10 years ago, I graduated Uni with no debt and about $1,000 net worth.
My first job (engineer) paid $100k/yr. After taxes & expenses, I saved $70k per year for 3 years.
With $200k net worth, I lived on $5k per year and for the past 7 years, I worked only 30% of the time – just enough to cover my expenses without dipping into my savings.
This year I sold bitcoin (bought for $7,000. sold for $1,000,000). My target to retire-retire was $800,000, so I've finally reached my goal.
The sell orders executed so fast that I don't know where to put it. I already stuffed every US bank that I have to the $250k FDIC max, but my last sell order exceeds that. I've applied to open bank accounts with maybe 100 banks in the US, and I've only succeeded in opening 1. My requirements:
[1] No monthly fees
[2] No inactivity fees
[3] No phone or phone number required
[4] Online Banking with 2FA support (TOTP, Webauthn, or email)
99% of the banks that I've tried to open with auto-deny me. My credit is great. When I call and ask why, they say something about the information I gave them not matching their records. The ones that have an appeal process told me "the system" denied me, and there's nothing they can do – even supervisors.
My long-term plan is to buy a small condo in a city and a lot of land in the country. But it'll probably take me 6-24 months to find and finish those deals, and in the meantime I want to keep my money somewhere safe.
I'm also a bit worried about the USD tanking. I've looked into banks in Europe and Canada, but Canada requires a tax ID and I only speak English. Can anyone recommend a very stable bank abroad (with English language support) that a US American can open remotely that meets the above requirements?
Where would you put your money if you were in my situation?
It's the same government and university research institutions that say tobacco causes lung cancer that also says Bitcoin uses more energy per transaction than a credit card.
You trust their findings that tobacco causes lung cancer yet you don't trust their findings on crypto.
The key to your misunderstanding is the "per transaction" part. It's a common misconception.
Now look at how much energy the whole financial industry uses. Put it on a line graph next to bitcoin's energy usage. You can almost not even see the blip of bitcoin's energy usage compared to the harm that the financial industry is causing.
Then learn how the energy does not increase as the transactions increases. This is a fact. The difficulty increases. It's mathematical. Read the white paper.
Then maybe you can finally see the lie perpetuated by the financial industry, which is a disaster to our environment compared to the greener alternative of bitcoin.
This is correct, the difficulty doesn't increase proportional to the number of transactions directly, but instead to ensure that blocks are mined every 10 minutes on average. This means that if there are a million miners and a single transaction in a block, the difficulty will be very high, requiring a lot of compute, for just a single transaction. Sure this is unlikely, but illustrates how mining can be disproportionately intensive for a low volume of transactions.
The reason the carbon emissions per transaction is a useful metric is to put into context the environmental impact that would happen if a significant amount of current banking transactions happening now were moved over to using Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency that uses proof of work to mine blocks. This was the intention behind the creation of Bitcoin as outlined in the whitepaper, so it's reasonable to model the environmental impact of continuing to use proof of work for Bitcoin mining at the scale of the financial industry which is where some people want to see Bitcoin be in the future.
If all global monetary transactions moved to Bitcoin, the amount of energy used by bitcoin would not increase, and global emissions caused by financial transactions would decrease by nearly 100%.