Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean you will see people here on this forum argue that bitcoin mostly uses up peak energy and unused capacity and such bullshit nonsense - it's frankly not that hard to spin a narrative that could sound plausable. But then when you see people firing up coal plants in your back yard just to mine BTC (as opposed to China) reality suddenly kicks in and it's hard to spin bullshit arround that. Regulators are really dro…
You see people firing up coal plants in your back yard? That's not an experience most people ever have.
$365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin
341–350 of 758 posts
Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes it sound like he was doing a cheap pump and dump. Maybe you're right.
Tesla still has 90% of the Bitcoin they bought. If his proclamation knocks, say, half the value off Bitcoin, and it stays there, that wasn't a very clever pump and dump, because they kinda skipped the 'dump' part.
They only declare their sales after the fact. There is a chance that Tesla owns no bitcoin at this time. Probably they still do, but...
Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Bitcoin sits on top of those very same institutions as well. The only thing stopping criminal gangs from stealing the keys to your wallet forcibly at gunpoint is the justice system. And the blockchain could not exist without the massive government subsidized investments in network infrastructure.
Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cus he's not that bright. Isn't this the elephant in the room that no one wants to consider? Why do we have to start with the assumption that Musk is a genius, then work back from that? The dude thought covid would go away last May. He thinks it's easier to make Mars habitable than it is to keep the Earth habitable. He's thought that full self driving was 6 months away for literally 4 years now. And he didn't really…
SpaceX wins lots of space contracts with the help of Musk's "Occupy Mars" marketing. Tesla sells lots of cars on the promise of self-driving in the marketing. Musk bought BTC, single-handedly pumped the price of BTC, and then sold at a huge profit. I don't think he's a genius but Musk is definitely not stupid. He's just not playing the obvious game you think he's playing.
Isn't this just the same thing idiots did for Trump though? Look at whatever Trump does, and then find a reason in retrospect why actually that was a smart move.
SpaceX wins contracts because they are able to send payloads into space, nothing to do with marketing, and sending payloads into space isn't even that hard - they basically beat out Nasa who weren't allowed to compete and Boeing who can't send a plane to 30,000ft without fucking it up.
Tesla sells lots of cars because they're electric and Apple made battery technology cheap.
BTC has been running up and down far longer than Musk has been involved and it'll continue after he's gone.
Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin
#345So 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…
He may not be all-knowing, but my retired, former customer service employee grandmother knows Bitcoin is produced with dirty energy in China. It's not exactly secret knowledge.
So, it's obviously a pump and dump.
Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can do both at the same time and we should.
"Global Warming" is about the Earth going ~2C to 4C out-of-whack with our traditional norms over the next century or so. Mars is about being at -60C all the time, or roughly 80C away from what humans want. And temperature isn't even the worst part: Mars doesn't have enough oxygen for Humans to survive. Mars doesn't have enough nitrogen for plants to grow (and make oxygen). Mars doesn't have enough gravity to keep a d…
In your nightmare scenario we're going to need terraforming tech for Earth.
If all of humanity lives on Earth though, we're just one unlucky meteorite away from going extinct.
Given this: let's develop the terraforming tech for Mars, and establish colonies there.
Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin
#347Very perplexing behavior from Musk, I must say. Bitcoin's energy consumption has been front-and-center for a few years now and even more so when the bull market got hot. How does Musk decide to throw $1.5 billion worth of Tesla's cash into BTC without acknowledging this? I was expecting a little bit more due-diligence from him, but he's been absolutely consumed by crypto markets in general.
Cus he's not that bright. Isn't this the elephant in the room that no one wants to consider? Why do we have to start with the assumption that Musk is a genius, then work back from that? The dude thought covid would go away last May. He thinks it's easier to make Mars habitable than it is to keep the Earth habitable. He's thought that full self driving was 6 months away for literally 4 years now. And he didn't really…
That's not the answer but it's close. The correct answer is that "geniuses" can be dumb. Intelligence doesn't make one invulnerable to bad ideas, cons, indoctrination, herd behavior, logical fallacies, addictions, delusions, or anything else.
Related is the fact that billionaires and millionaires are just humans with lots of money. People seem to think a lot of money makes people somehow superhuman, or vice versa. It doesn't. Billionaires are subject to all the same fallacies and errors as anyone else. There is no superhuman enlightened "illuminati" that is somehow above and beyond the rest of us, at least cognitively. They might have a little bit more information but they are no more rational than we are.
Based on the COVID denial, cryptocurrency stuff, and memes if I didn't know better I'd say he's been hanging around on the 'chans... and I don't know better.
Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Global Warming" is about the Earth going ~2C to 4C out-of-whack with our traditional norms over the next century or so. Mars is about being at -60C all the time, or roughly 80C away from what humans want. And temperature isn't even the worst part: Mars doesn't have enough oxygen for Humans to survive. Mars doesn't have enough nitrogen for plants to grow (and make oxygen). Mars doesn't have enough gravity to keep a d…
In your nightmare scenario we're going to need terraforming tech for Earth. If all of humanity lives on Earth though, we're just one unlucky meteorite away from going extinct. Given this: let's develop the terraforming tech for Mars, and establish colonies there.
> In your nightmare scenario we're going to need terraforming tech both on Earth and Mars.
The hypothetical technology to reduce Earth's temperature by 4-degrees Celsius is simply going to be fundamentally different from the hypothetical technology to increase Mars's temperature by 80-degrees Celsius.
Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin
#349Meanwhile, Palantir announces an interest in accepting Bitcoin payments and investing in cryptocurrencies.[1] Leading from behind! [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/3-palantir-allows-payments-bi...
Peter Thiel is full pro-Bitcoin.
Is that the same Peter Thiel who famously talked about how China was pushing bitcoin to destabilize the dollar?
Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elon is a gambler on a hot streak. He keeps making big bets that pay off, but the luck to cunning ratio is dangerously high. Some day the shoe is going to go cold and he's going to be fucked. He'll drop off the richest people list faster than he climbed it (which was too fast).
Unfortunately that's not how the current setup works. The most successful the gambler is, the more of other's people they get to gamble. He's at that point where he could never be right again and it'd never personally affect him. I mean if Tesla goes to 100 tomorrow morning, who gets hurt more? Elon or instructional investors that are supposed to be funding things like pensions?
Assume Tesla stock fell to 100. Well I bought mt stock at 189 pre-split, so the share I bought at 189 are still worth 500. It is the day traders who get hurt, but the people in it for the long haul are still doing fine.
I always get a laugh for the people trying to scare people that Tesla stock will fall while not realizing a lot of the early purchaser will still make a profit even it the stock tanks big.