Tesla will no longer accept Bitcoin over climate concerns, says Musk

[Energize]

Whoever stated that it wasn't me. The thing with houses is there is they are actually something tangable. Prices may take a bit of a dive occasionally (2008/9) but medium to long term, most people know they recover due to real demand (need) and this won't stop while the popultion keeps climbing.

Unless people start building more houses...

Economics is all about demand and supply, increase the supply of houses and their prices drop.

a finite amount of nothing, backed by nothing = nothing.

Like all fiat currencies then except that it's an infinite amount of nothing. Many of which collapse given enough time.

 

[Surveyor]

That's not how cryptocurrency works, if mining stops it has no effect on the ability to use the currency.

How would Bitcoin transactions be verified without miners?

 

[Energize]

no not the same, backed by governments/nations vs backed by hype and in the case of BTC, being first (or first to get hyped)

Because no fiat currencies have ever collapsed due to political events...

How would Bitcoin transactions be verified without miners?

Mining for a block reward which you were (presumably) talking about and mining for a transaction fee are very different.

When compared to say Mastercard or Visa the electricity cost of operation is not much different when you take into consideration the $ value of the sum of transactions.

 

[Energize]

In your head, imagine 10-50 years in the future and everything bought/sold is done with crypto currenies (your wish no doubt), how do governments a) collect taxes & b) pay for things or do we assume all governments build massive crypto mining data centres and rely on that to fund public services?

I wouldn't say it's my wish that all transactions are done with cryptocurrencies, I don't think all eggs should be put in one basket, just that cryptocurrencies should be in use as they prevent the government tyranny that fiat currencies enable.

Governments collect taxes now based on the coerced disclosure of information like salary, and the voluntary disclosure of financial information like company profit and product price, I don't see that changing with cryptocurrency really.

But my general libertarian hope in 50 years time would be a minimal government needing very few taxes compared to now.

 

[Surveyor]

Mining for a block reward which you were (presumably) talking about and mining for a transaction fee are very different.

Please post a link supporting this point.

When compared to say Mastercard or Visa the electricity cost of operation is not much different when you take into consideration the $ value of the sum of transactions.

If Bitcoin is going to take over from fiat currencies then the network will have to verify large numbers of transactions not just large value.

 

[Energize]

Please post a link supporting this point.

Basically blockchain rewards halve periodically so assuming the currency remains the same value you need twice the electricity cost to mine, whereas transaction fees are fluid and change as the difficulty of mining increases, or external events occur, the more expensive mining is the more transaction fee is demanded by miners so there is no exponential electricity cost. Just look at how volatile transaction fees can be!

https://privacypros.io/tools/bitcoin-fee-estimator/

https://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com

If Bitcoin is going to take over from fiat currencies then the network will have to verify large numbers of transactions not just large value.

Sure but with ASIC's et al and the general reduction in electricity requirements of processing power I don't see this being something that is going to be a huge hurdle to overcome. Besides I see crypto being part of a mix of currencies, hell we could even see physical commodities like gold being used more for transactions in the future, unlike fiat currencies which always lose value due to monetary inflation gold tends to remain much more stable over time.

 

[Pho]

Anyone mentuined proof of stake?
Not all crypto is proof of work
Just saying , maybe this is how things will go etherium suposidly migrating eventually
https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/beacon-chain/

This. As far as I'm aware all the energy (pun intended) is being spent to reduce the energy requirements of the blockchain now.

Ethereum layer 2 which is coming soon should solve this.

Ethereum will be about 7,000 times more energy efficient than Bitcoin, which continues to rely on mining.

https://cryptobriefing.com/ethereum-staking-will-drop-power-consumption-by-99/

I find it quite funny that literally the only reason energy consumption is so high is because we as humans don't trust each other. If we actually trusted people not to try and defraud the system you wouldn't need to waste all the energy to confirm transactions

I don't think I'm so fussed about using the blockchain for currency, but I can really see the benefits of using it for permanence (records/data that live forever), smart contracts (much simpler arbitrage, less lawyers required to read contracts) etc.

Web3 login is also quite interesting; you can register/sign into sites through your wallet. If you understand public key / private key authentication (or basically ssh keys) it's kind of the same idea. It should be much more secure than a username/password and much quicker too. MetaMask already supports this for sites that have implemented it.

As far as I understand it just sends your wallet address which is basically a unique ID, they can't see your balances etc unless you choose to share it. You also have multiple accounts on your local wallet to keep them separated.

 

[Energize]

This. As far as I'm aware all the energy (pun intended) is being spent to reduce the energy requirements of the blockchain now.

Ethereum layer 2 which is coming soon should solve this.

This is another thing to consider, while Elon virtue signals about his ill informed views on environmental damage, there are many other cryptos with less cost in operation.

 

[Surveyor]

Basically blockchain rewards halve periodically so assuming the currency remains the same value you need twice the electricity cost to mine, whereas transaction fees are fluid and change as the difficulty of mining increases, or external events occur, the more expensive mining is the more transaction fee is demanded by miners so there is no exponential electricity cost. Just look at how volatile transaction fees can be!

https://privacypros.io/tools/bitcoin-fee-estimator/

https://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com

Sure but with ASIC's et al and the general reduction in electricity requirements of processing power I don't see this being something that is going to be a huge hurdle to overcome. Besides I see crypto being part of a mix of currencies, hell we could even see physical commodities like gold being used more for transactions in the future, unlike fiat currencies which always lose value due to monetary inflation gold tends to remain much more stable over time.

And when 100 or 1,000 times more transactions have to be verified than are now?

 

[Energize]

And when 100 or 1,000 times more transactions have to be verified than are now?

Eh, I just responded to that?

And Bitcoin is just one currency, there are much more power efficient ones out there.

 

[hans gruber]

I'm just waiting for tulipcoin and then I'm going in big.

 

[Rainmaker]

XRP incoming as a replacement is my bet.

BTC Energy Use for 100 Million Transactions in 2019: 95.16 Billion kWh
XRP Energy Use for 100 Million Transactions in 2019: 790,000 kWh

I can see it highly likely that Elon tries to damage the SEC reputation some more as he has already openly declared that he dislikes them in the past, and as such could accept XRP to help the Ripple Labs case.

Monero (XMR) has my vote. It's similarly lower powered, has exceedingly low transaction fees (fractions of a penny, versus pounds for BTC), and also has the advantage of being fully private - unlike BTC. Every transaction in Monero is encrypted (sender, recipient, amount) and every real transaction accompanies 6 indistinguishable fake transactions to obfuscate the chain. You'll never be able to see who owns what, who paid whom, or how much, in Monero. The BTC ledger is public. What's the point of a 'crypto' currency that isn't fungible and doesn't have the privacy benefits of cash? There's a decent P2P/DEX market for XMR too which helps.

 

[Paul Spencer]

Monero (XMR) has my vote. It's similarly lower powered, has exceedingly low transaction fees (fractions of a penny, versus pounds for BTC), and also has the advantage of being fully private - unlike BTC. Every transaction in Monero is encrypted (sender, recipient, amount) and every real transaction accompanies 6 indistinguishable fake transactions to obfuscate the chain. You'll never be able to see who owns what, who paid whom, or how much, in Monero. The BTC ledger is public. What's the point of a 'crypto' currency that isn't fungible and doesn't have the privacy benefits of cash? There's a decent P2P/DEX market for XMR too which helps.

thanks going to look into XRP more

 

[4k4uNuNu]

"Until now western regulators have been pretty relaxed about Bitcoin, but this might change soon."

Is this it, is this finally the end of this madness and we can all buy a computer again? I have my doubts but fingers crossed.

 

[Journey]

Is this it, is this finally the end of this madness and we can all buy a computer again? I have my doubts but fingers crossed.

Yes by the look of things it is, in a couple of weeks the market will likely be flooded with GPU's.

 

[moon man]

Etherium getting hammered, I was nearly in at £1250 some time back (why, fomo probebly I got 100,000 gold shares for same reason, been boring tbh but one day ) but all the jumping through hoops and sending photo id put me off never realised this was needed or is this just binance, kraken ect, dunno

 

[fez]

If crypto is going to be viable long term they need to fix the power consumption of maintaining it. In its current state, the likes of Bitcoin should be rightly shunned.