Just as, in days of old, those who wished to do legitimate (and costly) science had frame their research as supporting alchemical beliefs leading to discovery of immortality, or means to make gold from lead.

and astronomers who wished to build an observatory had to go along with some highly flimsy justification about how it could serve as a means to prognosticate the birth of an heir or victory in battle for some petty murderous strongman.

Crypto has alternative consensus methods available today and a former PoW blockchain (Ethereum) was able to cut their emissions by 99.9% by moving to a efficient alternative with Proof-of-Stake. For crypto it is possible.

AI (Deep Learning) on the other hand has no efficient alternative methods available for training, fine-tuning and inference and continues to waste tons of water and consume more resources.

> Ai is next of my power hungry worry list

It should be the main concern. The top of your list even, hence the aforementioned points today. Deep Learning has no efficient solutions to its energy problem which remains to this day after decades of its existence.

Actually, bitcoin uses a ridiculously small amount of power for what it provides. See for example here https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ for an introduction to clear up this misconception.

Coinbase reveals in 10-K and 10-Q filings how it's lost over 75% of retail customers, i.e. the guys who supply the scarce actual dollars to crypto.

CoinDesk has been running regular articles on how it's down, e.g.

* https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/07/05/crypto-trading-v... - "Still, spot trading volumes remain at historically low levels. Spot trading volume in the second quarter was the lowest since Q4 2019, according to the report."

* https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/06/15/crypto-trading-v... - "Average daily volumes for the second quarter of 2023 were $10 billion for the top 10 tokens (excluding stablecoins), compared to $18 billion average daily volumes in the first quarter of the year."

this is important, because a thin market means the price is more easily fakeable. The TrueUSD stablecoin seems to have lost its backing recently, but simultaneously with that Binance somehow printed $2b worth of TrueUSD. What could you do to the bitcoin price if you had $2b of fake money to do it with?

True, but there was an exchange a few months ago that turned off trading for customers for whatever reason, but the exchange forgot to turn of its bot and you could see a perfectly-formed, gradually-increasing, stair-stepping pattern in it's price chart.

Every attempt to peel away the onion layer reveals mass problems.

It's like saying 'we have no hard proof that all this Mafia gangs revenue came from illegal activity!'.

What I'm saying is, the point of crypto is hustle, there is no real economy, and the players are all shady as can be.

Literally nobody knows where the Binance guy even is!

Why would the Binance guy want to hide from global authorities?

Regular bank CEO's don't.

It's mafia-adjacent the whole way down, with a lot of small dupes and kids playing with some amount of money.

There is no 'there there' in the value creating sense that we might want to see.

If you told me BTC was 95% regular people using it for business and 5% shady, I'd say we need to work on that problem. But it's only 5% 'useful' and the rest is just layers of scam and fraud.

We need to dump crypto, and if we want to try that experiment again - because I think there might be value there - we can give it a new name and keep it clean from the start.

I’ve long since lost my astonishment at the revealed preferences in layoff selection criteria. It isn’t a complete Machiavellian free-for-all, but merit and fine-grained logic usually don’t prevail at the top of the criteria list in the trenches.

Under which legal jurisdiction does Binance operate? It's not "all of them". I'm not sure that it's "any of them".

On chain, there are not more than 100k users across chains daily. Real users across all EVM chains is probably around 20k/day. Major airdrops like Optimism and Arbitrum went out to like 600k wallets (and most have multiple wallets). OpenSea has like a few thousand daily active users.

Which makes you wonder - all these billions in funding for serving just…100k real users? Because if its not onchain, it might as well be a database.

The only difference with engineers is they can believe at least in theory they could create the backbone of some services, so they could have a shoddy mvp made in a few days which they assume just needs a "little" work to top it off, whereas others can't start without tech help, but massively underestimate how much tech work is required for their ideas.

If you dont believe me, hang around a startup space and see how people talk about trying to find technical cofounders

For example my blog/website operates theoretically in all countries on the world ...still it's only me needed. I think you get the point.

I think a measure like active users is more related to the size than number of countries and coins/tokens ...

But it is true I focused a too much on the platform itself etc. They have a lot stuff going on around it for legal, kyc, regulations, Marketing etc ... The operation of the platform itself is probably not the biggest part of their business anymore.

But coinbase for example, does it with less than 5000 ... But probably not so easy to compare

Also, until the 70s, USD was backed by gold.

Previously, you tried to say that FB was going to, I don't know, Sue startups who use LLAMA or something, due to them not yet releasing a commerical license, with a permissive license?

Do you still stand by this statement, now that FB has commercially released a large language model?

And then question 2 would be, what possible argument could someone say to you, to have convinced you that your previous argument was not justified, given that new evidence has proven that to be the case?

Cyberextortion rings still operate out of countries with weak law enforcement or tacit approval of their governments, so I don't know if disappearance of cryptocurrency would hurt them much.