271–276 of 276 posts
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Tesla didn't dump bitcoin. They only sold 10% of their holding, so any negative impact of their decision to cease acceptance of bitcoin for vehicle purchases, on the value of their bitcoin holdings, would outweigh the gains they made from pumping bitcoin and selling a portion of it.
> They only sold 10% of their holding That we know of.
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It's not a fundamental thing it's just that looking at the per-transaction energy cost really puts things in perspective. And 500kWh is hard to comprehend so I like to put it in perspective by comparing it to locomotives. An F40PH, which is a very common American passenger locomotive as seen on Caltrain, Amtrak, Metra and the MBTA puts out about 2.4MW at full blast. So, just under 5 transactions per hour, per locomot…
Expressing the energy consumption in electric vehicle mileage makes the numbers more tangible. 500kWh is ~3000 kilometers of range for a mid-sized EV, or enough to move a family across the whole continent. Just to shift BTC from one pocket to another.
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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 materi…
It's so easy to find something 'patently absurd' in a comment if you aren't bound by the actual content of the comment.
Maybe there was something confusing in my choice of words, given the downvotes.
I don't think HN is naive enough to think that large publicly traded companies genuinely make decisions based on moral concepts like right and wrong. If they do the right thing, they do it because they see an advantage in it. That's how they're designed to function.
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Carbon credits are doing their exact purpose. It is moving profitability into environmentally friendly sectors and out of polluting sectors. This is in order to make polluting more expensive and environmentally friendly cheaper... I’m not sure why you would think selling carbon credits is evil.
So if I'm allowed to put out 1000kg of CO2, and my neighbour as well for a total of 2000kg of CO2, hey, let me be zero emissions and emit 5kg of CO2. Hooray, it's better for the environment, the CO2 emissions are down 995kg! Oh wait, I sold my credits to my neighbor, so total CO2 emissions are still 2000kg. Hooray, I'm saving the planet! Worship me! /s
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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.
The way I understand all the responses to my comment, it seems a lot of people have the impression that the assumption of good faith makes someone naive... But that's absolutely not the case.
The assumption of good faith does not require one to "believe" that any given action is the product of good faith. The only thing it requires is that good faith be the starting point from which you evaluate someone else's (or yes, a for-profit corporation's) actions. All one needs to do is begin by first trying to understand how an action could be explained by factors other than bad faith, or could be compatible with good faith.
This is in fact a very weak requirement!