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Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

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Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#141

Post by jude- »

z77dj3kl wrote: post #67
jude- wrote: post #26

Point of clarity: Bitcoin transactions take negligible energy to produce and validate. It's block production that's energy-intensive, and it's the same regardless of how big or full blocks are. Like any energy-intensive industry that could operate profitably via fossil fuel consumption, mining should be regulated to only use green energy. No different than power production and consumption today.

You can't regulate Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin is not controllable in the same way as say, rare earth metal mining, where you can exert pressure on whoever is mining them (or whichever nation is exporting them). There's very little any government can do to pressure a mining farm in Far East Russia or Northern China to use green power for their operations. You can do Bitcoin mining almost completely offline. Once that mag…

It's pretty hard to hide the fossil fuel-burning power plant generating your PoW. If your local government or citizens won't stop you from polluting the environment, other governments can impose retaliatory tariffs or even sanctions on your government, and citizens of other countries can boycott your country's goods and services. Make the financial penalties for tolerating fossil fuel-burning PoW steep enough, and your power plant gets shut down.

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#142

Post by new_realist »

danhak wrote: post #53

Here's my wild speculation on why Musk did this (and why it's brilliant) He knows there is a large and growing community of Bitcoin speculators and enthusiasts out there. By "endorsing" Bitcoin in this way, he not only moved the market--further enriching these folks--but also signaled that he is an ally to them, significantly boosting positive sentiment toward him and increasing the likelihood that they will purchase…

Or he is simply front-running the trades he asked Tesla to make after he loaded up, personally.

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#143

Post by Gatsky »

rektide wrote: post #139
Gatsky wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an upper bound on bitcoin power usage as I said, it is also a ‘horseshit’ calculation as per your classification. I’m not sure how equating it to driving down the coast is a meaningful comparison. Although the porn calculation is not ‘accurate’ I doubt it is wrong by an order of magnitude.

I'd wager the porn calculation is wrong by at least two orders of magnitude. It's grossly ineptly inaccurate. Data-centers do work. Sending porn/videos to people is easy, hardly work at all. sendfile() is amazing. Try it. This article you linked is trying to re-set the numbers, argue that most other calculations are significantly high. Many calculations are well over 7.5GW. The 5.25 this article presents is a conserv…

It’s obvious you consider bitcoin immoral, and are willing to grasp any negative aspect and distort it as much as possible. This means for example you aren’t bothering to understand the point that it is not the energy consumption estimate that is the relevant upper bound, it is the emissions of the energy sources being used. Why do you care so much about how hydroelectric power in remote China is being used anyway?

Well it seems that neither of us have intimate knowledge of the power usage required to serve video at scale (sendfile()? Give me a break..).

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#144

Post by jude- »

rektide wrote: post #115
jude- wrote: post #26

Point of clarity: Bitcoin transactions take negligible energy to produce and validate. It's block production that's energy-intensive, and it's the same regardless of how big or full blocks are. Like any energy-intensive industry that could operate profitably via fossil fuel consumption, mining should be regulated to only use green energy. No different than power production and consumption today.

Bitcoin is presently estimated to consume ~10GW of power[1]. Transaction rate has climbed to & stabilized ~4 transactions/second[2] (it peaked for a day above 5 tps during the frenzy 3 years ago). Running 10GW for 1/4 a second comes to 695 kWh. One could drive a Tesla up and a good part of the way down either American coast with this much energy. "Negligible energy" to produce a transaction is not correct. Miners are…

Meanwhile, my ancient laptop can generate and validate many thousands of transactions per second, using just 10s of watts. In fact, the negligible cost to validate transactions is exactly what allows you to run a node at home, on a humble Raspberry Pi.

Miners don't sell transactions. They sell block space in which to store them. That, fundamentally, is simultaneously what makes Bitcoin so expensive, and so valuable -- people wanting to get their transactions confirmed.

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#145

Post by jude- »

olejorgenb wrote: post #105
jude- wrote: post #26

Point of clarity: Bitcoin transactions take negligible energy to produce and validate. It's block production that's energy-intensive, and it's the same regardless of how big or full blocks are. Like any energy-intensive industry that could operate profitably via fossil fuel consumption, mining should be regulated to only use green energy. No different than power production and consumption today.

But the block size is limited - in effect limiting transactions per block. The difficultly of mining a block increases over time -> energy consumption of mining a block increases over time (assuming stationary hardware) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem

Right -- miners are selling you block space in which to store your transactions. That's the thing everyone's buying with Bitcoin, and that's the thing miners are spending all their energy on -- putting your transactions into blocks. The transactions themselves are very cheap to produce and validate.

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#146

Post by p1necone »

centimeter wrote: post #133
p1necone wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I misunderstood what you meant, but this argument still seems specious. The people currently employed by the financial industry would not cease to exist if the financial industry did not need as many employees, they would find jobs elsewhere. The downstream effects of what people spend their wages on isn't part of the the actual impact of the industry they work for.

Yes, they would find jobs elsewhere, and their energy consumption and pollution would no longer go to support the finance industry. If you want to make a fair equilibrium comparison, compare the current state of affairs with a future state of affairs where the population is smaller by the amount of people who currently work for payment processors.

I'm really not understanding your argument here. We should decrease the worlds population by the number of people who currently work for financial institutions?

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#147

Post by gthrowaway52 »

krona wrote: post #68
kd913 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is the greenest form of finance that gets greener over time? What nonsense is this? Already ONE transaction consumes as much power as an entire American household uses for a week.That is 215 kwh of energy for one transaction. It's using the equivalent of 2.26 million American homes worth of energy for just 330k transactions. A significant chunk of that is wash trading, ie people buying and selling to themselv…

That is 215 kwh of energy for one transaction. Nope. The marginal cost of a transaction is next to nothing. Just take a step back and think about what you're saying: that a bitcoin transaction would cost £3.40 in the UK. Obviously nobody would be using bitcoin if that were true. Proof of work is where the value of the coin is derived. How much energy do you think it takes to mint a physical coin? Now compare that to…

> Just take a step back and think about what you're saying: that a bitcoin transaction would cost £3.40 in the UK

I hope I'm not misinterpreting your point, but bitcoin transactions cost even more than that.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

Users have to bid for space on the blockchain to store transactions. Early on the space was cheap and miners got their profits from the # of bitcoins they mined. As that dries up the incentive to mine shifts toward transaction fees.

The electricity costs right now are unclear to users because of indirection. Mining dilutes the value of bitcoins each user holds but they do not see a loss in their wallet. I wonder if once confronted with even greater transaction fees over time whether users will be willing to continue to pay up to use it. One has to cross their fingers that the demand stays high enough to sustain enough mining to prevent the from being taken over with 51% attack.

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#148

Post by sofixa »

PurpleFoxy wrote: post #123
exclipy wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all the world's clean energy is consumed by bitcoin mining, then what energy does the rest of us use?

More clean energy. There is almost infinite energy raining down on us.

Theoretically, but not in the real actual world we live in. Few countries are on 100% renewables/nuclear.

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#149

Post by ForHackernews »

jude- wrote: post #145
olejorgenb wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the block size is limited - in effect limiting transactions per block. The difficultly of mining a block increases over time -> energy consumption of mining a block increases over time (assuming stationary hardware) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem

Right -- miners are selling you block space in which to store your transactions. That's the thing everyone's buying with Bitcoin, and that's the thing miners are spending all their energy on -- putting your transactions into blocks. The transactions themselves are very cheap to produce and validate.

This is a distinction without a difference. What use is a bitcoin transaction that is not included in a block?

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#150

Post by sperma »

nexthash wrote: post #87
danhak wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All large enterprises keep cash reserves. Whether you agree or not, the prevailing thesis behind keeping cash reserves in BTC is not that it will turn a profit, but that it will avoid devaluation like USD.

That's a ridiculous assumption to make. Bitcoin's value comes from speculation, not from anything of value in the real world. The price could tank to $500 tomorrow, because there is no government, no trust, and nothing in the real world backing it up other than hype. In light of this USD devaluation seems like a way less risky alternative.

HN is the only place I know where users are this stubborn to keep their head in the sand about Bitcoin. It's been 12 years man. Bitcoin could not tank to $500 tomorrow. It never will. Sorry
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