Bitcoin Forum
April 28, 2025, 11:53:23 AM *
News: Merit Poker is still available for a limited time
 
  Home Help Search Login Register More  
  Show Posts
Pages: [1]
1  Economy / Economics / Tesla stops car purchases with Bitcoin on: May 13, 2021, 11:23:12 AM
The real reason behind the sudden drop in price?

Guess what? Yesterday Tesla announced that the company will no longer accept car purchases with Bitcoin.
Who's surprised?

But it's not this fact, that pisses me off. Businessmen buy Bitcoin, sell Bitcoin, fine, do whatever you want with it, but the most annoying thing about this is how he still wants to seem all warm and fuzzy.

Elon Musk explained this decision on Twitter, stating that the company's concern is with the ecological aspect of Bitcoin mining and transactions:

Quote
Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin. We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel.

Like hell you are! Didn't know about that fact when made a purchase worth $1.5B?

Quote
Concerns about bitcoin's energy demands have been around since the very beginning, with crypto pioneer Hal Finney tweeting about potential future CO2 emissions on 27 January 2009 – just two weeks after receiving the first ever bitcoin transaction from the cryptocurrency's pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/bitcoin-bad-environment-mining-cryptocurrency-b1846773.html

And this, in fact, is a total bs, because of all currencies cryptocurrencies are considered to be rather eco-friendly as compared to the fiat system. Why? Because paper money production and running banks...surprise-surprise - require huge energy consumption.

Quote
The estimated global production costs of paper currency in 2014 were 5 terawatts per year and 10 billion liters of water. While the banking system alone is even consuming more energy than the Bitcoin network, bankings energy costs are calculated around 100 terawatts per year. This is almost double that of Bitcoin. Indeed, banks need to run a lot of servers, branches and ATMs to keep their system accessible to the public.


Source: https://www.ledger.com/energy-consumption-crypto-vs-fiat

Your thoughts on this? Are cryptocurrencies, and, in particular, Bitcoin, that harming to the environment when compared to cash? Or is this just an excuse for screwing people over?
2  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / How do I convince people that Bitcoin isn't a financial pyramid? on: February 27, 2021, 02:42:24 PM
With more and more influential people and companies getting involved with Bitcoin there's been a lot of talks about the crypto world among regular people, to whom Bitcoin is still something new and unknown.

As you might expect, many of these people believe that Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies will not benefit the economy, but rather only make it worse, and many are convinced that Bitcoin is yet another pyramid. And what upsets me the most is that among these people are economists, financial advisors, they should know better, than that...

So how do I prove them wrong?

Though I'm not a professional economist, still I've come up with some arguments as to why Bitcoin ISN'T a financial pyramid:

1. There's no single beneficiary
In financial pyramids, there's always someone, an organization, or a group of people who benefit from peoples' investments. Who benefits from Bitcoin? Anyone can become that person if he/she invests enough money, there's no one, who controls it.

However, a friend of mine argued that there are people, who benefit: electric companies from large energy consumption due to mining and the companies that develop and sell the miners.

But that's just crazy, to believe in that we'd have to assume that they're all in collusion.

2. There's no need for new recruitment
That's probably my favorite. The main reason why financial pyramids survive is that they constantly recruit new customers. Without that - the pyramid falls.
But there's absolutely no need to recruit new people for Bitcoin to function, am I right? Without new users, there'll be just redistribution of what there is among the current users, txns will still be going and the miners will have work to do. So there's no required amount of users for Bitcoin to function like there is in the pyramid. I see no potential flaws here.

3. There are no promises
In financial pyramids, it is common that an organization lures people in by promising that they can easily "turn $100 into $1000", for instance. There's no such thing with Bitcoin. Yes, there's a potential for it to grow, you can make money out of it, but there's also a potential for it to drop, everyone invests knowing this can happen and sometimes it does happen, we go in here being aware of the risks.

That's about it.

Also, one thing that people keep telling me and get me cornered with is that there's no actual value behind Bitcoin. And that the economy can't function like that. Making Bitcoin only requires resources (e.g. energy, machines), but Bitcoin doesn't give anything in return. They say that behind the fiat there's an actual value, which is why we can avoid inflation: precious metals, country resources, plus it is fixed to the GDP, which is why the economy can be stabilized.
Without that - fiat is just paper. And while Bitcoin has nothing like that fixed to its price - it is also nothing.
They say you can't just "create" money out of nowhere. The only way Bitcoin can function as a part of the economical system - is if we replace the fiat with it. What can you say about that? Sounds reasonable, but I'm not a specialist. Is that really true?

Don't hesitate to point out if I'm wrong somewhere, it'll help a lot. Also, it would be very helpful if some of you could come up with more arguments, proving that Bitcoin isn't a financial pyramid.

I know it isn't and I also want other people to know that it isn't, and for that, I need as many arguments as possible.


3  Economy / Trading Discussion / investing in art? on: August 12, 2018, 09:34:18 PM
I've been thinking recently, people discuss here on forum different types of investments: crypto investments, real estate, gold and precious metals, stocks, but I haven't seen one about art, like investing in paintings or other works of art. This, however, seems like a good opportunity to me. Just think about other investments: a certain cryptocurrency can be destroyed by market rivalry, same can happen to real estate and stocks and they can become depreciated. But art lives, because something stronger lays there - it's ideology and sense of beauty. Paintings can live through ages, Pablo Picasso, for instance, wrote his works about a 100 years ago, but his famous "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" was sold in 2010 for $106.5 million and it happens a lot. Apart from ideology there's another thing about art items that can increase their prices - auction. It helps to recover price and increase it instantly even when it seemed like everyone has forgotten about that piece of art. What's your opinion on this?
4  Other / Politics & Society / Shouldn't people take a better care of their own species? on: August 08, 2018, 08:06:24 PM
I know it may sound strange, as we live in a society, where people mostly adore animals and I don't have anything against it, but still there's one catch. Sometimes it comes to my mind that some people spend too much money on pets and numbers speak for themselves (estimated expenditures for 2018 year - 72.13 billion USD according to The American Pet Products Association), I'm not talking about simple feeding or taking care of homeless pets here. I'm talking about this habit, when pet keepers become obsessed with some special breeds that cost thousands of dollars, or do expensive haircuts, paint nails or whatever for their animal companions. Come on, is that what animals really need? I think that's just a show-off, and why develop new breeds, when there are lots of animals struggling on streets?
But another, more important question is lying on top of that: shouldn't people take care of other people, instead of domesticating animals, that would feel better under wild nature conditions? Only in the US there are nearly 564,708 homeless people, taking them away from streets and giving them the opportunity to become educated would improve country's economy by increasing the number of skilled labour. What's your opinion on this?
5  Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Why are regular and priority fees equal? on: July 01, 2018, 10:06:13 AM
If you've made transactions recently you might have noticed that regular and priority fees are either equal or nearly equal. Since fees depend on the volume of pending txs on the network at the moment when you make your tx the fact that tx fees are low means that not much people are using BTC lately. But what has preconditioned such a small difference between fees? Does this mean that the time of generating 2 blocks and 6 blocks on blockchain is almost equal? But how is that possible? 
6  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Altcoin Discussion / Is TON, GRAM worth investing? on: April 07, 2018, 12:30:23 PM
There has been a lot of agiotage around this ICO, and now we know, that it raised up to $1.7 Billion! Moreover, raising those funds wasn't an arduous task, on the contrary to most ICOs, people wanted to invest in it so badly, that up to 10 fake Telegram ICO websites appeared, offering tokens with a very low price. However, not everyone believes that this project has a promising future: https://news.bitcoin.com/telegrams-ico-has-raised-1-7-billion-but-not-everyone-is-impressed/

What is your opinion on this? Will you but tokens, when they will be easy to get?
7  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / What happens if you mistype the address while sending BTC ? on: February 17, 2018, 10:09:19 AM
My question is plain and simple, if one is sending BTC to a particular address and mistype just one or two characters the money won't be sent to just another address (34 characters given in a random gradation - the probability is negligible). So where do those Bitcoins go? Just disappear somehow, or still exist, but fall out of cycle of money. Or they won't be even sent due to Base58Check functions? Can someone professional please expound how this works?
Pages: [1]
Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Powered by SMF 1.1.19 | SMF © 2006-2009, Simple Machines Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!