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$365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

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Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#261

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Doesn't matter: considering that all cryptocurrencies have significant environmental impact, using them would force ESG-screening funds to drop the company.

Bitcoin is deliberately inefficient to a horrifying degree but it is not "all cryptocurrencies". Most modern designs are thousands or millions of times more efficient.

And thus worth 1000s to 100000s of times less money. Bitcoin is about turning electricity into bits, the trick is the decreasing amount of bitcoin, thus get in at the base of the pyramid to make more money

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#262
So many comments in this thread suggest Musk is an all knowing individual. "How could he miss this?" "I can't believe someone so wealthy can miss something so important!" And so on.

This is a really sad view, IMHO. Wealth may provide more opportunities to learn and expand, but that doesn't mean the wealthy know everything. He should have done his research, maybe he did and decided to go that route anyway, but wealth is only correlated to knowledge, not causative.

Edit to add: No defense for Musk here, I just hate seeing wealth equated to smarts.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#263

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The proof of stake ETH2 chain is already live for Ethereum and has been since December. That chain is parallel to the existing proof of work chain. They now need to merge the POW chain into the ETH2 validator nodes so they can conduct consensus from there on. The merge has been simulated already and is being tested. Core devs seem to be confident it will be feasible with low risk. But of course, there's always a chan…

It's one thing for it to be live, it's another thing for it to be stress tested in actual production/real world with people's actual money. I have a vested interest in hoping it lands successfully, but being a software engineer, I know how many bugs I've had even in simple programs, I can only imagine the kinds of bugs that will be discovered in eth2 considering just how complex it is.

The proof of stake chain is running in production with $16B staked in it.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#264
post #250

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Okay, here's my Big Brain, 4D Chess take: Elon Musk wanted to adopt Bitcoin, but he knew there was this big problem with energy consumption. It's bad for his brand, and perhaps goes against his own ethics. Could he say "hey, get the energy consumption down and I'll go all-in with Tesla"? People wouldn't think much of it. Better option: Buy a huge stake in Bitcoin, announce that he'll be accepting bitcoin at Tesla, ge…

The energy consumption is the only security mechanism Bitcoin has. It's impossible to drive it down. PoS would be a completely different fork, and it's not clear how secure/censorship-proof it would be.

Any protocol change is, by definition, a fork. If everyone says the new PoS Bitcoin is the real Bitcoin, then it is so.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#265

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I didn't downvote you, but your comment is the kind that gets downvoted. You're pointing out something that's true and besides the point. MSFT stock can decrease in value without any shares getting destroyed. The market value is in fact what people mean by "$X wiped off".

Ok, I might not have been familiar with the use of the term. I thought in the context of crypto, where coins can actually be "wiped off", in that they can be destroyed and removed from the available pool, it was a little confusing to me. But if this is a common usage to mean a sudden drop in price then I take it back.

General crypto news and talk is pretty lowest common denominator. I agree because of pointing cryptocurrency to null essentially and literally wiping it out, the phrase isn’t the best. But it’s still a common enough phrase.

FYI. I know virtually nothing about cryptocurrencies.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#266
post #234

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And denying covid kept workers in his factory, against the law. I think there needs to be some rule in discussion that as soon as you start arguing over if someone is dumb or evil, you have to stop. It's impossible to figure out which (or what mix) it actually is.

I'm fairly certain it was not in violation of "the law", but rather in violation of edicts from unelected officials.

"The law" gives public health officials authority to issue those "edicts". Try taking them to court and see how far that gets you. Hint: not very.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#267
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, here's my Big Brain, 4D Chess take: Elon Musk wanted to adopt Bitcoin, but he knew there was this big problem with energy consumption. It's bad for his brand, and perhaps goes against his own ethics. Could he say "hey, get the energy consumption down and I'll go all-in with Tesla"? People wouldn't think much of it. Better option: Buy a huge stake in Bitcoin, announce that he'll be accepting bitcoin at Tesla, ge…

It is not possible to clean up bitcoin. Even if it moved entirely to renewable energy it would still be a massive opportunity cost. There are productive uses that energy could be put to. Bitcoin is not productive. Using gigawatts to process a few transactions a second, when existing financial frameworks can process millions of transactions a seconds at a fraction of the energy input means that bitcoin is always a mas…

Existing financial frameworks sit on top of the whole lot of trust-providing institutions, that include governments and us army. If you would compare energy consumption of all that, bitcoin could be cheaper alternative. Maybe.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#268
post #54

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How is this a pump and dump? They never dumped. It is certainly stupidity from Musk, but I don't know why you are implying maliciousness when they are still holding Bitcoin and therefore they are equally hurt by this drop in value.

Last information we have is from late April saying that TSLA sold off 10 percent of their bitcoin holdings. Nobody has any idea what their holdings are today.

Can't you just look at the blockchain?

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#269
post #168

I don't really buy the pump and dump take here. Even if it had been an intentional pump, no reason to trigger a selloff. Some Theses: - Elon is a quick decision maker, he could have genuinely been persuaded about energy usage post-hoc. The energy bit does run somewhat contrary to Tesla's core mission. - In line with this, tesla may be about to form a partnership or make a move with another crypto platform, both becau…

I find it hard to believe that a guy who talks non stop about clean energy does not know how much dirty energy cryptomining uses. It is even less likely that he signed off on a $1.5b purchase of it, and that no-one involved in that process brought up its energy use.

It is not clear at all how much dirty energy cryptomining uses, so...

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#270
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly certain it was not in violation of "the law", but rather in violation of edicts from unelected officials.

"The law" gives public health officials authority to issue those "edicts". Try taking them to court and see how far that gets you. Hint: not very.

Well, given how nobody was prosecuted, taking it to court seems unnecessary, which was my point.
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