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$365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

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Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk of Covid has never been the individualized risk. It's the collective risk of what happens when hospitals and ICUs reach capacity when too many people catch Covid at once. For example, what is happening in India. This was widely known in the US on the first week of March in 2020. When hospitals reach capacity, people in their 40s and 50s become much more likely to die from Covid. Lots of preventable loss of l…

>For example, what is happening in India. What is happening in India? The death rate per capita there is still way less than in the US or UK. How come the death rate in Florida is less than that in California and New York, in spite of no lockdowns and an older population in Florida? There's no statistical evidence that countries with stricter lockdowns had a lower death rate than those without.

Death rate per capita I think is a misleading way to look at it. If covid wipes half of my say 10 ppl family and half of someone else’s say 4 ppl family, I lose 5 ppl and they lose 2 ppl. Per capita rate is fine for statisticians after the fact. But during the pandemic you can’t tell me we lost same ppl per capita. Obviously I lost much more (hypothetically)

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#692
post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some definition of "higher" and "slower", yes. The scale of BTC is such that if we distributed transactions evenly across the 7b people on the planet, you get one transaction per five years . The current mining payout is 6.5BTC per block, or roughly $350,000. We are fitting around 1,500 transactions in a block, meaning each transaction costs $300. The price will only rise as more miners join and there is more dem…

> you get one transaction per five years Isn't it per 89 years? So basically every person gets one transaction in their lifetime. (If we are generous and allow for 5 transactions per second, then everyone can make 2 transactions in their lifetime. Yay!) That is rather remarkable. (1500 transactions/block * 6 block/h * 24 h/d * 365 d/y / 7e9 person = 1/89 transactions per person per year)

I grabbed some page that claimed 7 transactions per second and also did the math wrong. Not sure how that happened.

This is the big reason why I don't buy the lightning network. It won't be possible for people to have a wallet that connects to some lightning hub, since opening and closing a connection requires an on-chain transaction. So it will be impossible for anybody other than the richest few to even possess a useful wallet. Everybody else will have bits in a database they don't control.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#693
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I really dislike some of his behavior, this goal post moving to try to deny Musk credit for what he's accomplished annoys me. Before Musk we had no economical reusable launch systems, economical space flight was sci-fi, and in the 2000s there were many people who thought modern civilization must inevitably grind to a halt as we deplete oil because oil is absolutely irreplaceable for modern transport. SpaceX bui…

Yes, those comments are right up there with the 'what have the Romans done for us' list. Like him or hate him, no point denying Musk his achievements, which are more than many of us here will manage in our lifetimes and Musk appears to be far from finished. His biggest enemy at this point is himself, that unstable streak is a real worry. But here's to hoping that he will notch up a longer list of achievements.

As long as you're quoting Life of Brian:

"He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy!"

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, those comments are right up there with the 'what have the Romans done for us' list. Like him or hate him, no point denying Musk his achievements, which are more than many of us here will manage in our lifetimes and Musk appears to be far from finished. His biggest enemy at this point is himself, that unstable streak is a real worry. But here's to hoping that he will notch up a longer list of achievements.

As long as you're quoting Life of Brian: "He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy!"

Hehe, he definitely is not the Messiah, and it is very well possible that he indeed is a very naughty boy.

For Musk being grounded will have a completely different meaning though :)

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I accept pieces of paper (and now bits in a computer) for my valuable work, and bought a valuable home, car, and computer with those papers and bits. Money works purely on belief. If we all suddenly disbelieved in the dollar, the value would be zero. Curiously, most cycles of hyperinflation come more from loss of faith than from money printing. When people lose faith in a currency, they sell it off as a value st…

> suddenly disbelieved in the dollar you can disbelieve in the dollar. But you can't disbelieve in the Secret Service/US military showing up and kicking your ass

Also democracy. What if Bitcoin went up to $100M/coin? What is the likelihood that both Trump and Biden are going to be like "Well the BTC people were right and now they can buy all the companies and real estate. The rest of you americans will have to just have fun being poor, there is no way we will tax BTC wealth"

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#696
post #233
post #220

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Cus he's not that bright. Isn't this the elephant in the room that no one wants to consider? Why do we have to start with the assumption that Musk is a genius, then work back from that? The dude thought covid would go away last May. He thinks it's easier to make Mars habitable than it is to keep the Earth habitable. He's thought that full self driving was 6 months away for literally 4 years now. And he didn't really…

No comment on how smart or stupid Elon is (he is somehow effective ), but I'm with you on all of those things except "He thinks it's easier to make Mars habitable than it is to keep the Earth habitable": The concept of having humans on another planetary body makes a lot of sense as a backup-plan for humanity. The Drake equation be damned - in case we're actually alone, we have a pretty strong moral requirement to mak…

The point is that Mars is far less inhabitable than even the bleakest predictions for Earth.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Longest _valid_ chain. Invalid blocks are just ignored.

That’s what miners do as well.

Yes. I just wanted to emphasize that in PoW coins, a rogue miner cannot force the whole network to accept blocks because all network participants (even passive non-miners) will just ignore the "invalid" block.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Musk bought BTC, single-handedly pumped the price of BTC, and then sold at a huge profit. Doesn't this have legal ramifications when done in the stock market? If it is shady for that market, why is it acceptable in other markets? Oh, right, they're not regulated.

pwning libertarians is ok in my books! (ooooh, was there lead in your hamburger? just the price of freedom, I guess! if you don't like it, you can go eat fiat hamburgers like the plebes.)

lead in your hamburger is illegal in both libertarian legal frameworks and non-libertarian legal frameworks.

liberty: intentionally or intentionally harming people is illegal. If you or your company poison someone, you are held responsible for the harm you caused.

non-liberty: a specific regulation about the level of acceptable lead in meat. limited liability shields the owners from being held responsible.

Re: $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin

#700
post #31

Very perplexing behavior from Musk, I must say. Bitcoin's energy consumption has been front-and-center for a few years now and even more so when the bull market got hot. How does Musk decide to throw $1.5 billion worth of Tesla's cash into BTC without acknowledging this? I was expecting a little bit more due-diligence from him, but he's been absolutely consumed by crypto markets in general.

Not so perplexing. It's just as easy in crypto to make money on price rises as it is price dumps. It's legal market manipulation.
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