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Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

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Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#461

Post by INTPenis »

rzodkiew wrote: post #338

Bitcoin is a mystery to me. Somehow it's hailed as revolutionising the economy, by replacing currency with a worse kind of currency. It feels like this is where all the "how to get rich quick" book writers and other hustle bros went and created one giant financial pyramid, which works in quite simple way: - buy bitcoin - tell everyone around how revolutionary it is, so they buy it and what you holding increases in va…

Let me demystify it for you. It's used for drugs.

That's how I view it. A very small minority of die hards are trying to use it for other things, donations of course, but it's mostly used for drugs.

There's a "paper" on pnas claiming the opposite but if you actually read it they make massive assumptions in it. I can't believe they were allowed to publish a paper based on assumptions.

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#462

Post by topkeks »

burkaman wrote: post #318
febeling wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin miners use surplus energy in remote places with lots of thermal or hydroelectric power. Remote China and Iceland. This electricity often can't be put to any other use anyway. The price of energy is probably enough to ensure this. Besides, the cost of maintaining Bitcoin has to be compared with holding up a fiat currency empire like the US. This requires lots of military, suppression of democracy and generally…

Energy grids are very big, and are planned very intentionally. Renewable energy produced in remote places is often used to power far away cities. It's very unlikely that a consistent energy source capable of powering a large bitcoin mine would not be integrated into the grid if the mine wasn't there. Here's some further reading: https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoins-climate-impact-global-c... https://www.cell.com/joul…

None of those explain how to export literally free thermal energy from Iceland to Europe.

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#463

Post by pqs »

me551ah wrote: post #400

I really don't get why bitcoin is worth so much.Bitcoin is called a store of value like gold, but gold has inherent uses. If the price of gold went to zero then you could still use it to make jewellery or use it for electrical conductivity. If the price of bitcoin goes to zero then it's worthless. It's also not environmentally friendly and bitcoin mining uses up 0.21% of the world's power supply. And all of this ener…

To me, the bans are the proof tha BTC is ofering something. Why would central banks fear something that has no value?

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#464

Post by RhodoGSA »

Nevada's new corp-building cities seemed mighty suspect originally. Tesla is the biggest employeer in Reno and yet not a single word from Tesla came to respond to the news. However, bitcoin company's responded.

Elon always seems to have some long term vision that no one is thinking about. What if he builds a city in Texas and Nevada that pays and transacts in bitcoin? This whole threads arguments about the 'Use Caseof bitcoin' Would evaporate over night. Elon is the richest man in the world, whatever he puts his mind to can be accomplished. If anyone can do it, Elon can do it.

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#465

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

whb07 wrote: post #417
BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #381

Oh noes, if this starts a trend, becomes widespread, and businesses start hoarding crypto tokens instead of investing in building stuff, it could cause a great depression pretty much the same way gold hoarding caused the economy to collapse in 1929. When people, businesses and banks start hording tokens instead of investing in building and maintaining the production capacity of consumables, the ratio of value of toke…

I cannot tell if this is sarcasm or not. But I’ll assume it’s not: You cannot eat gold or bitcoin. The “hoarders” at some point will want to consume be it a pizza or a lambo. Then there’s those who invest in ways to get more... what for it.. gold or bitcoin so they go out and purchase picks and shovels. Crazy stuff, extremely complicated when I write it as such. Btw, the FED made a trivial recession into a “great” on…

I am dead serious.

The FED did cause the great depression and a lot of it had to do with currency being tied too closely to a deflationary token (gold).

>You cannot eat gold or bitcoin.

That is precisely the problem. The economy can get into a bad equilibrium where hoarding intrinsically valueless tokens displaces investing in productive assets. This state can persist because the firsts to invest in productive things are at a disadvantage to the token hoarders (at least for some time).

>The “hoarders” at some point will want to consume be it a pizza or a lambo.

Yes, then it becomes a game of "catch the peak" because when people realize all these tokens are sitting on the sideline but production has declined and there isn't much to purchase with the tokens, and that if they want to buy something at a good price they better be quick, the cycle can reverse explosively.

It's important for aggregate savings to be (at least indirectly) tied to things you "can eat" or the production thereof.

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#466

Post by amelius »

rzodkiew wrote: post #338

Bitcoin is a mystery to me. Somehow it's hailed as revolutionising the economy, by replacing currency with a worse kind of currency. It feels like this is where all the "how to get rich quick" book writers and other hustle bros went and created one giant financial pyramid, which works in quite simple way: - buy bitcoin - tell everyone around how revolutionary it is, so they buy it and what you holding increases in va…

Wouldn't the same apply to gold?

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#467

Post by nickik »

I didn't like Bitcoin when it came out and I still don't get it. I used it for a while for the only thing it seems possible useful for, but I don't have saving of it (to bad I guess).

- It uses to much energy.

- Its simply a public ledger with horrible privacy characteristics.

You can of course work around the privacy issue, but systems should be designed to have that characteristic, not require work around on every level.

And in terms of economics, actually running a complex, multiplayer economy on Bitcoin is in my opinion not possible at all.

This is something that Bitcoin advocates ignore, but even under the Gold standard, the actual broad money (in a monetarist sense) was expanding and contracting because of banks issuing currency and fractional reserve banking.

I had various arguments with people involved in Bitcoin claiming Side-Chains could have the same properties, but I don't see how that makes sense.

I for one, don't want to go back to what amounts to energy inefficient, horrible privacy gold coins.

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#468

Post by koonsolo »

me551ah wrote: post #400

I really don't get why bitcoin is worth so much.Bitcoin is called a store of value like gold, but gold has inherent uses. If the price of gold went to zero then you could still use it to make jewellery or use it for electrical conductivity. If the price of bitcoin goes to zero then it's worthless. It's also not environmentally friendly and bitcoin mining uses up 0.21% of the world's power supply. And all of this ener…

I'm pretty sure most gold investors don't actually have the gold physically at their location (Maybe someone can prove me wrong here).

Gold seems to be mainly to store loads of money, without actually having the physical drawbacks of gold. So most money invested in gold, is basically a paper that claims you have gold. In that case, the benefits of the physical attributes of gold go away pretty quickly.

So having a claim that you own gold, is maybe not that different than storing value in some virtual thing that everyone agrees on has some value.

Let's say you do want to have the physical gold at your location. Well, then you have to think about transport and safely storing it.

It feels like Bitcoin bootstrapped it's way up to having value. And right now, it seems as a "store of value", it has some benefits over gold itself.

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#469

Post by MrMan »

bronak1 wrote: post #395
rzodkiew wrote: post #338

Bitcoin is a mystery to me. Somehow it's hailed as revolutionising the economy, by replacing currency with a worse kind of currency. It feels like this is where all the "how to get rich quick" book writers and other hustle bros went and created one giant financial pyramid, which works in quite simple way: - buy bitcoin - tell everyone around how revolutionary it is, so they buy it and what you holding increases in va…

Society has had multiple stores of value, as none is perfectly secure. Gold, oil, dollars, real estate, (some) bonds & equities. Crypto is the first that’s decentralized and digital and on a open network not governed by any centralized entity which is powerful bc the world needs a international reserve currency

I don't want to rely on a currency which is managed and beholden to an unelected cartel of corporations.

I prefer representative government by elected officials.

Re: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

#470

Post by bouncycastle »

ma2rten wrote: post #330
RhodoGSA wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin unleashes a million possibilities and overall guides the market. Check out Ethereum, Polkadot and Cardano if you want to see a real use case - Until then the usecase for bitcoin is the same as gold. But one day Bitcoin will pour it's 'Gold' Into the broader crypto market.

Can you name a single compelling use case for Ethereum, Polkadot or Cardano?

For Ethereum, Defi.(Decentralized finance). Basically crypto based financial services run on smart contracts as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Services include lending and borrowing, decentralized exchange, insurance, stablecoins, derivatives, portfolio management and more.

MakerDao, Uniswap, Compound Finance, Yearn Finance, just to name a few. It's only just starting to take off, see more metrics here https://defipulse.com/

Another area taking off on Ethereum right now are "Non Fungible Tokens". Basically digital art trading on crypto.

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