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How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

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Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#81

Post by scotty79 »

skybrian wrote: post #79
scotty79 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Google buying back stock is just another inverstor willing to gamble on value of GOOG stock? I wonder why corporations buying back their stock is even legal. Isn't it quintessential insider trading?

No, you're confused. Google isn't like other investors because they control the supply of stock. They don't need to buy stock since they can create it. Google owning its own shares doesn't do anything just like writing an IOU to yourself doesn't do anything. This is a way of returning money to shareholders, like paying a dividend. It's taxed differently because it increases the price of the stock, so it's capital gai…

But after they buy back their shares they can later sell them on the market, right?

Or do they instantly destroy them as they buy them back?

Either way the result is the same, they can buy them when they are cheap and resell/emit them when they are expensive. And they have internal knowledge of the company. And that's insider trading.

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#82

Post by scotty79 »

Aterio wrote: post #78
scotty79 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheapest energy is when renewables production peaks. Then it can be worth less than zero.

Part of renewable is short term storage. You use that peak energy to create heat, charge a battery or do similar things. You can easily create hydrogen. But using it for searching for a hash is the worst idea. If you would be able to use the heat output sure that could work but let's someone do that first Until then doing anything else with this energy is critit!

Battery is expensive and doesn't hold much. Nobody buys your hydrogen or heat an it needs to be made, stored and transported with losses that make this endeavor uneconomical (that's why nobody is doing it).

So you have two options really. Either partially sponsor your windturbin with bitcoins you'll mine with it or not build the turbin at all.

The current problem is not how to utilize every bit of excess energy. The current problem is where to get the money from to build capacity that will at time generate excess that is hard to transport away from the power station.

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#83

Post by skybrian »

scotty79 wrote: post #81
skybrian wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're confused. Google isn't like other investors because they control the supply of stock. They don't need to buy stock since they can create it. Google owning its own shares doesn't do anything just like writing an IOU to yourself doesn't do anything. This is a way of returning money to shareholders, like paying a dividend. It's taxed differently because it increases the price of the stock, so it's capital gai…

But after they buy back their shares they can later sell them on the market, right? Or do they instantly destroy them as they buy them back? Either way the result is the same, they can buy them when they are cheap and resell/emit them when they are expensive. And they have internal knowledge of the company. And that's insider trading.

I suppose it's true that there is trading happening and there are insiders who are doing it, but that's not what "insider trading" is. A company can use its own information internally to benefit shareholders and it's perfectly legal. Insider trading is when you learn of information that doesn't belong to you. It's a violation of trust.

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#84

Post by simonsarris »

polote wrote: post #43
dvt wrote: post #9

I'm genuinely curious when the fat lady will stop singing in regards to Bitcoin. I sort-of understand the allure of ETH and its derivatives ("programmable money" does bring something new to the table), but BTC is supposed to be a "value store" yet is down 30% from November; or it's supposed to be a "currency" but you can't use it as one; or it's supposed to be "decentralized" but mining is monopolized by a handful of…

What's the difference between BTC and a GOOG share ? Google doesn't give any dividend and the GOOG share has not any voting right. But even the GOOGL share there is a voting right, but Google founders will have the majority anyway. So what's the difference ? In both case you posses a piece of electronic paper that can be exchanged on a market and there is no other benefit. Not defending BTC, I'm just curious

Google stock has a lot of signals for price: profit, user retention, growth, outlook, leadership, new products, etc. And of course a level of FOMO if people decide that google is the next big thing that may irrationally drive up the value for years.

Bitcoin has a single signal for price: Price. That's why people get in and drop it. This can make for certain feedback loops. But not only in one direction. (that it also has some uses has so little bearing on its price action that its hardly worth mentioning from a price perspective. The two do not correlate, eg, a 50% drop in bitcoin does not mean 50% or even 5% less usage to transfer money from A to B)

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#85

Post by bee_rider »

scotty79 wrote: post #50
bee_rider wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTC + a very high carbon tax might actually be an interesting way to incentivize the desired overbuilding on renewables. But Texas is probably going to skip the second part.

Another interesting idea would be for the government to constantly buy any amount of energy produced by renewables at guaranteed price using tax money, and "distribute" it evenly to all enrgy users. This way people using least energy wouldn't pay for electricity at all and people building wind farms would have real good incentive to build more.

That is an interesting idea, I wonder how it would work out. Added benefit of just eating up any demand for energy, I guess crowding out any non-renewables. I bet administratively it would be easier than my idea -- people could proactively show they are selling renewables.

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#86

Post by fivea »

seltzered_ wrote: post #66
fivea wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A deeper dive: they aren't renewable, they're at best rebuildable I find your YouTube video neither insightful nor informative. It reads as a string of desperate attempts at gotchas, only possible by repeatedly moving goalposts and misrepresenting positions, which are at best immaterial to the discussion. I mean, the main point the YouTuber made against renewables is that different energy generation and distributio…

I recommend watching the full video. I don't think he's against renewables but trying to frame what they really are in a more realistic manner.

> (...) I don't think he's against renewables but (...)

It really makes no difference what's the youtuber's opinion on renewables. The point is that the arguments made by the YouTuber are completely pointless and meaningless, and completely miss the whole point -- and radical improvements -- made over the total dependency on fossil fuels in general and oil in particular.

This video is a classical case of something that's "not even wrong".

If anyone has any interest in the subject, they'd be better served by reading/watching anything else.

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#87

Post by Aterio »

scotty79 wrote: post #82
Aterio wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of renewable is short term storage. You use that peak energy to create heat, charge a battery or do similar things. You can easily create hydrogen. But using it for searching for a hash is the worst idea. If you would be able to use the heat output sure that could work but let's someone do that first Until then doing anything else with this energy is critit!

Battery is expensive and doesn't hold much. Nobody buys your hydrogen or heat an it needs to be made, stored and transported with losses that make this endeavor uneconomical (that's why nobody is doing it). So you have two options really. Either partially sponsor your windturbin with bitcoins you'll mine with it or not build the turbin at all. The current problem is not how to utilize every bit of excess energy. The…

That's just not true.

We already have plenty of renewable energy which is cost effective.

We don't need Bitcoin to balance this out.

And Bitcoin doesn't just consume the excessive energy, it consumes all of it as long as it is cost effective to consume it.

Not running your Bitcoin farm 24/7 is not effective.

Bitcoin is not supporting energy production.

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#88

Post by Aterio »

scotty79 wrote: post #44
Aterio wrote: post #5

Always a good idea to build and consume renewable energy and then making heat out of it. Texas power grid sounds very good: cheap and reliable. Ah wait wait we talk about searching for arbitrary hashes which can't be recycled or actually used in a state which probably needs AC in summer and an independent unstable power grid in a time were every additional CO2 generated creates even more pressure for our society. Per…

It's always a good idea to find a way for people to profit from extending renewable capacity beyond what's profitable from established users. If you can't make goverment pay for energy produced by excess wind and solar thrn greedy bitcoin "investors" are next best source of cash.

Yes and we need to stop this shit through laws

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#89

Post by lowkey »

dvt wrote: post #9

I'm genuinely curious when the fat lady will stop singing in regards to Bitcoin. I sort-of understand the allure of ETH and its derivatives ("programmable money" does bring something new to the table), but BTC is supposed to be a "value store" yet is down 30% from November; or it's supposed to be a "currency" but you can't use it as one; or it's supposed to be "decentralized" but mining is monopolized by a handful of…

> Maybe I'm just not smart enough to understand BTC.

I don’t think that’s true. I suspect it is more likely that you’ve given Bitcoin only a cursory study where you compared it to a very inefficient database, recognized that on-chain transactions are slow and expensive, energy-consumption is significant, and it isn’t as easy to spend as US dollars - and so you dismissed it as a fraud.

Everyone I know who eventually embraced Bitcoin, initially rejected the idea - myself included. It is not easy to appreciate the brilliance of Bitcoin unless you first understand the problem it is trying to solve.

Unfortunately few of us really understand what fiat money is and how it is created - or at least that was true before Bitcoin forced us all to investigate. One of the funniest implications of Bitcoin is that now every time the talking heads on CNBC or CNN mention US dollars, they now refer to it as fiat.

Bitcoin proponents call it the hardest money ever created. Unlike fiat, Bitcoin is virtually impossible to debase. The supply of Bitcoin is predictable for the next 10 minutes or the next thousand years. No other currency has a predictable inflation policy. No other currency is resilient to the desires of centralized actors to manipulate the money supply.

Here is an exercise I like to do on any complex topic I don’t fully understand. I ask myself what the proponents know that I don’t know? (and vice versa, what do I know about the subject that the proponents don’t get?)

Here is a list of mostly billionaires who all hold and advocate for Bitcoin. Ask yourself, what do they know about Bitcoin that you don’t? Also, what do you know that they don’t which makes you so confident it is a scam?

Bitcoin Proponents:

Elon Musk, Barry Silbert, Mark Cuban, Michael Saylor, Mike Novogratz, Tyler & Cameron Winklevoss, Paul Tudor Jones, Tim Draper, Bill Miller, Stanley Drunkenmiller, Anthony Scaramucci, Jack Dorsey, Steve Wozniak, Tim Cook, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#90

Post by antognini »

scotty79 wrote: post #81
skybrian wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're confused. Google isn't like other investors because they control the supply of stock. They don't need to buy stock since they can create it. Google owning its own shares doesn't do anything just like writing an IOU to yourself doesn't do anything. This is a way of returning money to shareholders, like paying a dividend. It's taxed differently because it increases the price of the stock, so it's capital gai…

But after they buy back their shares they can later sell them on the market, right? Or do they instantly destroy them as they buy them back? Either way the result is the same, they can buy them when they are cheap and resell/emit them when they are expensive. And they have internal knowledge of the company. And that's insider trading.

As I understand it a company does not generally hold its own stock like other investors do [0]. You should think of it more as a sink/source for the stock. So the company can just arbitrarily create as much of its own stock as it wants. Obviously doing this will dilute existing shareholders, so companies won't do this unless there's a good reason to. Likewise, when the company buys back stock, that stock just disappears, so now every other shareholder has a larger fraction of the company.

[0]: I think the main exception here is that there might be an employee equity pool. The board will approve a certain number of shares to be created for the pool, and then they'll sit around and gradually be transferred to employees as their stock grants vest.

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