There is no such thing as "extra electricity", only wasted electricity. Bitcoin's energy usage produces absolutely nothing positive for society.

Watch this documentary on the subject.

It's funny that they use really messed up, third world countries as some sort of crypto "use case." These are societies that will try anything and have very lax regulation and environmental standards. Bitcoin doesn't solve any of their real problems. It's just more exploitation.

It's about time everybody realize there's very little going on in the crypto industry that's not fraud and grift.

Here is a great documentary explaining why. It's a shame it isn't getting the attention it deserves, but I guess crypto companies are still prime advertisers in mainstream media and nobody wants to bite the hand that feeds.

Imagine how AWESOME social media would be if everybody from Texas and Florida were no longer allowed to post?

In fairness, any one of those probes could turn into a significant issue if the right vulnerability is found.

There are some systems out there thought that can nip this stuff in the bud, especially if they're using whitelisting and blacklisting of IP space. One system I've found useful is free set of scripts called "login-shield." It's on github.

A state full of idiots who deny everything from climate change to vaccines.... who really wants to live there?

A place with so much urban sprawl it can take hours to get from one side of the city to the other depending upon the time and traffic.

A place devoid of any real physical beauty or natural resources.

A place with a fucked up privatized power grid that sells power to bitcoin miners while people die from rolling blackouts.

A place with privatized toll roads everywhere because the city sacrificed the publics' freedom to special interests.

Couldn't happen to a nicer place. Good riddance Austin and all of Texas.

Instant red flag.

Everybody needs to watch this documentary and avoid getting suckered into the whole crypto ponzi scheme.

As a mod of several very large communities on Reddit, it's not over.

Reddit's reputation and loyalty its users had is GONE. We may still be hanging around, but now we're just using Reddit the way Reddit used us: to promote other things, including Discord, kbin, Mastodon and many other communities.

Most communities have now split and spread across multiple sites on the Internet.

Reddit has done us a tremendous favor by making people realize they shouldn't focus their time and resources around any specific corporate walled garden.

If you go into many communities you will find they are also promoting off-site places to visit and socialize as well.

This is the beginning of the end for Reddit. Its traffic is down by at least 50% in most areas.

Years from now, Reddit's demise (as well as Twitter's) will be taught in classes as an example of how to completely screw things up on social media.

But this is much worse for Reddit than Twitter. Reddit really had a lot more to lose. Twitter has always been a cesspool.

But the most content-dense social media site, along with the most content-void social media site, both failing at the same time, is a sight to behold.

I guess a lot of people in Louisiana are paying Pornhub customers, verses MS and VA

Yea, give your old used hard drives to a crypto company. Would could possibly go wrong?

I use a system on my servers called Web-Shield that has proven to GREAT at stopping unauthorized bots from scraping my web sites as well as hacks and system probes. It's a simple shell-script based system that uses ipset/iptables to block specific areas of the web where there aren't legit users - just super cheap web hosting platforms that are the source of most of this activity. It's free. You should check it out. There's also a companion system called "login-shield" that does the same for login ports. Hooray for open source solutions to stuff like this.

It is hard to know what sort of algorithms would best promote real community...

How about this novel concept: Let the fucking user decide!

Once you realize the underlying technology is a scam, it becomes apparent there's little more than a de-centralized pyramid scheme happening. Stablecoins only exist as a proxy for fake money that was never there in the first place, pumping up the market so people at the top of the pyramid can cash out.

It's 2023. The crypto industry has had almost a decade and a half to prove they can do something people really want or need, and they've failed.

She needs to watch this documentary on blockchain. It lays out how it works and the various false promises it doesn't live up to.

I get that there's money on the line for some people, but still... this tech really doesn't make any sense.