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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

#491

Post by jcampbell1 »

MobileVet wrote: post #339
bhouston wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Huh? Every time I spend bitcoins I pay capital gains on the amount I spend.

If you don’t, you are committing tax fraud.

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

#492

Post by MrMan »

vntok wrote: post #427
robjan wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has bitcoin actually solved that problem though?

Yes it has, anyone in the world can open their own "current account"/"deposit account" for free, right now. Barring hacking you, no government or authority can access it without your consent. None can prevent you from receiving money in it from someone else, or from transferring money out of it to someone else.

Bitcoin is a leaf node in the network, like "dollar". Bank account is at a higher level. A bank is a business that provides lending ,transfer, and custody services, the currency can be anything, including bitcoin.

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

#493

Post by colinmhayes »

prepend wrote: post #223
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then can Etherium 2.0 get some love?

“Hey there, you love the rich getting richer and a perpetual level of Uber rich controlling the financial system that is unbreakable? Then you’re going to love proof of stake.”

The rich get richer is a truism. Crypto can't change that, it would take a complete political revolution.

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

#494

Post by fasteddie31003 »

thehappypm wrote: post #424

I am embarrassed by the industry. How many of our generation's best and brightest minds are doing crypto and day trading? Imagine if these minds were focused on societal problems -- energy, health, food. I know multiple Harvard CS graduates who went right into the crypto space. What a waste.

Think of the crypto programmer who make it possible for poor Venezuelans to have an island of crypto inflation stability when their Bolívars are worth toilet paper. I don't know of any feel goody NGO where a Harvard grad could feel woke working at that could do that.

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

#495

Post by ddtaylor »

afavour wrote: post #413
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.” -Satoshi Nakamoto Feb. 2009 If this isn’t resonating with you after the past year, I don’t know. I was forced to watch my government bungle a pandemic in the worst possible way and then asked t…

> I was forced to watch my government bungle a pandemic in the worst possible way and then asked to pay for it for decades. No I don’t think I will. That has very little to do with currency and everything to do with you not wanting to pay taxes. You may think that COVID response has been a catastrophic waste of money but if you'd lost your job would you have claimed the increased unemployment benefits? I suspect the…

I don't think everyone who wants to check and balance the monetary power of the government is anti-tax. I think most of us would just rather they have to do it through legitimate means. Cryptocurrencies cannot be bargained with or taken over. If governments want to print and debase their fiat currencies, they are free to do so, but there will always be an elephant in the room that never does that because it's incapable of doing it.

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

#496

Post by nickik »

koheripbal wrote: post #370
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ll notice that even if they accept Bitcoin as payment, they’ll never price anything in Bitcoin. Nobody does that. They always price it in dollars and accept Bitcoin at the market rate. When people start pricing things I’m Bitcoin without doing some daily calculation, that’s when you know it’s serious.

You will never be able to price anything in Bitcoin, ever. It's volatile because deflationary currencies are inherently volatile. The future of finance is in some future crypto that provides for economic-growth-based inflation/deflation of the money supply. The Fed does this manually, and that's what keeps USD more-or-less stable.

> It's volatile because deflationary currencies are inherently volatile.

That is wrong. Maybe you mean 'fixed supply currency'.

There is nothing inherent in deflation, defined as 'general decline in general price level' that makes it volatile in terms of purchasing power.

The old pre-WW1 gold standard was deflationary, but it was also as stable as any system humans have ever come up with. It worked by banks adjusting reserves depending demand for their base currency.

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

#497

Post by xerxespoy »

Closi wrote: post #192
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #88

I don't understand all the Crypto hate on this site. Since when have hackers become the luddites to new ways of finance?

> I don't understand all the Crypto hate on this site. Since when have hackers become the luddites to new ways of finance? For me, it's because nobody can explain what the value offering of Bitcoin is - mainly the question 'what can I actualy do with a bitcoin?' . It's a bad currency because it is slow to exchange and costs lots of money to exchange - I can't use it to buy my coffee in the morning. It's a bad non-spe…

Bitcoin != Cryptocurrencies

It's like using the term "COBOL" when you mean "programming languages", and then criticising COBOL's modern utility in that context. The parent comment was about crypto (short for "cryptocurrencies") in general, not Bitcoin, which is 12-year old technology, and broadly not fairly comparable to current cryptocurrencies or their applications.

You are as correct that you can't do much with a Bitcoin as you are that you can't do much with COBOL. This doesn't however mean that programming sucks.

If you're interested to learn about the space and what's going on in it, visit https://coingecko.com, select "developer", and sort the list by "Commits past 4 weeks".

This is a list of currently actively developed projects. Click a few and visit their websites. For example, SC, 4th in the list, is a incentivised and decentralised cloud, which is up and working right now. You can earn money from spare storage.

There are many such projects pushing various different boundaries of technology. I too find it baffling how uneducated and "luddite" many on HN are regarding blockchain and cryptocurrencies. There's a whole world of activity going on, and many here are missing out.

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

#498

Post by Consultant32452 »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #110
pmorici wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coinbase

Not very reliable. The most reliable broker is... Having a few accounts at different brokers that you could use - e.g. Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, etc.

I would submit any of them are fine. The important thing is not leaving your coins there, and transferring them to a private wallet ASAP.

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

#499

Post by tome »

hfsp wrote: post #408
sireat wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us have been around crypto for a long time (meaning since 2010-2011) and have not seen any progress in positive terms. Most of crypto growth has been pure speculation/ crypto2crytpo related services/morally questionable uses. Positives * ... Sort of positive/sort of negative: Evading capital controls Being your own bank.. Big Negatives: * POW energy use - huge one * POS stakeholder issue * Hard to use for Joe…

Defi is a scam. Have you calculated the energy costs of the current system, when yelling "huge" energy use? Have you considered the wasted energy of a government halving a fiat currency holder's purchasing power in a year or less?

> Have you considered the wasted energy of a government halving a fiat currency holder's purchasing power in a year or less?

In what way would that waste energy?

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

#500

Post by capableweb »

MrMan wrote: post #469
bronak1 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society has had multiple stores of value, as none is perfectly secure. Gold, oil, dollars, real estate, (some) bonds & equities. Crypto is the first that’s decentralized and digital and on a open network not governed by any centralized entity which is powerful bc the world needs a international reserve currency

I don't want to rely on a currency which is managed and beholden to an unelected cartel of corporations. I prefer representative government by elected officials.

> I don't want to rely on a currency which is managed and beholden to an unelected cartel of corporations.

Great, don't think we have any currencies that are run by a cartel of corporations (yet), although Facebook's currency was probably gonna end up being that.

For cryptocurrencies, they are usually run by "miners" who can be anyone, not just corporations. You can run your own miner, or your own node, hence they are called decentralized. This feature does not exist in our current centralized currencies, and is one of the main selling point of cryptocurrencies.

> I prefer representative government by elected officials.

That is great that you feel that you are represented correctly in your government, I am really happy for you. For many other people in the world though, that does not exist or if it does, doesn't work out in practice and people don't feel represented. You don't have to look very far to discover which countries I'm referring to.

For people living in these countries, where they don't trust the central bank (like many don't trust the central bank in the US to have people's best interest at heart), cryptocurrencies offer a way out of the system without going off-grid and leaving the option of having things to trade with, without going back to a goods barter ecosystem.

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