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Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

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Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#331

Post by knuthsat »

user-the-name wrote: post #233
knuthsat wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our biggest environmental footprints as individuals are heating and cooling. Having an electric car is nothing compared to it. Take one intercontinental flight and again, having a fossil fuel car for a year does not exceed the emissions of that flight. http://www.withouthotair.com/ Legitimizing Bitcoin has nothing to do with the environment in the large scale of things. It's like saying that you need to optimize fast…

Bitcoin is economically set up such that its energy consumption will follow its price. With the price at the level it is now, the energy consumption is that of a medium-sized country. An entire country's worth of energy is getting burned to run a network capable of a whooping TWO transactions a second. Now that Tesla has bought these coins, they have so far driven the price up by another 10%. This will eventually be…

The amount of environmental destruction and pollution done by the farming industry or similarly land invasive industries is incomparable to bitcoin. It has an effect on so much of the ecosystem that it's just silly to put Bitcoin in any kind of calculation with regards to environment.

Water pollution, shit pollution, river pollution, ocean pollution, air pollution, probably only the last one somewhat related to bitcoin.

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#332

Post by scsilver »

Traster wrote: post #268

This really seems like yet another failure in governence. There doesn't seem to be any good reason for a car company to be investing in crypto currency other than their CEO's personal interest in the technology. If you have something productive to do with the money, invest it in your business. If you do want to keep money on hand for investments, investing in such exotic instruments seems weird, you want something re…

How exotic is it when the future head of the SEC is teaching classes at MIT about blockchain's roles in finance of the near future.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-s1...

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#333

Post by Daniel_sk »

graeme wrote: post #297
whitepaint wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why has gold prevailed over thousands of years while almost all fiat currencies went to 0?

Gold stores value but it hasn’t really appreciated. Whereas the claim for bitcoin is that it will soar in value. Why? Warren Buffett said it best on gold. It just sits there. Here’s one quote I found. In another he compared buying gold in 1900 vs us stocks. “ I will say this about gold. If you took all the gold in the world, it would roughly make a cube 67 feet on a side…Now for that same cube of gold, it would be wo…

The same argument can be said about BTC. BTC doesn't pay dividends. I would rather own a company than the amount in BTC. Well in case of Gold in worst case you will be left with some shiny metal, that also has some intrinsic value because it's used in electronics (e.g. gold plated contacts). If BTC goes down then you will have nothing.

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#334

Post by villasv »

lottin wrote: post #322

This is very worrying. Don't they have financial advisors at Tesla? An automaker should focus on making cars. This is what they specialise in and what they are good at. They should not be speculating with financial assets. Tesla shareholders can do that themselves, if they wish to.

Ultimately this comes down to Mr. Musk stomping his feet until his personal vision starts being called "strategic" by Tesla C-level.

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#335

Post by edanm »

buildbuildbuild wrote: post #201

Cryptocurrency is a blind spot where Hacker News’ normal optimism towards innovation has disappointed for a decade. May this thread be one we can reference years later as another example of “our collective opinions can be very wrong about technologies that were transformative in hindsight.” Innovators, follow regulations and go for it. Don’t let the HN crowd get you down. Few of these commenters have ever been unbank…

Maybe you're right.

But the truth isn't a popularity contest - in either direction. Just because something is popular doesn't make it good. Just because something is unpopular doesn't mean it's a transformative technology that's being misunderstood.

(Fwiw, I'm a blockchain skeptic - I think about the only thing the blockchain technology is good for is cryptocurrencies. About cryptos specifically, I'm very unsure whether they are "good" or not.)

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#336

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

javert wrote: post #305
iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote: post #35

This is going to be one of those events that everyone points back to after the crash to show we had reached peak bubble. Like AOL buying Time Warner etc.

If you think this is a bubble, you should think that this is the very beginning, not the peak.

Should we? Bitcoin went up 4x from October to January, and was dropping from early January until today. I don't claim to be able to predict the market, but that seems consistent with a bubble that's close to its peak.

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#337

Post by uncoder0 »

user-the-name wrote: post #233
knuthsat wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our biggest environmental footprints as individuals are heating and cooling. Having an electric car is nothing compared to it. Take one intercontinental flight and again, having a fossil fuel car for a year does not exceed the emissions of that flight. http://www.withouthotair.com/ Legitimizing Bitcoin has nothing to do with the environment in the large scale of things. It's like saying that you need to optimize fast…

Bitcoin is economically set up such that its energy consumption will follow its price. With the price at the level it is now, the energy consumption is that of a medium-sized country. An entire country's worth of energy is getting burned to run a network capable of a whooping TWO transactions a second. Now that Tesla has bought these coins, they have so far driven the price up by another 10%. This will eventually be…

You're not comparing bitcoin to the right thing. You're comparing bitcoin's energy usage to the usage of a country. Bitcoin is competing against much bigger players than small countries it's attempting to compete with Fiat currencies. The best comparison would be to compare it to the energy required to sustain the USD as the de facto fiat currency. It's hard to get exact numbers on the DoD's full energy usage but as some points of reference they use about 4.6 billion gallons of fuel a year, 10% of the US's aviation gas usage, etc. To put the DoD's usage into perspective, "The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) consumes more energy than any other federal agency—77% of the entire federal government’s energy consumption."(https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R45832.pdf)

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#338

Post by rzodkiew »

Bitcoin is a mystery to me. Somehow it's hailed as revolutionising the economy, by replacing currency with a worse kind of currency.

It feels like this is where all the "how to get rich quick" book writers and other hustle bros went and created one giant financial pyramid, which works in quite simple way: - buy bitcoin - tell everyone around how revolutionary it is, so they buy it and what you holding increases in value, then tell them to do the same.

Keep repeating the above two steps through different layers of abstraction, so it's not so obvious anymore.

The other thing that comes into play and makes it grow even bigger is when people see others who made money on this bunch of bollocks, and think that the fact they are rich somehow makes them smart. Then they buy into all of the cryptocurrency platitudes wholesale without stopping for a moment to critically evaluate it.

I think I'm a bit sour, because this whole crypto-crap infested the idea space of decentralisation, which is imho very important step that we should try to take take as a society. Now it's just forever tainted with bitcoin and all the greed fuelled people there, while the decentralisation should be quite the opposite in nature.

You know what would be revolutionary? Getting rid of currency altogether.

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#339

Post by MobileVet »

bhouston wrote: post #158
Waterluvian wrote: post #30

I bought $100 of BTC a while ago for fun. I watched it go up and down and mostly up. I got bored, and sold it for cash to donate... literally an hour before the big spike just earlier. I know about the fallacies of predicting the market. I understand 20/20 hindsight. But to actually experience it is such a strong lesson. To be flooded with, "ohhh I'm such an idiot!" and then think about how there's just no way I coul…

You do illustrate exactly why no one should ever buy a Tesla in bitcoin, because it isn't currency, it is more of an asset like Gold. So why does Elon say that people will buy Tesla's in BTC then?

Because there are massive tax benefits to purchasing something with bitcoin. What other asset can be turned into a hard good without realizing a tax on appreciation?

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#340

Post by thinkcontext »

criley2 wrote: post #94
cies wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla is not about being good for the env. It's about making money. Same thing with SpaceX not being about going to Mars. It's about making money too! The going to Mars/ good for env stories are to get some public goodwill behind them from a certain crowd.

If we're being honest, SpaceX is designed to gobble up government contracts. That's it. That's the whole business model. If NASA offered contracts exploring the ocean depths then Elon Musk would be sinking Tesla's in submersibles.

That was ULA before SpaceX came around. They had a monopoly on government launch and they won almost no commercial contracts on the global market because they were uncompetitive. SpaceX has totally reversed both of those. They have saved the government $Bs by undercutting ULA and is the top commercial launcher in the world.
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