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Bitcoin breaks above $20k

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Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#381

Post by intotheabyss »

SI_Rob wrote: post #58
tectonic wrote: post #2

What's the carbon footprint of BTC like these days? Has any progress been made on mitigating this fundamental design issue?

The entire point of Bitcoin is that you irreversibly give up something you value in exchange for creating a Bitcoin in return. The Bitcoin now stands for that lost value, and there is now a corresponding psychological motive to replace the valuable thing that was lost (electricity, and all that goes with it including environmental impact) by mentally investing that loss in the Bitcoin token. So you protect it, you su…

I mean, I can make the same argument for any tech stock shares. All they give me is "governance rights" but at the end of the day, I'm trying to convince the next guy that TSLA is worth 500B in marketcap and that the TSLA stock will capture that value... somehow.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#382

Post by zadler »

paulgb wrote: post #29
aresant wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning and similar are making steady progress which would reduce the carbon footprint somewhat I'm more interested in the variety of "energy recovery" startups out there - eg https://www.crusoeenergy.com/ - that are harvesting wasted energy to mine cryptocurrencies

> Lightning and similar are making steady progress which would reduce the carbon footprint They might bring down transaction fees, but most of the money in mining is from block rewards, which depends on the market price of Bitcoin rather than transaction volume.

At the moment this is true, however it is conceivable that tx fees could pay for the network in the future. At current prices, each tx would cost about 50 dollars to produce 125,000 dollars each block, as the block reward does today. This is not unreasonable if the market cap of Bitcoin continues to increase and it is used as a settlement layer with smaller transactions taking place on second layers like lightning or Ethereum.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#383

Post by mrlala »

johnyzee wrote: post #333
mrlala wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. I 100% understand what you are saying but I also 100% disagree with it. This is all greed with no substance. Wealthy people and those who desire to be wealthy are doing everything they can to arbitrarily prop up something which does not really have value. And they seem to be winning- which is everything that is wrong with the world right now.

The world wants and needs a medium of exchange, otherwise we are back to bartering fish for sheep skins. All the medium of exchange needs, is to be scarce - people have used conch shells when it served the purpose. Right now, bitcoin is the best medium of exchange for the modern world. It beats physical stuff like gold, because it can be transferred digitally, across physical boundaries. It beats sovereign currencies…

>driven to a large extent by greed and ignorance. But so is a lot of the stock market and other investment vehicles

That I completely agree with and have almost as much issue with. But at least the underlying's have some value. The actual value is up for debate, but it's actual value of something (like an underlying company and their cash/IP/other assets etc) or a commodity which is physically useful (an ounce of gold, a barrel of oil).

Bitcoin has no underlying value. You equate that to conch shells- ok, but that's all they had when they used it. We already have currencies. So comparing it to a situation where a civilization may have used conch shells is pretty laughable. If all we had was conch shells and you came up with bitcoin? Great! Seems like a nice idea, it's an improvement. Bitcoin, however, is not an improvement by any stretch of the imagination.

>The world wants and needs a medium of exchange, otherwise we are back to bartering fish for sheep skins.

That's what... currencies are for especially the USD in particular. You say otherwise we are back to bartering fish for sheep skins.. huh? We are not there, we have currencies... Are they perfect? Of course not. But we have a few extremely large currencies (like USD, EUR) that do exactly what you say.

And now here's the humorous thing. You will tell related to currencies- "well, what good does USD do to me, I'm in Country X and can't use it or don't have it!" The fucking price of crypto is being quoted RELATIVE TO CURRENCIES so... wtf?

If you are in Country X and want to send some value to the person in Country Y.. ok so yes you can send bitcoin. Great. But what if you actually want to use your money? You have to convert bitcoin into X or Y?? There is no point to all of this!

And because of different costs of living all throughout the world, the 'amount' of bitcoin you pay someone would still 'relative' to their underlying currencies worth.

I'm just getting tired even trying to type this insane circular logic.

If there were no thieves and people were perfect, then crypto might make sense. But because there is no recourse for accidentally sending money to the wrong person, literally losing your hard drive or whatever and you can't recover, someone hacking into your account etc.. crypto is MEANINGLESS for any normal use.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#384

Post by JxLS-cpgbe0 »

three_seagrass wrote: post #254
JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I never made either statement. GBTC has a $14B market cap. Do any Dogecoin ETFs? No? Then maybe BTC is more than a hobby. It's a serious long-term store of value people are increasingly using as a hedge. A serious currency with commercial and institutional investors. When you understand why Dogecoin doesn't have these things, you'll understand what a "hobby" actually is. > BTC is still hobby money. Can y…

Again, being an asset does not mean something is a useful currency. You keep listing characteristics of assets , like existing in an ETF or having a market cap or having commercial investors. Those are not characteristics of currencies , which are widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce.

Why is why I never said that

> currencies, which are widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce

So billions of dollars of institutional trading means BTC is widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce. So, you said it's a currency.

That makes no mention of the consumer space, where I bought my widescreen monitor with BTC and pay my friends in BTC with PayPal. Have you heard of PayPal?

> BTC is still hobby money.

Can you post a single reason to believe that?

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#385

Post by tromp »

ARandumGuy wrote: post #304
three_seagrass wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By design, any changes to update the Bitcoin protocol need to be accepted by the miners with the majority of computing power - a.k.a. a hard fork. For many reasons, such as stealing electricity and having access to chip manufacturers, there are a handful of miners in China who have the majority of the computing power for Bitcoin. They can mine bitcoins at a cost that is less than for everyone else. This creates probl…

This is one of my big issues with Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies. It's not a democratic system, it's controlled by whoever has the most investment in the currency (either through mining power, or amount of currency). This means that the people who get the most decision making power are incentivized to only make changes that help their investment. Any change that would help a majority of users, but harm these top…

With some crypto currencies, the developers are invested only by development efforts, holding negligible mining power or amount of currency (which they have to buy like anyone else). They work like a meritocracy, with those who contributed most to the design and coding have the most decision making power.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#386

Post by mrlala »

agumonkey wrote: post #113
mrlala wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. I 100% understand what you are saying but I also 100% disagree with it. This is all greed with no substance. Wealthy people and those who desire to be wealthy are doing everything they can to arbitrarily prop up something which does not really have value. And they seem to be winning- which is everything that is wrong with the world right now.

You don't think "bitcoin as an inflation resistant storage" is a good theory ?

Not at all, you know why? Because everyone talks about BTC relative to some other currency.

The very topic of this post "Bitcoin breaks above $20k or $20,000 USD / BTC". How can something that can only be quoted in terms of another currency be inflation resistant?

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#387

Post by modeless »

fidelramos wrote: post #250
modeless wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has any progress been made The carbon footprint is funded by the block reward which is halved every 4 years until it dwindles to nothing. Progress is slow, but inexorable.

Not just the block reward, Bitcoin miners also receive the sum of the fees of the transactions included on each block. The idea with the progressively diminishing block reward is that transaction fees will represent a larger share of miners profits as time passes.

The block reward dominates by far. Transaction fees are paid directly by users. They will not pay more than the actual value they derive from the use of the network.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#388

Post by reinier »

Taek wrote: post #282
nostrademons wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is representative of a bigger problem within the developed world: the top problem on many people's mind is "Other people have money and I don't." This manifests in a lot of other areas as well: stock market speculation, people asking for government handouts, folks looking for get-rich-quick startup ideas, glorification of the "side hustle", etc. And I think the root cause of that is that productivity gro…

Bitcoin's value is fundamentally monetary in nature. Bitcoin itself (less so the cryptocurrency space as a whole) is about financial sovereignty, stable monetary policy, robust uptime guarantees, and resistance to manipulation in the governance. You are _supposed_ to buy and hold Bitcoin for a long time, because Bitcoin is most important where it gives you an alternative when government money is poor (or even just as…

Also, it is finally a replacement for all the IOUs in the financial system. The financial system is currently IOUs all the way down. Caitlin Long talks about this on a recent Real Vision interview.

"The market structure is fundamentally built on layers of intermediaries and settlement of both securities and payments happen on a delayed net settlement basis. By contrast in crypto, the markets are decentralized, no layers of intermediaries, settlement happens on a real time gross settlement basis..."

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#389

Post by nwah1 »

nwah1 wrote: post #191
varajelle wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) You don't need trust the watch tower, they can't steel your money. 2) you can host a watch tower yourself on your server.

If a payment channel is still open, then the blockchain hasn't confirmed anything yet, the only speedup is to reduce roundtrips to the blockchain in the case of a series of transactions. So you are still limited by the speed of the blockchain, unless you decide to trust parties in the Lightning Network.

Onion routing also requires trust that there is no collusion between nodes

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#390

Post by ur-whale »

louwrentius wrote: post #170
ur-whale wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this crap Sounds like your opinion. Not seeing much in the way of justification.

That is true. https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-...

Just went and read your article.

Here's to hoping you've shorted Bitcoin hard.

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