471–480 of 578 posts
Easy solution: tax carbon emissions. Who cares if you’re using energy to mine Bitcoin? Or if you’re using it to play video games? Or to run the AC all day? If it you’re internalizing the cost of any emissions, then you’ll use those resources efficiently.
Even easier solution. Tax all the coal that enters your country economy, either from earth or from neighbours.
It’s a simple equation: So long as there is more money in mining BTC than there is cost in energy to mine it, mining will proceed. No entity in the world can control the price of crypto. But, we can and already do regulate energy production. I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere. Seriously, what are the…
To me it seems like Bitcoin (and other pow cryptocurrencies) are almost like the climate change scapegoat for a number of social and economic issues that have seemingly come to a head recently to facilitate their rise. People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?" and I think it is…
It sounds like you're saying that bitcoin is like a hedge against trust in government. A sort of financial measurement of conspiracy theorism. This is a fascinating perspective, but I'm not sure who is financially exposed to that form of risk. It seems like a great vehicle for speculation ("do I think people will trust institutions more or less in the near future?") but not much else. I'm sure there's someone who stands to lose money if public faith in government erodes. but its difficult to imagine that investor
Many of the comments here are asking the wrong question - its not a matter of whether miners should be able to buy power plants and licences; so much as why it was cost effective for a disused coal plant to be acquired instead of a purchase of 25% of a specific wind farm's output, for example - the latter would drive renewable expansion, and the energy industry is already all over the fact this is the most cost effec…
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About half is used for jewelry because gold is shiny pebbles. About 10% is used for electronics. Mining Bitcoin consumes 5X as much energy as gold, btw, per unit value extracted. It also requires mining gold to produce the circuit boards used for mining Bitcoin - given the popularity of the ENIG immersion gold plating process for PCB contacts. The secondary issue is that of course each Bitcoin transaction generates 1…
There is a really easy solution for this disaster - a trusted party could run a big relational database that was basically a non-inflating currency and really cheap to run. Except that isn't going to work, because governments are untrustworthy and as history shows will sooner rather than later debase their currency. All people are looking for here is a safe way to store value over time. If governments would let peopl…
There are ways to do so that don't involve scenarios literally as absurd as _buying power plants_ to do random equations.
Perhaps some of that desire for a safe value store should be invested in that direction.
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About half is used for jewelry because gold is shiny pebbles. About 10% is used for electronics. Mining Bitcoin consumes 5X as much energy as gold, btw, per unit value extracted. It also requires mining gold to produce the circuit boards used for mining Bitcoin - given the popularity of the ENIG immersion gold plating process for PCB contacts. The secondary issue is that of course each Bitcoin transaction generates 1…
There is a really easy solution for this disaster - a trusted party could run a big relational database that was basically a non-inflating currency and really cheap to run. Except that isn't going to work, because governments are untrustworthy and as history shows will sooner rather than later debase their currency. All people are looking for here is a safe way to store value over time. If governments would let peopl…
It's most useful for transactions or transfers that are illegal somewhere. A government can deprive a criminal of a house more easily than a password.
I suspect it was embraced by western governments because it facilitates capital flight from the developing world to the developed world - especially from China.
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We have plenty of work to do just replacing existing power generation with renewables, so it's not clear to me how additional demand accelerates such replacement. (This is in answer to both you and tshaddox.)
It's faster and cheaper to build out new capacity and then later retire old capacity than it is to do an in-situ replacement. Build the battery-backed solar and wind farms now, and then watch the coal and gas plants go bankrupt.
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The stock is valued of the basis the net present value of future earnings. The obvious difficulty there is determining the future earnings (and discount rate). But that doesn't mean they don't exist - it's a rational premise of valuation. Amazon is worth a lot because it's a giant machine with $350B in revenues - so investors can quibble over their earnings and 'how much that is worth' in future earnings - but it's b…
> But that doesn't mean they don't exist - it's a rational premise of valuation. Some times they do and some times they don't. That means it's not a fundamental property for stock valuation. What was the rational premise of valuation behind Gamestop? There was one, but it had little or nothing to do with Gamestop's future earinings.
Sorry this is not true let me illustrate:
If there is a 9/10 chance that the profits will be $1, and a 1/10 chance that it will be $0, then we can value those profits in present terms at $0.9 (Edit: assuming no issues with cost of capital, time value of money etc. i.e. constant real dollars)
If we can reasonably calculate the profits and risk, then we can make a valuation.
GameStop was not a valuation, it was a stampede.
Also note that everything is subject to whims of speculation, fads etc. etc..
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I don't get your argument. Bitcoin is very very volatile and just because it went up the last x years, doesn't make it stable or trustworthy. My money in my bank is very safe and it doesn't cost me anything. The inflation itself is a systematic thing and should affect bitcoin equaly. When corona came, i was looking at the stock market and was surprised how many people left it. It doesn't make much sense to distrist t…
I'm assuming you're in the US/Europe/somewhere with a stable currency. Places like Argentina that have had serious devaluation of currency do not see money in their bank accounts as "safe". Bitcoin can provide a way for e.g. Argentinians to get their money into other currencies when the government is actively preventing that through "standard" mechanisms. It's safe (er, safer) from that perspective.
As someone from a country which has had its currency's value slashed to half 5 years ago, I genuinely don't see how Bitcoin is safe at all. If anything, gold or real estate are safer.
Sure, if it is somehow guaranteed that I won't wake up tomorrow seeing 1 BTC = $30 000, I could see your argument. But is that guaranteed?
I would also like to add that the swings that BTC takes are unpredictable (at least for the common people who would benefit from it being a safe storage for their wealth).
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It could be argued that people are flocking to Bitcoin not to increase wealth but to preserve it over a long period of time. I don’t know where you live in the world but where I live wages haven’t risen in line with the cost of food and shelter. Leaving money in the bank is like working to buy a block of ice only to watch it melt away. To argue that any store of value isn’t speculative to some degree is naive.
> To argue that any store of value isn’t speculative to some degree is naive. Isn't there a difference between currency in general being speculative to some degree and cryptocurrencies specifically, whose main value proposition is speculation?
What I was referring to was stocks since they have outperformed government bonds and gold the last few years. Take Amazon for instance. I don’t think the share price is equal to total assets minus total liabilities divided by number of shares. Amazon doesn’t issue dividends so why did the shareholders pay so much for the shares?
Who cares? Everyone is fixated on Bitcoin... there are tons of energy inefficient processes out there. The solution has nothing to do with Bitcoin... environmental impact needs to be priced into energy itself, whatever the application. This is a failure of the markets (and therefore ourselves). Bitcoin is a scapegoat.
The failure is governments subsidize so much energy production they effectively take the market out of the equation. Remove government incentives for cheap power at all costs and then you'll see the action of the market.