El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin • Hacker News Board

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#311

Post by dougk16 » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:14 AM UTC

Tenoke wrote: post #87

dougk16 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good analogy with http. But keep going. After http people realized the importance of https. Sending credit card numbers and passwords in cleartext over the Internet was clearly a bad idea. So what is https in this analogy? Monero, PirateChain, Aeon, Wownero are the major contenders.

Monero yes, the other 3 do not seem like all that serious contenders. LTC with mimblewimble would be a way better example. Of smaller ones, SCRT which is a whole privacy-focused smartchain would be my other pick.

Interesting I had not heard of SCRT. The others I've vetted pretty deeply but of course I could be missing something. Everyone do your own research of course and it'll be interesting to see which one(s) win.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#312

Post by boxed » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:38 AM UTC

willmadden wrote: post #251

rawtxapp wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are 100% incorrect. Bitcoin is wildly deflationary. Therefore it does not encourage an economy to function, it encourages people to hold onto it with white knuckles. It's not oil for the economy, it's sand. In my opinion, that's the biggest lie that people have been made to believe to justify constant stealing of their purchasing power over time. People will always spend money for things they need, they will al…

Correct. Keynesian economics is a fraud we're taught to disguise the fact that we're being robbed. You don't need an inflationary currency for a currency to work. Gold and silver worked just fine for thousands of years, and only ran into problems when corrupt governments and banks printed more paper receipts than they had reserves. Central banking just legalized this practice for private profit, and then the peg to g…

Those years when "it worked fine" were also when the entire world lived in squalor and horrible conditions. Including kings. I don't think we should call the past horrors "fine" in any way. I'm not saying the gold had anything to do with it. But you shouldn't say that world was OK.

The US gold standard collapsed. That's a fact of history.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

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Post by emptysongglass » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:44 AM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #303

emptysongglass wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Inversely, with BTC, you would want to spend as little as humanly possible. Sign me up. Hyper-consumerism has laid waste to our planet, commoditized every human interaction, and polluted our minds with its drivel. Behold Denmark and its glorious decision to punish its citizenry for saving any amount of money at all. Hope you weren't thinking of saving your pennies for a ticket out of the renter's racket, Denmark wo…

>Hyper-consumerism has laid waste to our planet If you don't want to consume, then you can just...not consume. Why buy bitcoin in order to not sell it, ever?

But you would sell it to pay for things you actually need, like food and warmth. It's a built-in mechanism for regulating appetites for useless crap.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

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Post by NicoJuicy » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:14 AM UTC

emptysongglass wrote: post #275

ethanbond wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But currency needs to move in order to be, you know, a currency. The lack of upward price movement of e.g. the US dollar means that there is no advantage to sitting on it. Invest it, spend it, or lose it. Inversely, with BTC, you would want to spend as little as humanly possible. Make whatever philosophical arguments you want: this is not adding oil to the engine. This is adding sand.

> Inversely, with BTC, you would want to spend as little as humanly possible. Sign me up. Hyper-consumerism has laid waste to our planet, commoditized every human interaction, and polluted our minds with its drivel. Behold Denmark and its glorious decision to punish its citizenry for saving any amount of money at all. Hope you weren't thinking of saving your pennies for a ticket out of the renter's racket, Denmark wo…

I don't think you know how economics works.

If no one would spend money, the related countries would go bust within a year.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#315

Post by NicoJuicy » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:21 AM UTC

rawtxapp wrote: post #180

NicoJuicy wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Euh... HODL ? :) I mean, it's literally the #1 meme for cryptocurrency.

I mean, of course hodl, but not at the cost of dying of starvation or missing out on having your dream home, etc. Bitcoin subreddit is full of stories of people buying their first homes or cars, I've seen many people start their small businesses with their gains. Life is short, you enjoy/spend what you have while you're here.

> Bitcoin subreddit is full of stories of people buying their first homes or cars, I've seen many people start their small businesses with their gains.

Sure. It's like the successful ipo's. While 1% succeeds and people want to have a startup, everyone forgets that 99% fails.

I earned the 2nd biggest amount of people i know personally and i can't buy a fancy car with it. On Reddit, you can see all people come together on a population of 10 billion, lol.

People that were interviewed for Bitcoin gains in the newspaper in 2020 had 20% of my gains in 2017. And it went life changing money either.

Seeing it on Reddit mostly means that you have found your "community".

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

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Post by NicoJuicy » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:25 AM UTC

rawtxapp wrote: post #166

GhostVII wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also encourages them to invest their money. The choice isn't either spend money on over-consumerism or lose it, the choice is either spend it or invest it so someone else can allocate more resources to what they are doing.

For sure, but then you have to understand and research what you're investing in. We also end up with sky high (in my opinion unjustified) P/E ratios just because money doesn't have elsewhere to go and it creates all kinds of wild inaccurate pricing imo. In this world where the currency doesn't depreciate like ~95% over a 100 year period, only investments which make sense will get money thrown at them.

Depends on the forward P/E, how much market share the company can take and the position they are in.

If the P/E is high, it mostly has to do with what i mentioned and your are late to the "party".

But high p/e stocks != Fiat money as the op mentioned.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#317

Post by NicoJuicy » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:32 AM UTC

rawtxapp wrote: post #144

fnord123 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mandating BTC as legal tender is an awesome move. To me the most important benefit is that the 70% of the population which was excluded from banking and relegated to use physical currency will now be included. If the economy is an engine and money is the oil, El Salvador, which had only some drops of oil, will now get a complete oil change with synthetic on top of that. You are 100% incorrect. Bitcoin is wildly def…

> You are 100% incorrect. Bitcoin is wildly deflationary. Therefore it does not encourage an economy to function, it encourages people to hold onto it with white knuckles. It's not oil for the economy, it's sand. In my opinion, that's the biggest lie that people have been made to believe to justify constant stealing of their purchasing power over time. People will always spend money for things they need, they will al…

The crypto holders have an irrational fear/hate about inflation and forget that it's a requirement for people to spend their money and supporting the economy.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

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Post by celticninja » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 11:55 AM UTC

sklearncowboy wrote: post #109

xwolfi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like maybe there are more pressing problems than making bitcoin with this electricity supply. I dont know but it feels wasted on a fad.

I think this is a real problem in the West. Consider how much brain power and resources have been spent on quant finance and crypto now in the past 20 years. Imagine if all those resources had been spent on something more productive.

Think of the worldwide effort, resources and brain power spent on memes since the creation of the internet, if we didn't create the internet surely we could be sending people to other galaxies by now.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

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Post by fnord123 » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 12:09 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #306

fnord123 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is presented in a conspiratorial manner. "Who wants their money to be worth less?" "Governments don't want you to know..." It's very simple. 100 euros in your hand right now is worth more than a possible/probable 100 euros in your hand next week. And Jeff Booth is arguing that we are trapped in a mental prison because we agree with this obvious fact.

Inflation is a different problem: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but if you have a bird in your hand you are better off trading it for a table because somehow a table in the hand depreciates less than a bird?

I mean, yes? Are we explaining investing from first principles?

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#320

Post by sanderjd » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 12:50 PM UTC

rsj_hn wrote: post #300

sanderjd wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a distribution problem? They can't build enough power cables, or they've already built them over as far an extent as is manageable? I can see how it's easier to just put a big data center on site, but it seems like it would be better to invest differently.

To invest in a data center requires things like reliable property rights, a functioning judicial system, peace and security, network connectivity and other supply chain issues. You want rule of law, peace, security and infrastructure. The advantage of bitcoin is that once you mine the coins, it is a lot harder for someone to come and take them from you, whether that someone is a rebel group or a corrupt government of…

I think you misunderstood my question. My guess is that the plan to use the volcano for mining bitcoin is to put a big bitcoin mining data center close to it and powered by it. My question is why this is better than expanding distribution of the power generated to be used for more useful things across the country and region.