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Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

nytimes.com

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Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#91

Post by nonbel »

smaddox wrote: post #82
nonbel wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"I'm all for "wait and see", but have we ever done that with a technology that is literally using more electricity than a medium sized nation? " I keep seeing these types of posts every few months and they always seem very poorly thought out and presented. Almost like people did the actual analysis but didnt like the results... Don't you need to compare this with the energy usage of the industries bitcoin is suppose…

Deflationary currency disincentives investing in the future. There's nothing good about it.

This argument makes no sense since by abstaining from consuming resources you are saving them for the future.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#92

Post by dmoy »

zigzag448 wrote: post #88
hudon wrote: post #9

This seems like good news for speculators (disclosure: I still hold Bitcoin and worked at a Bitcoin exchange). Having said that, "Wall Street" should be wary of enabling the use of a system that is using more electricity than the country of Switzerland [0] without any productive output. The energy consumption is rapidly rising too. Furthermore, Bitcoin's transaction throughput is dismally low compared to existing pay…

The discussion about the energy consumption of bitcoin can only be discussed because we know how much energy it takes to produce one BTC. What we don’t know is how many banks there are in the world with all the computers and mainframes they use to keep track of all the fiat money. And then of course the energy to produce a hardcopy of that money like knocking down trees and mining metals. So in my opinion we only can…

I'm not sure I buy this. If we know definitively that btc uses more energy than all of Switzerland, and we know that Switzerland doesn't spend >100% (or likely even >30%) of its energy on banking, and we know that Swiss banks clear more money than Bitcoin, then we have a reasonable point of comparison.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#93

Post by brandonsometig »

sparkie wrote: post #74
brandonsometig wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a second layer(and possibly more on-top of that) for several reasons. How do you expect to propagate and store 1GB blocks (hell, even 100MB blocks) every 10 minutes for the foreseeable future. I understand that the cost of storage and bandwidth has been falling for some time however if you want this system to gain 'mainstream' adaption it cannot everyone's coffee purchases for the rest of time. How do you ke…

Extremely large blocks will require the big miners to all host their servers in a ULLDMA-like facility, because low latency block propagation gives them the advantage. Anyone not in the club will suffer high-latency block propagation which will put them at a disadvantage to the other players who are all hosted in the same physical location. The result is that a single-point of failure in the system will come not from…

At which point you may as well put the transactions in a SQL database and call it Paypal.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#94

Post by mrb »

hudon wrote: post #24
mrb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't refer to the Digiconomist BECI for electricity consumption figures. The author makes fundamentally flawed assumptions, causing him to overestimate the consumption by 1.5× to 2.8×, and likely by 2.2×. BECI starts with calculating average mining revenues based on a 439-day (variable) moving average of the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash prices. Then BECI assumes a fixed 60% share of these revenues are spent on electrici…

He seems to support his 60% figure with a lot of evidence [0][1] and you have agreed in the past that if anything 60% is the number your model converges to as well... Anyway, the discussion is a good one and I'm glad at least 2 people are concerned about this. This is exactly the kind of thing we should be truth-seeking on, as well as finding use cases... not if Wall Street is finally allowing people who don't know a…

[0] and [1] present zero evidence for supporting 60% as a current valid estimate. [0] even misrepresents the Morgan Stanley report (which actually supports my numbers, not his): http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/#critic-6-aut...

Alex of Digiconomist is very good at writing long verbose paragraphs that "seem" to support his model, but when we look at his actual data and logic, it's full of holes, flaws, and poor assumptions.

One of the things we both agree on is that in the future (1 year? 10 years?) the ratio will tend toward 40 to 60%. But that doesn't say anything about the ratio as of today.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#95

Post by TimJRobinson »

smaddox wrote: post #82
nonbel wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"I'm all for "wait and see", but have we ever done that with a technology that is literally using more electricity than a medium sized nation? " I keep seeing these types of posts every few months and they always seem very poorly thought out and presented. Almost like people did the actual analysis but didnt like the results... Don't you need to compare this with the energy usage of the industries bitcoin is suppose…

Deflationary currency disincentives investing in the future. There's nothing good about it.

It gives less return on investments, however it also incentivizes those who don't invest (mostly middle and lower class) to hold onto their money instead of spending it immediately, because it's worth more in the future. Which could decrease consumption in the world and possibly create a more sustainable future.

Deflation seems bad from our current mindset of growth at all costs, and especially bad if you're one of the upper class who's investments return more than inflation, ensuring you'll keep your status.

But this could possibly bring a brighter future for humanity, where we tame the viral nature of capitalism and the rich getting richer at a far faster rate than the rest of society.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#96

Post by mrb »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #45
mrb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't refer to the Digiconomist BECI for electricity consumption figures. The author makes fundamentally flawed assumptions, causing him to overestimate the consumption by 1.5× to 2.8×, and likely by 2.2×. BECI starts with calculating average mining revenues based on a 439-day (variable) moving average of the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash prices. Then BECI assumes a fixed 60% share of these revenues are spent on electrici…

Even if he's overestimating by 2.8x, it's still within the same order of magnitude. So the conclusion of Bitcoin using up country-scale amounts of electricity is a valid one.

My beef with claiming Bitcoin consumes "as much as a country" is that it is uninformative, highly misleading. Countries span multiple orders of magnitude so it is like saying a vehicle weights "as much as a rock" when a rock could be 1 kg or 10 tons.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#97

Post by hudon »

zigzag448 wrote: post #88
hudon wrote: post #9

This seems like good news for speculators (disclosure: I still hold Bitcoin and worked at a Bitcoin exchange). Having said that, "Wall Street" should be wary of enabling the use of a system that is using more electricity than the country of Switzerland [0] without any productive output. The energy consumption is rapidly rising too. Furthermore, Bitcoin's transaction throughput is dismally low compared to existing pay…

The discussion about the energy consumption of bitcoin can only be discussed because we know how much energy it takes to produce one BTC. What we don’t know is how many banks there are in the world with all the computers and mainframes they use to keep track of all the fiat money. And then of course the energy to produce a hardcopy of that money like knocking down trees and mining metals. So in my opinion we only can…

As the article I linked to explains, 100,000 transactions on Visa uses considerably less electricity than 1 Bitcoin transaction.

If we can’t find any benefit that Bitcoin brings, then there should be a cost threshold where we start applying the brakes. In other words, how much energy are we willing to spend without a beneficial use case? With Visa and banks, we already know they serve hundreds of millions of people on earth—if not billions.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#99

Post by ric2b »

roenxi wrote: post #65
mvindahl wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the whole thing is computer data, stored on media. Already these days it's hard to find hardware to read the 5.25" floppy disks that I stored my code on in the late 1980s, and that's just three decades. Preserving digital data is a continuous effort. And yeah, you can encode your private keys in gold, and I kind of think that everyone should do that, to keep future archaeologists puzzled :-P

If your house burns down, there is a reasonable chance of recovering, eg, gold slag. Not so much chance of recovering the markings that were on that gold before. It is difficult to compare the durability of gold and bitcoin. It does seem plausible, given the length of time we've been using it, that gold's value is completely related to its intrinsic properties and difficulty of mining. Bitcoin can't possibly be value…

You're severely underestimating how much it takes to melt gold. I'd be surprised if you could do it with a burning house.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#100

Post by throwawaylolx »

hudon wrote: post #9

This seems like good news for speculators (disclosure: I still hold Bitcoin and worked at a Bitcoin exchange). Having said that, "Wall Street" should be wary of enabling the use of a system that is using more electricity than the country of Switzerland [0] without any productive output. The energy consumption is rapidly rising too. Furthermore, Bitcoin's transaction throughput is dismally low compared to existing pay…

>At least wait until the blockchain can solve a real world problem before burning through the mines?

What do you mean? Bitcoin already solves problems; e.g., https://www.forbes.com/sites/ktorpey/2017/12/31/bitpesa-ceo-...

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