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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

#231
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…

BTC has pivoted away from the Bitcoin whitepaper in mid 2017, decided to constrain its transactional troughput and went the "store of value" route. It can handle some 4 transactions per second.

An unconstrained version of bitcoin can handle hundreds, and with technological improvements thousands and then tens of thousands of transactions per second. I can already do this on a Raspberry Pi [0] (in controlled conditions).

Bitcoin's footprint is sadly big, but still smaller than that of the banking industry. I foresee a future where most of the mining is done with renewables, as this is what will make the most sense.

[0] https://read.cash/@mtrycz/how-my-rpi4-handles-scalenets-256m...

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#232
Why did Tesla saying they would accept payment in bitcoin move the price so much anyway? Surely it was only ever going to be used in a very small fraction of Tesla’s sales. And Tesla’s sales only represent a very small fraction of the total number of bitcoin transactions.

Were bitcoin speculators behaving rationally when they bought and sold on this news? And if not, don’t they deserve the majority of the blame here?

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#233
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought that Bitcoin was particularly bad because block sizes were small, so there's a big incentive to mine and get mining fees. No. Doesn't make sense. Miners get rewarded for spending energy in all PoW coins. I don't think details such as block size matters. Dogecoin BTW as well has the 1MB block limit, their block time is just smaller (1 minute). However dogecoin has quite small amount of transactions compare…

Dogecoin is incredibly more efficient for kilowatt per hash than bitcoin. Of the very popular older coins only XRP is more efficient. https://www.trgdatacenters.com/most-environment-friendly-cry...

KW per hashrate doesn't make much sense. At that point you're just comparing the efficiency for the available hardware for hashing function, ASICs that are designed to handle up to calculating SHA256 of up to 1MB of data versus scrypt ASICs.

Since that's the case, your statement of "of the very popular older coins only XRP is more efficient" falls apart as at the very least Litecoin would need to be at the exact same spot.

And if you are talking about per mined blocks, then you are putting the network difficulty into the picture and arguing a lower network difficulty (hence lower network hashrate) as a selling point isn't going to get you anywhere.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#234
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…

BTC has pivoted away from the Bitcoin whitepaper in mid 2017, decided to constrain its transactional troughput and went the "store of value" route. It can handle some 4 transactions per second. An unconstrained version of bitcoin can handle hundreds, and with technological improvements thousands and then tens of thousands of transactions per second. I can already do this on a Raspberry Pi [0] (in controlled condition…

As I said, the number of transactions is irrelevant up until the block reward gets minuscule or completely ends. That is statistically not expected to happen before a few decades.

I know about the banking industry argument but the banking industry is not only about transactions and they also catch up with technology, removing staff closing down offices and branches. In fact, those related to transactions are already almost gone, the rest is about things where BTC is irrelevant anyway, things like compliance anti-fraud etc. If anything, the crypto exchanges assumed many of the banking infrastructure.

Blockchain vs a centralised database is not even a competition when it comes to efficiency, no matter how much you want o twist the argument the fundamentals are rock solid.

What blockchain solves is the trust issue but only for storing the value and not for using it. The problem is, we as humans rarely transact with people who we don't trust. Even with the ransomware and drug trade use cases of the crypto coins, the transaction depends on the trust that the seller will deliver the goods.

The only possible use case is when the society ceases to function. When that happens, BTC would be very useful but when that happens the economy would be fraction of what is now because everything beyond transactions will still need trust so that the labour can integrate vertically and do high value production.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#235

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…

Elon is a con man.

I can't find this youtube video of an engineer explaining why the Boring Tunnel is hyped up bullshit. It's just a slow car based subway with very low throughput due to by-design bottlenecks at the entry- and exit-points.

Can't find it. Wouldn't be surprised to learn that Google/Youtube is shadow banning it.

Somebody knows what I mean and can post a link?

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#236
post #11

Earlier 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.

Much better for people to learn not to make investment decisions based on a single company.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#237
post #104
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

With a market cap that is 20 times lower, higher market cap means higher prices, means more miners and thus more energy requirement

Not quite. Energy requirements correspond to daily dollar emission (column PoW produced 24h in [1]).

Early in their emission, coins can have high daily emission and low marketcap. And dogecoin is at less than 1/3 of its 500B soft total supply [2].

[1] https://www.f2pool.com/coins

[2] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#238
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh well, I guess bully to musk for a clever trick but he's shedding trust fast!

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#239
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Musk said they were looking for crypto with an energy requirement of <1% of bitcoin's, so that would rule Doge out too.

He should look at the one that uses 0.15% of bitcoin's while having a much more even distribution than Dogecoin (which had 20x block reward in its first year).
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