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Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

amycastor.com

131–140 of 162 posts

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#131
post #14

Genuine question: what's the end game here for Musk? He's been tweeting about dogecoin, and then Tesla invests a non insignificant amount of money in BTC. I smell something fishy.

Maybe he did it as a form of charity to Bitcoin holders (who are presumably mostly tech futurists as mentioned elsewhere in this thread). If that's the case, we might see similar news about ETH or Monero tomorrow.

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#132
The argument about CO2 emissions and bitcoin seems reflexive and ill-informed. The reality is, it’s very small.

Bitcoin is estimated to emit 22 million tonnes of CO2, and that is based on country level energy generation mix [1]. In reality it is probably lower due to cost benefits of renewables like hydro. Global emissions are 50 billion [2]. Pornography causes 10x as much CO2 as bitcoin [3].

[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/science/bitcoin-us...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

[3] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2209569-streaming-onlin...

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not just as true for bitcoin; bitcoin doesn’t have an army of employees to make your transactions go through.

I misunderstood what you meant, but this argument still seems specious. The people currently employed by the financial industry would not cease to exist if the financial industry did not need as many employees, they would find jobs elsewhere. The downstream effects of what people spend their wages on isn't part of the the actual impact of the industry they work for.

Yes, they would find jobs elsewhere, and their energy consumption and pollution would no longer go to support the finance industry. If you want to make a fair equilibrium comparison, compare the current state of affairs with a future state of affairs where the population is smaller by the amount of people who currently work for payment processors.

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#134
post #45

What a ridiculous headline. How do you spend clean car credits, exactly? Tesla has a market cap of almost a trillion dollars.

You sell them to other companies for money and then spend that money? You cannot, however, spend market cap.

In a way, you can even spend market cap, just issue new shares and raise money for the company. This way you can generate a lot of cash, especially if your market cap is inflated.

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#135
post #132

The argument about CO2 emissions and bitcoin seems reflexive and ill-informed. The reality is, it’s very small. Bitcoin is estimated to emit 22 million tonnes of CO2, and that is based on country level energy generation mix [1]. In reality it is probably lower due to cost benefits of renewables like hydro. Global emissions are 50 billion [2]. Pornography causes 10x as much CO2 as bitcoin [3]. [1] https://economictime…

46 TWh/y mentioned in this link comes to ~5.25 GW continuous usage. With an actual transaction rate of ~4 tps in 2021, each transaction takes ~364.6 kWh. Enough to send a top efficiency Tesla down the entire West coast.

To give some idea of the magnitude of this draw, some reference figures: the 95 nuclear power plants in the US have a net capacity of ~98 GW of power. Two reactors under construction will add ~1.25GW capacity. Even by these fairly low estimates linked, about 4-5 nuclear power plants.

The numbers on porn's power consumption are just horseshit. The methodology was to take all power consumption of data centers combined, and say that whatever % of internet traffic/throughput is porn is what % of data-center power consumption porn is responsible for. This is just abjectly insulting bad math, presented as insightful: just absolute junk worthless numbers. Porn & video in general has radically higher bandwidth-to-cpu usage ratios than many applications, sendfile() is stupid efficient, caches run hot for popular videos, and sending the bits around is just not that costly. Running cpus and gpus is what constitutes the bulk of the energy expenditure in data centers, not switches, yet porn is getting dinged as though it's traffic is the only thing that matters. Pieces like this should be rescinded & apologies should be issued.

Bitcoin is a monster & energy wastage of this class is an abomination. It should not be tolerated in a society that has it's head screwed on straight.

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's just a simple stunt. Apparently, the onboard computer on the latest Teslas is capable of mining BTC profitably at the current prices (allegedly). It would be amusing to have cars mine when idle/plugged in, or better yet have any unsold inventory mining 24/7 (since electricity can be written off as operational expenses). I wouldn't put it past Elon.

Mining BTC is not profitable without dedicated ASICs. Other coins might be possible, but I doubt car hardware would have significant hashrate.

it is profitable 1. at scale and 2. when you are not paying for the electricity. Tesla covers both of these

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#137
post #132

The argument about CO2 emissions and bitcoin seems reflexive and ill-informed. The reality is, it’s very small. Bitcoin is estimated to emit 22 million tonnes of CO2, and that is based on country level energy generation mix [1]. In reality it is probably lower due to cost benefits of renewables like hydro. Global emissions are 50 billion [2]. Pornography causes 10x as much CO2 as bitcoin [3]. [1] https://economictime…

46 TWh/y mentioned in this link comes to ~5.25 GW continuous usage. With an actual transaction rate of ~4 tps in 2021, each transaction takes ~364.6 kWh. Enough to send a top efficiency Tesla down the entire West coast. To give some idea of the magnitude of this draw, some reference figures: the 95 nuclear power plants in the US have a net capacity of ~98 GW of power. Two reactors under construction will add ~1.25GW…

That’s an upper bound on bitcoin power usage as I said, it is also a ‘horseshit’ calculation as per your classification. I’m not sure how equating it to driving down the coast is a meaningful comparison.

Although the porn calculation is not ‘accurate’ I doubt it is wrong by an order of magnitude.

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#139
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

46 TWh/y mentioned in this link comes to ~5.25 GW continuous usage. With an actual transaction rate of ~4 tps in 2021, each transaction takes ~364.6 kWh. Enough to send a top efficiency Tesla down the entire West coast. To give some idea of the magnitude of this draw, some reference figures: the 95 nuclear power plants in the US have a net capacity of ~98 GW of power. Two reactors under construction will add ~1.25GW…

That’s an upper bound on bitcoin power usage as I said, it is also a ‘horseshit’ calculation as per your classification. I’m not sure how equating it to driving down the coast is a meaningful comparison. Although the porn calculation is not ‘accurate’ I doubt it is wrong by an order of magnitude.

I'd wager the porn calculation is wrong by at least two orders of magnitude. It's grossly ineptly inaccurate. Data-centers do work. Sending porn/videos to people is easy, hardly work at all. sendfile() is amazing. Try it.

This article you linked is trying to re-set the numbers, argue that most other calculations are significantly high. Many calculations are well over 7.5GW. The 5.25 this article presents is a conservative number. Even if it's half that number, it's still astronomically high. And it's not going to be an order of magnitude over the reality. Unlike this no-good lying dirtbag porn estimate.

Driving down the coast is supposed to drill home what a giant flaming pile of garbage energy efficiency bitcoin has. It's supposed to try to impress what 5.25GW of power means, make real what each transaction's 1/4 of a second of that sort of power consumption can do. It's supposed to impress upon us how irresponsible it is that anyone would use this system, how desperate they would have to be to waste so much energy, to screw over humanity with such a gratuitous waste of energy supporting this deranged insane scheme, just to avoid using the monetary systems the world has. Yes. Unfortunately many people lack other means to put their wealth into into stable currencies, & that is sad, causes big hardships for them that are cruel, but for every other reason brought forth: bitcoin is a ruinous colossal waste & it's presence on this earth is an embarrassment.

Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin

#140
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an upper bound on bitcoin power usage as I said, it is also a ‘horseshit’ calculation as per your classification. I’m not sure how equating it to driving down the coast is a meaningful comparison. Although the porn calculation is not ‘accurate’ I doubt it is wrong by an order of magnitude.

I'd wager the porn calculation is wrong by at least two orders of magnitude. It's grossly ineptly inaccurate. Data-centers do work. Sending porn/videos to people is easy, hardly work at all. sendfile() is amazing. Try it. This article you linked is trying to re-set the numbers, argue that most other calculations are significantly high. Many calculations are well over 7.5GW. The 5.25 this article presents is a conserv…

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