this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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You need the same infrastructure for any electronic payment system.
What you don't need for anything is crypto "mining", which is almost pure overhead. That's what the article is about.
Mining is barely transactional in nature. Pretty much all of it is calculating hashes, which, on one hand, is super important as part of Proof-of-Work consensus, the most decentralized one we have, but on the other we have other reasonably secure options that waste two orders of magnitude less power.
It's not necessary to perform any of the functions of crypto, including money laundering. That makes it pure overhead; pure waste. There are offshore banks that facilitate tax fraud and other criminal activity. Crypto, somehow, allows exchanges to escape the scrutiny that falls on these banks. Objectively, there is no good reason why all this waste should let you avoid scrutiny of regulators or police.