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.
Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin
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Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm on the fence about whether this is correct or not. The question in my mind is: do you include military spending in the cost of maintaining a fiat currency and if so to what extent? Fiat currencies are backed in part by the power of the governments that issue them, so is defense spending a form of "proof of work" for them? If the US government disbanded its military would the USD hold any value for very long? Same…
Do you honestly think that the value of Bitcoin would not tank if the value of the US Dollar tanked?
We're talking about the relative efficiency of Bitcoin vs. conventional finance in an energy or other cost per transaction sense. I'm asking whether some amount of military spending should be counted in the cost of maintaining a fiat monetary system.
If people were using Bitcoin as currency directly its value would remain equal to whatever people were willing to trade for it. Obviously if all people were willing to trade it for was USD it would become worthless, but that's not the point in this thread.
Bitcoin has other problems as a currency but that's not the topic of discussion here. Some other cryptocurrencies try to solve these, such as it being too deflationary or lacking functionality.
Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Controlling for transaction volume the energy consumption of bitcoin is orders of magnitude higher than the rest of the finance industry.
No; every dollar you give to visa (or whatever payment processor) will eventually go to a human who will use energy, pollute, etc.
That's just as true for bitcoin, and outside what I would consider the actual cost of running the financial system.
Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin
#64What this tells me is that Tesla has too much cash and doesn't think investing that cash in its main business would produce gains comparable to BTC. Tesla believes in the profitability of BTC more than its own profitability or the profitability of one of Musk's other ventures.
Sure, maybe they want to diversify but that's a hell of a lot of money to throw at such a volatile commodity.
Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin is the greenest form of finance that gets greener over time? What nonsense is this? Already ONE transaction consumes as much power as an entire American household uses for a week.That is 215 kwh of energy for one transaction. It's using the equivalent of 2.26 million American homes worth of energy for just 330k transactions. A significant chunk of that is wash trading, ie people buying and selling to themselv…
How many skycrcapers are there in the world constructed for financial institutions. Want to go down the rabbit hole of calculating that CO2? Also, cite your sources
Are all those ASIC miners just sitting out in fields then?
Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin
#66Here's my wild speculation on why Musk did this (and why it's brilliant) He knows there is a large and growing community of Bitcoin speculators and enthusiasts out there. By "endorsing" Bitcoin in this way, he not only moved the market--further enriching these folks--but also signaled that he is an ally to them, significantly boosting positive sentiment toward him and increasing the likelihood that they will purchase…
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.
Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin
#67Point of clarity: Bitcoin transactions take negligible energy to produce and validate. It's block production that's energy-intensive, and it's the same regardless of how big or full blocks are. Like any energy-intensive industry that could operate profitably via fossil fuel consumption, mining should be regulated to only use green energy. No different than power production and consumption today.
You can't regulate Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin is not controllable in the same way as say, rare earth metal mining, where you can exert pressure on whoever is mining them (or whichever nation is exporting them). There's very little any government can do to pressure a mining farm in Far East Russia or Northern China to use green power for their operations.
You can do Bitcoin mining almost completely offline. Once that magical hash that satisfies the proof-of-work requirement appears, there's no tracing to where it was produced.
Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin
#68Yeah this narrative is played out. Yes bitcoin uses a lot of energy. Almost certainly less than the things it is competing against. And over time it has the potential to decrease that consumption drastically with other protocols, an option traditional banking doesn't possess. Bitcoin is already the greenest form of finance and will get much cleaner in the future.
Bitcoin is the greenest form of finance that gets greener over time? What nonsense is this? Already ONE transaction consumes as much power as an entire American household uses for a week.That is 215 kwh of energy for one transaction. It's using the equivalent of 2.26 million American homes worth of energy for just 330k transactions. A significant chunk of that is wash trading, ie people buying and selling to themselv…
That is 215 kwh of energy for one transaction.
Nope. The marginal cost of a transaction is next to nothing. Just take a step back and think about what you're saying: that a bitcoin transaction would cost £3.40 in the UK. Obviously nobody would be using bitcoin if that were true.
Proof of work is where the value of the coin is derived. How much energy do you think it takes to mint a physical coin? Now compare that to the amount of energy it takes to transfer it to a shop assistant.
Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin
#69Re: Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin
#70Point of clarity: Bitcoin transactions take negligible energy to produce and validate. It's block production that's energy-intensive, and it's the same regardless of how big or full blocks are. Like any energy-intensive industry that could operate profitably via fossil fuel consumption, mining should be regulated to only use green energy. No different than power production and consumption today.
What would it mean for a bitcoin transaction to exist without ever being included in a block?
Maybe its fee is too low now but some miner will add it to a block later when the fee becomes reasonable again, win the mining lottery and add it to the blockchain. Maybe next year or never.