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Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

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Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#51

Post by rawtxapp »

elhudy wrote: post #42
rawtxapp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the early adopters have either permanently lost their coins or sold it local maximums, very few people would have hold on to it that long. And you can argue that if they had that kind of strong belief, they should receive some rewards for it. It's like saying by the time a company IPOs, early VCs have benefited the most, while that is true, you could also argue they deserve it because of the risk they took.

>while that is true, you could also argue they deserve it because of the risk they took. they didn't take any risk though, they just "mined bitcoins", which were more abundant then.

Well if the price increased at 1$, and you didn't sell any, you risked it going back to 0$. From that perspective, there's a risk holding on to it.

Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#53

Post by lordnacho »

rybosworld wrote: post #21
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't this be said about literally anything? No. Carbon taxes would not make everything worthless.

Deduce just a bit more, and see that I meant you can tax literally anything until it is worthless. I think you already knew what I meant but just wanted to nitpick.

It's not a nitpick, he's referring to Pigovian Taxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

It's obvious that you can tax anything by some amount to eat up the value.

He means if you tax it according to the amount of unaccounted-by-the-market negative value, it comes out negative.

Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#54

Post by jonny_eh »

ipnon wrote: post #41
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't this be said about literally anything? No. Carbon taxes would not make everything worthless.

Carbon taxes also wouldn't make Bitcoin worthless. You can easily imagine Bitcoin mines powered by solar. Many already are, in order to capitalize on the cheap energy. The article posted in the OP is specious.

Solar power isn't necessarily free of externalities though. Once you run out of roofs to install them on, you then need to use up land.

Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#56

Post by yladiz »

I'm very conflicted about this. On one hand, I have a little bit of Bitcoin and am happy about some of the gains I've gotten (not life changing in any sense, but more than I expected). On the other hand I hesitated for a long time to buy any because I knew of the large environmental impact that its energy use has (yes, I really did avoid buying Bitcoin for a long time because I roughly knew of the environmental/energy costs). It's hard to reconcile these two positions in my mind, and part of me feels like this is a "tragedy of the commons" situation where it's fine if I have some because everyone else has some as well and I won't impact anything by _not_ having some.

Curious what HNers think about this - is it bad to have Bitcoin in light of how bad the environmental impact is, especially with analysis about the taxes/cost/impact like this? Or is not participating really not reducing the impact of this in any meaningful way so you're kind of only losing if you don't?

Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#57

Post by onelastjob »

Nano completely solves this. Under 1 second transactions fully confirmed, no mining, no inflation, it's decentralized (and getting more so). All the coins were premined. It uses a block lattice rather than a blockchain, so it is scalable (the main net is doing 185 transactions per second now (1776 tps on the test net). The system to determine voting power (regarding confirming transactions) is basically a liquid democracy where you can delegate your voting power (based on how many coins you own) to a different representative at any time. It leaves Bitcoin in the dust and is an incredibly elegant cryptocurrency that will be the future of microtransactions online as well as an actual usable cryptocurrency. nano.org

Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#58

Post by FlownScepter »

arnavs wrote: post #44
FlownScepter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't this be said about literally anything? Not at all. Lots of businesses make money by turning materials and/or labor into products. Other businesses make money solving problems for people or other businesses. However, crypto (and most of the rest of the financial sector) burn shit tons of energy, materials, time, and human effort generating wealth; wealth expressed in either bitcoin that doesn't really exist, o…

Crypto mining produces a service, which is maintaining a ledger of payments that works in a certain way. This specific problem — settling transactions — is an industry amounting to billions. Think of BTC like a MasterCard or Visa competitor, albeit a unique one.

This 'service' doesn't need to exist. It didn't solve a problem that wasn't already solved, we've had ledgers since the Bronze age, and probably before that. That's not to say that the blockchain itself isn't useful, of course it is for numerous applications, including even financial ones. However, Bitcoin as it stands today is functionally useless apart from being something that our system has decided has value, because.... waves hands.

If bitcoin went away tomorrow, a bunch of financial companies would have a lot of problems, a few big holders would be out money, and that's it. For every other human, it's Thursday.

Conversely, if gasoline didn't exist tomorrow, society would collapse.

Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#60

Post by quattrofan »

onelastjob wrote: post #57

Nano completely solves this. Under 1 second transactions fully confirmed, no mining, no inflation, it's decentralized (and getting more so). All the coins were premined. It uses a block lattice rather than a blockchain, so it is scalable (the main net is doing 185 transactions per second now (1776 tps on the test net). The system to determine voting power (regarding confirming transactions) is basically a liquid demo…

If I had a dollar for every alt coin...lol
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