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Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

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Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#381

Post by arcticbull »

scottiebarnes wrote: post #367
arcticbull wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As imtringued also pointed out to you, the central bank in no uncertain terms cannot create money. QE is not carried out by creating money. It's carried out by creating bank reserves and exchanging them for assets at primary dealers, increasing liquidity. That article you linked elides a number of key intermediate steps. QE indirectly increases the money supply as I explained to you. Not directly as you seem to conti…

Are we hiding behind linguistic semantics? If the fed wants to buy $100b of assets tomorrow, it can do so, despite not having that money. The interbank mechanics are unimportant, the point is the value is created at will, creating inflation, and is a decision of a few powerful individuals.

Your article you keep referencing is wrong in context scotty. They're not buying them for money, they're swapping them for reserves. It's not the same thing. It's an edge case operation, that the Fed will unwind in time, as they were happily doing between 2009 and the COVID pandemic. You're reading a babies-first-economics article. We're not in 101 territory anymore. At least read the Forbes one I linked you that goes into more detail.

You are wrong on this one, and you do not understand enough to even want to challenge your assumptions. We're done here, and I once again, implore you to audit an economics class.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#382

Post by scottiebarnes »

arcticbull wrote: post #381
scottiebarnes wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we hiding behind linguistic semantics? If the fed wants to buy $100b of assets tomorrow, it can do so, despite not having that money. The interbank mechanics are unimportant, the point is the value is created at will, creating inflation, and is a decision of a few powerful individuals.

Your article you keep referencing is wrong in context scotty. They're not buying them for money, they're swapping them for reserves. It's not the same thing. It's an edge case operation, that the Fed will unwind in time, as they were happily doing between 2009 and the COVID pandemic. You're reading a babies-first-economics article. We're not in 101 territory anymore. At least read the Forbes one I linked you that goe…

Maybe Chairman Powell explains it better?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrjoElG8KGI

PELLEY: Fair to say you simply flooded the system with money?

POWELL: Yes. We did. That's another way to think about it. We did.

PELLEY: Where does it come from? Do you just print it?

POWELL: We print it digitally. So as a central bank, we have the ability to create money digitally. And we do that by buying Treasury Bills or bonds for other government guaranteed securities. And that actually increases the money supply. We also print actual currency and we distribute that through the Federal Reserve banks.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#383

Post by shagie »

atrus wrote: post #89
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. Dyson spheres and stellar engineering to power cryptocurrency mining rigs. I shudder at the thought.

Isn't this roughly what happened in Accelerando? We split the solar system and gave everything below the asteroid belt over to the marketing bots.

Yep. It's a good book. To read it from the author's site: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

Economics 2.0 in the later third of the story.

> Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally becoming visible on a cosmological scale.

> There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various states of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in the water zone around old Earth. Earth's biosphere has been in the intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization can fix them – gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red ball of wool the size of a young red giant.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#384

Post by arcticbull »

scottiebarnes wrote: post #367
arcticbull wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As imtringued also pointed out to you, the central bank in no uncertain terms cannot create money. QE is not carried out by creating money. It's carried out by creating bank reserves and exchanging them for assets at primary dealers, increasing liquidity. That article you linked elides a number of key intermediate steps. QE indirectly increases the money supply as I explained to you. Not directly as you seem to conti…

Are we hiding behind linguistic semantics? If the fed wants to buy $100b of assets tomorrow, it can do so, despite not having that money. The interbank mechanics are unimportant, the point is the value is created at will, creating inflation, and is a decision of a few powerful individuals.

Scottie even in that video you linked me you stopped short of the next sentence which says:

NARRATOR: But by law, Chairman Powell's Federal Reserve can only lend money that must be paid back.

Which is what I've been telling you.

Powell was providing a simplification, an analogy, so that folks such as yourself without a meaningful background in economics can understand. Obviously he did an insufficient job, and I strongly suspect this clip was out of context.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#385

Post by arcticbull »

scottiebarnes wrote: post #374
arcticbull wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and? That comes with consequences. If the creditworthiness of the US is not maintained internationally (i.e. by inflating the currency to evade insolvency) then it will lose its reserve status as significant global clout and domestic welfare. The risk of the US doing that is reflected in its credit rating which is reflected in the interest rate the US has to pay on its bonds. The interest rate is the compensati…

That was my rebuttal to the response that central banks can't create infinite money. You agree they can service an unlimited amount of debt (with consequences), but you refuted that they can create unlimited money. But they're the same operation.

I do not. Under the current model, it can't really happen. However Congress could change the model to make it happen. I was just entertaining your hypothetical.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#386

Post by zepto »

exolymph wrote: post #334
geertj wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's scary is that the whole thing was designed to be unstoppable. It’s only unstoppable within the game theoretic model of crypto itself, not within the larger societal context. Once Bitcoin power consumption enters the common discourse, my guess is that politicians will step in and simply outlaw PoW systems. There is no real downside for politicians. The average voter hasn’t yet invested their life savings into…

This gets into First Amendment tangles.

How? Nobody is prevented from speaking.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#387

Post by oneoff786 »

esarbe wrote: post #370
oneoff786 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the price of food goes up, and farmers have a bad time?

Then the rich countries cannot dump their chronic surpluses on the international markets and kill the local markets of developing countries for small-scale farmers.

Oversimplified beyond the point of usefulness. The effects of reducing farmer subsidies are enormous and far more wide reaching than dumping implications in developing countries.

The original question was why can’t we just feed everyone.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#388

Post by robomartin »

qwertygnu wrote: post #50
robomartin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blockchain is the single largest threat to banking, and that doesn’t come without a price. That's an interesting statement. The first question that occurred to me was: Why does banking have to be threatened? In other words, is this a solution looking for a problem?

Yes there are lots of problems with banking. Cryptocurrency does have a reason to exist, though of course we went and fucked it all up. It can help ordinary people outmaneuver oppressive regimes. It can perform that same core functions that banks can (i.e. keeping track of and moving around money) in a public and distributed way. The banking industry (often metonymically known as "Wall Street") is literally the canon…

> Yes there are lots of problems with banking.

I keep reading versions of this assertion and have yet to read anyone publish a clear list of these "lots" of problems. I am trying to understand. So far, I don't.

In other words, so far I still think crypto is a solution looking for a problem.

Even worse, to me it feels like early entrants and those with millions to throw at crypto made out like bandits and everyone else is in the grips of a Ponzi scheme that will end badly at some point. I could be wrong, of course, I just know too many people who jumped in and got hurt.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#389

Post by scottiebarnes »

arcticbull wrote: post #384
scottiebarnes wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we hiding behind linguistic semantics? If the fed wants to buy $100b of assets tomorrow, it can do so, despite not having that money. The interbank mechanics are unimportant, the point is the value is created at will, creating inflation, and is a decision of a few powerful individuals.

Scottie even in that video you linked me you stopped short of the next sentence which says: NARRATOR: But by law, Chairman Powell's Federal Reserve can only lend money that must be paid back . Which is what I've been telling you. Powell was providing a simplification, an analogy, so that folks such as yourself without a meaningful background in economics can understand. Obviously he did an insufficient job, and I str…

No, you seem particularly focused on a technical detail concerning the flow of money rather than the larger theme at play; that is, the value of money is at the whims of the central bank. I'm imagining those who lived to see the Zimbabwe dollar devalue from dollars to trillions of dollars would have a hard time believing you when you say central banks can't create money.

Furthermore, there are some that believe an interest rate should be determined by markets rather than policy makers.

And on the personal note, I have a minor in economics, my bachelors was finance. Economics is a broad subject, and even if you study monetary policy at the undergraduate level, the mechanics of central bank asset flow is not a subject well covered. But hey, thanks for the elitism and insulting the 99.99999% beneath you.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#390

Post by zepto »

qwertygnu wrote: post #50
robomartin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blockchain is the single largest threat to banking, and that doesn’t come without a price. That's an interesting statement. The first question that occurred to me was: Why does banking have to be threatened? In other words, is this a solution looking for a problem?

Yes there are lots of problems with banking. Cryptocurrency does have a reason to exist, though of course we went and fucked it all up. It can help ordinary people outmaneuver oppressive regimes. It can perform that same core functions that banks can (i.e. keeping track of and moving around money) in a public and distributed way. The banking industry (often metonymically known as "Wall Street") is literally the canon…

> It can help ordinary people outmaneuver oppressive regimes.

An unproven fantasy.

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