Precious metals have been sought by humanity for ages because of their strong resistance to oxidization and fiat money is backed by governments. There is also a strong oversight on both of them by various organizations. These are the reasons why people are usually willing to pay for them.
At the moment, I do not think major cryptocurrencies have any of those qualities. Though it could change if all major governments have a favorable view towards it.
US dollars are the only accepted means to pay taxes. This is the big thing that makes national currencies work. Having a government behind a currency may not be a sufficient guarantee of value but it is, at least so far, a necessary one.
For bitcoin at least, it's an intrinsically deflationary currency. There's no incentive to spend a bitcoin today if it will be worth more tomorrow, so it ends up being primarily a currency of choice for transactions which are unfeasible in any other way, which ends up being primarily illegal transactions.
Your ability to convert your Aussie dollar holdings into US dollars with ease is contingent on there being a relatively stable demand for Aussie dollars, which are the only legal means of paying taxes in Australia, and settling debts denominated in Aussie dollars. Cryptocurrencies are not a legal means of payment of taxes and are not created as debt so lack that guarantee that people will want to exchange significant quantities of USD for that coin [I guess in theory some cryptocurrency could have the property of being emitted as debt, but I'm not sure decentralisation and credit creation go well together].
I think you missed the point I was trying to make. I haven’t had my coffee so that’s my bad.
As long as there is a means of conversion you can start with anything and end up being able to pay your taxes. You can’t directly pay taxes with your time and skills, but you can trade your time and skills for USD, and then pay your taxes. You can’t directly pay your US taxes with the AUS dollar, but there is a market where you can exchange that for USD, then pay your taxes. The logic is inclusive of BTC, which makes the ideology that BTC is bad because you can’t pay your taxes with it, at very least, murky.
Sure, you can convert anything to anything if you can find someone else that wants to complete the trade at a suitable rate.
Taxes provide [part of] the reason to believe a market to exchange Aussie dollars will exist in two years time: tax and Aussie-dollar denominated debt mean a lot of people need Aussie dollars. That's the only reason the Aussie dollar is worth more than the plastic its printed on. BTC doesn't have that reason [to any meaningful extent; credit is a tiny part of the economy and nobody needs BTC to pay taxes] and unlike the fruits of your labour [which I'd hope are more useful or entertaining than an alphanumeric string even if they can't be exchanged in future], it doesn't have any non-exchange-related reason to be worth anything either. The some-people-need-it-to-pay taxes argument is why Aussie or US dollars aren't bad despite being as intrinsically useless as BTC.
So the argument is that BTC is bad because both intrinsically useless and almost entirely lacking a mechanism [similar to taxes] to create a stable flow of future demand to acquire it
You can pay taxes with dollars and buy oil anywhere in the world. And the US government will send the strongest army in history against anyone who will try to decline US dollars for their oil.
>gold
Gold is naturally rare and has a much wider network of places that will accept it as payment.
>food, medicine, and shelter
Because you can use those for actual real-world things? How is that even comparable?
Food, medicine, etc have intrinsic value. That's what the OP is talking about. The US gov't says that the US dollar has value and is willing to back it up. That is extrinsic value.
I agree with that but these are specifically RPIs running on solar power (which, btw, will be useless for mining btc), so they will be completly wasteless (the energy goes to waste otherwise). The only exception would be if you somehow rose the cost of mining for others, which would not happen since you're using pis to mine btc. Except I guess the environmental cost of producing these pis, but unless you buy tens of thousands your purchase would be a rounding error
locally no impact, globally supporting a system that burns enormous amounts of power (of which much is co2 producing).
would be a cool little project, and it falls to you to decide which side of the ethics of it you subscribe to.
I would love to have a little cryptocurrency miner, completely self sufficient, just doing its own thing until it dies. but I would also love a cryptocurrency that didn't have the same kind of environmental impact that bitcoin has. maybe another application? selling computing power?
Every project is a global rounding error environmentally, that doesn’t mean they’re harmless. The real yardstick is simply a cost vs benefit equation as we can’t mitigate everything. On that scale a project trike this is extremely harmful as the benefit is nonexistent and the harm is real.
I am, or at least I think they should be used sparingly.
They destroy the planet. And on a personal scale, over-reliance upon them encourages lack of exercise and a needlessly stressful life spent in traffic.
I reckon we could make a big dent in pollution and obesity rates by having most people reduce their car usage.
Sorry of my brevity caused you any frustration but I find it’s usually easier to ask questions and seek mutual understanding and clarity rather than make assumptions and accusations about intentions and torpedo the conversation before it’s even got going.
Google 'cryptocurrencies louwrentius' to understand my position.