Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin
amycastor.com
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Sure, maybe they want to diversify but that's a hell of a lot of money to throw at such a volatile commodity.
Historical data hints that we are not close to the peak of the current bubble and when BTC drops it probably won't be lower than today, or at least, not for a long time.
Of course there is also probability that the 12-year trend will crash into zero, but that probability dwindles with every year Bitcoin isn't broken and every popped bubble that lands on an even higher low.
In the short term how could it?
Also, isn't a $1.5 billion investment by a big named company (Tesla & Musk of all companies/people) a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that it will assuredly pump BTC prices? A $1.5 billion punt on anything, especially BTC & considering the stock growth/capital raising recently, doesn't seem that wild to me.
He knows there is a large and growing community of Bitcoin speculators and enthusiasts out there. By "endorsing" Bitcoin in this way, he not only moved the market--further enriching these folks--but also signaled that he is an ally to them, significantly boosting positive sentiment toward him and increasing the likelihood that they will purchase a Tesla as their next vehicle.
In one fell swoop, he not only drove demand for his product, but also made it more affordable to his target market without lowering its cost.
It would be amusing to have cars mine when idle/plugged in, or better yet have any unsold inventory mining 24/7 (since electricity can be written off as operational expenses). I wouldn't put it past Elon.
Miss me with this new kind of planned obsolescence.
I would be interested to learn more about that. I thought the bulk of the Autopilot compute power is in dense neural network inference which wouldn't be any good for SHA hashing.
It’s just normal internet shitposting except you have real power.
Alternatively this is just a value storage. Musk went on record saying he thinks stock is overvalued at the beginning of 2020 and then it went on 700% rampage. This could be just that Tesla has more cash than they need and they wanted to store it in an asset sheltered from inflation.
BTC is serious: until FED stops printing money unsustainably, companies need a better store of value.
Bitcoin transactions take negligible energy to produce and validate. It's block production that's energy-intensive, and it's the same regardless of how big or full blocks are.
Like any energy-intensive industry that could operate profitably via fossil fuel consumption, mining should be regulated to only use green energy. No different than power production and consumption today.
You can do Bitcoin mining almost completely offline. Once that magical hash that satisfies the proof-of-work requirement appears, there's no tracing to where it was produced.
Countries should then tax imports from other countries that do not have a carbon tax.
"Negligible energy" to produce a transaction is not correct. Miners are willing to sell transactions that cost enormous heaps of money to mint because the coin itself "has value".
[1] https://news.bitcoin.com/the-bitcoin-network-now-consumes-7-...
[2] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second
Miners don't sell transactions. They sell block space in which to store them. That, fundamentally, is simultaneously what makes Bitcoin so expensive, and so valuable -- people wanting to get their transactions confirmed.
Bitcoin is estimated to emit 22 million tonnes of CO2, and that is based on country level energy generation mix [1]. In reality it is probably lower due to cost benefits of renewables like hydro. Global emissions are 50 billion [2]. Pornography causes 10x as much CO2 as bitcoin [3].
[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/science/bitcoin-us...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
[3] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2209569-streaming-onlin...
To give some idea of the magnitude of this draw, some reference figures: the 95 nuclear power plants in the US have a net capacity of ~98 GW of power. Two reactors under construction will add ~1.25GW capacity. Even by these fairly low estimates linked, about 4-5 nuclear power plants.
The numbers on porn's power consumption are just horseshit. The methodology was to take all power consumption of data centers combined, and say that whatever % of internet traffic/throughput is porn is what % of data-center power consumption porn is responsible for. This is just abjectly insulting bad math, presented as insightful: just absolute junk worthless numbers. Porn & video in general has radically higher bandwidth-to-cpu usage ratios than many applications, sendfile() is stupid efficient, caches run hot for popular videos, and sending the bits around is just not that costly. Running cpus and gpus is what constitutes the bulk of the energy expenditure in data centers, not switches, yet porn is getting dinged as though it's traffic is the only thing that matters. Pieces like this should be rescinded & apologies should be issued.
Bitcoin is a monster & energy wastage of this class is an abomination. It should not be tolerated in a society that has it's head screwed on straight.
Although the porn calculation is not ‘accurate’ I doubt it is wrong by an order of magnitude.
This article you linked is trying to re-set the numbers, argue that most other calculations are significantly high. Many calculations are well over 7.5GW. The 5.25 this article presents is a conservative number. Even if it's half that number, it's still astronomically high. And it's not going to be an order of magnitude over the reality. Unlike this no-good lying dirtbag porn estimate.
Driving down the coast is supposed to drill home what a giant flaming pile of garbage energy efficiency bitcoin has. It's supposed to try to impress what 5.25GW of power means, make real what each transaction's 1/4 of a second of that sort of power consumption can do. It's supposed to impress upon us how irresponsible it is that anyone would use this system, how desperate they would have to be to waste so much energy, to screw over humanity with such a gratuitous waste of energy supporting this deranged insane scheme, just to avoid using the monetary systems the world has. Yes. Unfortunately many people lack other means to put their wealth into into stable currencies, & that is sad, causes big hardships for them that are cruel, but for every other reason brought forth: bitcoin is a ruinous colossal waste & it's presence on this earth is an embarrassment.
Well it seems that neither of us have intimate knowledge of the power usage required to serve video at scale (sendfile()? Give me a break..).
Tesla has a market cap of almost a trillion dollars.
You cannot, however, spend market cap.
1. Sell to other companies for USD
2. Trade USD for cryptocurrency
Suppose I wanted to conduct a 51% attack against Bitcoin. If I succeed, I stand to benefit monetarily, for example by shorting BTC on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange -- since a successful 51% would massively damage trust in bitcoin. Alternatively I could double-spend, though reaping the rewards without getting caught might be harder. Let's put the details aside and just agree that if you had the power to 51% bitcoin, you could make a lot of money off it.
What stops me from doing this is that the energy required for 51% of the mining power would be ludicrously expensive, even for just the half-hour[1] or so it would take to execute a damaging attack.
At least, it must be more expensive than the amount of money I could gain via my short position and/or double-spends. Otherwise it would be worth doing, right?
But for that to be the true, it must mean that the whole rest of the network is currently expending at least that much energy, every half hour or so, to constantly stop somebody from doing this.
So doesn't that put a dollar-amount floor on Bitcoin energy consumption, equal to [maximum amount one could stand to gain from crashing Bitcoin] repeated every [minimum duration of 51% attack to destroy confidence in bitcoin]?
Whether the mining is occurring with cheap energy in Iceland or expensive energy in California doesn't change that enough of that energy must be used to make it too expensive for an adversary (who could also be operating in Iceland or wherever) to attack.
[1]I say half-hour because 3 confirmations are considered sufficient for Coinbase to accept a BTC deposit, so I think it would make big waves if 3 blocks got reversed by a 51% attack.
There are some niche cases that the Bitcoin crowd love to showcase where energy is truly very cheap (they tend to be saturated sources), but mostly Bitcoin is mined on illicit energy contracts in developing areas where that energy can be had for dirt cheap.
Bottom line is that it absolutely does not advance renewable energy production anywhere where that is taken seriously.
Bitcoin is already the greenest form of finance and will get much cleaner in the future.
What nonsense is this?
Already ONE transaction consumes as much power as an entire American household uses for a week.That is 215 kwh of energy for one transaction.
It's using the equivalent of 2.26 million American homes worth of energy for just 330k transactions.
A significant chunk of that is wash trading, ie people buying and selling to themselves to manipulate the price. Is that worth it?
A simple visa or mastercard transaction produces several orders of magnitude less CO2.
For 330k transact
Also, cite your sources
Seems like humanity has engaged in war on a pretty regular basis since long before people decided to put their trust in paper money.
This is such a disingenuous point: as though a world running on Bitcoin wouldn't be filled with the exact same financial institutions, doing the exact same things they do now, even though those exact things are what all the new business involving Bitcoin are generally trying to do.
Nope. The marginal cost of a transaction is next to nothing. Just take a step back and think about what you're saying: that a bitcoin transaction would cost £3.40 in the UK. Obviously nobody would be using bitcoin if that were true.
Proof of work is where the value of the coin is derived. How much energy do you think it takes to mint a physical coin? Now compare that to the amount of energy it takes to transfer it to a shop assistant.
I hope I'm not misinterpreting your point, but bitcoin transactions cost even more than that.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
Users have to bid for space on the blockchain to store transactions. Early on the space was cheap and miners got their profits from the # of bitcoins they mined. As that dries up the incentive to mine shifts toward transaction fees.
The electricity costs right now are unclear to users because of indirection. Mining dilutes the value of bitcoins each user holds but they do not see a loss in their wallet. I wonder if once confronted with even greater transaction fees over time whether users will be willing to continue to pay up to use it. One has to cross their fingers that the demand stays high enough to sustain enough mining to prevent the from being taken over with 51% attack.
Paying a few bucks for a Bitcoin blockchain transaction or a few milli-cents for a lightning transaction seems efficient in comparison.
<TL;DR>
Claim: Bitcoin wastes too much energy.
Counter-Claim: Bitcoin’s energy consumption is more efficient than that of gold and traditional banks.
Add to this bitcoin does an infinitesimally small number of transactions compared to the global financial system and I am doubtful that on a per value or per transaction basis that it would be within an order of magnitude. A lot of this is inherent to the design, and while it may be able to be evolved or an alternative crypto may not have the caveats, Bitcoin as it stands now is VERY power inefficient.
Those already exist (Lightning Labs) and there's so much more to do with a secure programmable distributed database.
This requires people, and locations. Software isn't going to solve this problem. The only way I think this will be solved is by becoming very similar to what already exists.
Yes you could create a more energy efficient bank, but that is orthogonal to that bank using bitcoin. Many people have tried, but most have failed. Those that succeed are generally acquired and the bigger banks tend to (albeit slowly) integrate those efficiencies.
The post I was replying to originally was citing an article claiming that the energy costs of holding dollars and gold was higher then bitcoin. I was showing how tallying the total energy used by global banks was a false equivalency as much of what a bank does has no direct equivalent in the numbers given for Bitcoin.
Fiat currencies are backed in part by the power of the governments that issue them, so is defense spending a form of "proof of work" for them? If the US government disbanded its military would the USD hold any value for very long? Same goes for any other fiat... e.g. if the PRC disbanded the Chinese military would the Yuan retain much value?
If fiat currencies require a constant demonstration of credible military (and police) capability, that's a rather enormous cost and brings with it quite a bit of resource use and pollution.
(I would guesstimate that Bitcoin would still be less efficient than USD but that the margin would be smaller.)
If people were using Bitcoin as currency directly its value would remain equal to whatever people were willing to trade for it. Obviously if all people were willing to trade it for was USD it would become worthless, but that's not the point in this thread.
Bitcoin has other problems as a currency but that's not the topic of discussion here. Some other cryptocurrencies try to solve these, such as it being too deflationary or lacking functionality.
It's been clear for a long time that Bitcoin is not suited for small transactions.
The people currently employed by the financial industry would not cease to exist if the financial industry did not need as many employees, they would find jobs elsewhere. The downstream effects of what people spend their wages on isn't part of the the actual impact of the industry they work for.
It seems like 100% of people should want air which is non-toxic, water which is non-toxic and food which is non-toxic.
But of course, being an "abolitionist" was a political group in the 1800s but now it's just assumed that 100% of people are anti-slavery, so maybe the optimistic take is that "environmentalist" will undergo the same transformation as "abolitionist".
So no, we are not all 'ecologists', not in the same sense anyway. And not to the same degree.
[1](complete ecosystem collapse, widespread poisoning of populations worldwide, etc)
This is a really low bar for what it means to be an environmentalist.
The way I see it, your 'environmentalist' label generally applies to those who thing we should spend/sacrifice a lot. And the 'climate denier'/'anti-environmentalist' label applies to those at the opposite end of the spectrum who don't think we should sacrifice or spend anything.
Also re: slavery, more people are enslaved now in the world than at any point in history. More black men are enslaved by the prison system in the USA than there were at the height of North American slavery. So things are never so boolean.
People may agree in principle on what the end goal is, but disagree about the method to get there. Today the "environmentalist" is a political label like "liberal", "feminist" etc. It has a simple surface meaning but also comes with a lot of connotations and baggage, so that not everyone is comfortable pinning it on themselves.
(Both for the environment, and my wallet since I'm already deep in Eth)
And it's not really "free", because you'd instantly devalue the currency itself (and thus your own stake).
Explaining that we are lucky to have bitcoin because China is wasting unused electricity...
Yes, this is technically 100% accurate. However it's also 100% missing the point, since for the transaction to be globally accepted, a hash needs to be mined.
To paraphrase a few memes, "they're technically right, but they're being an asshole about it."