoin is only freedom for the oppressors in this scenario since only they are allowed to move unchecked and will use it to get out when they realize their days in their country is numbered.
(Try telling a Bitcoin maximalist that software has bugs...)
Many clicker games are perpetually-changing resource-balancing and short-vs-long-term-tradeoff games under the hood. Do you spend your [_] on something linear and replace it soon, or exponential but you'll be waiting longer for the next thing? Do you spend [#] to support more passive styles, or do you go full [%] and spend 30m micro-optimizing by hand to save hours later?
That same kind of thing exists in the core of lots of games. E.g. look at StarCraft - Zergling rush, or get more resource gatherers? Early and mid game is super heavily focused on this, and the players and community spend incredible amounts of effort micro-optimize their setup to get even one more unit in a time window. Through this lens, the combat is primarily evidence of your superior resource management, and whether you investigated your opponent's plans well enough.
---
They're of course not all homogeneous, but if I had to pick one thing they overwhelmingly share in common, it's this resource-balancing aspect. And they go a heck of a lot further in it than most other kinds of games do.
Censorship resistance. Digital money that does not require constant "authorizations" from incompetent, flaky, slow, or even sometimes corrupt payment processors or other financial entities. Money that works even where traditional systems fail. No denied transactions. No limits. No "account" to open. Works for the underbanked. Send it truly anytime anywhere. No other system does this.
In other words, money created by people for the people.
Just playing devils advocate, but isn’t it’s usage reliant on traditional systems like electricity, ISPs, hardware makers, software makers, mining operations, etc?
Say you were in California during rolling blackouts, or Florida post hurricane that knocks the power out for weeks, or an authoritative country that has historically turned the internet off on its citizens during protests/uprisings. How would it all work?
Banking systems has more choke points. If money is on your bank account and it gets blocked, that's it, nothing can be done about it.
With Bitcoin, even if internet in the entire country is blocked, you still have options: you can transmit data by phone. There are many ways to smuggle 250 bytes out of a country.
You can also just memorize the mnemonic phrase (so-called brainwallet) and move yourself out. They won't find your bitcoins even if they strip-search you. (But if they know you have them, wrench attack might work, no defense against that if your privacy is compromised.)
All the other things are not necessary for using cryptocurrency, they just need to happen somewhere. So the system can route around the damage. Mining is not possible in your country? That's OK, it will work as long as there's at least one country where mining is possible.
So Bitcoin resilience is not about working when power is out, obviously. It is about giving people options to route around the damage. If your bank blocks you, you can't go to another bank to get money on your account, since that money resides within a particular bank. But Bitcoin is global - you can access your funds from any computer in any country, as long as you have a private key.
Those banking systems are the primary method of turning fiat into bitcoin & vice versa, so those banking choke points are defacto choke points for bitcoin as well.
At some point we will have CBDCs which crypto exchanges and banks will support, so legacy bank chokepoints should disappear altogether.
Kind of like saying "what good is Bitcoin during a hurricane Katrina scenario" but by that point its survival, not money you're worried about.
There are also devices for offline transactions.
Relying on HAM radios and satellite links are both legacy systems and we can’t pretend any significant percentage of the global populace could conduct Bitcoin transactions without centralized 3rd party services subject to the same regulations as the banks, much less use HAM radios, especially the poor and unbanked who always seem to be the goto demographic the proponents of cryptocurrency point to as the people benefiting greatly from cryptocurrency.
It’s on par with saying when supply chains fail we have farming, hunting and gathering. Very few people are capable of getting fresh water much less living off the fat of the land.
I like the technology and do see it as still in the early stages of adoption, but I liked the freedom of the early internet, unfortunately that didn’t stop SV and VC money from putting a strangle hold on it, making it the shit-hole sandboxes it is today, exploiting people and farming their attention and data for advertising dollars.
> sent via HAM radio
You probably want to transmit your private key in a secure manner. HAM radio is not a good way to do this: http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-dismisses-encryption-petition
You are correct in that technically HAM does not allow for encrypted communications, but that's not an issue here, and probably would be very low on the list of concerns in a situation where your only comms channel is HAM.
It is not censorship resistant, the entire system could be censored. Heck, FinCEN is already moving forward with regulations that require regulatory reporting on crypto transactions touching US institutions in a similar way to CTR reports. Bitcoin exists only because it is not a threat to governmental monetary control, and could be squashed the moment that changes.
The government can deliver serious blows to BTC but I’m not sure it can be totally destroyed.
Banning bitcoins as I described would mean the vast majority of all banks in the world would not be able to act as on/off ramps to crypto so it could never hit mainstream as a medium of exchange. It would also be worthless as a store of value because you wouldn't be able to get that value anywhere useful. It might live on as some part of the existing shadow banking networks, but it would never deliver on the promise of currency available to the masses & disconnected from arbitrary nation-state monetary policy.
I'd like to be clear in my viewpoint though: I am not anti-crypto. I think there are many improvements it can bring to the existing global financial infrastructure. I just don't have any faith that it can deliver on promises of freedom from government regulations & control. If it exists, it will always exist because of government forbearance in killing it, not despite government antipathy.
I think the real joker is the black market. Modern drug organisations are Apple sized businesses that also have their own enforcement of violence and justice systems, and so on, making them effective non-geographic states.
I live in Denmark, we’re a rather small country, we frankly have less authority behind the Danish Krone than some drug organisations would have behind whatever crypto currency they fancy.
In all seriousness, the entire concept of money has always been created by people.
IMO, cryptocurrency seems like a religion. I’m seeing a lot of belief of what said religion will do for you.
That implies a sincerity in their beliefs.
While it's difficult to figure out what people's true motivations are, the promotion of new cryptocurrencies, the "get in early" rhetoric, leads me to believe most cryptocurrencies are little more than pyramid schemes. The ability to mint/mine/farm currency without paying in directly doesn't really negate that since it is intended to become more difficult as time progresses. The actual value comes from speculative investments from a growing number of people.
Yes, I know it's not happening much. Bitcoin has failed (so far) as a payment/exchange system, and that's cause for sadness to me, but also a good way to look at the history and ask the questions about why it has failed and how to go about creating a better "King-proof Money".
Further, even if you got there, governments could simply ban bitcoin. It then becomes extremely hard to use as a common medium of exchange because literally no legal business could accept it without risking the business and their life outside of prison.
It would also render useless the scenario of fleeing a despot country with hard currency assets intact because wherever your destination, those assets are still illegal to use.
All of this means that, at any point, governments could reduce bitcoin to-- at best-- another side of shadow banking, like how drugs can be a medium of exchange in the criminal world. That does not allow room for common usage by the masses.
Bitcoin & other crypto exist because nation states allow them to exist.
Besides, it would be naive to take pog trading advice from boosters who are holding a hundred million Alf pogs.
You're the one who sounds like they are subscribing to a religion and haven't actually even attempted to understand what financial freedoms are suddenly afforded to you when you use cryptocurrency.
Collateral requirements vary by asset and account country according to national law. Generally it’s 50% LTV on equity collateral but leverage can be higher depending on the case.
I paid for a house with their margin to avoid triggering gains on long term positions, while waiting for some locked up options to liquidate.
Financial freedom is an interesting topic, and one that I don’t have much expertise in.
What is cryptocurrency freeing you from? You listed several opportunities that cryptocurrency could provide you, but I don’t exactly see the correlation with financial freedom.
Again, the correlation is obvious to anyone who actually uses this stuff. If I want to trade on margin on Fidelity, I need to sign some forms, go through a lengthy application process which may or may not actually be accepted to finally be able to trade with high interest rates and non-transparent margin requirements (my fidelity margin requirements change out from under me nearly every single day) routed through rent seeking, too-big-to-fail hedge funds and dark pools with T+2 order execution and restrictions on when during the day I can trade (only during day trading hours). Oh and don't accidentally trip up a "good faith" violation and have your account suspended from margin trading for a month even though you've done nothing wrong, and their antiquated systems simply aren't able to account for the fact that you weren't, in fact, trading money you didn't have.
Just let me do what I want with my money, it's pretty simple. Sure maybe there are negative externalities that come with that, but freedom isn't free.
We probably have differing perspectives of what freedom means. Financial freedom to me means dedicating my time to doing things that enrich my lived experience.
> "Again, the correlation is obvious to anyone who actually uses this stuff"
I don't know if it is your intention, but I find that to be dismissive and unnecessary. I would appreciate the opportunity to discuss opposing viewpoints with civility.
Giving people loans with "no questions asked" has lead to significant amount of problems in the past.
The current systems may not be perfect, but they do exist for a reason. Chesterton's Fence and all.
Added bonus: both will confirm the recipient name, and if I truly, actually fuck up the payment, I can get the money back again rather than it disappearing into the ether.
Finally: the money I have transferred is now available to actually spend on things straight away, without needing to then reconvert it to real people money with a sizeable cost.
Instant payments should be coming to the US in 2023. See https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_faq.htm
All technology becomes outdated at some point, if cryptocurrency is useful to me right now to perform basic financial operations how is that not a use case?
The nice thing is that if your account is closed on the weekend, the thing you need to buy probably is too.
How can the same people who make this argument turn around and in the same breath decry Bitcoin for being nothing more than a speculative store of value? You can’t have it both ways.
No one buys Bitcoin to spend it. This much is abundantly clear. And Bitcoin, as an inflation-proof global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms, never had to do anything other than sit there as an idle speculation to fulfill its primary role as safest safe haven asset. That’s what makes it such a powerful idea.
Many here are fairly libertarian, at least regarding drugs. Do you agree with every classification of every drug in US law and that all punishment for them is perfectly appropriate?
In the past you’d be denied banking for the color of your skin or treated differently based on genitalia.
Illegal is only defined by imperfect governments. So yes, it allows for illegal things, that’s a great thing.
It also means you won’t have an account closed for thoughtcrime, or cheering the wrong political party. It means an authoritarian government can’t keep you locked there. And it means you can avoid myriad kafka-esque dystopic mishaps of “the system”, nightmarish AI flagging slip ups that close your account or prevent you from sending money to a relative in need in another county because it’s Sunday or you forgot to renew you drivers license.
Not to mention you can now use code to manipulate your money, give early users real equity in your company and design fully digital co-ops, avoid some of the burden of blatant classist laws like accredited investors, and design incentive mechanisms for your startup that are guaranteed in code.
No, I don't support all laws in pretty much any regime. But I do believe that the ability to enforce laws is important. The only thing that consistently works more poorly than having rules is not having any rules at all.
You are of course welcome to move to a lawless state if this is really what you want, but I suspect you would not find it to be the utopia you dream of.
How is this anything but dismissive? Your whole post was insinuating it’s only utility is for illegal things, in context implying that’s what makes it non-valuable. If you weren’t making that claim, then there’s no point to your post. Don’t hide from your own claim and act coy now. It was obviously dismissive, and now just looks like you’re backsliding. Not to mention the straw man turning “some laws are bad and you should be able to resist them” into “live in a lawless state”. Or that you ignore the litany of non-illegal uses I added.
In fact, I’m skeptical of 99% of the field, I believe without PoS it should fail and isn’t worth the cost, and I was a harder skeptic until recently and changed my mind because I honestly believe I’ve seen some truly interesting uses now outside of being a freer currency.
Get outside of “pro” or “anti” box and think in terms of utilities and specifics, and if you reply reply to my specific claims.
Monero and other privacy coins don’t have a traceable ledger.
Now clear this up for me... how do you send a ton of cash anywhere in the world in minutes without risk? Is it easy to smuggle out of an authoritarian gov? Can you manipulate it with code?
Cash is a great way to pick up bitcoin anonymously though, you make a good point.
Thanks, but no thanks.
It has one of the most beautiful endings in my opinion
Not true. All kinds of blockchain development is happening in hundreds of fields.
The most important development so far is deflationary capped currencies independent of any single government. Currencies that almost anyone in the world can use, which helps the poor in the countries like Venezuela, Argentina, Sudan, Lebanon, Iran.
Is it a lack of awareness due to disinterest, or objective reasoning, we’ll never know!
the market has been saying “hey this is useful in some circumstances” for over a decade
That isn’t strictly true. Before the advent of Bitcoin, there was no global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms. That simple academic experiment was quickly infiltrated by profiteers, however. Most people never cared to cultivate an understanding of Bitcoin beyond the barest of surface level understandings, and these same people are now able to finger point at blatantly self-serving get-rich-quick ICO projects — like Ethereum and Chia — which have clearly achieved nothing in spite of endlessly promising investors “innovation”.
The only thing innovative that has ever come out of the Bitcoin space is Bitcoin itself: a speculative store of value. Every national currency is similarly speculative, and people who “missed” Bitcoin are loathe to admit the same thing that happened to gold’s market capitalization prior to its ubiquitous use as money, is now happening to Bitcoin.
That is not good in itself.
> That simple academic experiment
Original description by its author intended it as a replacement for a payment system and currencies, not as an academic experiment or as a store of value useless for normal transactions
But the deflationary global economic system Bitcoin facilitates disincentivizes mass consumerism — mass consumerism which is destroying the world’s natural ecosystems. This is only possible via a global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms. Bitcoin’s creator invented this. It is an innovation, in every sense.
Deflationary economics discourages capital investment, because it rewards saving — i.e. “hoarding” — not spending or investing. Assuming a Bitcoin-based economic system, as the pace of technological advancement continues to quicken, and more products and services hit the market, absolute BTC-denominated prices will have to decrease. More products and services on the market, with a fixed supply of money, equals lower absolute prices.
In addition, global adoption of a free-market money like Bitcoin would eliminate the ability of governments to fund weapons of war and public works projects by printing their own money. That would no longer be possible.
Bitcoin throttles humanity, and with it humanity’s ecological destructiveness could be kept at bay. No other aspect of cryptocurrency is of societal value in any way.
A paperclip maximizer is incentives gone wrong. People wants profits so they can do something with them. But the AI wants paperclips because it is programmed to want paperclips, and it does so to the detriments of any other goals. It would devour the child of the AI designer to turn her into an input for paperclip production.
I don't get how people keep bringing this up.
So it's all pure speculation is what you're saying?
So what are some of the reasons people want crypto?
1. As a store of value. Fiat currencies lose purchasing power over time by design. Especially now that interest rates are funny. If people/businesses (Tesla) want to preserve the buying power of their income/capital, they can not just keep their USD or EUR on RMB in their bank account. Traditionally gold fulfilled this function, but gold has limitations being bulky and all. Furthermore the COMEX where the gold price is decided is completely dysfunctional due to institutionalized deeply rooted corruption. Example: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/jpmorgan-to-pay-%24920-mln-f... (note that this manipulation is ongoing and the fine was a fraction of what JP Morgan made on these spoofing trades).
People are turning to something that cannot centrally be corrupted as easily by a few governments and bankers. People and society as we know it NEED a store of value. So they're turning to one of the few options left: crypto.
2. As a safe haven from a corrupted US/international financial system. See point 1. Metals price manipulations are just a small fraction of the corruption that goes on. There's a reason why Elon Musk Tweeted something along the lines of "Bitcoin, in retrospect it will be inevitable." Tesla stock got naked shorted into oblivion by hedge funds while the SEC did nothing. Coincidence? US companies get deliberately shorted into bankruptcy by hedge funds (case in point: GameStop where this strategy failed). And then there's the share rehypothecation scam with perpetual failures to deliver on institutional trading positions and so on. Example: https://web.archive.org/web/20060421085925if_/http://www.rgm...
Does it still seem like a silly nerdy gamble now that Tesla converts some of it's cash into BTC? Not to me anyway.
3. As a free bank account with upgraded features like almost instant tranfers and total privacy (in case of ZEC and MNR). Ever tried to transfer money to a foreign bank account, thereby losing a significant percentage to currency conversion fees and other fees? Or over the weekend with a national holiday on Friday? You'd be lucky if the money gets into the other account within 4 days. It's infuriating IMO. And now it's also unnecessary, because: crypto.
4. Democratization of the cloud computing market. Example: decentralized yet commercial file transfers: https://skynet-send.hns.siasky.net/ There are other applications like coins that allow you to render Blender projects in exchange for a tiny fee.
So... Can anybody explain to me how all of the above is "nothing" and how the alternatives are somehow clearly more energy efficient and less damaging to the environment (lol: gold mining)? The down voting is not really doing it.
Inflation of fiat currency = loss of purchasing power of fiat currency. So these two sentences contradict each other.
And I get the point that the idea is that this inflation should be constant and there's nothing wrong with it in theory. Sure. Fine.
But that doesn't change the fact that keeping x USD on a bank account for x years decreases the purchasing power of that amount of money. And that that decrease in purchasing power is not desirable. So people try to maintain that purchasing power by converting those USD into something else. We used to have saving accounts, but yeah... those ceased to function due to negative interest rates.
And that's all without going into the scenario where the central banks are failing at their mission to maintain price stability. Which arguably is happening right now and is arguably the reason why people are dumping fiat currency in exchange for anything else that can better preserve buying power.
Am I wrong here so far?
Am I arguing that crypto is inherently and permanently a better currency than fiat? No. Not at all. Am I arguing that fiat currencies are currently not a great store of value: absolutely. And in that situation to preserve your buying power, you buy things you think will retain purchasing power better. I personally (and obviously many others) believe crypto could serve as protection as well as other assets that "can't be printed by governments and central banks". Is it speculation? yes, of course. But so is keeping fiat cash as fiat cash.
And I don't agree that central banks are failing to maintain price stability. Inflation data indicates otherwise [1] [2]. If anything, central banks are failing to create enough inflation to meet their inflation targets.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA
[2] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/macroeconomic_and_sectoral/h...
I don't get this statement. IMO it's undesirable for both reasons.
From the point of view of holding USD on a savings account -10% inflation (aka: 10 deflation) is the same as 2% inflation with savings accounts that reek in 12% interest rates. You're arguing that nobody in the world should want to have such a savings account? Everybody should invest it in something at a risk-free rate? You mean a risk-free investment? I'm not sure what that means.
> And I don't agree that central banks are failing to maintain price stability.
I'm talking 2020 - 2021, as in: right now. The data you link goes until 2019 pre-corona, pre-helicopter-money times.
Here in Europe there's without a single doubt in my mind stagflation going on right now (prices that rise faster than the average income).
Holding cash in a bank account is IMO a guaranteed significant loss of purchasing power right now. If you take 1 look at past year's commodity prices, you'll see that the market agrees with me.
Year over year examples: lumber spot price up 300% up, silver 74% up, gold (the gold standard for measuring inflation) 5% up, housing prices 10 - 30% up, wheat price 25% up, and so on and so forth.
Does this mean all these things have all of a sudden become more desirable? No. Does it mean the USD/EUR/etc have lost buying power? IMO very big yes.
Useful concepts and events: speculation, economic bubble, tulip mania.
Crypto only needs resources as much as it needs security and throughput. More efficient cryptos will win as they are cheaper.
I can't get excited about people too poor to have access to banking putting their money into something as severely volatile as crypto currency.
There is room for new financial companies supporting mobile banking and banking in the developing world, but I don't see why crypto needs to be involved.
But others can and that’s the important point here.
There are people who benefit from having strong stores of values with deflationary pressure, and it ain't the poorest among us.
Listen to yourself here.
The debasement argument is irrelevant when the purchasing power can vary by 10% on a daily basis.
There might be countries where there are advantages to crypto (say Turkey who was in the news) where it’s a better short term alternative, but crypto in my book is as speculative as ever, and I have seen nothing that changes my mind.
I’ve heard (don’t know how true it is) there also there are also some big players who have big hoards of a coin and can dump or pump a value at their wim.
First crypto took marginal GPU and energy capacity. Now it is taking SSDs.
It has so far produced nothing except higher values measured in fiat. And the higher the values go the more resources needed for the computer networks.
Of course crypto is not an AI so it can only get fed more resources if it converts believers to feed it more. More GPUs, more SSDs, more coal, to run calculations.
So this should be self limiting at some point. Or maybe I’m wrong and some practical use will come of it but it’s been 12 years without any so far.