The Future Of Money

[Left Shift]

On 6/15/2021 at 4:39 PM, Mark K said:

 Same old story, a few bad apples ruin things for everybody. 

Isn't tRump supporting crypto the same thing as saying it's only valuable to criminals?

 

[Mark K]

Isn't tRump supporting crypto the same thing as saying it's only valuable to criminals?

 Just another patriot who seeks liberation from Uncle Sam's laws. 

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

China Tries Again
 

China's central bank has doubled down on its moves to crush cryptocurrency and announced that all transactions involving cryptocurrencies are illegal, effectively signaling an outright ban.

People’s Bank of China said in an announcement on Friday services offering transactions, trading, token issuance, and derivatives for cryptocurrencies are “all illegal financial activities and are strictly prohibited.” They added that overseas virtual currency exchanges that provide services to Chinese residents through the Internet were also engaging in illegal financial activity. 

Heh. You can't really ban math. They've tried and failed before and will fail again.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

The Future of Money turns out to be: hamsters.

Well, at least one hamster.

A hamster is living his best life and crushing the self-esteem of traders everywhere, buying and selling cryptocurrency better than even professional financial investors. Named Mr Goxx, this little hamster has been deciding which crypto to buy, when to buy, and when to sell, and since June 12th. He is now up an impressive 19 percent profit – that’s more successful than the S&P 500.  

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

McDonalds in El Salvador started accepting Bitcoin this month.

...El Salvador on Tuesday became the first sovereign government to adopt bitcoin as legal tender alongside its existing currency, the U.S. dollar. It allows the country’s residents to pay taxes and other debts using bitcoin, and for businesses to widen their payment options to the cryptocurrency. ...

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Bitcoin Futures on NYSE
 

On Tuesday, the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) started trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

The launch of this new fund—which will allow investors to purchase a package of bitcoin futures contracts—saw the price of the cryptocurrency rise 4 percent to a near all-time high of $64,000. Cryptocurrency news site Decrypt reports that five other Bitcoin ETFs have applications pending with the SEC. Provided the agency doesn't explicitly reject them, all of them could be trading by early November.

...

Some progressive groups, meanwhile, are fuming that Gensler allowed the Proshares ETF at all.

"Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have already sucked an insane amount of money from the real economy," Bart Naylor, financial policy advocate at the consumer group Public Citizen told Politico. "Enabling more gambling under the banner of the SEC debases what's supposed to be the gold standard of world securities markets oversight."

...

I wonder if he knows how funny his use of "gold standard" is in that context?

 

[slug zitski]

McDonalds in El Salvador started accepting Bitcoin this month.

Turn off the electricity and everyone goes broke 

drop your phone in the sea and you starve 

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Turn off the electricity and everyone goes broke 

drop your phone in the sea and you starve 

Yes, and the snowbirds are returning to this part of the world. This is also the time of year when the need to keep some extra cash and fuel on hand in case of curricanes goes away for a while. Turn off and wreck everything and cash and fuel become very handy indeed. At least, as long as people think the cash has value.

 

[slug zitski]

Yes, and the snowbirds are returning to this part of the world. This is also the time of year when the need to keep some extra cash and fuel on hand in case of curricanes goes away for a while. Turn off and wreck everything and cash and fuel become very handy indeed. At least, as long as people think the cash has value.

Imagine what an all electric car Florida would look like during a hurricane evacuation !!!

 

[Ishmael]

Imagine what an all electric car Florida would look like during a hurricane evacuation !!!

Damn cunning, those lefties. At least it would be a smog-free catastrophe.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Imagine what an all electric car Florida would look like during a hurricane evacuation !!!

I think that would go OK. They should have the range. Coming back before power is restored might be a problem but most are running a generator anyway so could charge it back up. Fetching fuel for the generator is always the issue either way, so... not much difference.

 

[Movable Ballast]

I think that would go OK. They should have the range. Coming back before power is restored might be a problem but most are running a generator anyway so could charge it back up. Fetching fuel for the generator is always the issue either way, so... not much difference.

My EV has 280 miles of range and can charge to 80% in 30 mins. Not a problem. 

 

[slug zitski]

I think that would go OK. They should have the range. Coming back before power is restored might be a problem but most are running a generator anyway so could charge it back up. Fetching fuel for the generator is always the issue either way, so... not much difference.

Naw… bumper to bumper slow moving evacuation traffic will sap there batteries 

with a fuel powered vehicle just carry a jerry jug 

 

[slug zitski]

My EV has 280 miles of range and can charge to 80% in 30 mins. Not a problem. 

One million drivers will all be looking to recharge at the same time 

 

[Movable Ballast]

One million drivers will all be looking to recharge at the same time 

Yeah or get gas...

 

[slug zitski]

Yeah or get gas...

No , you don’t need to stop for gas because you have your full jerry jug 

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Naw… bumper to bumper slow moving evacuation traffic will sap there batteries 

with a fuel powered vehicle just carry a jerry jug 

I carried three last time, and my wife had another three in her car.

But gas powered vehicles do run out of fuel in those evac jams.

One million drivers will all be looking to recharge at the same time 

And refuel. And no place is open. And the few that are are out of fuel. Hence the full tank and multiple cans when I depart.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Bitcoin Environmental Disaster
 

...

"Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are terrible for the environment," declares Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.). "It's an extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions," pronounces former Federal Reserve Chair and current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. "It's a way to both hide dirty money and destroy the environment at the same time," says Daily Show host Trevor Noah.

Such environmentalist attacks on bitcoin are best understood as a strategy by economic, media, and political elites to undermine a powerful new form of money that they can't control. Critics distort the basic facts about what's known as bitcoin "mining," the process through which a global network of computers maintain the bitcoin network through computation. Though energy intensive, this process is what makes bitcoin a truly decentralized monetary system. 

One of the starkest arguments against bitcoin is based on a logically flawed argument that its energy use will increase in a linear fashion as it becomes more widely used. Critics take the total amount of energy usage by bitcoin miners and divide that into the current number of transactions to arrive at a per-transaction cost. They then project that per transaction cost into the future. "A single bitcoin transaction," warns Warren, "uses the same amount of electricity as the typical U.S. household uses in more than a month." 

But this analysis is fundamentally wrong, says Nic Carter, a partner at Castle Island Ventures who has written a series of influential articles about bitcoin and energy. "They devise this per transaction energy cost figure. And then they extrapolate bitcoin's transactional load to hundreds of billions per year."

In fact, as the bitcoin network grows to support more transactions, it doesn't require additional energy, just as the Federal Reserve Building's electricity bill doesn't increase with every ATM withdrawal. The electricity consumed by mining isn't used to power individual transactions; it's used to power the foundation layer of bitcoin's monetary network, which can then be extended almost infinitely. "Bitcoin transactions and bitcoin's energy use are not really correlated," says Carter. "An additional marginal transaction doesn't really add much energy outlay to the bitcoin system."

The energy used by bitcoin miners has increased significantly since the cryptocurrency first launched in 2009, and it will continue to grow as more people use it (earlier this year, Deutsche Bank announced that bitcoin was the "third largest currency on the planet, after the dollar and the euro). 

But the media's claims are simply outlandish and provably false. In 2017, Newsweek boldly predicted that bitcoin was on track to "consume all of the world's energy by 2020!" One of  the most commonly cited figures—that the energy used to power bitcoin will generate enough greenhouse gases to raise global temperatures by more than 2 degrees Celsius—comes from a 2018 two-page analysis published in Nature Climate Change and trumpeted by The New York Times and other outlets. 

Nature Climate Change went on to publish three rebuttals (read here, here, and here) pointing out the implausible assumptions used to generate those figures, including the same fallacy of calculating an energy cost per bitcoin transaction and then assuming a linear increase as the network grows. 

So how much energy does bitcoin mining actually consume? Critics routinely invoke the idea that bitcoin uses more electricity than whole countries to generate attention-grabbing headlines, but that's also true of many industries, and if bitcoin were a country it would rank 39th out of 59 tracked by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. 

The Cambridge Centre estimates bitcoin uses just over 100 terawatt hours per year, which is less than gold mining and many other residential and industrial activities. And for what it's worth, bitcoin's market cap is over a trillion dollars, far more than the GDP of many of the countries to which it's compared.

More importantly, bitcoin's critics tend to ignore that miners are incentivized to use energy that would otherwise go to waste. That's because electricity is hard to transport over long distances, while bitcoin mining can happen anywhere that there's internet access. So miners gravitate toward energy sources, such as hydroelectric, wind, and solar, that have excess capacity and are intermittent.

Miners "will go to the Amazon, they will go to the Congo. They go to Serbia, Siberia. They will go to Antarctica in the middle of the ocean. They'll go wherever the cheapest energy is," says Alex Gladstein, the chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation. They bring their equipment and plug into systems when the price is right and stop when the price goes up beyond the level at which they can make a profit. 

...

A recent industry survey put bitcoin mining's sustainable energy use at around 56 percent, a figure that will likely grow, especially since China, once the location for a majority of miners, has banned the practice. As CNBC reports, miners are heading to the United States en masse, taking advantage of non-polluting nuclear energy and renewable sources that would otherwise not be used. "This shift toward zero-emission, clean energy sources has already begun to recast the narrative among skeptics that bitcoin is bad for the environment," writes McKenzie Singalos.

Bitcoin opponents such as Elizabeth Warren are now invoking arguments that whatever size bitcoin's energy footprint ends up being, it's still too much. She has said that the rule-bound computation involved in bitcoin is "useless." The claim that mining is useless is the essence of the government's attack on bitcoin because it's this component of the system that most directly challenges state power. The work being carried out by this global computer network is what allows bitcoin to be controlled by mathematical rules instead of human actors vulnerable to government or corporate control. 

Unsurprisingly, the alternative cryptocurrencies that meet the approval of Warren and other politicians always lack this specific quality.

...

That lack of control is completely inconsistent with Magical Monetary Thinking so must be stopped. To the extent math can be stopped.

 

[Steam Flyer]

Naw… bumper to bumper slow moving evacuation traffic will sap there batteries 

with a fuel powered vehicle just carry a jerry jug 

Think for a second... oh wait, sorry, you're a moron. I'll explain:

Florida is flat. It's hills that pull EV batteries down. Creeping along slowly will more than double the spec range.

Same for boats, but I expect you've never noticed that

- DSK

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Web3!