It's actually possible to take control with <50%.

Putting it into economic terminology, the externalities aren't priced in.

If only we had the slightly less evil Elon Tusk in this quantum branch...

Tesla seems to be getting flak not just for the investment but also for the hypocrisy:

"Tesla got $1.5bn in environmental subsidies in 2020, funded by the taxpayer."

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952

I guess it's typical Musk - really good at engineering and innovation, total muppet at most other stuff.

Especially last sentence summarizes the reason for this article. Since when the Cambridge analysts are involved in taxation and stand as proponents? Writing those endless tabloids about energy consumption and wasting server space is also not CO2 politically correct.

A carbon tax on cryptocurrencies could be introduced to balance out some of the negative consumption, Mr Gerard suggested.

Really. This fake news about energy consumed by bitcoin ???

“ Currently, the tool estimates that Bitcoin is using around seven gigawatts of electricity, equal to 0.21% of the world's supply.”

Total flaw in calculations is simply that the computers used to mine the Bitcoins are in use anyway and mining occurs in background.

The BBC said mining the “last” bitcoin could consume all the worlds energy supply 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Why don't we takle those.

Or, why don't we calculate the carbon footprint of the current, state-owned fiat currency system? E.g. the co2 emitted for printing the paper money, by all the armoured trucks transporting useless paper to and from ATMs, stores, banks, etc.

evidence please!

65% mined in China, and China uses coal for 65% of its electricity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electr...ector_in_China

So that's 42% already.

For the other 35% mined you'd need 23% of the electricity to come from coal to reach 50% overall - looking at big players (US 24% from coal; Russia 20% from coal) it's going to be very close to that.

Rubbish (or at least years out-of-date).

1. Most Bitcoin are mined by custom ASIC, they have absolutely no other use.

2. Background processing doesn't come for free - modern processors are very good at throttling their power usage when not required.

The Cambridge analysis actually covers the range of mining equipment and their assumptions, which is why there's a huge potential maximum cost if it was all done by "real" computers, but in practice the average is at the lower end because it is done by custom rigs.

This may well be correct - the algorithm exponentially increases the difficulty of mining coins over time.

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/difficulty

According to that chart it's doubling each year - if you take the commonly used projection that the "last" bitcoin would be mined in 2140 (I have no idea if that is actually correct), then it will take 2^120 times more work to "discover" than one currently, i.e.

x 1000000000000000000000000000000000000 (10^36)

So actually it's not just our energy generation, but the total annual output of thousands of stars.

Of course mining rigs will improve, but probably not that much.

If you think the bitcoin network is energy intensive, you might want to stop and think about how much energy is consumed by banking system.

I seem to remember a rough calculation of about 150 TWh per year. This is about double what Bitcoin is currently. But remember, Bitcoin energy use scales with price, so they'd be on parity at about $100,000 per BTC and a million-dollar Bitcoin (the mythical figure we always dreamed of in the early days which doesn't seem so crazy now) would have a much higher (10-fold) use.

Technical aspects are interesting, but psychological ones too. This headline about a 48 million dollar Prius is interesting. The story is about someone who sold 1000 BTC some years ago to buy the car. If the guy have hodlded, these 1000 BTC are 48 million today. https://www.thedrive.com/news/39208/...millions-today

Others examples about people selling BTC to buy cars are in there. Another case of someone buying a 200K Lamborghini. If he have not sold, the BTC would be 10 million today.

So, what do you think is the impact of things like this around in the internet? Will people will really use BTC to pay for things today of keep holding until death? My poorly informed opinion is that people will still not use it for transactions. Everyone will tell you to remember about the 48 million Prius

Old-timers are full of stories like that. I used to spend 10 BTC a month on server hosting. I regularly kid a friend about the 20 BTC he bought off me to join a private torrent site. It's all water off a duck's back - nobody could have reasonably predicted the massive price increases (who bought Apple stock in the 90s?) and there's no point regretting the past; always look to the future.

For sure, using BTC for every day transactions is not a thing now. It's literally a (higher risk) replacement for gold or treasuries.

If the bitcoins scarcity will be defining factor to constant increase of its price then scenarios could be:

- It becomes generally accepted mean of transacting, to avoid word currency, in which case it will be further divided it into small fractions that will be either HODLED or spent, in which case it will be difficult for now to predict percentage of keepers versus spenders in the future.

- It will be still a digital unregulated asset that may further enjoy long term speculations or will disappear to chasm after losing its hype amongst investors.

I would currently bet on the first proposition alongside the other altcoins by amount of institutions warming up to the blockchain concept and alternative ways of investing the money. As with any relatively new technologies, there will be always two camps with protagonists and antagonists. However, regarding the volatility of cryptocurrencies, I think it will not be as high as witnessed in the previous few years. Remember, as with any emerging investment ideas, the crypto’s will eventually find their ground after confusing period on the market and stabilize. That was mainly the case in early days of new stocks trading with their high volatility back then.

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I offered this framework to bitcoin valuation on a separate thread

https://www.englishforum.ch/3247936-post5.html

Came across this chart on the uses of gold. Indeed only 7% is industrial use. The rest is by and large store of value (I consider jewelery as a store of value not really a medium of exchange or unit of account)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...-sector-share/

BREAKING: people unable to use BTC in my hometown due to power outages

Same cold front that left Texas powerless, left Monterrey (MX) in the darkness. Funny thing cool air can take payments down. Cool air, not even thaaat cold.

Just a little note on that: people still can use BTC, they likely just can't use the bitcoin main blockchain, until they go online. People still can use their wallets in the offline mode (marginally OK, when you trust the sender enough for the amount of payment, e.g. you know the person good enough or are dealing with an established business and have an adequate legal protection for the deal). Still better than bank cards in the same situation, though.

I don't really see what this gets you except as an exercise in acausal negotiating. If somebody sends BTC through an offline wallet, the transaction is just going to sit in their mempool (assuming they're running a full node) and nobody but the sender can see that. The sender can't even contact the receiver (say through email) to say he's made the transaction (the cheque's in the post...)

If the sender is online, but the receiver is offline, it's going into everybody's mempool and, certainly, a receiver who trusts the sender will often accept a transaction as complete if it just appears in the mempool but hasn't been mined yet; but the receiver can't see the mempool.

I don't think any meaningful transactions can be made in this situation.

And they get through half a million gallons of water to make three batteries. That water is consequently polluted.

This is why I don't see mass adoption of BTC as a currency. And also why I'd never use it. I couldn't sleep at night if I knew I paid the equivalent of 300,000 bucks for an Uber ride 3 years ago.