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Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

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Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#241
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only because it's not used. This is like arguing we should switch from using cars currently on the road because they use energy, to cars currently standing in a garage, because we measured and clearly the parked cars use less energy than the cars on the road. It's not even hyperbole, it's precisely equivalent and just as boneheaded as it sounds.

This is not true. Dogecoin is way lower KW per hash than bitcoin. Dogecoin is .12 and bitcoin is 707 https://www.trgdatacenters.com/most-environment-friendly-cry...

... because it is not used. The difficulty is adjusted depending on the amount of minors, which would increase if the price increase.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#242
post #95

What I don't get is, why people are talking about environmental impact per transaction. Transactions or not, the computers are churning constantly to solve the useless function that would produce the hash with the most 0s in it. It really doesn't have anything to do with transactions(the fees are only a fraction of the profits). The energy impact would be precisely correlated to the fiat price since the miners will b…

BTC has pivoted away from the Bitcoin whitepaper in mid 2017, decided to constrain its transactional troughput and went the "store of value" route. It can handle some 4 transactions per second. An unconstrained version of bitcoin can handle hundreds, and with technological improvements thousands and then tens of thousands of transactions per second. I can already do this on a Raspberry Pi [0] (in controlled condition…

If bitcoin had the same market cap (currently 40 trillion) as all of the cash in the world the price would be higher and the ecological footprint would be significantly worse.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#243
post #95

What I don't get is, why people are talking about environmental impact per transaction. Transactions or not, the computers are churning constantly to solve the useless function that would produce the hash with the most 0s in it. It really doesn't have anything to do with transactions(the fees are only a fraction of the profits). The energy impact would be precisely correlated to the fiat price since the miners will b…

It's not a fundamental thing it's just that looking at the per-transaction energy cost really puts things in perspective. And 500kWh is hard to comprehend so I like to put it in perspective by comparing it to locomotives. An F40PH, which is a very common American passenger locomotive as seen on Caltrain, Amtrak, Metra and the MBTA puts out about 2.4MW at full blast. So, just under 5 transactions per hour, per locomot…

Expressing the energy consumption in electric vehicle mileage makes the numbers more tangible. 500kWh is ~3000 kilometers of range for a mid-sized EV, or enough to move a family across the whole continent. Just to shift BTC from one pocket to another.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#244
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except they still own a ton of Bitcoin No where in my sentence suggested they sold all of it. > so I don’t see how selling a tiny bit of it could be described as “to perfection” Telsa did not lose any money from their BTC investment and are still up >40%. At that time, they (and others on Twitter) caused a run up in the crypto markets to drive the BTC price up to new all time highs and got out a large profit even b…

Why is it clever to tank an asset that they own? How did the 12% drop benefit Tesla? You're not making any sense.

> Why is it clever to tank an asset that they own?

It's not but that doesn't mean Musk won't do it anyway. He once tanked his own company's stock by smoking cannabis in public. After something like that anything is possible.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#245

Why did Tesla saying they would accept payment in bitcoin move the price so much anyway? Surely it was only ever going to be used in a very small fraction of Tesla’s sales. And Tesla’s sales only represent a very small fraction of the total number of bitcoin transactions. Were bitcoin speculators behaving rationally when they bought and sold on this news? And if not, don’t they deserve the majority of the blame here?

Perception... And also, who says speculators behave rationally?

It is rational to expect that a "bad news" might take the price down because irrational speculators would sell, therefore it is rational to be irrational, and sell.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#246
post #95

What I don't get is, why people are talking about environmental impact per transaction. Transactions or not, the computers are churning constantly to solve the useless function that would produce the hash with the most 0s in it. It really doesn't have anything to do with transactions(the fees are only a fraction of the profits). The energy impact would be precisely correlated to the fiat price since the miners will b…

[deleted]

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#247
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. If anyone believes this bs they're just enabling and encouraging musk to continue manipulating markets as he pleases. People will now start praising his decision but make no mistake, I don't know what was the real reason behind it but sure as hell it wasn't climate change and the way musk goes about releasing information that is moving markets is contemtable

I wonder if Bitcoin investors will start to work out what all those regulations they avoided were for.

No, of course not. Most big stakeholders in cryptocurrencies want a manipulable asset to invest in. A long circuituous route was taken to building one when regulation cut off the ability to do what they are doing with their coins.

I mean, the whole transacting without borders, and providing a transaction medium that is somewhat immune to geopolitical power projection by any one nation state looks great on paper; but it's also the type of idealistic tool frequuently used to get someone to part with their money.

As much of a raging contrarian as I am when it comes to Federal regulation a d interference in markets; the type of market activity surrounding crypto is a spot on copy paste of the types of scammy behavior the SEC was meant to rein in, even if the rulemaking (whether I like how it's done or not) hasn't caught up. It's also market activity that's producing no net positive societal value as far as I've heard of measuring being done to account for it. Businesses popped up to facilitate movement of coins, and conversion to fiat; but the externalities (regulatory escape, lost funds by people when scam exchanges walk off with everyone's assets, greased anti-money laundering mechanisms, environmental costs, brain drain)...

I know my viewpoint on it probably means about as much in the long run as a gnat fart, but it's just one of those things that seems like a solution looking for a problem, picking whatever problem looks most likely to gain momentum this week, and to hell with the problems caused as a result.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#248
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because only that amount could be sold for a good enough price? Someone has to buy it and a sudden increase in supply will drive the price down, that amount is not a single transaction with fixed price.

None of that was an answer to any of my questions. Specifically, how did talking down Bitcoin benefit Tesla? I don't understand how that move plays into Tesla's hands.

Selling some at a good price, wait/manipulate it back up again, sell some more, repeat. You can’t liquidate the whole thing at the same time.

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#249

Why is is Bitcoin mining mainly happening in China, but not other compute bound tasks? How about machine learning. Why aren't the leading data centers for ML based in China? Or are they? And on the energy front - if fossil fuels are the best energy source for calculating hashes, why not for other types of number crunching? Can boycotting one type of calculations really keep the fossil fuels under the ground? If they…

There are several reasons it's mostly a China-operation. Interestingly, it's a textbook example of deficiencies being the competitive advantage.

#1 - China's electricity grid is not very efficient at distributing, which leads to some areas with constant surpluses, directly translating into extremely low electricity prices in those areas

#2 - almost all computer hardware is manufactured in East Asia. Chinese miners don't buy their hardware on the open market, they snatch underhanded special deals with the manufacturers who're then deeply sorry about their "unexpected manufacturing shortfalls"

#3 - Crypto is essentially banned in China for private citizens. Chinese Communist Party is actually quite happy about the mining though - when you zoom out a bit, it's just a money pipe from the rest of the world (mainly US) to China. It also funds bootstrapping of their silicon industry

#4 - crypto in general benefits from weak rule of law. Try running a crypto mining operation in France - the tax collectors will be knocking on your door after the first mined block. Corruption and nepotism is absolutely endemic in China - "sharing" a bit of the mining profits with the local officials has a high chance of skirting the rest of the tax burden

Re: Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin due to climate impact

#250
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that was an answer to any of my questions. Specifically, how did talking down Bitcoin benefit Tesla? I don't understand how that move plays into Tesla's hands.

Selling some at a good price, wait/manipulate it back up again, sell some more, repeat. You can’t liquidate the whole thing at the same time.

That's still not an answer to my question. Specifically, how did talking down Bitcoin benefit Tesla? That step didn't feature in your hypothesised manipulation strategy.
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