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Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

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Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#511

Post by doggosphere »

jariel wrote: post #492
jerry1979 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin creates no value. Bitcoin creates a "source of truth" which has lots of value for people. For example, working at an organization where everyone wants to cooperate to deliver a product, figuring out who should own, update, and report on sources of truth takes lots of effort. But those sources of truth within organizations help people coordinate their collective efforts. Out here in the regular world where w…

That's a good idea, but in practice, no value is created by BTC. And of course, there are a ton of ways of having a 'source of truth'. So BTC is not a good currency, and it's not a very good store of value either. But we knew that going into it, because it's obvious from the start. It's just a speculative instrument. If you get paid in a regular currency, then you're good. If you don't want to hold it, than buy an ET…

Value is created by having an asset that cannot artificially be inflated at will. It is a protocol that is open source, decentralized, permissionless, and censorship resistant.

Central banks have monopolized money and obliterated the concept of sound money when they began manipulating the interest rate. They allowed fractional reserve banking, where you can give out money you don't have. They created and spent trillion of dollars they didn't have to prop up markets through quantitative easing.

And now you have housing markets and stock markets in bubbles. Inflation that is inevitably coming.

Mortgage rates only ever go down to support the housing market.

http://www.fedprimerate.com/mortgage_rates_chart-graph.htm

Treasury yields only ever go down to support the stocks market.

https://www.macrotrends.net/2016/10-year-treasury-bond-rate-...

Debt to GDP ratio only ever goes up:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

Ask yourself why this is happening, and how we return to sound money.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#512

Post by jariel »

doggosphere wrote: post #511
jariel wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good idea, but in practice, no value is created by BTC. And of course, there are a ton of ways of having a 'source of truth'. So BTC is not a good currency, and it's not a very good store of value either. But we knew that going into it, because it's obvious from the start. It's just a speculative instrument. If you get paid in a regular currency, then you're good. If you don't want to hold it, than buy an ET…

Value is created by having an asset that cannot artificially be inflated at will. It is a protocol that is open source, decentralized, permissionless, and censorship resistant. Central banks have monopolized money and obliterated the concept of sound money when they began manipulating the interest rate. They allowed fractional reserve banking, where you can give out money you don't have. They created and spent trilli…

"Value is created by having an asset that cannot artificially be inflated at will."

That is not value.

You can do that with Gold.

We could do that with an arbitrary fixed currency that someone invents.

BTC 'has not value' because it can't be used for anything - as a currency it's useless, and as a store of value it's next to useless (there are better stores of value).

Your comments about 'money' don't necessarily relate:

1) Currency is not supposed to be a hard store of value. It's there to grease the economy, not for you to hold large quantities. If you want to store value there are plenty of ways to do that.

2) Inflexible currency i.e. 'hard money' makes no sense, and that's why nobody uses it.

3) You say 'inflation is coming' - well if we have such bad currency, why hasn't inflation already taken root in the last 20 years? It really has not.

Again - BTC creates zero value, there's no point to it - it can't be used as currency and it's not a better a store of value than rare comic books.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#513

Post by BTCOG »

arcticbull wrote: post #498
BTCOG wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that you should say the opposite of what JP Morgan is now saying. That the wild fluctuations are steadily going away as volatility has been calming down quite a lot.

JPM like Goldman are only interested in selling their clients what they want. It's what they do. And it's only to benefit themselves. These are the bankers Bitcoin was trying to overthrow lol doesn't that ring alarm bells? Remember?

We typically use the bankers as a sentiment indicator to show you folks who like bankers, that the bankers are getting into Bitcoin. The beauty in Bitcoin is these bankers enter in an equal or lower playing field to those involved. We don't seek permission from, or worry about said bankers.

They are pawns, if you will, to point to as jumping off points to your average Joe and say "Look! Your favorite X,Y,Z institutional guy is into Bitcoin now!" That is all.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#514

Post by SwimSwimHungry »

webinvest wrote: post #364
SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't this be met with a proof of stake coin? I could at least tolerate a PoS cryptocurrency because it at minimum consumes orders of magnitude less energy than Bitcoin would.

It could. But so far, no PoS coin has ever survived a bear market. Look at Peercoin and Novacoin as examples.

And that right there is probably why Bitcoin is going to persist. They can't afford to become poor themselves easily. So it was never about the technology and all about keeping an entrenched position at all costs.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#515

Post by elil17 »

graiz wrote: post #180
elil17 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If you're on grid, unless and limiting yourself to times when there's a surplus, every KW of clean electricity you use is a KW of dirty, natural gas or coal peaker plant electricity someone else has to use. If you've got an off-grid solar set up, you're just bidding up the price of PV panels.

As the volume of panels has gone up over the last decade, the he price of panels has also gone down as production scales and efficiencies improve. You would need enough demand to create a global shortage. That doesn't seem likely and would cause a short-term spike, not a long term price increase.

I would agree except for the fact that PV panels use rare earth metals and other natural resources

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#516

Post by SwimSwimHungry »

sokoloff wrote: post #314
SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be projecting. I'm not hysterical, just very emphatic about my points.

I have the same amount of crypto holdings that I had 20 years ago: zero. I’m considering buying some as part of my overall asset allocation at some point, but so far have not as they seem like electronic magic beans in some ways. Bottom line: I’m far from a crypto advocate . I am experiencing your argumentation style in this post as having a significantly greater amount of hysteria than emphasis.

After sleeping on this and coming back, I can see where I may have gone a bit off the rails a bit. Though if you read threads from earlier, I was goaded on a bit (with someone mentioning I needed to calm down... Like yeah that's the last thing you want to say to someone you're having a discussion with)

Sometimes when the heat is cranked up, flamefesting can be inevitable. I'll try to take more frequent breaks.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#517

Post by doggosphere »

jariel wrote: post #512
doggosphere wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Value is created by having an asset that cannot artificially be inflated at will. It is a protocol that is open source, decentralized, permissionless, and censorship resistant. Central banks have monopolized money and obliterated the concept of sound money when they began manipulating the interest rate. They allowed fractional reserve banking, where you can give out money you don't have. They created and spent trilli…

"Value is created by having an asset that cannot artificially be inflated at will." That is not value . You can do that with Gold. We could do that with an arbitrary fixed currency that someone invents. BTC 'has not value' because it can't be used for anything - as a currency it's useless, and as a store of value it's next to useless (there are better stores of value). Your comments about 'money' don't necessarily re…

You can do that with Gold.

Yes, we had gold as a monetary standard for quite some time.

1) Currency is not supposed to be a hard store of value. It's there to grease the economy, not for you to hold large quantities. If you want to store value there are plenty of ways to do that.

Money is supposed to be sound. Your notion that currency should not be a hard store of value is a new one, an idea created to support fiat. From first principles, money is a store of energy (creative work, physical work), which is then utilized for efficient exchange of goods and services. Money is not a tool for "greasing the economy", this was only possible when governments confiscated gold and declared all money to be paper that they controlled. Furthermore, buying stocks/houses/gold etc. is indeed a way of escaping USD into assets. However, someone else has to be willing to take that USD. It will still exist, and whoever holds it will be losing value over time. It is a problem when your base asset becomes toxic and no one wants it.

2) Inflexible currency i.e. 'hard money' makes no sense, and that's why nobody uses it.

We used gold and other rare metals for thousands of years. It was literally the global standard for trade.

3) You say 'inflation is coming' - well if we have such bad currency, why hasn't inflation already taken root in the last 20 years? It really has not.

The USD's buying power has fallen dramatically over time. Inflation has been very visible in home prices and stock prices.

https://howmuch.net/articles/rise-and-fall-dollar

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#518

Post by admax88q »

originalvichy wrote: post #301
admax88q wrote: post #186

All this talk about Bitcoin causing global warming is starting to feel like a targetted misinformation campaign. Yes it's wasteful, and yes it's using a fair amount of energy at the moment. But all estimates show it's still a very small fraction of the problem. It feels like we spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about bitcoins carbon footprint for its size.

How can it be interpreted as misinformation if the information is pretty solidly based? Everyone is looking for low hanging fruit in the race to slow down the climate disaster and it’s an easy target. I’m glad online currencies exist as a technology but I’m not glad an energy intensive one is currently #1 when at the same time the entire tech is taken over by investors/speculators instead of users. And if calculation…

I guess misinformation isn't the right term. It's not _wrong_, it just feels like it gets a disproportionate amount of attention.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#519

Post by admax88q »

yc-kraln wrote: post #233
admax88q wrote: post #186

All this talk about Bitcoin causing global warming is starting to feel like a targetted misinformation campaign. Yes it's wasteful, and yes it's using a fair amount of energy at the moment. But all estimates show it's still a very small fraction of the problem. It feels like we spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about bitcoins carbon footprint for its size.

This is literally a bitcoin mining operating looking to bring a coal-burning powerplant back online. Pay attention.

Ban/tax coal. So long as coal is cheap, people will use it for something.

There's lots of ways to turn energy into money besides bitcoin mining. Gotta make carbon intensive energy not worth it.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#520

Post by lamontcg »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #172
lamontcg wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That study says that if you replaced 100% of the power generation of the United States with wind farms concentrated in the middle 1/3rd of the country that it would create localized 0.50C rise in SURFACE temperatures at the wind farms and 0.24C rise in SURFACE temperatures across the whole USA. The authors note very clearly that isn't a global rise in temperature and would be offset by the effects of GHG reduction. F…

But you're comparing this with nonrenewable energy! I'll state for the third time that I'm in favour of replacing non-renewable energy with renewable energy. What I'm saying is that it's still wasteful, and not cost-free if we're producing insane amounts of energy that don't need to be produced in the first place.

Your argument is a bit of a mess though.

It is easier to argue that the bitcoin energy expenditure should be turned off. That would lower energy demand and prices and we're now in a regime where that makes running carbon-burning plants less attractive and they'd get turned off while any renewables that bitcoin is using would become available.

And if I could snap my fingers and replace all the GHGs with wind I would and I wouldn't care about your concerns. And you're trying to argue that I can't make that comparison but I absolutely am. The issues you're bringing up aren't 1% of the problem that we have with GHGs so worrying about perfect renewable energy or overall dropping demand is so much less right now than worrying about getting off GHGs. The localized 0.5C surface warming of wind in that paper just isn't worth talking about at this point.

But it isn't totally perfect! Surely you must agree?

No. I. Do. Not. Care. About. Perfection.

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