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I tried using a gift card at Lowes this weekend which was apparently not under my name or driver's license and they wouldn't let me use it. It's my gift card from a prior return but perhaps the agent keyed in my name or license wrong and/or someone else conducted the return for me months ago and I can't recall. So I'd say it's pretty secure, hah.
Unfortunately with some gift cards it’s not a case as it can VISA or MasterCard gift card and don’t need anything and no one will ask any questions. Some customers in UK do use it as they don’t trust banks and you can get some customers who never had a bank account.
Imagine getting your network attacked and they asks you for 1Million in iTunes gift cards.
I think when a lot of people think crypto they think Bitcoin, and though it can be a great speculative investment (probably over $100k in 2025) it's very limited and wasteful. Ethereum is the real innovation that can turn into a trillion dollar financial ecosystem. It replaces not just currency, but banks and loans and stock markets and auction houses and mortgage companies and pensions... That could create IT jobs, but not nearly as many as the traditional finance jobs it will wipe out. If the legacy financial lobbyists can't torpedo it, of course.
@William Monero has cypherpunk appeal, being anonymous and fungible, but I suspect it will be harmed by regulation the most.
First, can we please stop to abuse the term 'crypto'. Crypto stands for cryptography and I - like many, probably most - others in the field hate to see us and our work being intermingled and confused with crap pseudo currencies.
As for the OP, yes and no. Yes, graphics cards prices were driven up quite hefty by crapto miners and certain graphics cards were all but unavailable for normal people with normal budgets. But no, I do not think that Chia has a really major role in current drive prices, which IMO are more to do with covid related problems (e.g. international transport) and other factors.
Btw AFAIK Chia does not need fast storage for the major part and spindles do fine.
Re (real) crypto I'm not at all interested in all the crap mining crap. Simple reason: If with the best of their rigs one could bring down the time cost of a hash algorithm from say 10^148 to 10^144 (10.000 times faster) that's still insignificant from a cryptanalytical perspective (but maybe very significant for crap miners).
(For those interested I recommend Aumasson's recent paper)
It is very significant on my bank account balance.
For hosts, yes.
Why? Simple, check the one week chart of BTC.
If you're "brave" enough to speculate that it's going up forever after this, eh go for it. There are A LOT of people in the OTC who do the same and end up bankrupt. Only difference is, most OTC stocks are actually backed by something but have bad management.
some companies are behind the crypto and here is example why crypto is good for IT, example of CELO coin:
https://celo.org/ - Global payments infrastructure built for mobile
https://www.wsj.com/articles/startup-celo-aims-to-make-crypto-accessible-to-mainstream-mobile-users-11554204600
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/20/deutsche-telekom-invests-in-blockchain-payments-platform-celo.html
you do have a various IT projects based on crypto coins, so it's not just everything about Bitcoin!
Cryptocurrency is just speculation, therefore is bad in my opinion.
I shall always respect a man contributing with something useful to society's evolution, not a man dreaming of getting rich through speculation. This is my opinion and how I feel.
I think you are just using this as an example, so I'm not attacking you, but what is the usefulness of a "mobile phone-focused blockchain"? Like I feel like someone just slapped two buzzwords together.
The main website lists three things: "mobile" (they developed a lightweight client but ok, I'm pretty sure there are lightweight Ethereum clients), "stable" in that there are Celo dollars that are stablecoins but Tether is an ERC20 stablecoin so that isn't new, and "usable"
For it to have a total market cap of $800m is completely absurd in my book, and there seems to be no innovation in that it's just an Ethereum copycat with a few minor changes but the developer can say "mobile blockchain." Personally I think this highlights the state of the altcoin market: there are a bunch of people speculating pushing shitcoins up and incentivizing the creation of new ones.
Maybe I'm wrong, so convince me otherwise, but it just looks like a shitcoin to me at the moment.
Re: CELO:
This is the video on their about page on their website. Like wtf. How to say nothing at all while pretending to be inspirational.
What if some alien owns this planet, and humanity is a cryptocurrency project of where the alien is mining? Each human is already different in his/her DNA, making reproduction a blockchain of encrypted humans, mined from other 2 different humans, ready to be valued as a spiritual hash.
EDIT: The end might be nigh, if said alien decides to cash out.