You don't say? That wasn't obvious at all or anything. Good thing the nytimes was able to let us know in this hard-hitting report!
Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say
391–400 of 400 posts
Re: Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously, the way people talk about it you would think that a third of the world's energy supply was getting pumped into NVidia cards. The global average energy consumption is 110,000TWh. Every cryptocurrency in circulation collectively uses about 55TWh, or 0.05% of the world's energy usage.
And yet it isn't providing value to 0.05% of the world's population. Even if it did, the energy would go up (exponenially?) I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it.
It could be providing value even if only used by a small percentage of the world by serving as a price floor on electricity.
It de-risks and incentives clean and cheap energy generation like solar.
Re: Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
a fraction of a percent is pretty much the definition of loose change
Seriously, the way people talk about it you would think that a third of the world's energy supply was getting pumped into NVidia cards. The global average energy consumption is 110,000TWh. Every cryptocurrency in circulation collectively uses about 55TWh, or 0.05% of the world's energy usage.
0.05% of a $30 000 per year income is $15. Sure, it's not a massive proportion compared to some entirely nessacary things, but I can't imagine someone on that kind of income happily spends $15 where they don't have to.
Re: Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet it isn't providing value to 0.05% of the world's population. Even if it did, the energy would go up (exponenially?) I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it.
When I am playing a game, my computer's power consumption increases by a lot. I am using more energy and ultimately generating more entropy in the universe. Is it worth it?
Your computer's power consumption increases by a lot - so much in fact it might hit it's cpu and gpu rated max wattage - perhaps 300 watts in all for a high-power PC. A kettle uses around on average 1800 watts while on. Washing machine is 700 watts. On the scale of home gadgets, a fairly beefy home PC is only really in the middle of the pack for power consumption.
Re: Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
Creating billions of dollars’ worth of value with a ridiculous perpetual-motion fake-dollar-printing machine is a real innovation. Creating money by printing is not a new thing. Making people believe that the money you've created with whatever hocus-pocus is real and that investment X will just spew money indefinitely is not at all a new thing. It is one very standard old thing. That by itself doesn't prove bitcoin i…
> Making people believe that the money you've created with whatever hocus-pocus is real and that investment X will just spew money indefinitely is not at all a new thing. Across so many people, and at BTC's market cap though? I think that's unprecedented. Penny stocks or pyramid schemes, sure, but they never affect this many people or hit 12-digit valuations. (By the way, fiat money doesn't count as an example becaus…
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Re: Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say
#396Any ideas on why "they" appear unable to keep the price up at this point in time and continue fueling the hype? Already cashed out or just impossible to stem the tide of disillusioned people taking their losses and exiting?
The amount of tethers issued ($2bn or so, none since March) is small compared to the trade volume of bitcoin ($3 to 7bn per day recently). They only really have enough to effect things at the margin.
Re: Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody uses Linux as an operating system because it's logistically harder for 99.9% of people. It's still incredibly important and foundational, and will continue to be, even supposing this never changes, even if that same 99.9% of people never know what it is. Nobody used the Internet in its early days because it was logistically hard for 99.9% of people. However it made completely new things possible and over time,…
Actually everone uses it and you don`t even realize. Cellphones are all linux/bsd derivitives. All financial transactions will eventually be on a cyptocurrency but maybe nobody will realize it.
This is exactly the point I was attempting to make :-) Probably not all that clearly though, thanks for clarifying it a bit.
Re: Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been reading up lately on how fiat money systems work, and it doesn't seem to me that boots and guns really help. Certainly there have been countries with plenty of soldiers who failed to maintain the value of their currency. You have to pay taxes in the local currency, but if the currency crashes you just have to pay a higher nominal amount of taxes. You can outlaw competing currencies, but you can only do that…
The US' military might is the only reason why all oil is traded in USD and the main reason why the USD holds value.
Ok but what about all the other fiat currencies of the world?
Re: Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Our debts are their assets. Inflation reduces the value of their assets. And our assets are their debts.
So for states which have net debt position (including the US), it is to their advantage to have steady price inflation (i.e. currency value steadily being worth less and less in purchasing power), so that the debt is steadily reduced in "real terms" size. And this is in fact exactly what many/most governments seek to do, using a combination of fiscal policy levers, including issuing debt (government bonds) and also m…
I think you can factor inflation out of it at the international level; USA wants more things priced in dollars (like oil) because we can manufacture dollars but nobody else can – an enormous edge. Which explains why USA foreign policy is what it is in one sentence.
Re: Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say
#400“The stock market — the daytime adventure serial of the well-to-do — would not be the stock market if it did not have its ups and downs. (...) And it has many other distinctive characteristics. Apart from the economic advantages and disadvantages of stock exchanges — the advantage that they provide a free flow of capital to finance industrial expansion, for instance, and the disadvantage that they provide an all too convenient way for the unlucky, the imprudent, and the gullible to lose their money — their development has created a whole pattern of social behavior, complete with customs, language, and predictable responses to given events. What is truly extraordinary is the speed with which this pattern emerged full blown following the establishment, in 1611, of the world's first important stock exchange — a roofless courtyard in Amsterdam — and the degree to which it persists (with variations, it is true) on the New York Stock Exchange in the nineteen-sixties. Present-day stock trading in the United States — a bewilderingly vast enterprise, involving millions of miles of private telegraph wires, computers that can read and copy the Manhattan Telephone Directory in three minutes, and over twenty million stockholder participants — would seem to be a far cry from a handful of seventeenth-century Dutchmen haggling in the rain. But the field marks are much the same. The first stock exchange was, inadvertently, a laboratory in which new human reactions were revealed. By the same token, the New York Stock Exchange is also a sociological test tube, forever contributing to the human species' self-understanding. The behaviour of the pioneering Dutch stock traders is ably documented in a book entitled “Confusion of Confusions,” written by a plunger on the Amsterdam market named Joseph de la Vega; originally published in 1688, (...)”
— John Brooks, in “Business Adventures” (1968)[32]