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Post by Dr. Rumak on Sept 19, 2022 5:39:29 GMT -5
I was going to post in "Unpopular opinions", but I figured I'd create a separate thread, because most people don't care about this. Anyway, I remain pretty skeptical of blockchain as coming up with something useful, but maybe it will be like the Apple Lisa, and lead to something useful in the future. But where my unpopular opinion comes from is the news SEC Chair Gensler Raises Concerns Over ‘Staking’ Model on Ethereum (and a subsequent drop in the price). Proof of Stake uses so much less electricity than Proof of Work, that regulators need to not be encouraging Proof of Work. I'm in favor of regulation here, but both of these things need to be subject to same the regulations, and probably neither commodities nor securities are the right models to use. |
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Post by ganews on Sept 26, 2022 16:42:09 GMT -5
Today I learned that the state of Colorado now allows people to pay taxes with cryptocurrency through PayPal. I submit that this is Bad. Of course, they are using PayPal to wash it into real dollars, so it's not like the state has its own virtual wallet (that would be Incredibly Bad).
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Post by Dr. Rumak on Nov 16, 2022 14:56:14 GMT -5
I wonder how much of AWS is used to mine crypto, both intentionally and through hijacking systems. Should the whole crypto space ever collapse, Amazon (and the other public cloud providers) could be looking at a major loss in revenue. |
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Nov 17, 2022 11:21:06 GMT -5
I wonder how much of AWS is used to mine crypto, both intentionally and through hijacking systems. Should the whole crypto space ever collapse, Amazon (and the other public cloud providers) could be looking at a major loss in revenue. So, from some cursory Googling, it looks like the Amazon's revenue through AWS was $469 billion in 2021. As of June of this year 19.07 million bitcoin had been mined, with 1.92 million bitcoin left to mine. The price of bitcoin as of the time I'm typing this is $16,525.90, which brings the total value of all bitcoin mined to presumably a couple of billion over $315 billion (I would assume that tens or hundreds of thousands of bitcoin have been mined since June?). It seems unlikely to me that, even when you factor in all the other cryptocurrencies out there, that the collapse of crypto would be a major blow to Amazon's revenue through AWS, even if the profits from hijacking are smaller than the costs on the part of the hijacked? Unless there's just a lot of smaller operators who are spending fairly big (or spending fairly big on the part of those they've hacked) on crypto mining, much of it through AWS, and losing out? Am I missing something? |
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Post by Dr. Rumak on Nov 17, 2022 18:10:30 GMT -5
I wonder how much of AWS is used to mine crypto, both intentionally and through hijacking systems. Should the whole crypto space ever collapse, Amazon (and the other public cloud providers) could be looking at a major loss in revenue. So, from some cursory Googling, it looks like the Amazon's revenue through AWS was $469 billion in 2021. As of June of this year 19.07 million bitcoin had been mined, with 1.92 million bitcoin left to mine. The price of bitcoin as of the time I'm typing this is $16,525.90, which brings the total value of all bitcoin mined to presumably a couple of billion over $315 billion (I would assume that tens or hundreds of thousands of bitcoin have been mined since June?). It seems unlikely to me that, even when you factor in all the other cryptocurrencies out there, that the collapse of crypto would be a major blow to Amazon's revenue through AWS, even if the profits from hijacking are smaller than the costs on the part of the hijacked? Unless there's just a lot of smaller operators who are spending fairly big (or spending fairly big on the part of those they've hacked) on crypto mining, much of it through AWS, and losing out? Am I missing something? I'm not following. I know that some percentage of AWS is used for cryptomining. How do those numbers help estimate what percentage that is? |
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Nov 17, 2022 22:08:34 GMT -5
So, from some cursory Googling, it looks like the Amazon's revenue through AWS was $469 billion in 2021. As of June of this year 19.07 million bitcoin had been mined, with 1.92 million bitcoin left to mine. The price of bitcoin as of the time I'm typing this is $16,525.90, which brings the total value of all bitcoin mined to presumably a couple of billion over $315 billion (I would assume that tens or hundreds of thousands of bitcoin have been mined since June?). It seems unlikely to me that, even when you factor in all the other cryptocurrencies out there, that the collapse of crypto would be a major blow to Amazon's revenue through AWS, even if the profits from hijacking are smaller than the costs on the part of the hijacked? Unless there's just a lot of smaller operators who are spending fairly big (or spending fairly big on the part of those they've hacked) on crypto mining, much of it through AWS, and losing out? Am I missing something? I'm not following. I know that some percentage of AWS is used for cryptomining. How do those numbers help estimate what percentage that is? I mean in that there’s only so much crypto to mine. Although, as the article said, if hackers are mining with other people’s money, extremely inefficient crypto-mining doesn’t matter, so never mind. |
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Dec 5, 2022 12:26:25 GMT -5
Saw a headline (to a paywalled Fortune article that I'm not reading) that reads "Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says it's 'baffling' FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried isn't 'in custody already'", and while, yes, I think Sam Bankman-Fried should go to prison, I think this is one of the most people who live in glass houses statements I've ever heard someone make.
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Post by Dr. Rumak on Dec 5, 2022 14:32:05 GMT -5
Saw a headline (to a paywalled Fortune article that I'm not reading) that reads "Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says it's 'baffling' FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried isn't 'in custody already'", and while, yes, I think Sam Bankman-Fried should go to prison, I think this is one of the most people who live in glass houses statements I've ever heard someone make. I have wondered what the average length of time is for arrest in a financial crime. Like, when I read the Wikipedia entry for Jeffrey Skilling, the former CEO of Enron, it seems that he wasn't arrested until February of 2004, which would have been over 2 years since Enron declared bankruptcy. There's no reason to believe that SBF would differ much from that. |
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Dec 5, 2022 14:40:38 GMT -5
Saw a headline (to a paywalled Fortune article that I'm not reading) that reads "Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says it's 'baffling' FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried isn't 'in custody already'", and while, yes, I think Sam Bankman-Fried should go to prison, I think this is one of the most people who live in glass houses statements I've ever heard someone make. I have wondered what the average length of time is for arrest in a financial crime. Like, when I read the Wikipedia entry for Jeffrey Skilling, the former CEO of Enron, it seems that he wasn't arrested until February of 2004, which would have been over 2 years since Enron declared bankruptcy. There's no reason to believe that SBF would differ much from that. Yeah, I didn’t even think about that, but the reason I said SBF should go to prison rather than that Coinbase Man is correct is that it’s rather self-serving for Coinbase Man to pretend that he expects financial criminals of SBF’s ilk to face appropriate consequences for their crimes. It’s all part of the needless to say dubious effort by Coinbase Man to position Coinbase as the “responsible” crypto exchange. And who knows: if crypto isn’t currently on its last legs, then it seems reasonable that Coinbase could use Binance’s connections to China to argue that Coinbase is the clear best option as a crypto exchange (not that Binance is good, obviously, just that I don’t think US-China relations have much to do with why Binance is also bad). |
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Post by Dr. Rumak on Dec 14, 2022 8:04:53 GMT -5
I sat through a presentation from ServiceNow about how they intend to use the blockchain technology. They apparently are a supporter of Hedera, which is a enterprise supported blockchain. I've read through the paper, and I still don't get why blockchain makes any of this easier. |
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Post by ganews on Dec 14, 2022 11:06:47 GMT -5
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