The explanation is obviously bullshit, everybody knew the climate impact years ago. He realized his power for market manipulation for Dogecoin and he milked the cow for real this time.
Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact
91–100 of 276 posts
Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that you can't really take a company at face value if they reverse course after having already profited from their "lapse in judgement". The parent post lined out potential motivations behind all this that IMO aren't really that outlandish. It's speculation, but it's not some outlandish crackpot theory
Sure, but a basic rule of civility is that you should "assume good faith" and give others the benefit of the doubt when the good faith explanation is plausible.
I think a lot of people feel that the good faith explanation isn't sufficiently plausible in this case, assuming even just the most cursory of research was done before this decision
Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact
#93So far, Elon/Tesla: 1. Bought a bunch of Bitcoin. 2. Announced they were going to accept Bitcoin, sending the price up. 3. Sold a bunch of Bitcoin to pad out otherwise poor earnings, citing their goal of "testing liquidity of the market." 4. Announced they were going to stop accepting Bitcoin, sending the price plummeting. As though he didn't know the environmental impact a week ago? As though he didn't check for liq…
When Tesla announced the initial move they received a huge amount of push back for the environmental concerns. And it didn’t look good for an EV company of all things. There is a trend I’ve seen of a company making a decison, everyone hating on them for it, then they reverse the decision, and they are still criticised. If a company turns around and reverses a decision citing the very reasons they were criticised for…
Not really, since 1) Musk knew environmental impact well before; 2) it took him a lot of time to react, way too much to put it into 'oh now I understand' ; 3) they happily support dogecoin which is basically exactly the same issue
Not much respect for Musk for this one, either he is knowingly manipulating market for whatever amoral reasons or his asperger is getting somehow the worst of him
Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact
#94So far, Elon/Tesla: 1. Bought a bunch of Bitcoin. 2. Announced they were going to accept Bitcoin, sending the price up. 3. Sold a bunch of Bitcoin to pad out otherwise poor earnings, citing their goal of "testing liquidity of the market." 4. Announced they were going to stop accepting Bitcoin, sending the price plummeting. As though he didn't know the environmental impact a week ago? As though he didn't check for liq…
Is that not market manipulation?
Bitcoin is not a regulated market and the SEC cannot interfere because of this. Someone might sue in civil court I guess.
It's not market manipulation in the strict legal sense, more so in the moral sense.
Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact
#95What I don't get is, why people are talking about environmental impact per transaction. Transactions or not, the computers are churning constantly to solve the useless function that would produce the hash with the most 0s in it.
It really doesn't have anything to do with transactions(the fees are only a fraction of the profits). The energy impact would be precisely correlated to the fiat price since the miners will be paying for the energy and equipment in fiat.
Transactions or not, the higher the price, the dirtier the proof of work blockchain is. Just look at the most recent block: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/00000000000000000002865...
reward: 6.25BTC
fees for transactions: 0.5BTC
total revenue: 6.75BTC, that is ~ $350K at the moment.
Each block is mined every 10min on average, so it is 2.1M per hour. So the total energy consumption is limited to $2.1M per hour or $1.5B per month at this price. It would be $150M if the price was $5k instead and $30B if the price goes to $1M per BTC. When that happens, 1 transaction will amount to the energy consumption of an American family for 1 year or more. At $1M per BTC, $360,000,000,000 worth of energy would be wasted per year on calculating a hash of a block that is functionally exactly the same with the same amount of transaction as the one calculated for $360, $3.6 or $0.03.
I'm sure I'm missing something like investors betting on price increases, infrastructure elasticity etc. but the correlation must be roughly like that.
Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact
#96Why is is Bitcoin mining mainly happening in China, but not other compute bound tasks?
How about machine learning. Why aren't the leading data centers for ML based in China?
Or are they?
And on the energy front - if fossil fuels are the best energy source for calculating hashes, why not for other types of number crunching?
Can boycotting one type of calculations really keep the fossil fuels under the ground? If they are useful to power computations - won't they be used for some kind of computations anyhow?
Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact
#97Elon is still promoting Dogecoin which is also proof of work. Lots of people will be harmed when it crashes. Nearly all cryptocurrencies crash 85% every once in a while.
Humor: So I'm sure your explanation of why somebody hasn't already successfully implemented practical proof of stake before is totally credible and unbiased! ;)
Not Humor: If somebody will work on it for free, do you promise to pay them in your own cryptocurrency? "Will work for stake!"
Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact
#98It seems that Tesla is using the popularity of Bitcoin to prove the concept while making a lot of money and then they can switch to Dogecoin propping its price up.
Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that you can't really take a company at face value if they reverse course after having already profited from their "lapse in judgement". The parent post lined out potential motivations behind all this that IMO aren't really that outlandish. It's speculation, but it's not some outlandish crackpot theory
Sure, but a basic rule of civility is that you should "assume good faith" and give others the benefit of the doubt when the good faith explanation is plausible.
That assumption of good faith works (mostly) for individuals. It does or should not extend to for profit corporations.
Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. If anyone believes this bs they're just enabling and encouraging musk to continue manipulating markets as he pleases. People will now start praising his decision but make no mistake, I don't know what was the real reason behind it but sure as hell it wasn't climate change and the way musk goes about releasing information that is moving markets is contemtable
I wonder if Bitcoin investors will start to work out what all those regulations they avoided were for.
Very unlikely. For Bitcoin this is just another day. 10-20% drops should be expected by anyone who knows anything about crypto.