And yes, crypto can be used for money laundering to confuse the trail (but the block chain is a public record of transactions that can be examined by a determined investigator)- and some cryptos are better at this than others. But exchanging crypto for fiat currency on an exchange is regulated and reported to the IRS…

If I were to spend $3,000 to replace my GPUs with the latest versions I could mine ~$10 a day and if the value mined stayed the same it would pay for itself in less than a year… BUT the difficulty of the mining calculations grows with time, so the same hardware will mine less and less of a coin per day- so the value of the coin would have to grow at the same rate for the value mined per day to stay the same.

Additionally the crypto coin market fluctuates wildly- so any ‘investment’ in hardware is probably risky/foolhardy/self-destructive – I am only trying it because I already had the hardware for 3d-rendering…

There are a LOT of people doing it, and the energy used to mine just Bitcoin is huge:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/17/bitcoin-electricity-usage-huge-climate-cryptocurrency
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itcoin’s electricity usage is enormous. In November, the power consumed by the entire bitcoin network was estimated to be higher than that of the Republic of Ireland. Since then, its demands have only grown. It’s now on pace to use just over 42TWh of electricity in a year, placing it ahead of New Zealand and Hungary and just behind Peru, according to estimates from Digiconomist. That’s commensurate with CO2 emissions of 20 megatonnes – or roughly 1m transatlantic flights.

That fact should be a grave notion to anyone who hopes for the cryptocurrency to grow further in stature and enter widespread usage. But even more alarming is that things could get much, much worse, helping to increase climate change in the process.

Burning huge amounts of electricity isn’t incidental to bitcoin: instead, it’s embedded into the innermost core of the currency, as the operation known as “mining”. In simplified terms, bitcoin mining is a competition to waste the most electricity possible by doing pointless arithmetic quintillions of times a second.

So there are some serious ethical concerns…

The reported amount stolen was $530 million in their proprietary cryptocurrency.

Ironically enough, the fact that remaining investors dumped a lot of the currency to demonstrate a lack of faith, depressed the price, so the stolen coins will be worth less.

C’est la vie.

If you invest in a business, either by loaning your no-account cousin some cash, or by buying stock in a company, your money goes into buying raw materials, investing in physical plant, and paying workers to improve on those materials and facilities through their labor. And yes, the management of that enterprise counts as “labor”, if its any good. All management does is provide an administrative and coordinating function, which is certainly a valid function, but only part of the labor value that goes into the final product.

All that labor may generate enough revenue when the product or service is sold for the workers to get paid, the owner to make a profit, and for you to get a nice dividend. That’s the way the system should work, although sometimes the business goes south and nobody wins.

There is nothing morally or mathematically wrong with investing in a business enterprise, or for an enterprise to borrow to launch a new venture. In either case, the future market value of the product or service is going backwards in time to bootstrap the creation of the product. Sure, its risky, and sometimes everybody loses, but that’s the chance you have to take. Otherwise, we would have to sell the product (or service) before it was manufactured, purely on faith.

So where does that value come from? It is derived from the labor that goes into the raw material to make it a sellable product. All value, all wealth derives from human labor. Even the raw material used to make the product has value only because of the human labor required to locate, extract, refine, accumulate, transport and distribute it.

I don’t see where in that whole scheme bitcoin fits in. Things like money, gold, currency, capital, equities etc are just accounting aids. They have no intrinsic value, we just use them to keep score.