Why would they go to the trouble of thinking about and making plans for years down the road when there’s a profitable grift to be enjoyed right now?
n/m—
The sick thing is that all of that electricity is being used up to create nothing.
Bitcoins serve no purpose and have no value aside from existing and being difficult to acquire. They only have whatever arbitrary value that is assigned to them by a market of people willing to buy them, primarily as an investment, to sell to other people as an investment.
I can’t wait for the bottom to fall out enough to kill it. It’s a destructive fad which harkens back to the worst of the 80s toxic consumer culture of greed. Valuable resources, and now potentially lives, spent on creating nothing.
Go Sportsball!
I’m not even sure what the grift is. I guess distracting Texans?
Rams I figured, but Joe Burrow!?
Isn’t it also true that, as additional bitcoins are found, it becomes increasingly difficult (and expensive) to find more of them?
Yes. Bitcoin has a finite amount, 21 million, and most have already been found.
By its very nature, the rare at which they are found will become exponentially slower.
Only one block — yielding 6.25 Bitcoin as of August 2021 — is created every ten minutes. On average, the blocks created will keep ‘halving’ every four years, until eventually only 0.000000001 Bitcoin are awarded per block ‘mined’ by the year 2140.
It’s like a pyramid scheme; those who got in early reap the riches, while those who joined late are slaving over scraps.
Yes, indeed. It’s rather like those MLM schemes where the ones who start it make out like bandits and are the source of all the glowing testimonials while those who come in later don’t do so well.
@Atamasama Ninja’d (by an hour).
I suspect that there may be a nefarious motive to Greg Abbott’s love of cryptocurrency.
Some constitutional sedition theorists……ie John Eastman, have proposed a way for states to evade that pesky Constitutional provision that prohibits states from coining or printing their own money.
AFAICT - Eastman’s reasoning is always rather convoluted - it involves making the argument that the federal government has failed in their responsibility to provide a stable currency.
It’s part of a more far-reaching theory of sedition, one that primarily involves border states setting up their own immigration police force - but he thinks that if the state can make the argument that they don’t like the way the federal government is performing one of the core functions clearly authorized by the Constitution, they can kick them out and do it themselves.
So, if Texas doesn’t like inflation, they can make their own money. It’s about as dumb as the idea that the current Vice-President has the ultimate say in who becomes the next President, but Texas is dumb. They just might try it.
Some Republicans in Texas are screaming “Screw Abbott!” Why? Because he’s not far right enough. 
…
The root of the anti-Abbott sentiment on the right stems from the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 when the governor used his executive authority to implement a statewide mask mandate and a shutdown on certain businesses. Since Abbott lifted those measures, he’s pivoted hard and promised that there would be no more local safety precaution mandates allowed for masks, vaccines or businesses. However, he continues to face criticism within his party, especially in comparison to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who in 2021 passed anti-mandate legislation for COVID-19 vaccines and masks.Abbott’s handling of COVID-19, including efforts to block vaccine and mask mandates, was “worthless,” said Julie McCarty, director of the True Texas Project, one of several grassroots organizations hosting candidate forums on behalf of Abbott’s challengers.
…When it comes to apparent wins on abortion and other GOP priorities, his detractors say he didn’t go far enough.
…By McCarty’s count, Abbott was successful in carrying out only two of nine GOP priorities, religious freedom and constitutional carry, across four legislative sessions in 2021. But she said he failed to ban “taxpayer-funded lobbying” — which allows local governments to pay for legislative lobbyists at the capitol — protect Confederate monuments, implement more school choice policies, pass stronger election reforms, completely abolish abortion and end gender-affirming treatment for children.
When it comes to abortion, she said supporters like herself will stand for nothing but an absolute ban…
McCarty also said the Republican-backed overhaul of elections laws in Texas, which took three legislative sessions to pass, didn’t go far enough and should have carried harsher penalties.
…
She sounds nice…
That’s exactly the platform that Don Huffines and Allen West are campaigning against him under. That Abbott is a RINO, and that he’s not a “real” conservative, etc (Huffines’ tag line is “An Actual Republican for Governor”) and that more cracking down/intolerance is necessary toward illegal immigrants and Democrats and everyone else who doesn’t toe the crazy right-wing line.
Remember how Fox News was blathering a bunch of bullshit about how certain areas in the US were now “No-Go” zones?
I’m afraid they might have been correct. Just not the areas they were talking about.
The project to turn Texas into a conservative police state takes another big step forward. Abbott has ordered the state’s child welfare agency to investigate any gender-affirming medical interventions of trans minors as child abuse (following on an opinion by AG Paxton that deterimined such procedures fell under state child abuse statutes). Abbott also pointed out that professionals who have contact with children are legally mandated to report suspected incidents of child abuse or face criminal charges. And that, “There are similar reporting requirements and criminal penalties for members of the general public.”
So inform on your trans kid neighbor taking hormone blockers or prepare to be thrown in jail.
Welcome to Soviet Texas, comrade!
I early voted in the primary and voted for Beto O’Rourke. :crosses fingers:
I voted in the Republican primary, specifically to try to keep the crazies out. Abbott has been terrible lately (he was only “bad” previously), because he’s scared of getting primaried by the MAGAts. I hope that after our primary election next week, he’ll tone it down some.
I was able to find one governor candidate (Belew) that sounded reasonable, and I had to vote against our incumbent AG and Lt Gov, because they’re among the craziest of the MAGAts already.
This is what some Democrats are doing in ID as well. Dems have no chance in ID so you might as well try to get the most sane of hte lot past the primaries. Sadly, “sane” doesn’t describe nearly any of them. It’s crazy turtles all the way down.
Registered as independent in Arizona, before a primary election I get to choose which ballot I want, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or Green (who have been dropped). I considered the Republican ballot in 2020 but it was a bunch of people trying to out-crazy each other so I picked Democrat.
I often vote in the Republican primary as my local elections are pretty much a done deal in that regard, and my only way of having a voice comes from trying to choose the less odious of the options.
They keep making it harder to do so. All of them are batshit insane, and trying to figure out which one is the least so is like trying to tell which starving crazed weasel is biting my face the most gently.