Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers • Hacker News Board

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#241

Post by nybble41 » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #216

andirk wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there hard evidence that shows the energy consumption of bitcoin? How is that calculated? I do believe it's "a lot" when I see those giant farms churning. And how do we compare it to fiat where the security is via vaults and sharks with lasers and other types of security?

> And how do we compare it to fiat where the security is via vaults and sharks with lasers and other types of security? You can easily compare. Fiat provides orders of orders of magnitude more value added services on top of just money. Bitcoin is consuming all that energy while struggling to send money between to people at a (often an order of magnitude) higher cost. Oh. There’s not just bitcoin, of course. There’s t…

The amount of energy used for Bitcoin mining has very little to do with the rate of transactions. The limiting factor is mining profitability, which depends on capital and energy costs on on hand and current and expected Bitcoin prices, the block reward (which decreases over time), and transaction fees on the other. Only the transaction fees increase with more transactions, and for now they're insignificant compared to the block reward.

A billion Bitcoin transactions would be about 250-500 GiB, depending on the transaction size. If we were willing to accept block sizes of 1.5 to 3.5 GiB then we could handle that many transactions per day using no more energy than the current system. Of course, you'd need a 50+ Mbit dedicated downlink and some fairly capable hardware just to keep up with all the traffic, which is why we don't permit such large blocks.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#242

Post by nybble41 » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

godzillabrennus wrote: post #3

Cypher wrote: post #2

Well bitcoin is better for store of value, just use a CC for spending - more protection.

Has your local currency been so awful at storing value that it lost more than 75% of its value in a little over a year? In Venezuela you’re probably better offer with Bitcoin. If you live in a developed free market economy then probably not.

Bitcoin did not lose "more than 75% of its value in a little over a year". You're conveniently picking the peak price during a short-lived bubble as the baseline for your comparison, as if $20k were the normal price. No one with any sense purchased significant amounts of Bitcoin at that price. (Obviously quite a few people did buy at that price—but that's not the point. Buying after a sharp rise in the price is a losing strategy for almost any investment.) I could just as easily draw your attention to the fact that even now Bitcoin has nearly tripled in value (+190%) over the last two years.

Right before the run up to $20k Bitcoin was around $6k; now it's at $3700. That's only a loss of 40%, not 75%, if you bought at the pre-bubble price. And it reached $3700 for the first time only about a year and a half ago, in July of 2017. It's hardly the only investment to show no net gain (or loss) over that time period.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#243

Post by skinnymuch » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 10:59 PM UTC

nybble41 wrote: post #240

skinnymuch wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s a BTC machine? What happened to the money the poor souls dumped into it?

It's a vending machine for exchanging BTC and local currency. Depending on the type it may be linked to an account at an exchange or else rely on scanning QR codes for the receiving address (either the users or the machine's). Some only sell BTC, while others support both buying and selling. I imagine that this was one of the models that was linked to an exchange account, since the QR-based versions make it fairly ob…

I see.So the people didn’t just lose their money then, or get scammed out of a portion of it.