I don’t know who would benefit from interacting with this.
Going from a Kraken fee of 0.16% to a Binance fee of 0.075% after discounts (while assuming that depositing money one has in a bank account will still work well and that there is no risk from legal liability or of an account being closed) would let one recoup a $250 fee after trading a value of at least $294,117 ($250/((0.16-0.075)/100)). If one is Canadian and would otherwise have to suffer a 0.5% fee, one could recoup a USD 250 fee after trading a value of at least USD 58,823.
Someone that has about $300,000 in a bank account that wanted to use all of it to buy cryptocurrency would probably be able to afford to become a citizen of Saint Kitts and Nevis or Saint Lucia or even Malta, so Palau is probably not actually targeting rich people.
Someone that is making about $300,000 worth of trades but isn’t rich is someone who trades a small value many times each year, and “the vast majority of day traders lose money”. This suggests that, for most people, this will be the final meaningful purchase they make before their net worth declines rapidly. However, anyone that does end up profiting might be inclined to spend more money in Palau (whereas people who go broke won’t even be able to afford to stay in Palau and so probably won’t be able to cause problems in Palau), so Palau might end up profiting from people who lose money and people who gain money.
I happen to have been asked about this many months ago, since at least one person was visiting cryptocurrency meetup events in order to advertise this “residency card”.
The existence of everyday Palauans is threatened by climate change (sea level rise, coral reef death, heightened typhoon intensity), which is being accelerated by the energy use of proof-of-work coins. Sad to see the Palauan government sell out their own people
It’s a bit strong to call it selling out. They are fucked already. Like their entire country will likely have to evacuate within the century. I’m not certain about this country but others are building a gov fund to help pay for that. Anything to help really. It’s not like this is the thing that is going to really cement bitcoins. The ship has sailed.
I get what you’re saying. But it undermines their efforts in other forums to try to fight climate change, if elites there are cashing in on carbon-heavy crypto, while everyday folks suffer from collapse of fisheries, saltwater intrusion into groundwater, etc
It’s just grift all the way down with crypto, isn’t it? Scams layered on scams layered on scams.
Yeaaaa
Yup. They have the exchange operators on record saying they actively trade against their customers. It’s a club and if you’re not in it you don’t get to win.
I’d say you’re right for 99% of it, but there is 1% that’s genuinely useful.
More like 0.01
That’s probably a fair assessment, but still a rather damning indictment of the industry writ large.
There are definitely better versions of cryptocurrency that I think could be more useful, but the industry is definitely not headed in that direction. Instead, it’s all pump-and-dumps, rug-pulls, and other schemes that render them nothing more than highly speculative asset classes in which the underlying asset has no intrinsic value.
That’s true. And personally, I stay away from all of that mess. And anybody I introduce, I take great pains to explain why I stay away from all that mess. But if they want to make their own mistakes, then that’s on them.
Yup. There are a handful of useful coins, and a handful of legit exchanges. Hold your own keys in FOSS wallets, keep backups of your keys, and don’t expect to get rich quick (and instead find a use outside of investing). Do that, and you should be fine.
I’m super interested in privacy coins like Monero, so I go out of my way to find merchants that accept it. It’s reasonably stable, has very low transaction fees, and it’s fairly popular among privacy advocates, so I doubt it’ll go away anytime soon. That said, I only keep what I’ll spend, so make a couple hundred at a time.
Please elaborate on what this magical 1% that you feel is useful and worth expending the same amount if energy as Australia
drugs of course. i thought everyone had heard of it already!
My first question to you would be, how much energy does the banking sector use to run bank branches, haul physical money back and forth, bring employees to and from work, etc?
Next, not all blockchains require extreme levels of computation power for proof of work. Take Monero, for example, which deliberately makes ASIC chips impossible to use and is therefore mined only on CPUs, which are extremely common.
So you don’t have an actual use cases then.
Well the use case for monero is usually buying drugs on the internet. As long as the war on drugs continues, it’ll be useful for that
Only people relying on random public nodes. Better to run your own. Monero GUI is pretty clear about the risks when setting up wallet.
Money of course. I have been paying my bills with crypto since 2023.
And i have been using my bank account and cash to pay all my bills since i have had bills to pay. What’s the advantage of using something that is less convenient, less secure, and more resource intense than a normal checking account with direct deposit? You keep dodging the question on what use cases you think crypto currencies have an advantage over fiat currency.
And you keep demanding a use-case like the other commenter is proselytizing.
If were just going to ask people questions they have no responsibility to answer: Do you know why BTC was developed?
Fiat currencies are money by decree of a government. If you have lost trust in your government or your government is not trustworthy to begin with, then the Fiat currency is not worth the paper it’s printed on or the digits in your bank account. Your access to your bank account can be restricted at any time for any reason with just a simple push of a button and you have extremely small or no recourse to such an action. Cash is better in that regard, but even so your government or central bank purposely says they want to devalue your cash and other currency by a set target per year. Therefore making you have to work harder or become poorer. As an example, the U.S. Federal Reserve targets a 2% inflation target per year, which means if you put a $100 bill under your mattress today, in 2035, it would only buy you $80 worth of goods. I’m not that old, and yet, when I was a young kid, a $500,000 nest egg would work extremely well for a good retirement. Now, that is absolutely not the case. Not because of the goods getting more expensive, but because of the currency depreciating in value as you work for it.
Or any proof of stake coin like Ethereum, which doesn’t require any mining at all. The electricity argument is extremely out of date for most coins besides Bitcoin itself.
As far as I know GPU mining is pretty much completely dead because after Ethereum switched the yields on everything else tanked.
To be fair I’m not a huge fan of pure proof of stake because it makes validation more difficult because you have to have code for slashing somebody’s stake if they are malicious or bad and a malicious entity could just buy up a bunch of your tokens and tank them. Admittedly, not a lot of people would do so, but I could totally see a government buying up a bunch of tokens on a network and purposely crashing the network in order to rid themselves of a nuisance and calling it justified. Proof of work makes that much more difficult. Still doable for certain, but much, much more difficult.
So a government is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to get enough Ethereum to disrupt it, before accounting for the price going up by purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars of Ethereum, and then they’re going to destroy the hundreds of billions of dollars they invested to take the network down, temporarily. Like sure, it’s possible, but once established, it’s not happening.
It would be more cost effective to do a supply chain attack and introduce exploits/weaknesses to try and make people doubt using it, attack the infrastructure and steal coins from exchanges and other off chain services or smart contracts with bugs, and pass laws to restrict it.
edit: Oh and there’s also the queue to activate a valid staker. It will take a lot of time to even begin to be able to do this, instead of hoarding/renting asic hardware and turning it on out of the blue.
Ethereum could literally roll back their chain to negate the attack, anyway. They’ve done it before.
That us cheap. Many places charge ~$250K. But then you own a house and can sell it later…
The whole point of this card is basically to bypass KYC requirements for crypto exchanges that don’t allow US customers. They are very explicit about this in their marketing.
And when you do that with Canada, you make a tidy profit!
Then again, if you can find a house anywhere in the country, with running water, for less than a mil, there’s a gov analyst job waiting for you too!
Is well water fine? There are some nice but small houses in northern Alberta.
I look at real estate listings a lot to avoid doom scrolling.
Edit: Correction, west of line between Calgary and Edmonton.
That’s for actual residency. This seems to be able to exist in the country digitally. Other countries, like Estonia, have the same thing.
It can technically be used to extend your stay in Palau long enough to establish tax residency since it would allow you to stay in Palau for longer than 183 days a year. Not unusual for people sitting on big crypto stashes to move abroad or buy citizenships in order to cash out their crypto without capital gains tax (or at least that’s how it goes - I imagine the IRS doesn’t go down that easily).
The “substantial presence test” is more complicated than you might have thought: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/substantial-presence-test
If you spent a full 210 days (30 days from a visa on arrival followed by 2 consecutive 90-day extensions) each year in Palau, but spent the remainder of every year in the USA, you would be physically present in the United States (U.S.) on at least “183 days during the 3-year period that includes the current year and the 2 years immediately before that”. Specifically, the “count” would be 232.5 (instead of 465 since days in earlier years are counted as 1/3 or 1/6), which is at least 183.
It seems the easiest way to avoid being considered a United States resident for tax purposes from meeting the substantial presence test is to not be physically present in the United States (U.S.) on at least 31 days during the current year. If you wanted to do that, there are many places where most United States citizens are already allowed to stay for “365 days” or “1 year” or “Unlimited”, notably including Palau, as well as Marshall Islands and Albania and other countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_States_citizens
Ah, thank you.
Used to be the DOJ had an expansive view of USA sovereignty. Guess we will see.
