7 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 27.0 ms ] thread
Hiking electricity prices have put a spotlight on crypto mining. Kosovo banned mining recently and Russia is discussing the same. These latest real world developments can also be affecting expectations. I think proof of work crypto will inevitably be killed by legislation, when it grows enough to become sufficiently painful for society.
Mining's a tricky one. There's cheap electricity in poor and unstable countries with bad electrical grids - they like selling power, but then miners go nuts and overstress it. (This happened in Kazakhstan, for example.)

So large miners are tending to the US and Canada - there's pockets of cheap electricity, there's a decent grid, there's good rule of law, and there's a lot more political stability.

I really want Ethereum to finally get off proof-of-work - not because I have any love for ETH, but because, as well as ETH then not using a country's worth of electricity, that will put tremendous political pressure on BTC.

Even if ETH paves the way I have a feeling the BTC devs and community won’t have the stomach for that kind of change.
oh, almost certainly not - they'll be under political pressure, yet be utterly unable to change in the face of it. They will go down on principle.
> Bitcoin is accounted as an intangible under GAAP rules — and if the value of an intangible goes down, it can’t go back up again.

Can someone explain this?

From this article: https://news.bloombergtax.com/financial-accounting/sec-rejec...

> U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, offer no rules for reporting the value of digital assets. Nonbinding guidance from the American Institute of CPAs says companies should classify the currency as an intangible asset, as outlined in ASC 350. This means businesses that don’t qualify as investment firms would record cryptocurrency at historical cost and then only adjust it if the value declines. Once their holdings get written down, or impaired, companies can’t revise the value back up if the price recovers.