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Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

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Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#131

Post by ArtTimeInvestor »

qeternity wrote: post #115
ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #96

Why 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…

Because there is tremendous risk of having data located in China. This is not the case with Bitcoin. If you put your SOTA AI/ML project there, your IP will be stolen, guaranteed. If you put your Bitcoin mining there, your only risk is the hardware.

The Bitcoin mining farms in China are not rented out to western customers. They do not sell the raw processing power. They sell the finished product: mined blocks.

They could do the same for ML. Sell the trained models.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#132

Post by swinglock »

tromp wrote: post #59
spottybanana wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile they started accepting Dogecoin at SpaceX just couple of days ago . Dogecoin has exactly the same energy spending incentives as Bitcoin. The whole set of actions doesn't sound very logical.

> Dogecoin has exactly the same energy spending incentives as Bitcoin. While the incentives are the same, Dogecoin has roughly 7.4x lower energy requirements than Bitcoin currently, so accepting Dogecoin instead of Bitcoin is a tad less offensive.

Only because it's not used.

This is like arguing we should switch from using cars currently on the road because they use energy, to cars currently standing in a garage, because we measured and clearly the parked cars use less energy than the cars on the road.

It's not even hyperbole, it's precisely equivalent and just as boneheaded as it sounds.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#133

Post by [deleted] »

arcticbull wrote: post #10

So 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…

[deleted]

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#134

Post by vkou »

epgui wrote: post #75
asddubs wrote: post #64

Earlier 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.

You should assume good faith until money comes into play. Once that happens, you should assume little.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#135

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #96

Why 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…

Probably because it's a good way to funnel money out of China

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#136

Post by ALittleLight »

galeos wrote: post #116

He is also suggests they are look at Proof of Stake cryptocurrencies with significantly lower energy use. Maybe this is just a pre-cursor to Musk launching a PoS 'Tesla EnviroCoin' down the line...

I suggest E-coin. I cannot imagine the hype for such a coin.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#137

Post by KirillPanov »

x3sphere wrote: post #63
Negitivefrags wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, but none of it makes any sense. I have to imagine the decision to buy Bitcoin and accept it as payment was vetted by a lot of people internally, not just Musk himself. And the environmental impacts from mining are well known. Musk isn’t stupid either - he must’ve known this would be an issue for Tesla’s image.

It all makes perfect sense if they in fact want to buy more bitcoin at the moment. There has been a whole lot of very, very ugly inflation data released over the last few days.

This would explain why they refrained from selling before making an announcement which they surely knew would (and did: -10%) tank the BTC/USD rate.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#138

Post by lbriner »

post_below wrote: post #111
Athas wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because this makes it seem like they are not making the right decisions because they are right , but only because doing the wrong thing made them unpopular. It makes you wonder what other wrong things they do that doesn't elicit enough of a popular response to make them reconsider. It's not like the environmental impact of Bitcoin was a subtle or obscure issue when they first made the decision. They should have k…

For profit companies don't make decisions because they're right. Right and wrong have no meaning in capitalism. Companies make decisions based on profits. We might wish it were different, but it very clearly isn't. The best we can hope for is that public pressure convinces companies that right and profitable overlap.

That is an absolute statement being applied to a relative world.

The idea that a company won't make a right decision ever is patently absurd. The idea that there are good companies and bad companies is likewise absurd.

Of course, a large company has to worry about money because their burn rate is so high, to imply otherwise is naive. It doesn't follow that a cash rich company won't decide to sustainably source materials or pay a fair wage for their employees.

Whether companies should ever be allowed to get that large is a different discussion.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#139

Post by ArkanExplorer »

mrtksn wrote: post #95

What 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 b…

And as such, the best thing that Tesla can do for the environment is to sell all of its PoW coins and continue to talk-down the price.

They, and we, can also petition Governments to ban the exchange of PoW coins for fiat. PoW coins serve no purpose and represent a egregious waste of our civilization's advanced manufactured goods and electricity. Taking crypto down a notch might also make ransomware attacks less likely.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#140

Post by mrweasel »

lwhi wrote: post #2

I see this as market manipulation. Tesla hasn't suddenly become aware of information not available when Tesla initially announced they'd accept bitcoin as payment.

Either market manipulation or incompetence, it's one of the two.

For someone who owns Tesla and a solar company, claiming that he didn't already knew that Bitcoin is a huge energy sink seems unlikely.

Tesla is a little more high profile, but they certainly aren't the first company to implement something, or take a action, where you from the outside question the environmental impact. Only to have the company reverse the same decision a while later, claiming a huge effort to help the environment.

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