In a Thursday speech, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Paul S. Atkins announced “Project Crypto,” an initiative to modernize the country’s securities rules and regulations to move financial markets on-chain.
“Under my leadership, the SEC will not stand idly by and watch innovations develop overseas while our capital markets remain stagnant,” he said at an America First Policy Institute event in Washington D.C. His plan includes measures to reshore crypto businesses that have left the country and to ensure that “archaic rules and regulations do not smother innovation and entrepreneurship in America.”
This was a really interesting reply, thanks. I’d leave a longer response, but honestly I really need to be asleep right now.
I will say though, even today the barrier for entry is lower than that for bitcoin mining. You can definitely get started for $1000. I wouldn’t really recommend Bitcoin mining as a hobby at this point, but that’s basically the low end for a single machine.
Personally, that’s about as much as I ever spent on mining equipment, and it was fun, I learned a lot, and it was even lucrative in the end.
No problem. It’s past my bedtime too, but I’m really pleased that I’m able to discuss this stuff and I’m not getting downvotes or called a shill simply for providing information. It’s always been a big area of fascination for me, the technology is really neat. :)
Sure, you could set up something that can process blocks. But there’s no way you’d be able to make a profit with something that small. One of the fundamental tenets of cryptocurrency is that it doesn’t rely on anyone acting altruistically, it assumes that everyone involved is in it for the money. It leverages greed to ensure that everyone “follows the rules”, by making it so that if you break those rules you make less money. So I wouldn’t consider a blockchain to be secure if it depended on miners who mined at a loss out of the goodness of their hearts. When people worry about centralization they overlook that Bitcoin has economies of scale that massively favors the bigger mining operations, the dollars-per-hash are much lower for the warehouses full of ASICs next door to a power plant than for the guy with a graphics card in a closet at home.
I did also mention that you could get involved in staking on Ethereum for much less than $120,000, at the cost of depending on third parties to handle the actual validation. You can do that either through staking pools or liquid staking. Essentially, you own a “share” of a single validator’s stake and get a proportionate portion of the validator’s rewards, minus a fee that the validator charges for actually running the validator.
That’s not true if your home electricity cost is low. You will be still making a profit. Last I checked hardware pays for itself after a year if your electricity is very cheap. Then it’s very slow profit and then it gets too old to make a profit.
With very cheap electricity you can expect 2x return after a few years and then it becomes garbage when the difficulty is too high