Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#161

Post by tacitusarc » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #141

endisneigh wrote: post #10

other than trying to get the money of suckers, I've never understood the point of bitcoin. no currency, digital or not, can be removed from the world's activities. why would you ever want something that could plunge 30% in a day? even if it went up 5 billion percent, then what? everyone sells and it goes down? what's the point? it's like the most zero-sum activity imaginable. edit: I'm sincerely wondering what the va…

Well so far it’s anything but zero sum. From nothing to tens of thousands of dollars in 10yrs is not zero sum. It’s highly volatile yes, and has lost >= 80% of its value four times in those ten years (so this little 30% dip is nothing by comparison). But not zero sum. It originally mainly appealed to two factions: techies who like disrupting big things from first principles, and people who were long concerned with th…

It's technically negative sum as it costs energy and results in no value, not even a painting you can hang on your wall.

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#162

Post by drcross » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #145

paulgb wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait until you hear all the energy it takes to run the current financial system Every Bitcoin defender repeats this line, but I never see any numbers. Whatever the energy use is, it's provably less than Bitcoin by any metric like transaction volume or market cap, by the simple fact that if you were to scale up Bitcoin's energy use for comparison to the world financial system, it would use magnitudes more energy tha…

The numbers I have seen usually comes from something like this https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2 However, it's a terribly bad faith argument. Essentially, they wrap up everything that isn't involved with ledger maintenance (ATM power, data center power for running the website, Air conditioning at branches power usage) and compare that to Bitcoin, which is only doing ledger maintenance. They do that, because i…

>We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis.

You weren't able to send value from one part of the world to another in minutes without an intermediary for a tiny fraction of the transaction amount in the 70's and you still can't do it today without crypto.

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#163

Post by tlb » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:04 PM UTC

alimw wrote: post #159

SkyMarshal wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well so far it’s anything but zero sum. From nothing to tens of thousands of dollars in 10yrs is not zero sum. It’s highly volatile yes, and has lost >= 80% of its value four times in those ten years (so this little 30% dip is nothing by comparison). But not zero sum. It originally mainly appealed to two factions: techies who like disrupting big things from first principles, and people who were long concerned with th…

When it began it was worth nothing and when it ends it will be worth nothing. Zero sum.

However, it will have transferred a lot of money from people who are bad at predicting the future to people who are good at predicting the future. This is good for the economy, because more capital is in the hands of people who are likely to invest in things that work.

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#164

Post by cogman10 » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

disruptalot wrote: post #151

cogman10 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pure garbage. The problem bitcoin solves, a distributed ledger, is one that's simply solved with a ledger over a trust network. In otherwords, this is a "solution" that is burning TWh of energy doing something global banks accomplish with kWh of power. All the power funneled into BTC would be far better spent doing anything useful. From electrolysis to protein folding. Also, it should be noted that shiny rock…

Central banks don't do fixed supply money. Investment banks don't do payments and financial products that don't involve a middleman. Bitcoin is a censorship resistant, neutral money and payment network. Banks don't do that. Banks don't consume "kWh of power" by the way. From the endless wars to protect the US (dollar) hegemony to 50 floor buildings draped in marble. Thats all cost + energy.

Bitcoin couldn't exist without the same endless wars and hegemony. Where do you think the computational power COMES from?

That's why it's a bad faith argument. The only thing bitcoiners want to compare is the power cost of running the mining rigs. Why don't they include the cost to manufacture said rigs? To mine minerals to build the silicon needed to power their currency? Why don't they include the governments needed to make sure the equipment supply chains are properly maintained? Why don't they include the amount of power needed to run the servers and switches needed to power the internet needed to run btc? Why aren't you looking at the construction costs for the buildings housing the mining rigs?

I'll tell you why, because they aren't making a good faith argument. They are trying to come up with ways to make BTC good and banking bad. That's it.

Lots of things cost energy. The question has to be "what are we accomplishing with that spent energy". When two algorithms do the same thing and one burns TWh while the other burns kwh.. guess which one I'm going to favor?

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#165

Post by 8note » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #141

endisneigh wrote: post #10

other than trying to get the money of suckers, I've never understood the point of bitcoin. no currency, digital or not, can be removed from the world's activities. why would you ever want something that could plunge 30% in a day? even if it went up 5 billion percent, then what? everyone sells and it goes down? what's the point? it's like the most zero-sum activity imaginable. edit: I'm sincerely wondering what the va…

Well so far it’s anything but zero sum. From nothing to tens of thousands of dollars in 10yrs is not zero sum. It’s highly volatile yes, and has lost >= 80% of its value four times in those ten years (so this little 30% dip is nothing by comparison). But not zero sum. It originally mainly appealed to two factions: techies who like disrupting big things from first principles, and people who were long concerned with th…

What's the definition you're using for zero-sum? Usually the definition is about the amount of value being conserved, rather than having to do with the total amount of value passing through

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#166

Post by cogman10 » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

drcross wrote: post #158

unknown_error wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would cryptocurrency free us from financial tyranny? At some scale finance becomes a state affair, and regulated by law backed by a monopoly on violence. Or, otherwise, you end up with crypto-warlords with private military companies. In neither sense would the average user be meaningfully "free"; it seems like you're replacing democratic checks-and-balances with harder-to-regulate digital capital, which is "freed…

>How would cryptocurrency free us from financial tyranny? Inflation is theft. Crypto prevents this theft.

Bwhahaha!

You mean the crypto that just lost 30% of it's value? Literally the topic of the article. THAT crypto is an inflation defense?

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#167

Post by 8note » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

paulgb wrote: post #130

drcross wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll listen to Bitcoin FUD all day but you don't seem to care about the hydro carbons purged in the process of strip mining the earth for shiny rocks though. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/why-bitcoin-may-actually-spe...

> you don't seem to care about the hydro carbons purged in the process of strip mining the earth for shiny rocks though This persistent idea that people who care about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin somehow single it out is silly. I dislike unnecessarily large SUVs, cruise ships, American suburb culture, and diamond mining too. Bitcoin just happens to be the topic of this thread.

Of note: things like SUV's still have energy related regulations tied to them.

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#168

Post by alimw » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #163

alimw wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it began it was worth nothing and when it ends it will be worth nothing. Zero sum.

However, it will have transferred a lot of money from people who are bad at predicting the future to people who are good at predicting the future. This is good for the economy, because more capital is in the hands of people who are likely to invest in things that work.

Well we know the people who lose significant money will be a strict subset of people who are greedy. Maybe that's a good thing? More seriously, study after study has shown that unless you take the fundamentals into consideration there is no way reliably to make money on the stock market, and certainly that will be the case for Bitcoin for which there are, amazingly, no fundamentals. The exception would be if you were, say, a person who can manipulate the market with tweets and with large purchases through a publicly owned company that you control.

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#169

Post by 8note » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:16 PM UTC

drcross wrote: post #162

cogman10 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers I have seen usually comes from something like this https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2 However, it's a terribly bad faith argument. Essentially, they wrap up everything that isn't involved with ledger maintenance (ATM power, data center power for running the website, Air conditioning at branches power usage) and compare that to Bitcoin, which is only doing ledger maintenance. They do that, because i…

>We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis. You weren't able to send value from one part of the world to another in minutes without an intermediary for a tiny fraction of the transaction amount in the 70's and you still can't do it today without crypto.

You can't per se do it with crypto today either.

You go through two intermediaries with crypto. One to turn your chinese currency into crypto, then another to turn the crypto into us currency.

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#170

Post by drcross » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #166

drcross wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How would cryptocurrency free us from financial tyranny? Inflation is theft. Crypto prevents this theft.

Bwhahaha! You mean the crypto that just lost 30% of it's value? Literally the topic of the article. THAT crypto is an inflation defense?

Yes. It's in price discovery phase. Volatility is expected until it reaches a sufficient market cap to not be affected by single events. It's pretty silly to think what it's like now is what it will be like when the market cap hits that of gold.