What good is Coinbase other than as a way to exchange crypto for dollars? If crypto is to ever have any meaning, then it shouldn't need to interface with the financial system that it aims to upend.
Buying and selling 'assets' on the Darkweb and amongst people you know in other countries with restricted foreign money transfer is one main use case of CoinBase.
In fact, I doubt BTC would have thrived as much as it did if it wasn't for SilkRoad/DarkMarket/EmpireMarket/WhiteHouseMarket etc. Not to mention the hundreds of millions that went into worse endeavors like ransomeware and funding terror organizations.
BTC didn't become what it is without the billions of dollars in demand for those very real use cases. Each drug dealer exchanges tens and hundreds of thousands of USD in crypt, much more than the average regular crypto enthusiast. BTC investors are investing in blood money, like it or not. It's not just a magic computer token thingy, and it hasn't been for a decade now since the SilkRoad inception.
You just described how to buy bitcoin privately with electricity. Why is it unrealistic?
Even if its possible, it would take days or weeks to get that much BTC. What if you want 2,000$ of BTC right now? Would you want to wait months before you get it?
And electricity cost varies widely between regions. Many areas in the US and China outright ban crypto mining.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=347208.0
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-m...
https://www.wired.com/story/china-says-bitcoin-wasteful-want...
If you want to buy large amounts, you would use the P2P markets for fiat to bitcoin trades https://bisq.network/
Bisq sounds interesting, but I have my doubts about them, since there is no escrow system and I don't think there is enough liquidity either. I'll check it out anyway.
I was a click away from buying a rig rig a few years ago. I wanted to build the rig because that seemed like the fun part. I even had excess electricity from solar panels, but chickened out.
I thought bitcoin made sense, but listened to the masses? I was always one of those guys whom never took chances with money.
I just might buy a cheap rig tomorrow? I’m so lazy, and broke, I’ll wake up, and put it off?
The thing about fungible assets is that they are neutral money. They aren’t “blood money”, they are simply blind to whatever they are used for. At least they aren’t finding wars like the dollar.
Plenty of the drug trade BTCs goes to funding the cartels in Columbia and Mexico actually.
Source: Tried buying BTC on LocalBitcoins once and 9/10 of the US sellers were asking to send Western Union to Columbia. Meanwhile, we know from the government that a lot of the BTC payments on dark markets end up in the drug dealer hands in Columbia. So, apparently they sell the drug BTC back to us at the higher exchange rate for USD so we can give it back to them for drugs, back and forth....
Which are only economically viable due to the US "war on drugs" and draconian prohibitions, which we've managed to export across the world via our foreign policy. Which brings us full circle back to the US dollar funding wars.
It's as though unethical people exist who are willing to do bad things with whatever they have to hand if it turns a profit.
However, just for clarification, BTC has been in the news very often during the last year. And many people are investing heavily in BTC since then. People who would otherwise never hear of BTC before.