This is just not true though, for instance Coinbase and Robinhood drive the large majority of the US retail crypto volume and both are extremely heavily regulated entities. Who are the “average crypto traders” you are talking, because if it’s more sophisticated desks vs US retail than again, almost all of those exist in regulated entities.
Just check the data… green energy from 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021. It’s literally straight up and to the right. This doesn’t need to be some anecdote there is real data on green energy usage in the space. You can simply check some of the regulated entities in the US doing it, I’ll use Riot Blockchain as an example because I know them well / have been friends with the CEO from back in my poker days
$3.6 B marketcap, publicly traded US company with high levels of required transparency and extremely penalties for lying/misinoformation
www.riotblockchain.com/bitcoin-mining
“Our self-mining operations are currently based out of Coinmint LLC.’s facility in Massena, New York where we have deployed a fleet of 16,146 next-generation Bitcoin mining ASICs. Coinmint’s facility is located in Zone D of the NYISO with very low cost of power, driven by an abundance of renewable energy generation sources. Coinmint draws its energy from 88% zero-emission sources.”
You can act as if you don’t have the information or you’ll “believe it when you see it” but it’s just data, it exists, and it is very clearly trending hardcore in the right direction.
You are misconstruing the word “regulation”. What is crypto? Years ago all you heard was “universal currency”. Now that the IRS is starting to acknowledge crypto, that “currency” narrative is conveniently changing. But its still not taxed as a currency, and is by far the most ambiguous asset. Especially when you get into copyright infringement on NFT’s. Its almost non-existent, hence the correct term, unregulated.
Also, the elephant in the room that every crypto investor always ignores: Money laundering & tax evasion. Not to mention the gross amounts of drug money funneled into crypto. Which again, is due to the purposeful decentralized anonymity of crypto, hence the correct term, unregulated.
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Hey there, it’s not all drug money and laundering. I also paid for a privately hosted DDoSer several years ago with BTC when I was being toxic on xbox
The “data” is also that China has resorted to pushing miners out of the country because they use so much coal-powered energy as to damage the entire country’s clean energy goals. US companies are like 1/6 of total production. It’s nice that your friend is committed to renewable energy but bitcoin mining at large is not.
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Just got the popcorn out the microwave
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These debates are where I get the most value from efour. I can see valid points from both sides. I hope we continue to have these conversations and don’t end up locking threads or pushing only one sided opinions.
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Available to everybody. Read back and check prices early on in this thread, you could buy a Fidenza for $1,000 for a long period of time along with a ton of other things, now the cheapest available is $600,000 and one just sold for $3.3m. The opportunity was here for everybody, I wasn’t here to shill and I have no hidden incentives. I told you all exactly what I was putting in, what I was putting it into, and why I thought the general consensus thesis might be wrong and you should consider the possibility that it is in fact something to pay attention to.
My first post in this thread was
"I both think NFTs are an insane bubble atm and simultaneously think it will be absurdly massive moving forward. 99.9% of it will die, a few of them will thrive to extreme success. Just like most CCGs/TCGs or anything else collectible. A few big winners, a lot of death otherwise. As always just collect things you find interesting and enjoyable and don’t try to stonk collectibles too hard or you will likely be very disappointed in market conditions different than one of the greatest global bull runs of all time across all sectors while the world prints so much money they can’t even publish a proper M2 anymore 
. "
My second
"As I mentioned before,
Do I think NFTs are a massive bubble and most are very dumb? yes.
Can I see a world where the large majority of ALL collectibles is digital? yes.
The second does not need to be very likely if it’s 100-10,000x upside on it’s outcome.
(caveat, this market is much further along than 10,000xs at this point, valuations are too high. more general principles evaluation)"
These were 4 months ago. I have a friend who did not have a lot of money who bought Artblocks at $100 per and has a portfolio worth tens of millions of dollars and has realized millions of dollars of gains. I am not saying anybody should do anything actionable now either. My entire point and the only thing I was trying to make clear in this thread is that it takes a huge amount of conviction that the outcome is 100% impossible to be so adamantly against something with so vast a scope and only a slight bit of doubt for it to be worth having some exposure.
Also fwiw I came from nothing, I grew up lower/middle class with parents that were a UPS driver and Kindergarten teacher. I dropped out of University, and have no degree. I don’t think I have any exceptionally special skills other than a strong desire to learn, the ability to keep an open mind, and always always saying “yes” to opportunities I think are cool with cool people.
Some things that I have done equipped with only that:
- Played poker professionally at the highest competitive levels
- Started and sold multiple companies in completely different areas
- Co-published academic research with one of the world’s leading research scientists and Facebook AI Research- Created and sold ML models I build from scratch by way of learning ML to pro MLB teams- Invested in incredibly awesome companies/founders doing things like building exoskeletons for paralyzed people, green energy optimization for utility companies, making clean water accessible globally- Done crazy interesting things with awesome people like buy a bank and potentially buying a soccer team
I’ve gone through booms and busts of multiple different industries exploding into massive massive industries and I have seen many of my now friends come from backgrounds of nothing, literally nothing (homeless, drug issues, fresh out of college, whatever all of it) to 9 and 10 figure wealth. I have watched friends go from average poker players to bringing companies public at $10B+ valuations, and go from posting memes on the internet to being extremely well respected and speaking to Fortune 100 companies and working with some of the largest orgs in the world. The single most common trait between all of them is that they are almost all relentlessly optimistic (about progress, many of them hate people) and constantly trying to learn new things.
That’s the only point I ever wanted to get across here, just be open to new things. Everybody is soooooo sure they are right and sooooo sure X is stupid or whatever it might be. I have NO idea and I’m totally fine saying that. I can assign probabilistic outcomes and guess their likelihood and refine my mental model but I’m not sure about anything and I’ve never tried to say I was sure about anything. I work on what I think is cool, I try to spend my time doing things with people who I think are cool, and clearly I spend way too much time on the internet trying to argue with people and get them to change their frame of view/mindset , but I promise you it comes from a good place. My goal is not to gloat or to get you to do anything, I’m very comfortable with who I am as a person and where I am in my life. Most of my life is dedicated to my work and to my family, but I’ve met a lot of awesome people in this forum and I like the discussions even though they are almost always coming from a negative place for most. Most people don’t know much about my background and I honestly don’t think it matters that much to the discussions here, but if you guys open your minds even a little bit there is so )!@*(4ing much opportunity in the world. There has never EVER been a better time for wealth creation, it’s not even remotely close and it’s accessible to literally everybody which has never been the case historically. It’s a time that anybody with even the slightest bit of motivation should be celebrating and yet we’re here bemoaning it and arguing. Maybe I’ll drop off the thread for a bit as I did earlier and let you guys resume the discussion but from the sidelines it’s extremely hard to watch. I honestly hope you can reframe how you view this entire thread and discussion and just focus on that one part. Open mind, world of possibilities. Create your own mental model for each part of it and act accordingly.
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Another completely incorrect take Scott. Crypto is so many orders of magnitude less anonymous than cash that it’s almost laughable. 99.99% of fiat offramps from crypto are fully KYC’d. Try getting any reasonable amount of money out of crypto while maintaining full anonymity. Good luck. Like this is just not remotely true at all and government orgs have commented again and again how easy it is to track. It takes extremely painstakingly difficult opsec to maintain any sort of long term anonymity and all of that money is basically never able to be off-ramped. Compared to cash crypto is an absolute dream for all tax authorities.
And while there may not be clear regulation on how it’s treated, the entities allowing it to be traded are regulated (do they have other “unregulated assets” they are allowed to trade on there? How about the ETFs and the balance sheets, etc., etc., it’s all taxed and while the IRS is fairly ambiguous allowing them to make whatever changes they desire later it’s not this like shady backwater swap where none of it is taxed and everything is shadowy. Coinbase sends 1099s to all of it’s customers in the same way that Paypal, Draftkings, or whatever other industry does once their transactional volume / profits exceeds a certain threshold. The users are KYC’d, their gains are reported to the tax authorities, the platform/entity is taxed and reports to the tax authority as well as complying with everything else required of a publicly traded company.
Like you’re using some weird nuance to try to pidgeonhole it to this definition but you’re completely missing the broader implications of everything else surrounded it. Just ask yourself simply how many other public companies are allowed to deal in unregulated things so freely and for such high volume. Coinbase, Robinhood, etc., it just does not happen without the proper authorities being EXTREMELY comfortable with it at this point. So like Pokemon cards aren’t regulated if that’s the definition you want to use, they fall under an existing definition, exactly as most crypto does
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@primordialaa, My points are very straight forward and obvious. They don’t require paragraphs of explanation. You keep talking about applications of crypto, which is great, but ignoring the speculative trading side of crypto.
90%+ people who approach me about buying a card with crypto never want to cash out before the deal, entirely because of tax implications. Its dead obvious its used to launder money. Just like with fine art. Except much easier due to being digital, less copyright laws = less regulated.
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@smpratte Cash must be unregulated too, because I know there are people who do cash deals in this space and don’t report them. Paypal must be unregulated as well for everyone in here who posts about staying under the $20k reporting limit.
I’m saying you’re using an extremely weak definition of unregulated. Cash, PayPal, fine art, it’s all used for nefarious things just as it’s all used for completely legitimate things. Everything you’re describing happens across many mediums and is external to regulation because, shockingly, not everybody follows the regulations put in place. It’s on the individual staying within the bounds of the law, the laws are pretty clear.
Ironically you unknowingly disproved your own point. Your own statement about paypal 20k limit is a regulation. One that doesn’t exist in crypto. That paypal limit is much lower now = more regulation. Meanwhile none of that exists for crypto.
If you want to die on the hill that crypto is just as regulated as paypal, feel free, but its completely false.
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It does exist though… Literally every exchange in the US implements it as do exchanges each in their own respective countries, same with every OTC desk and fiat offramp. The fact that somebody can act outside of these bounds and spin up 1,000 paypal accounts with fake IDs and move small amounts through them does not mean Paypal-esque digital currency is less regulated it means that somebody can act outside of the bounds of those laws and regulations created. As they can in cash, art, crypto, and anything else. The definition of regulation is “a rule or directive made and maintained by an authority.” and we have a LOT of those in Crypto, from FinCEN to the SEC to the IRS. You are conflating the fact that somebody can act outside of the bounds of the system because no central authority has control of the transacting mechanism with there not existing any laws or regulation for people to follow. This is the exact same situation with cash and many other things. You frame it in your earlier posts as though it’s completely obfuscated and the majority of transactions are outside of the bounds of regulation but that is very much not true and the vast majority of the volume in the US happens through regulated entities.
What does crypto being regulated have anything to do with collecting or flipping NFTs?
I think the main point @primordialaa is making is that there are always going to be bad actors & those that want to skirt the rules.
@smpratte , of course people are going to try and pay in crypto and not report anything. That’s just like half of PWCC’s vault business, people taking advantage where they can. Or people not paying Use Tax when buying from Amazon for years. If it needs to be further regulated, it eventually will be & I don’t think that detracts from the collecting or investing side. If they do regulate more its probably because the market is 10x or 100x bigger than today.
There are some consensus algorithms that consumer much less energy than proof-of-work, such as proof-of-stake. They aren’t used too widely I think, I haven’t followed crypto in a while. But I think there is room for “green coins” to see their day in the crypto world, such as Peercoin
Lots of them (and pretty widely used these days!). ETH 2.0 is proof of stake, Solana is proof of history which also has an incredibly low footprint relative to the throughout. Chia (by Bitorrent creator Brahm Cohem) is another. Lots of them, all with their own set of tradeoffs but you’re definitely not alone in that thesis
Markets with less regulation have more speculation. Its an inherent economic reality. Only in a crypto thread does that obvious point take 5 pages.
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Getting back to the topic of collecting, my unsubstantiated hypothesis is that the biggest issue to most crypto collectibles is if the price gets too high for one set of collectibles, it is very easy for someone else to just start a new collectible and distribute it as there are no physical/real-world constraints. We see analogous behavior with Pokemon all the time - everyone wants those PSA 10 1st edition, but as they balloon in price, people become flexible for other grades, etc.
The only crypto collectibles I would ever consider taking seriously are those that are backed and maintained by a credible real-world agent, be it an individual or an organization. If TPC ever issued an official Pokemon NFT, I would be all over it.
PoW (proof of work) is a feature, not a bug. It is supposed to use large amounts of energy because it’s meant to resist attack. If you can secure a monetary network with a small amount of energy, then anyone can muster enough energy to corrupt the ledger.
The benefit of PoW is that no single entity can allocate enough energy to alter the ledger without the nodes who are verifying transaction recognizing the invalid transactions were added.
Proof of stake is great for crypto application blockchains, but not for security. Proof of work is the only truly decentralized, secure monetary network we’ve discovered.
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Yeah I agree! For perm collecting I’m really only going after the more established stuff on Ethereum.
For flipping though im buying anything/everything