Thread by @NotBrunoAgain

Another scam-friendly aspect of btc and its ilk is that all the terminology is either obscure to laypeople or in some cases actively misleading - talking about 'mining' particularly tries to leverage people's intuitions in pretty deceptive ways

I think a lot of people think 'mining' relates only to bringing new coins into existence, or involves somehow 'discovering' bitcoins, which are themselves solutions to math problems

neither of those notions are true but the cryptogriftosphere doesn't try too hard to dispel them

and it obscures one of the core problems with btc, eth, et al, which is that 'mining' is really 'validating transactions' and consequently that the cost of moving one of those coins around is astronomically more than what you'd pay visa to validate a credit card transaction

calling it 'mining' puts the emphasis on what the miner gets ('free' 'money') and takes it off what is actually going on (if you want to actually use your monopoly money that transaction is bundled up with thousands of others and someone burns a shitload of cycles to validate it)

because the total rate of transactions on the btc network is actually relatively fixed by design, you have to 'buy' transaction processing from so-called 'miners' on the open market, on a per-transaction basis

result: btc transaction fees are around $15-ish usd right now

ethereum works on a simlar principle but the fees are even more absurd right now. nfts are largely a way of suckering people into entering this pay to play system, to the benefit of transaction processors and especially exchanges

in fact, the entire idea of 'coins' is itself a little misleading - people seem to think eg that you can put a coin into some physical format and carry it with you, which you can't. this has not stopped people from selling dozens of 'physical bitcoin' products, of course

(you can stick a private key associated with some network identity into a particular piece of physical media, of course, but unless you're doing that part yourself you can't trust no-one else has *that* private key somewhere else)

but the widespread vagueness with which the cryptogriftosphere describes what those protocols actually are and do has of course helped make money for all the people selling 'physical' btc of one kind of another, which was another sub-scam impelled by... high transaction costs