141–150 of 170 posts
I'm a Bitcoin skeptic, but mentioning "fundamental value" when talking about currency seems incongruous. The "fundamental value" of bitcoin is whatever people think it's worth. Just like USD.
I think it's emphatically not the case.
Since I have to pay for the electricity in dollars, and since I sell the bitcoin for dollars, I'm actually operating a machine that takes dollars as input and outputs dollars.
As long as I get more than a dollar out for every dollar I put in, I basically want to put as much money through the machine as it can handle, and I want to build as many more machines as I can afford. That will only change if the $ input:output ratio drops below 1.
If the cost of electricity goes up, my ratio suffers. I have to pay more to get the same amount of bitcoin out.
If the price of bitcoin goes down, my ratio suffers. I get less dollars out for the same input.
If you want me to burn less electricity, you need at least one of those two things to happen: Increase my electricity cost or decrease the price of bitcoin.
You may be rolling your eyes at the obviousness of this. That's because all industrial capitalism operates this way. You put money in to pay for power (to extract resources and fabricate), and you get money out the other end when you sell your product. The "use value" of the product never comes into it for the capitalist. All that matters is what it costs to produce vs what someone will pay at the end.
You may say "but industrial capitalism produces actually useful things like food and clothes" but when it does, that's just coincidental! The situation with bitcoin isn't unique, it just illustrates the phenomenon especially elegantly: the economy does not care whether it's producing useful things or destroying humanity. It only cares if the math works.
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> When bitcoin gets more efficient or energy cheaper, the amount of bicoin "work" done stays constant... Not quite. The extra work it does allows the network to secure itself better. We don't have to agree with this energy use, but it does do something.
Do you believe the Bitcoin network would be insufficiently secure if miners were incentivized only by the transaction fees and not the block rewards?
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In which ones?
Italy, France for example where there is a cap on how large a cash transaction can be. Here's a list: https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/shopping-internet/cas... [EDIT]: I should have been more precise: you can't buy a new car in those countries. You can still probably buy a used car with 10k euro if the transaction is conducted between private persons. But then: the seller will be left holding 10K euros in cash,…
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This is both a good and a fair critique of bitcoin. But I don't understand the endgame. Should the use of bitcoin be banned or just shamed? Let's assume for a moment that I live "off the grid" and run my full BTC node using my own solar power. Is that something that should be banned? Should it be shamed? I don't know where to draw the line.
This is a great question and I don’t have all the answers, but I’d at least like to see CEOs who put it on their balance sheet put to task for it. E.g. putting it on your books should be penalized by ESG funds. Elon Musk shouldn’t get away with greenwashing it through Tesla’s (possibly overrated anyway) environmental halo. Nor should California taxpayers be subsidizing electric vehicles if the carbon benefits are neg…
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This is a great question and I don’t have all the answers, but I’d at least like to see CEOs who put it on their balance sheet put to task for it. E.g. putting it on your books should be penalized by ESG funds. Elon Musk shouldn’t get away with greenwashing it through Tesla’s (possibly overrated anyway) environmental halo. Nor should California taxpayers be subsidizing electric vehicles if the carbon benefits are neg…
Teslas holdings do not cause emissions. Every time I see one of these bitcoin climate articles on HN the quality of dialog and general knowledgeability of the subject at hand, takes a nose dive.
Buying increases the market price, which increases the market value of the block reward, which increases the amount of energy miners are willing to use to earn the block reward.
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This is a great question and I don’t have all the answers, but I’d at least like to see CEOs who put it on their balance sheet put to task for it. E.g. putting it on your books should be penalized by ESG funds. Elon Musk shouldn’t get away with greenwashing it through Tesla’s (possibly overrated anyway) environmental halo. Nor should California taxpayers be subsidizing electric vehicles if the carbon benefits are neg…
What is the marginal environmental impact of a company adding 1BTC to its balance sheet?
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Teslas holdings do not cause emissions. Every time I see one of these bitcoin climate articles on HN the quality of dialog and general knowledgeability of the subject at hand, takes a nose dive.
Sure, technically it’s not holding that increases emissions, it’s buying, but you can’t hold without buying. Buying increases the market price, which increases the market value of the block reward, which increases the amount of energy miners are willing to use to earn the block reward.
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Do you believe the Bitcoin network would be insufficiently secure if miners were incentivized only by the transaction fees and not the block rewards?
Bitcoin has to withstand an attack from central banks of the world in the future. Just look at some comments from Christine Legarde to see what is coming. It's the war of media companies vs internet coming back, just with something much more important. I hope Bitcoin wins, but I think that nobody knows the future for certain.
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Even if we accept this argument at face value, every Watt-hour of hydro or solar that goes to mining Bitcoin could have been used to reduce demand for power generated from fossil fuels. Power generation isn't perfectly fungible, but it's enough so that this argument falls completely on its face. I wish people would stop making it. Bitcoin is an environmental disaster.
> Watt-hour of hydro or solar that goes to mining Bitcoin could have been used to reduce demand for power generated from fossil fuels. No, that power would have gone to reducing the price of power and people would have found new uses for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox