Blackouts have hit Iran. The government is blaming Bitcoin mining
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This is the real problem, and it's a nasty one; poor countries often have below-cost electricity and various other sorts of fuel subsidy as part of their welfare system. It's a reasonably effective way of handling a subsidy where there isn't a strong bureaucracy and banking system to distribute payments. Removing them can trigger protests (remember the gilet jaunes complaining about fuel prices? and this was an issue in many of the Arab Spring riots.)
However, bitcoin provides a way to arbitrage that subsidy to world-market prices. It also provides a way for Iranians to evade the sanctions targeting their country.
(Iran would be a middle-income or even wealthy country if it wasn't embargoed almost entirely)_
Let's assume this is true.
Nearly all of that hypothetical wealth would be amassed at the very top of the power structure, just like we see in other resource-rich mafia states.
Iran is a major energy producer, and it would make sense for electricity to be provided "below cost" when that cost is theoretical and pegged to the market price of fuel (ie, opportunity cost), rather than the true production cost of electricity.
On face, I strongly doubt the narrative that crypto mining is the cause for any kind of grid failure. The regime in Iran defaults to lies and disinformation when covering up its own miserable failures. Remember when they initially denied that Iran's military had downed the Ukrainian plane? Same deal; they lie until they are cornered. I am more inclined to believe Ziya Sadr.
For Americans who don't understand Iran's regime, compare it to Trump's cries of election fraud; the claim is intended to point a finger that distracts from the actual problem (him losing the election fair and square). The blame in Iran is always placed as far from the leadership as possible, even for centrally managed utilities like the power grid.
Very much unlike the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:G...
Fact is, United States is pretty shit when it comes to income inequality.
I’m not automatically worse off because someone else is better off. That’s fallacious nonsense (the zero-sum fallacy). And it definitely does not meaningfully translate across countries, if what you’re interested in is human welfare.
[0] https://www.hoover.org/research/income-inequality-isnt-probl...
I don't think they had real choice (with such a high-profile incident), but to be fair, Iran admitted they did it in three days, which is remarkably fast.
Hell, it's faster than how many days it took the current US president to concede he lost the election.
Did that actually happen? Promising a “peaceful transfer” is not the same thing.
I use the word "regime" to differentiate the faux-religious oligarchy of power players who manipulate the Iranian government from the Iranian people and their non-governmental institutions.
It's a regime that pretends to have democracy, but only establishes a democratic caricature. Take, for example, that the President of Iran is a relatively powerless figurehead whose electoral transitions hide the constancy of the Supreme Leader's control over the nation. Consider also that the candidates who run for that office must be approved by the Guardian Council, which means that an election for the Iranian presidency is not free even if it is conducted fairly.
I think Iranians have a greater problem with their government than does the US establishment.
This fact is also true of Venezuela, another country that I assume would fall into the basket to which you refer. Both Iran and Venezuela have a large diaspora. The Iranian diaspora consists largely of people whose families were well-established prior to the Revolution of 1979; many of those people and their children are now doctors, lawyers, and engineers in other parts of the world. Comparatively speaking, the Venezuelan diaspora did not come from the upper class, as the middle class rather than the upper class was gutted in that country, and many of the people who have taken buses across South America in the past eight years or so arrive with nearly nothing. Many beg in order to pay for food and shelter, some resort to crime, and others leave behind a work history in a specialized field to work basic jobs (such as running a burger stand, or selling beers at events).
Those Venezuelans, too, have a far greater problem with their country's regime than does the US establishment.
A clear example is Israel: it has a "regime" in Arab and leftists human rights communitjes, but not in US mainstream media.
China has a "regime" depending on how hard line anti-Communist you are. Even though the government has no democratic legitimacy (like the Soviet regime in the cold war), it's not a "regime" in diplomatic circles because the US is economically dependent on China. Likewise Russia is not a regime now that the cold war is over (for now).
One can argue that by tweaking the tax level per type of fuel, it shapes the market in one direction or another, but that is not a subsidy as in "it is supporting the people by making things cheaper".
He added, “It is a known fact that the mismanagement and the very terrible situation of the electricity grid in Iran and the outdated equipment of power plants in Iran can’t support the grid.”
Edit: curious, why was I downvoted?
Is it slow because this site is, on demand, scraping a web page and returning it without js or something? That's pretty cool.
It is beyond ridiculous, it's a crime against humanity.
In practice lightning channels require on-chain transactions to set up and tear down, and also have (had?) issues with nodes needing to be online for various reasons (including potentially losing the money to the counterparty), and IIRC there were potentially unsolvable routing issues too. They also require significant quantities of bitcoin to be locked into channels to make them work. It seems like a real hack.
Layer-2 solutions are coming up and Ethereum is showing excellent progress towards Proof-of-Stake. Combining these two, it will not only eliminate wasteful energy spending but will also get do hundreds of thousands of transactions.
When we get to those, will you stop crying for its demise or is there any other chip on your shoulder?
> People have been trying and failing to implement proof of stake for years and years.
People have been trying and failing to implement heavier-than-air flight machines for years and years. So?
Some things just don't work. And proof of stake is not exactly technologically difficult. Yet it's still not here.
If are so certain of it not being viable, what's stopping you from shorting it? You and every Negative Nancy out there could pool together to bet against it, no?
Even if you are not interested in the money, you can donate to environmentally-friendly causes - what do you think?
The fact that the markets are massively manipulated, irrational and untrustworthy. The entirety of the cryptocurrency markets is basically rigged gambling. I am not an idiot.
- You want everyone else to stop working towards something they believe is achievable but you are not willing/unable to show any concrete evidence of its un-feasibility.
- You are also not willing to put any skin in the game for what you believe.
With that in mind, please tell why anyone should take you seriously?
If the game is rigged and you truly believe so, yes, it's one more reason for you to put skin in the game.
Uh, no? If you think a casino is rigged, that is a reason NOT to play, no?
Anyway, I am sure you won't do any of that. It's much easier to just sit on your chair and fool yourself into thinking that you are the only one that knows all the answers and everyone that is trying to work on improving the state of crypto is a fool. What is off-putting about all of your comments is that you dismiss the work or research of anyone as a waste of time (and energy and natural resources) but you fail to provide any kind of compelling evidence that can reject whatever hypothesis people are trying to validate.
Yes, I have plenty of concerns about Tether. I tell anyone I can they should stay away from it. I also tell everyone that when Tether crashes down it is going to make Mt. Gox look like a day at the spa.
I also repeatedly tell them to avoid exchanges that can only do on-ramps in USDT and to use exchanges where they do have a proper KYC system in place.
I also repeatedly tell people that they shouldn't put money into crypto that they can not afford to lose.
I also repeatedly tell them that the idea is not to be rich by doing nothing. That buying crypto is not investing and that those trying to time the market or finding "moonshots" are stupid fools.
I also repeatedly tell people to do DCA, buy a little every month and get the money back during the boom cycles and only keep the profits to grow their stash, so that they don't feel bad about "losing" anything when the next crash inevitably comes.
I also repeatedly tell people that learning and getting involved with crypto is a matter of hedging against the vicious and corrupt financial elites that on each generation take away more and more of our agency and independence. That the price doesn't matter and that our freedom is what at stake. That there are tons of issues with the technology and there will be tons of bad actors trying to exploit both the technical and the social problems.
I tell them to expect things to crash any time, but I also tell them that even if past performance is not guarantee of future returns, so far every crash drove the price down 4x and then the boom cycle brought it back up 20x.
Depending on what country they live, I might tell them that even with all the crashes, BTC has NEVER gone down in price against the Brazilian Real since 2013.
You know what I don't tell people? That I have all the answers and they are fools for trying something on their own volition. Only douchebags do that.
But do you think Tether is having any effect on the overall market?
What does it have to do with you wanting to get rid of all of crypto, calling useful only for extortionists and scammers and with your certainty that PoS is never going to become a viable alternative?
By shorting, I would assume that the market is rational, and will go down. There is no reason to assume this, since the market is irrational, and manipulated.
Yet, shorting Bitcoin is not the only way to put "skin in the game", and you should know that.
- There are a dozen different projects popping up every week that are genuinely focused on solving the issues that armchair specialists love to criticize, you could work on them.
- There are many crypto projects that have a more hybrid approach to have consensus and are more inclined to work with and not against the status quo (e.g, Stellar) - instead of just spewing the tired "crypto is for suckers" speech, how about finding a project that you think is deemed more worthy of respect.
- There are lots of people that need some way to store and transfer value without relying on local governments or financial systems. If you think people shouldn't use BTC for that, what alternative are you going to bring/propose?
So, to sum up: next time a discussion about BTC or crypto comes around, can you please drop the histrionics and bring something better to the table?
- Bitcoin is an algorithmic and unchangeable monetary base.
- It's an un-censorable, neutral global payment network
- It's an immutable ledger.
What are you familiar with to compare to such a thing?
In what? It’s a terrible currency. It’s a terrible store of value too since it requires the power of a small developed nation just to keep it online. Gold needs some security but otherwise gold atoms just sit there and gold. Property and widely diversified bags of assets are also better stores or value.
It’s not even really decentralized. Any industrial process is subject to economies of scale. If it sticks around eventually there will be one or two mining conglomerates. Pools already have quite a lot of power and could collude to attack the chain if they could profit by it or if nation states forced them.
It’s a transparent bubble and gambling vehicle with little other utility.
If/When Ethereum 2.0 does come through with its PoS consensus systems, will you still call it a bubble?
My understanding is that PoS makes the hyperdeflationary problem worse by locking up a lot of currency, and also makes the wealth centralization problem worse. Eventually you'll end up with a few large stakers instead of a few large miners.
The thing that would really change my mind is if I saw cryptocurrencies being used a lot for useful commerce, not just gambling and money laundering. The closest I know is Monero which is used for black market commerce, but at least it's commerce. Trouble is that the bubbles actually chase away useful commerce by making the currency incredibly unstable vs. other currencies and stores of value.
Regarding PoS: Ethereum is not gold. Ethereum is oil. Yes, it has value, but only when it is used to get you something else.
Regarding "commerce" with crypto, I mostly agree, but the reality is that for payments to become a common use case we still need to build A LOT of critical pieces - chiefly: have a reliable/cheap system to get stable currencies [0][1], lower the transaction costs[2], make it easy for people to request[3] and accept payments online [4] and build some permissionless system to settle payment disputes [5] as well as to get insurance and the ability to do chargebacks. These things will take time to get right, but this should not mean that they should be facing eternal and constant unfounded criticism or accusations of fraud/malice. There are lots of people working on crypto who don't care about the price fluctuations and are not doing it just for the quick buck - they should be supported, not discouraged.
[4] https://hub20.io
Coupled with difficulty in scaling transactions, and the sketchiness of Tether (and the affect of a potential collapse of Tether on Bitcoin), Bitcoin definitely is a potential bubble.
But we are talking here about the technical issues regarding crypto.
PoW is just too costly and damaging to the environment, the fact that most of the miners are located in areas where they can get subsidized, cheap and dirty energy makes it all the more concerning. PoS should help here.
The ability of the network to scale is still a problem. ETH2 + layer 2 solutions (combined) should also solve a lot of these issues.
What I'd like to know is what are the technical issues that is still going to be used as an excuse for people to be against it.
[0]: https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-...
Check with people from Argentina, Venezuela, anyone that lived in the 1980's Brazil, Ecuador, Turkey, Lebanon, Greece... see if they really think if relying on the State and their financial systems is a good idea.
What I don’t understand is why you go from not trusting the state to trusting a different currency which the state you don’t trust could just ban outright at any time.
Not trusting the State does not mean that the State is able to exert absolute control over people's lives. In fact, I'd say that the less trust the people have on the State, the more "illegal" activities people practice.
Personally, I'd tend towards air travel being a net positive, while Bitcoin is well into the negative.