Comment by sn_master | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sn_master | Hacker News Reader

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How else would you obtain crypto if it wasn't by exchanging it with other fiat currency? Mining hasn't been realistic for many years now. It costs the same as a single BTC in electricity cost to mine one, assuming you have the mining hardware.

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.

How about good old working for it. I’ve received payment in Bitcoin and paid employees in cryptocurrency.

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.

> 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....

> cartels in Columbia and Mexico

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.

You write like illicit drugs is the only product made in Colombia. What about coffee, flowers, chocolate, bananas, palm oil, unrefined oil, and carbon? I feel personally offended.

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.

> It costs the same as a single BTC in electricity cost to mine one, assuming you have the mining hardware.

You just described how to buy bitcoin privately with electricity. Why is it unrealistic?

I don't have the hardware to mine BitCoins. You need expensive ASICs or at least very powerful GPUs, running 24/7, and you can't mine partial BitCoins. i.e. I won't get 200$ worth of BTC by investing 200$ in electricity.

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...

You can buy an older generation ASIC on the secondary market for pretty cheap (usually), and probably mine ~$10 worth of bitcoin/day (by joining a pool). I agree it's not much, but it is permissionless.

If you want to buy large amounts, you would use the P2P markets for fiat to bitcoin trades https://bisq.network/

10$ a day isn't practical at all for investment or online purchases. It's only good if you have a big rig of those to get at least 1,000$/month, but at what electricity and noise cost? I don't think I can run that in a single bedroom apartment with neighbors around.

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.

Yeah, I would say mining may not be practical primarily due to the noise. You would need a garage or similar to put the miners in.

I will never forget the guy (on here) who said, ‘I’m buying a few bitcoin, so if in the future my children ask me, why didn’t you buy when it was cheap dad?’

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?

Everybody wishes they had gotten more serious earlier. I ran testnet. Nice toy, but the fan noise was bothering me. Fast forward to way too darn late. I knew a guy that did get serious, barely. I don’t know how many he had, but he traded 26,000 of the coins from his CPU for some of the first ASIC rigs. Tiny steps in the direction of something you believe in add up. It can be anything.

More like a personality away than a click. People say the same thing every year then don't act on it, won't do it now either.

In the history of Bitcoin apart from the very early days it was always better just get the money you wanted to spend on rig/energy and just buy and hold BTC, unless you wanted to do mining very hands-on.

Sure you can mine partial bitcoins by joining mining pool. This is how everyone is doing that for the last 10 years.

Lets do a thought experiment: lets say you wanted $10,000 worth of bitcoin, and it costs an equal amount of electricity to mine. At 10c/kWh, thats 100,000kWh of electricity. There are ~720 hours in a month, so you need to be pulling 138kW 24/7 for a month to use up that much electricity. Is that realistic for a typical home? (spoiler: no)

Maybe in 2014. Criminals do not use strict us KYC exchanges and trackable bitcoin, that doesn't make much sense. If the onramp isn't anonymous (mining/a bag of cash) you'd be screwed. This one is a bit old my guess is the anonymous cash narrative is even smaller than in this graph: https://medium.com/@nic__carter/visions-of-bitcoin-4b7b7cbcd...

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