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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

#741

Post by vmception »

zupreme wrote: post #556

This comment is unlikely to win me many friends here, but it is worth considering that while Bitcoin is, nominally at least, decentralized and free from government control, internet access is not. A simple glance at the trend of governments to partially or to fully shut down internet services to certain areas in times of unrest or mass protest means, in the case of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies requiring collect…

bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies function without a ubiquitous internet

as in: someone’s will always have computers linked together

networking cant be shut off, ubiquity can

end users dont need todays convenience of always knowing their balance, it can degrade to going to an internet cafe or bank to check your balance

and transact with your notes

transactions can be made offline, transported offline like files and eventually sent to the network again for inclusion in the blockchain

someone has to go back to the internet cafe / bank

like the merchant at the end of the day

the only real issue is the initial hashrate drop if all major mining nodes were disconnected and couldnt reconnect. so up to the first few months, for bitcoin exclusively, could be stressful, but then difficulty will adjust for the remaining computers and accept transactions at the expected speed

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

#742

Post by kobalsky »

MrMan wrote: post #536
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of the crypto programmer who make it possible for poor Venezuelans to have an island of crypto inflation stability when their Bolívars are worth toilet paper. I don't know of any feel goody NGO where a Harvard grad could feel woke working at that could do that.

But is maybe the only inflation story anyone can come up with? Venezuela is misgoverned, but how do I know bitcoin governance is better? Bitcoin exchange rates are not stable. I can only hoard it, it's not an investment and not a currency.

> but how do I know bitcoin governance is better?

if you live in an affected country you may ponder about this while you see your money evaporate in front of your eyes.

or you can buy BTC to get your money in an exchange and distribute it into stable coins.

yes, one may implode, right now our national currency has imploded, whatever their governances are doing it's better.

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

#743

Post by byerobh »

gnrlst wrote: post #422
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 agree. What's also absurd is that Tesla raised $5B and now is parking 30% of that in Bitcoin, which we all know has a unique history of volatility. This is not going to end well.

Not unique, and if anything, becoming time-tested.

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

#744

Post by ameister14 »

ddtaylor wrote: post #495
afavour wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was forced to watch my government bungle a pandemic in the worst possible way and then asked to pay for it for decades. No I don’t think I will. That has very little to do with currency and everything to do with you not wanting to pay taxes. You may think that COVID response has been a catastrophic waste of money but if you'd lost your job would you have claimed the increased unemployment benefits? I suspect the…

I don't think everyone who wants to check and balance the monetary power of the government is anti-tax. I think most of us would just rather they have to do it through legitimate means. Cryptocurrencies cannot be bargained with or taken over. If governments want to print and debase their fiat currencies, they are free to do so, but there will always be an elephant in the room that never does that because it's incapab…

Cryptocurrencies cannot be bargained with or taken over

Sure they can. They are artificially inflated all the time - look at tether.

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

#745

Post by justincormack »

kortilla wrote: post #654
afavour wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was forced to watch my government bungle a pandemic in the worst possible way and then asked to pay for it for decades. No I don’t think I will. That has very little to do with currency and everything to do with you not wanting to pay taxes. You may think that COVID response has been a catastrophic waste of money but if you'd lost your job would you have claimed the increased unemployment benefits? I suspect the…

> That has very little to do with currency and everything to do with you not wanting to pay taxes. Debasing a currency is not a normal tax. Currency debasement is extremely regressive. - The poorer someone is, the more of their assets are likely to just be some cash in the bank. - it is a permanent loss of quality of life for people on fixed incomes. - it doesn’t exempt people a normal tax code does (low income, blin…

You make it sound like the currency has actually been debased, which has in fact not happened. Hyperinflation is a problem yes, I have been to countries while that was happening, like Brazil, or when the banking system was shut down. The US has around 1% inflation which is not the big problem for poor people.

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

#746

Post by qqii »

pelliphant wrote: post #439
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #88

I don't understand all the Crypto hate on this site. Since when have hackers become the luddites to new ways of finance?

I'm a crypto hater, I consider bitcoin to be a pyramid scheme. And also, I think that it is a positive thing that an institution that I can influence (government) is in control of deciding how transactions work. This might also be a cultural thing, since I'm scandinavian, and "we" generally consider government regulation as something necessary.

As a counter to being a pyramid scheme, we've seen the 4 year moving average price of bitcoin continue to trend upwards. That's more than 10 years and the price hasn't collapsed.

Bitcoin governance is performed through mining pools signaling their opinion on proposals, we saw this with segwit and larger block sizes. As a relevant example Ethereum currently is going through a proposal and one pool has been vocal in being against it, another vocally for it. As a result miners have moved their hashrate accordingly. At these kind of scales I don't see how it's that much different form government. The rules are different, the norms are different but governance exists.

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

#747

Post by op03 »

mrb wrote: post #489
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…

While away on vacation, I once sent $1000 in cold hard cash, on a Sunday, to an unbanked person in Los Angeles, in less than 1 hour, thanks to bitcoin and the recipient withdrawing it for cash at a Bitcoin ATM. There is not a single alternative service in the world that would have made this possible. If people thought a little beyond their personal use cases, they would understand the utility of Bitcoin/crypto for ma…

I sent bitcoin to a coconut tree recently. People just dont get what is possible here.

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

#748

Post by charcircuit »

agloeregrets wrote: post #713
charcircuit wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone on earth used Bitcoin the energy use would not go up. What would go up would be transaction fees because bitcoin only can process like 4 transactions every second. Proof of work is not the only trustless consensus algorithm and there are already plenty of projects on varieties of proof of stake.

Ha, I don't think you understand what you are saying. Okay, so what would happen if say transaction volume was 1000x current? how expensive would fees be? What would have to happen to make the hashrate go up so those fees are cheaper than credit card transactions (~2%) let alone ACH (Free)? Whats the point of bitcoin if buying a $3 coffee comes with $2 in fees too and the transaction takes 8 days? It would seem you w…

No, more mining equipment wouldn't lower the fee. It would just lower the income you make from mining. Bitcoin targets a block of a limited size every 10 minutes. If more people are mining it adjusts the difficulty to bring it back to 10 minutes.

I agree that Bitcoin will not scale to handle the global population. People will be on spread out over many different projects and people able to route through them. Of course this will all be hidden from the end user. I do believe cryptocurrency is the future of money. Most people will just be holding stable coins pegged to the dollar and they won't even know that it's a cryptocurrency. They will just refer to it as a dollar since it's abstracted away.

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

#749

Post by strgcmc »

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…

The insight here is, why not both? Old economies lurched from hard/gold-backed currencies to fiat. Why not build an economy that exists on multiple layers, and has both options? Use fiat to make short-term transactions and investments. Use hard crypto to fund the things you think are so valuable, they are worth overcoming the deflationary pressure for.

Moving away from all-or-nothing systems is kind of the point.

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

#750

Post by minusSeven »

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…

Every 12 years we have been having a great depression anyway which had nothing to do with crypto. What exactly changes in the great depression caused by crypto hoarding?
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