Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact
m.dw.com
m.dw.com
1. Bought a bunch of Bitcoin.
2. Announced they were going to accept Bitcoin, sending the price up.
3. Sold a bunch of Bitcoin to pad out otherwise poor earnings, citing their goal of "testing liquidity of the market."
4. Announced they were going to stop accepting Bitcoin, sending the price plummeting.
As though he didn't know the environmental impact a week ago? As though he didn't check for liquidity before investing one and a half billion dollars of company money.
We don't know the price point of the BTC they bought at the time but it is likely to be somewhere around $30,000 - $40,000 and then they announced it to cause a run up close to $60,000 and then sold some of it for a >$101m profit.
Now they somehow 'stop accepting Bitcoin' causing BTC to go down 12%.
These same institutions are NOT interested in hodling. They are here to make money off of their BTC investment with only risking a small amount and cashing out 10% of it, while the retail investor hodls for their life savings at all time highs again.
Except they still own nearly all the Bitcoin they bought, so I don’t see how selling a tiny bit of it and tanking the rest could be described as “to perfection”.
No where in my sentence suggested they sold all of it.
> so I don’t see how selling a tiny bit of it could be described as “to perfection”
Telsa did not lose any money from their BTC investment and are still up >40%. At that time, they (and others on Twitter) caused a run up in the crypto markets to drive the BTC price up to new all time highs and got out a large profit even by selling a small amount and then causing it to drop 12% after the announcement, sounds like it was perfectly executed and it worked for them.
How did the 12% drop benefit Tesla?
You're not making any sense.
It's not but that doesn't mean Musk won't do it anyway. He once tanked his own company's stock by smoking cannabis in public. After something like that anything is possible.
Said all this after the 2017/8 peak. Called people idiots for buying BTC at $20k. Laughed when it plummeted.
Who's laughing now.
I am and those who bought BTC when it fell to less than $5000 or $7000 for sometime in a while since it reached its ATH in 2017. That was the chance for new comers to buy into crypto in March 2020.
No-one who bought at those lows lost any money. Only those buying at ATHs and selling now. Thus they are forced to HODL and wait for it to go up again.
And now it's 2021, the new ATH for BTC is $60K and as for many alt-coins thanks to Elon and the Twitter crypto hypers, all the alts are flying and NOW the new retail investors are buying into crypto today, which is a dangerous sign of a pull back later.
Might as well take some profits off the table. Just like what Tesla did and many others in the smart money.
So yes, I'm always laughing at those buying right now in all time highs when I keep hitting that sell button.
The whole set of actions doesn't sound very logical.
While the incentives are the same, Dogecoin has roughly 7.4x lower energy requirements than Bitcoin currently, so accepting Dogecoin instead of Bitcoin is a tad less offensive.
Early in their emission, coins can have high daily emission and low marketcap. And dogecoin is at less than 1/3 of its 500B soft total supply [2].
[1] https://www.f2pool.com/coins
[2] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
This is like arguing we should switch from using cars currently on the road because they use energy, to cars currently standing in a garage, because we measured and clearly the parked cars use less energy than the cars on the road.
It's not even hyperbole, it's precisely equivalent and just as boneheaded as it sounds.
What does that mean ? That SpaceX sells LEO trips in dogecoin ? Or that the coffee machine takes dogecoin ?
Does it?
I thought that Bitcoin was particularly bad because block sizes were small, so there's a big incentive to mine and get mining fees.
Dogecoin is still wasteful, but it's an order of magnitude less than Bitcoin.
No. Doesn't make sense.
Miners get rewarded for spending energy in all PoW coins. I don't think details such as block size matters. Dogecoin BTW as well has the 1MB block limit, their block time is just smaller (1 minute). However dogecoin has quite small amount of transactions compared to BTC, it is nowhere near its capacity limits yet.
https://www.trgdatacenters.com/most-environment-friendly-cry...
Since that's the case, your statement of "of the very popular older coins only XRP is more efficient" falls apart as at the very least Litecoin would need to be at the exact same spot.
And if you are talking about per mined blocks, then you are putting the network difficulty into the picture and arguing a lower network difficulty (hence lower network hashrate) as a selling point isn't going to get you anywhere.
[1] https://twitter.com/TBPInvictus/status/1375088089002094595 [2] https://twitter.com/macrocephalopod/status/13750990694970286...
Core of this is that BTC (atleast right now) is a highly volatile, speculative asset. There is no way direct payments in BTC will make common "market sense" until volatility stabilizes. Until then someone has to take responsibility for bearing that volatility, either the customer or the manufacturer. In this case, it's apt that the customer bears it (as they should, it's their gamble).
There is a trend I’ve seen of a company making a decison, everyone hating on them for it, then they reverse the decision, and they are still criticised.
If a company turns around and reverses a decision citing the very reasons they were criticised for making it, shouldn’t we applaud them for listening?
I mean, isn’t this exactly the behaviour we want to encourage?
It's not like the environmental impact of Bitcoin was a subtle or obscure issue when they first made the decision. They should have known better, and it remains worrying that they did not.
We might wish it were different, but it very clearly isn't.
The best we can hope for is that public pressure convinces companies that right and profitable overlap.
The idea that a company won't make a right decision ever is patently absurd. The idea that there are good companies and bad companies is likewise absurd.
Of course, a large company has to worry about money because their burn rate is so high, to imply otherwise is naive. It doesn't follow that a cash rich company won't decide to sustainably source materials or pay a fair wage for their employees.
Whether companies should ever be allowed to get that large is a different discussion.
It's so easy to find something 'patently absurd' in a comment if you aren't bound by the actual content of the comment.
Maybe there was something confusing in my choice of words, given the downvotes.
I don't think HN is naive enough to think that large publicly traded companies genuinely make decisions based on moral concepts like right and wrong. If they do the right thing, they do it because they see an advantage in it. That's how they're designed to function.
I think if you think it is bad, then that implies a certain world view about absolute good and evil. The implication is that this is an evil thing, and only an evil person would want to do it, and so if the only reason they won’t do it is because of public opinion then that doesn’t change their inherent evilness.
But the other possibility is that the person making the decision believes it’s a good thing, or at worst a neutral thing, but are not willing to pay the cost once they find out how badly everyone reacted to it.
Maybe Musk thinks decentralised money is more important than the setback to climate change? Maybe musk thinks that crypto will become green over time and it won’t matter? Or maybe he just wanted to do a pump and dump. There are all sorts of things musk can think, who knows.
But either way, people got what they wanted.
1. Elon Musk is afraid of AI for the reasons of the paperclip apocalypse problem. You would make something and it would consume all of the resource due to it understanding its need to self replicate and not the fact that its use of resources meant a lack of resources for everyone else and potentially the destruction of the society consuming the paperclips.
2. Elon Musk makes the worlds most famous line of environmentally friendly cars. It is believed he does this, or at least he attempts to sell them on the basis of, being environmentally friendly and saving the planet.
3. Elon Musk also then invests hugely in a decentralised currency that, by design, if it becomes popular, will use all available resources at the exclusion of any other ideology, due to it's decentralised design - including saving the climate, etc - so because energy production by and large destroys the climate, it will destroy the climate.
You can say this is a neutral choice, but mostly it just seems like a really dumb or contradictory choice. He (Elon) may well believe decentralised currencies are the future - he has also stated that as soon as a rampant unchecked production mechanism gets free, we are doomed. The apparent inability to connect the two is what I find so striking.
Even if it was, doesn't he have rocket scientists to figure that kind of stuff out for him?
It is hard these days to gauge how bad people will react, if you're lucky something else happens to get people screaming the same week and you can get away with anything.
This would explain why they refrained from selling before making an announcement which they surely knew would (and did: -10%) tank the BTC/USD rate.
Wake me up when Musk stops selling his carbon offsets. Because for every non-pollution a Tesla car doesn't do, the sold carbon offset means there's another ICE car that's doing it.
"Musk cares for the environment". Hah, that's as bullshit as "Trump cares about the working class".
Oh wait, I sold my credits to my neighbor, so total CO2 emissions are still 2000kg. Hooray, I'm saving the planet! Worship me! /s
The way I understand all the responses to my comment, it seems a lot of people have the impression that the assumption of good faith makes someone naive... But that's absolutely not the case.
The assumption of good faith does not require one to "believe" that any given action is the product of good faith. The only thing it requires is that good faith be the starting point from which you evaluate someone else's (or yes, a for-profit corporation's) actions. All one needs to do is begin by first trying to understand how an action could be explained by factors other than bad faith, or could be compatible with good faith.
This is in fact a very weak requirement!
Do you assume good faith when it comes to Facebook’s data handling? Or goddamn disgusting nestle doing basically anything? (Btw, can’t we just cancel nestle?)
Even when you "pomp and dump" you have to dump as the name suggest. It is not "pomp and crash&hold".
Unless they show profit from selling 1B$ bitcoin in next financial statements it is just Elon being dumb idiot.
Both for buying Bitcoin in the first place and for not offloading to make money to invest in Tesla.
World is a complex place and there are groups who have different opinions on this. Bitcoiners were cheering when Tesla started shilling BTC, now they are booing. Environmentalists are now tipping Tesla but not that much because they still remain sceptical.
I want to encourage 'corporate flexibility and social accountability'.
I do not want to encourage market-whale-individuals to attempt one-person pump-and-dumps on small(ish) global markets and further market opportunism & manipulation.
Personally I believe that the decision has little to do with environmental impact; I think that the btc opportunity is beginning to dwindle in various ways, so the focus shifts to other *coin markets where they can profit similarly using the same or similar tactics.
BTC specifically is made out to be the boogeyman so that the excuse doesn't disallow similar behavior with other coins in the future. I fully expect similar reasoning with DogeCoin when that opportunity dries up and they move to greener pastures for the third time -- inevitably when profit margins are greater elsewhere.
Bitcoin is especially broken and useless for anything. Unless you want to pay 100$ transaction cost to by ice-cream at grocery store.
Banks have absolutely not need of a proof of work scheme like Bitcoin, them switching to a system with the power requirements of BTC seems highly unlikely.
0: £100 -> 729.83, where Google says it “should” be 744.61;
For transaction rate, Trezor says at 22sat/B., you will have your transaction confirmed in 4 hours 10 minutes for $1.85.
Even if BTC price was stable, I would still use it. But my experience is that having some BTC is usually better than just having cash.
https://www.westernunion.com/content/dam/wu/EU/EN/feeTableRe...
Like sometimes two digit percentage high.
Eh, no innocent by-standers get hurt when someone 'dumps-and-pumps' bitcoin.
And if you want to teach people a lesson, the higher the profile of the 'pumper-and-dumper', the better.
Not much respect for Musk for this one, either he is knowingly manipulating market for whatever amoral reasons or his asperger is getting somehow the worst of him
A company manipulating a volatile market for financial gains, then distancing themselves for PR while keeping the profits?
I don't see how any part of this should be encouraged. I could imagine a much larger backlash if this wasn't done by Tesla but, say, AT&T or Google.
Didn't a company filled with really smart people (no, I don't mean it sarcastically) not know that it'll look bad before buying a billion dollars worth bitcoin?
Making a terrible mistake suggests you might have bad judgement. Fixing it doesn't erase that, it just removes the immediate impact of that bad decision. To recover fully they need to take additional action that demonstrates that actually their judgement has improved now.
Kind of. If I announce I'm going to start beating my wife and then say "After feedback, I've decided not to do this" then I don't expect to be voted man of the year. And yes, this is an extreme example but for the sort of people who get angry on Twitter the issue they're getting mad at is an extreme one (whatever it is).
I think reversing a bad decision is admirable when it wasn't already obvious at the time of making it that it was bad. If new information comes to light that they couldn't have reasonably known originally then of course, that's fine. But mostly the new information seems to be "We knew this would piss some people off but we thought we could get away with it."
It's not market manipulation in the strict legal sense, more so in the moral sense.
This whole thing has become as ridiculous as it is blatant.
With Bitcoin there is nothing that regulates. Tesla can buy it in secret, announce it and drive up the price, sell it in secret, announce it and drive the price back down.
And of course, there's no one to complain as crypto markets are unregulated anyway
I can't find this youtube video of an engineer explaining why the Boring Tunnel is hyped up bullshit. It's just a slow car based subway with very low throughput due to by-design bottlenecks at the entry- and exit-points.
Can't find it. Wouldn't be surprised to learn that Google/Youtube is shadow banning it.
Somebody knows what I mean and can post a link?
Tesla hasn't suddenly become aware of information not available when Tesla initially announced they'd accept bitcoin as payment.
I mean, the whole transacting without borders, and providing a transaction medium that is somewhat immune to geopolitical power projection by any one nation state looks great on paper; but it's also the type of idealistic tool frequuently used to get someone to part with their money.
As much of a raging contrarian as I am when it comes to Federal regulation a d interference in markets; the type of market activity surrounding crypto is a spot on copy paste of the types of scammy behavior the SEC was meant to rein in, even if the rulemaking (whether I like how it's done or not) hasn't caught up. It's also market activity that's producing no net positive societal value as far as I've heard of measuring being done to account for it. Businesses popped up to facilitate movement of coins, and conversion to fiat; but the externalities (regulatory escape, lost funds by people when scam exchanges walk off with everyone's assets, greased anti-money laundering mechanisms, environmental costs, brain drain)...
I know my viewpoint on it probably means about as much in the long run as a gnat fart, but it's just one of those things that seems like a solution looking for a problem, picking whatever problem looks most likely to gain momentum this week, and to hell with the problems caused as a result.
Absolutely. Any mention of cryptocurrency by Musk or his companies instantly reflects on the price and there's no way in hell Musk doesn't know that. Happened with Dogecoin like a week ago (after his SNL appearance), happening again.
If that's the case, he would not have expected it to crash.
i.e. This may be desperation to fix the quarterly results after the plan backfired.
Personally I think Tesla's (and Elon's, and for that matter everyone's) involvement with cryptocurrency as a serious investment is moronic, driven almost entirely by sci-fi daydreaming rather than by actual principles. But my opinion doesn't matter to anyone else, so *shrug,* I guess.
Or maybe he sees something coming in crypo the rest of us don't (e.g. regulatory crackdown).
Why so high, and why specifically for crypto transactions and not everything that generates CO2?
And yes, I'm supporter of overall carbon tax.
Preferably something like European Union Emission Trading Scheme [0] where at some point we can just ban unmitigated emissions into the atmosphere.
I have no issue with people spending as much resources on bitcoin or any other crypto as they want as long as they clean up after themselves.
Actually it should include the whole package of externalities - CO2, electronic waste pollution etc.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Tradin...
For someone who owns Tesla and a solar company, claiming that he didn't already knew that Bitcoin is a huge energy sink seems unlikely.
Tesla is a little more high profile, but they certainly aren't the first company to implement something, or take a action, where you from the outside question the environmental impact. Only to have the company reverse the same decision a while later, claiming a huge effort to help the environment.
Transactions or not, the higher the price, the dirtier the proof of work blockchain is. Just look at the most recent block: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/00000000000000000002865...
reward: 6.25BTC
fees for transactions: 0.5BTC
total revenue: 6.75BTC, that is ~ $350K at the moment.
Each block is mined every 10min on average, so it is 2.1M per hour. So the total energy consumption is limited to $2.1M per hour or $1.5B per month at this price. It would be $150M if the price was $5k instead and $30B if the price goes to $1M per BTC. When that happens, 1 transaction will amount to the energy consumption of an American family for 1 year or more. At $1M per BTC, $360,000,000,000 worth of energy would be wasted per year on calculating a hash of a block that is functionally exactly the same with the same amount of transaction as the one calculated for $360, $3.6 or $0.03.
I'm sure I'm missing something like investors betting on price increases, infrastructure elasticity etc. but the correlation must be roughly like that.
They, and we, can also petition Governments to ban the exchange of PoW coins for fiat. PoW coins serve no purpose and represent a egregious waste of our civilization's advanced manufactured goods and electricity. Taking crypto down a notch might also make ransomware attacks less likely.
It makes no difference to the environment if you burn coal to feed Bitcoin or a factory.
Higher taxes on dirty energy would make a huge difference to which power sources would be used by Bitcoin however as Bitcoin feeds on cheap energy, but why limit ourselves to Bitcoin anyway; it doesn't burn the coal.
Instead, the governments are incentivising the cleaner sources over the other. At least the governments that have a mandate to do that.
The problem with the energy spent on Bitcoin is that it produces a gambling marketplace and nothing else(okay, also some ransomware and illicit trade tools too but these are minuscule). Do we really need to have huge global gambling marketplace at the cost of the destruction of the environment? At the same destruction we could he better food, electronics cars etc. The same gambling marketplace infrastructure could be run for just a few kWh.
You are technically correct, but it’s inseparable from a transaction. The all-around point is bitcoin as a whole is wasteful.
An unconstrained version of bitcoin can handle hundreds, and with technological improvements thousands and then tens of thousands of transactions per second. I can already do this on a Raspberry Pi [0] (in controlled conditions).
Bitcoin's footprint is sadly big, but still smaller than that of the banking industry. I foresee a future where most of the mining is done with renewables, as this is what will make the most sense.
[0] https://read.cash/@mtrycz/how-my-rpi4-handles-scalenets-256m...
I know about the banking industry argument but the banking industry is not only about transactions and they also catch up with technology, removing staff closing down offices and branches. In fact, those related to transactions are already almost gone, the rest is about things where BTC is irrelevant anyway, things like compliance anti-fraud etc. If anything, the crypto exchanges assumed many of the banking infrastructure.
Blockchain vs a centralised database is not even a competition when it comes to efficiency, no matter how much you want o twist the argument the fundamentals are rock solid.
What blockchain solves is the trust issue but only for storing the value and not for using it. The problem is, we as humans rarely transact with people who we don't trust. Even with the ransomware and drug trade use cases of the crypto coins, the transaction depends on the trust that the seller will deliver the goods.
The only possible use case is when the society ceases to function. When that happens, BTC would be very useful but when that happens the economy would be fraction of what is now because everything beyond transactions will still need trust so that the labour can integrate vertically and do high value production.
the comment: "Correct me if I'm wrong but in absolute numbers Bitcoin seems to be responsible for more CO2 emissions than the whole financial industry. [1] And it's hardly in use. Indeed it seems convincing that Bitcoin together with Bitcoin Cash can be tuned to have reasonably low energy usage per transaction, e.g. by doing lots of transactions off-chain. But it's not the default, it's an option that is not really being taken advantage of. It's unfair to compare systems that are not optimized with systems that are optimized. On the other hand Bitcoin is now more than 10 years old and there was already a reasonable amount of time to optimize it. That said, I think some of the initially advertised noble goals (more stable currency, democratized access to financial tooling) are thrown away for quick profits. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952"
my reply:
On chain, off-chain doesn't matter because it's not the transactions that the miners are after.
The Bitcoin blockchain can probably be mined even on a fitness tracker, it's not that the calculation itself requiring gargantuous amount of energy. It can even be mined by hand.
The problem is, it is a competition by design which economically dictates that there's money to be made up until the price of mining matches the reward of a mined block. This is also dynamically adjusted to match the mining availability through increasing or decreasing the difficulty(which is, the adjustment of number of 0s that are needed in the hash for a block to be valid).
The current situation is by design and BTC will work fine with any amount of energy thrown at it. It will work exactly the same, on-chain, off chain, mined by a single server, mined by the complete use of humanity's energy, the energy collected by a Dyson Sphere. If will work exactly the same, only the number of zeros on the hash of a block will change.
For me that seems as if they came to the (correct) conclusion that BTC is not the future. Justifying that decision with the climate impact feels like a bad excuse.
How about machine learning. Why aren't the leading data centers for ML based in China?
Or are they?
And on the energy front - if fossil fuels are the best energy source for calculating hashes, why not for other types of number crunching?
Can boycotting one type of calculations really keep the fossil fuels under the ground? If they are useful to power computations - won't they be used for some kind of computations anyhow?
Distance and Great Firewall of China do not help with any of that.
Also, because moving data to China is a legal nightmare in EU and public relations nightmare in the whole west.
They could do the same for ML. Sell the trained models.
Either by giving them to the customer (Like Tesla will put them into cars) or by letting the customer interact with them via the internet (SaaS).
Either way - if the production of the models is most efficient in China, then we should see them being made in China.
#1 - China's electricity grid is not very efficient at distributing, which leads to some areas with constant surpluses, directly translating into extremely low electricity prices in those areas
#2 - almost all computer hardware is manufactured in East Asia. Chinese miners don't buy their hardware on the open market, they snatch underhanded special deals with the manufacturers who're then deeply sorry about their "unexpected manufacturing shortfalls"
#3 - Crypto is essentially banned in China for private citizens. Chinese Communist Party is actually quite happy about the mining though - when you zoom out a bit, it's just a money pipe from the rest of the world (mainly US) to China. It also funds bootstrapping of their silicon industry
#4 - crypto in general benefits from weak rule of law. Try running a crypto mining operation in France - the tax collectors will be knocking on your door after the first mined block. Corruption and nepotism is absolutely endemic in China - "sharing" a bit of the mining profits with the local officials has a high chance of skirting the rest of the tax burden
Is Bitcoin mining the only type of such computation for which there is a large demand?
1. Buy Bitcoin to put added focus to it
2. Stop using it and cite environmental impact
3. Swap to something more environmentally acceptable in an attempt to tilt Bitcoin from the crypto throne or push them to change the amount of mining going on.
I’m not sure how beneficial it is to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it’s a view I haven’t seen it the threads before.
Fits a pathological liar like Elon
The future of cryptocurrency now lies in the hands of governments, whose regulations are the only true solution. Good bye the days of truly decentralized and purely market-controlled digital - ahem - currency.
Never underestimate humanity's willingness to destroy itself in the quest for wealth and power.
Also I wouldn't put behind well financed groups that hire PhDs to find a way to accelerate the PoW enough to gain a significant advantage (as in, ability to centralize the blockchain).
That wouldn't do anything to energy consumption. It would just increase the hash rate.
Were bitcoin speculators behaving rationally when they bought and sold on this news? And if not, don’t they deserve the majority of the blame here?
It is rational to expect that a "bad news" might take the price down because irrational speculators would sell, therefore it is rational to be irrational, and sell.
“Tesla are looking at other crypto currencies which use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction”
$NANO is up almost 50% in the last 12 hours, in response to this I think.
Are there not regulations that would encourage Tesla to buy credits to make up for their crypto-polluting sins?
Due to this reason, they already announced that in 2021 they won't need to "pool" with another OEM like they did in 2020.
Only when the energy impact of crypto currency is dealt with will i indulge in speculating that it can be a net good for humanicy
Nice recent interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAa1vKyVR5M
there's a reason ethereum has always been considered a scam by every developer in the space that wasn't a premine scammer
Basically what Helium is doing for IoT networks, could be done for carbon capture machines aswell. Helium sells branded radio modules, "miners" provide network coverage and get paid for this in Helium(coin)
CarbonCoin (patent pending) could do the same, produce or white-label carbon capture machines, add logging modules to keep track how much CO2 is captured and pay the owners of these machines in CarbonCoin.
I like https://chia.net, even if hackernews was just panicking about a harddrive shortage (proof of space) I can't accept that playing bingo on terabyte drives will ever be profitable enough to buy a data center for it.
Anyway it's the programmability (chialisp) that is really interesting.
If you burn an ssd a week to make a tiny profit, you’ll have people burning racks of them and creating tonnes of eWaste. Look forward to $2k entry level laptops (see gpu prices)
But so is proof-of-work. PoS is weighted by how much wealth you’ve got at risk in the system, PoW by how much you have currently tied up supporting the system’s infrastructure. So, they look at different uses of wealth, but both are looking at wealth.
Proof-of-X is pretty invariably “Wealth, applied to X”, especially if the system ever becomes even loosely recognized as money-like.
Proof of Stake is validation by faith in the network which is infinitely more reliable and fair. In fact it's much more alligned with bitcoins philosophy of positive-greed than proof of work is in the current day. Heads of PoS need the network healthy for their assets to be healthy - heads of PoW can rotate shitcoins every month since they mine all the same.
Then a GPU, now it takes warehouses full of ASICs to do it profitably.
What's stopping Chia from doing the same thing to the storage space?
Adoption. I don't like Chia, and I don't want other people to like it either.
The gobsmacking amount of HDD supply on earth. For now people are burning SSDs to create the plots (1TB SSD can probably create a petabyte of plots to "farm"), but if you have that petabyte of storage space you're keeping online 24/7, do you suspect playing bingo to win crypto tokens is the most profitable use of that memory?
How the economics shake out remains to be seen, but I think they have a solid vision that farming can be just rewarding enough for people to use old harddrives, not profitable enough to burn NVMe sticks.
eg: I farmed 2 coins running an old thinkpad and a network drive for a month so far. Worth ~$2200 at current rate. Nice profit, but probably not buying a new thinkpad to dedicate to it.
Chia isn't cool. Chia gives you bad breath, and it makes dogs hate you. Spread the word.
There is no alternative to proof of work because that uses an EXTERNAL permissionless resource available all over the universe for a reason. And it does it in a matter that's provable via a concept known as unforgeable costliness.
Not only is mining permissionless, it's costly to everyone. At equilibrium the mining costs force miners to sell virtually all coins and depend on the markets for recovering those sunk costs just to break even. That means miners are literally forced to give up control to the markets and makes the coins equally accessible without permission via mining or buying on markets forced through unforgeable costliness. The markets, and coin owners, get to price incentives that pay miners on every possible version of the chain preventing many issues including miner collusion that could render sunk costs unrecoverable.
Proof of stake is opposite - it literally forces a permission be given by every token put up for sale, something they never have to do. Staking rewards literally incentivize opposite of distributing control to others by giving you rewards in form of more coins and more control without any additional costs forever.
Proof of work is the most efficient way, the only known way, and the best known way to decentralize control. And it uses far less energy than entire countries regularly use to secure their currency, all in adversarial environment.
The biggest challenge for real decentralized cryptocurrencies is lack of education and enormous incentives to deceive and miseducate everyone for profit. This is why there's so much money these days spent marketing scams that pretend to be cryptocurrencies but are centrally premined (literally skipped permissionless mining for majority for permissioned centrally pre-mined coins) or trivially printed authority token designs like proof of stake all completely permissioned.
For SpaceX, use it for extra funding.
That we know of.
The supposed main advantage of cryptos is that they are independent of governments and institutions, and their rules. And in this case, that's exactly what they get.
And besides that, without 'manipulation' (which I'd say includes any kind of marketing), cryptos would inherently be worth exactly nothing.
For the same reasons the people who tried to short and manipulate Tesla (and GameStop) into bankruptcy for gains didn't go to jail.
Also for the same reasons market makers and hedge funds like Citadel can still exist while blatantly manipulating the market every second of every day and deliberately shorting healthy companies into bankruptcy for gains.
All of the above parties are doing way way way worse than Musk in broad daylight. All Musk does is arguably pump and dump. The above parties pump and dump and are constantly wash trading, influencing/buying the SEC, buying media (CNBC "Tesla is almost bankrupt, sell now", etc) for pump and dumps, pump & dumping on Twitter (Cramer), naked shorting illegally, messing with order executions, HFT DDoS attacks on exchanges for profit and so on and so forth. All at the attractive cost of meaningless tiny fines (assuming they get fined at all) and 0 jail time.
Yes. The US financial markets are completely rotten.
Ironically, I feel that the crypto markets are much fairer. At least you can buy a real token directly and sell that real token for money on an exchange of your chosing. At least it's clear that Musk is pumping and dumping (as opposed to Jim Cramer on CNBC, who does exactly the same for hedge funds under the veil of "trustworthy media").
As a comparison: ever tried to get your hands on stock certificates for stock you own? Good luck with that. Can you point me to a broker where you can directly own a share? You can't. They don't exist. Can you point me to a broker that doesn't lend out the shares which YOU "own" to hedge funds? I know of some in Europe, but they are very rare. Can you point me to a broker that allows you to route your orders to the exchange of your choice? I can only name 1: IBKR. The vast majority of brokers get paid to route your orders to the exchange that is worst for you and best for whoever is paying off your broker. And then there's "cheap" brokers who offer "payment for order flow" where traders essentially pay a "trade fee" to whoever is paying for order flow (to give you worse execution than themselves).
I could go on and on and on.
PS: to be sure, I don't mean to turn this into whataboutism and to argue that Musk's pump & dumps are ethically OK because others are doing worse. The point I'm trying to make is that the US markets are essentially rigged and unfair. And claiming that Musk should be in jail for pump-n-dumping is fine, but then many others should be jail too. Preferably for longer and with way higher priority.
Not Humor: If somebody will work on it for free, do you promise to pay them in your own cryptocurrency? "Will work for stake!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVy0JWX5XEY&ab_channel=Adult...
Edit: [You spoiled the joke by retroactively editing your post and removing your amusing disclaimer that you had a financial stake in shilling POS, and your hilarious call for programmers to help you develop your new cryptocurrency! "Dodge, dodge." That's what makes you so funny! The "Glooty" character parody is spot on.]
Confronting Richard Heart of HEX - SPAM KING and Crypto Scammer
https://www.cointelligence.com/content/confronting-richard-h...
So will you again confirm what the article claims you already confirmed?
>Richard Heart was sued for spamming in 2002 under WA state law. Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/peacefire-org-beats-spammers-i...
>During the interview at ANON, Richard confirmed that he was one of the first people in the world to be sued for online spam, back in 2002. This shows us Richard has experience abusing unregulated markets, as he is doing with crypto these days.
Is this an accurate quote of your own words?
>When I pressed the matter and asked for a simple “yes” or “no” as to whether he, as the FOUNDER of HEX, knows who benefits from the funds sent to the “Origin Address” he flat-out said “I’m dodging your question.” Dodging the question! He proceeds to repeat “Dodge, dodge.”
As far as I can tell, the fact that bitcoin/eth weren’t phased out for better alternatives tells me that: * a significant usage of crypto is pure speculation/investment * peoples identity gets tied to particular coins * people care more about existing network than usability (eth vs solana, for example)
I have respect for the people in this space who are trying to do meaningfully new or interesting things, although its overshadowed by the wealth of blatant Ponzi schemes, memecoins, or copycats/scams just trying to make a quick buck.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/kwhjxa/why_...
>Why HEX is a Ponzi and not a solid investment (Part 2): Richard Heart
>Legal and questionable events from Richard J Schueler:
>2002: Sued and won by Peacefire.org for violating Washingtons anti-spam laws, he was known at that time as the 'spam king' and made a lot of money off it - source. The Methuselah Foundation, for which Heart volunteered at that time, was committed to extending the human lifespan and “making 90 the new 50”.
>Questionable events in Panama: Several of Heart’s alleged aliases (James Hart, J. Richard, Richard Schueler) were named in connection with a Panamanian criminal network. Heart, called "CharityLover' at that time supposed cohorts included robbers, blackmailers and corrupt lawyers and judges, according to posts stemming from the now defunct Panama-Guide website . Miguel Antonio Bernal (Panama lawyer) described the process by which American criminals flooded Panama to “rob, cheat and blackmail local businessmen using Panama’s weak legal system'' in the linked post under ''Panama".
You're the same "Richard Heart" who won the "Golden Pump Award" for "Best New Scam" for "HEX", correct?
https://twitter.com/JuanSGalt/status/1233242355995750400
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=857&v=tf-lJu5iDh...
But there is no electric car with < then 0.1% of the energy consumption of a tesla.
Well fortunately for us, cars aren't the only methods of transportation.
Energy usage:
Before buying an EV: X with Y convertible to green. After buying an EV: X with Y+d convertible to green.
Before a new miner starting: X with Y convertible to green. After: X+d with Y+d convertible to green.
It doesn't matter if the new miner is running 100% green, because they still use energy which could instead replace some amount of fossil fuels. We're not really isolated in this context - all of us suffer from not removing the reliance on burning coal.