Tesla is a car manufacturer! It doesn't make any sense at all! At any company that made sense, a CEO would lose his job for gambling $1B of company money in a casino totally unrelated to the company's business interests.
IMHO rising energy price is totally not good for Tesla's and other electric car manufacturers. It increases TCO of electric vehicles and companies' cost of support for premium models with free charging access.
Energy-prices fluctuations are relatively irrelevant in the long run. Oil will run out, and renewables are the only hope to address energy needs without killing the planet. This message is well-understood by now, the transition has started, it’s just a matter of how fast (or slow) we get to the new normal.
What are you, Apple? That gives no charger for "environmental reasons" while packaging its wireless headphones in a crapload of unnecessary plastics.
If you are so energy consciousness then go bark at US military, those are the biggest polluters and energy hungry of the world.
Isn't a rebuttal different than a deflection?
Anyway half - 3/4ths of bitcoin mining is using clean energy that wasn't going to be used for anything else, or a sustainability solution for energy that was going to be used as pollution.
While the clean energy claim may be true, why do you claim it wouldn't have been used for anything else?
The answer to your question depends on which power source we are referring to. Where Bitcoin is a sustainability solution, it is reducing waste by products which were already being produced and now are not being produced because they are used for energy.
Bitcoin is a multi-billion industry whether you respect its existence or not, your arguments will simply have to get more nuanced to have a real conversation about what's happening.
Organizations that know better are intentionally omitting the source of energy, in their discussion about the amount of energy. Don't fall for it.
Or with electrolysis or storage you need to generate it and transport it to where it can be used, getting you back to square one because nobody is doing that because it is uneconomical. Whereas mining is not because it can be all done on site in remote locations and doesn't even need great internet. High latency, spotty internet is good enough for crypto mining.
We know what the ideals are: no pollution and infinite energy, or no pollution and less energy use. Thats not going to happen, and crypto wasn’t part of those 50 year old models, yet it is accomplishing a lot of those ideals and people choose not to respect its existence as it alters their worldview.
If miners could burn cyanide to mine, they would. They don't give a single shit about clean energy, just cheap energy
2/ Bitcoin is causing _more_ energy consumption. It's not curbing pollution, in any way. It's just grafting itself where the energy is cheap. Noone's building wind farms for bitcoin.
3/ If I cut off 36% (which is a low bound, other countries are not clean either) of your salary, go ahead and tell me it's okay because you still have the supermajority of it.
3/ I’m not sure what you are saying here? Is this supposed to be an analogy to something? What happens if you get rid of that energy use? The bitcoin network will adapt to a lower difficulty rate... not sure what you think you’re saying here.
That's not how bitcoin works. The price of bitcoin is the budget you can spend on mining a single coin. If the price is higher, you can afford to run more miners. If the cost of electricity goes down, you can afford to run more miners. If the efficiency goes up, you can afford to run more miners. Running more miners increases the mining difficulty and you are back where you started.
If Bitcoin is worth $50k people will destroy $50k of energy to acquire Bitcoin.
If Bitcoin price goes up, then the return on energy gets greater. Therefore, it's worth it to spend more energy mining. Then difficulty rises and takes this incentive away, reaching a new equilibrium with more energy spent.
We’re aware there are non-U.S. dollar currencies out there? And non-currency assets one can buy?
Crypto currencies are best compared to pink sheets prior to increased regulation, and no one in their right mind would tell you to buy pink sheets to hedge against economic downturn even if their favorite did show a 10000% increase in value.
can you expand on that?
"at any company that made sense" is true, to a point. But the point of tesla has been, for a not-insignificant number of people, not meant to make sense. It's faith based. It's cult based.
Elon Musk has strong parallels to Trump's appeal. It might not make sense. That's not the point.
and it is probably related to medieval kings and queens, religious prophets and why some monkeys are more equal than others.
According to SEC filings, Elon himself hasn't sold any recently, but he owns 20% of Tesla, worth about $10B today. Even if Tesla drops 10x, he would have $100M worth of shares. Not to mention all his other assets, shares in SpaceX etc. He has more money than he will ever need.
Tesla's market cap is $764.255B. 20% of that is $152.851B.
Sure, he also probably takes a salary for his role at the companies as well. Still, there's a reason he continues to work I'd assume? It might be he truly wants to get electric car on the road, or it could be he wants more money. In both cases you could ask: "Can Tesla survive his inevitable exit?"
So ignoring Elon's motivations here, as maybe he just has fun running Tesla, who knows, still the question is relevant to other investors into the Tesla stock, and for Tesla's employees.
Isn't that the strangest thing? If you watch videos of Elon he is no where near as charismatic as trump.
I think it mostly stems from his success with SpaceX and earning accolades for being, "The Guy who does Impossible things". His having a car manufacturing company with an impossible share price just make sense.
That's what you think.
Is that even legal? It sounds like pumping and dumping.
He's definitively manipulating the market in the sense of the colloquial meaning of the word.
If there are public signals that predict the performance of a stock then those who benefit the most are those who execute their trades as quickly as possible and since Elon knows what he is going to "announce" on his Twitter account he is going to benefit massively.
He has put the term "bitcoin" in his twitter bio.
Better thought of as a configuration value set by people with most of the mining power, which last time I checked was PRC
These splits have already happened multiple times (Bitcoin Gold, SV, ABC, Cash) and most claim to be "the real Bitcoin". They are all either dead or valued <1/100 of BTC.
Sounds like you’re saying Bitcoin only has value because the PRC allows it to?
The owners of Bitcoin would just fork and switch to a different algorithm, ruining the value of existing mining hardware.
Please learn how the Nakamoto Consensus works and how nodes protect the Bitcoin network while miners are slaves to the network. There's a rich history of this being tested by adversaries.
The practical problem is that users have to download the entire dataset. There are a lot of queries that cannot be done exclusively through an index and require downloading a substantial amount of data. Bitcoin (and any decentralized app) is exactly the same. It's just that they replaced the central server with a proof of work consensus mechanism that makes it truly decentralized.
It's not a practical user experience. Lightning is just a fancy federated paypal. The average user won't care once Paypal and Mastercard support Bitcoin. The inability to scale causes Bitcoin to give more power to established financial institutions. It's ironic. Bitcoin will just be relegated to a settlement layer.
Not ironic at all. Bitcoin is supposed to be a robust, decentralised, censorship resistant settlement layer. That's literally the point. It's the base protocol.
We don't, after all, expect users to care about TCP/IP whenever they post to TikTok.
But it's reasonable, based on current trends, to predict that the number of full nodes will continue to increase all over the world.
If they don't follow the rules as set by the users of the system, their blocks will be automatically ignored by the users software [1] (while users receive blocks from miners following their rules).
[1]: there is one CONDITION to that, and that is that an economic majority of users either do run real bitcoin nodes (can also be light clients on smartphones that connect to own node at home or to external servers that do not belong to miners) or that the services they use do run real bitcoin nodes (and do not collude with miners).
It is about an economic majority of users, and not about a simple majority. There are higher chances that users with more value invested, will run their own nodes, and therefore will not be tricked by malicious miners, and therefore increase the value of the blockchain where the rules are followed (if the forked blockchain with infinite or increase supply were to have some traction by an economic minority, the economic majority could run a second node with these changed rules and sell their coins on that chain, that would make the chain the loosing chain, like what happened with "Bitcoin-cash").
Obviously everyone running their own node would be best, so that those nodes are not run by a small amount of entities who could decide to run software/nodes that do follow their own rules. That is *WHY* bitcoiners are sooo much against raising the blocksize limit, so that running a node is not too resource intensive, so that the number of people running their own nodes (knowingly or even better unknowingly) is as big as possible. Many do think that bitcoin is slow for technical reasons. That is not the case (and lightning could increase the throughput a lot if it achieves it's goal one day). Bitcoin wants to be "slow" to make it easy for as much users as possible to run a node (read: having a maximum amount of users (knowingly and unknowingly) run real nodes, instead of SPV-wallets that do NOT validates the rules and therefore can be tricked by miners!)
By running your own node, you mainly protect yourself, but a tiny bit also the rest of the users (long term aligned incentives, once running a node is computational irrelevant, or one node per family runing on the home router or similar).
That being said, miners, developers, exchanges, ... all can influence what happens, but the biggest power lies in users hands... if the economical majority run (archival or pruned) fully validating nodes.
miners are timestamping machines, which main function is to order (!) the transactions. That's it!
The is the whole point, everyone/every node verifies the rules, but the network has to agree on some ordering, as they could be many possibilities to order the transaction, and the network wouldn't know who to listen (everyone has his own opinion about the best ordering). So the "lucky miner" extends the blockchain effectively ordering the new transactions.
If the miner increases the supply or doesn't follow any other consensus rule, other nodes won't accept it. So the miner has not much power. He orders transactions
Title: Reddit Post Reporting Tesla's Bitcoin Purchase From a Month Ago Was a Hoax
Reportedly, the person claiming to be a Tesla insider with intel on the bitcoin purchase was actually some political science major college student tripping on acid. Crazy how so many people ate this story up.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459021...
> Thereafter, we invested an aggregate $1.50 billion in bitcoin under this policy and may acquire and hold digital assets from time to time or long-term. Moreover, we expect to begin accepting bitcoin as a form of payment for our products in the near future, subject to applicable laws and initially on a limited basis, which we may or may not liquidate upon receipt.
I'm curious is this the transaction per $100 or is $18 a flat fee regardless of transfer amount?
In general a Bitcoin transfaction fee is a market price to get your transaction included in a block. There is one block mined every 10 minutes and each block has enough capacity for a few thousand transactions. You put your transaction out on the network with a fee specified, and miners trying to create blocks can choose whether to include it in the block they attempt to mine. Naturally, miners trying to maximize profit will choose to include the transactions with the highest fees, occupying the least space in the block.
The size of the transaction (in bytes) is not related to the amount being transferred. It is tied to the number of inputs and outputs. Bitcoin doesn't directly track the "balance" of each address. Instead of a transaction saying "deduct 1000 satoshis from my account and give it to Charlie", it says, "take the 800 satoshis received from Alice in this old transaction, and the 500 satoshis received from Bob in that old transaction, and with that 1300 total give 1000 to Charlie and 300 back to me". 2 inputs and 2 outputs in that example, but you can imagine how both the # of inputs and the # of outputs can vary in practical usage. Therefore, a transaction that moves Bitcoins accumulated from many small transactions will be somewhat larger and have a more expensive fee than one that moves Bitcoins that were acquired all at once.
However, don't take this to mean that has an impact on the cost of withdrawing from an exchange: since the exchange doesn't make on-chain transactions for each buy/sell, it doesn't matter whether you bought your Bitcoins a little at a time or all at once for calculating your withdrawal fee. It'll pretty much be a flat fee.
One other thing - you cant even move BTC in or out of Robinhood. Robinhood for crypto is a complete scam right now.
It has a big warning saying to not use it with cash you aren't willing to lose.
This has tended to be true (that it’d go through within a few days), but right now it’s probably largely false.
Assume a small 226 byte transaction (one input and two outputs); at $50,000 per bitcoin, 50¢ is 1000 satoshi, which is about 4.4 satoshi per byte.
Per https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d, transactions with fees under 5 satoshi per byte were last cleared on February 8 (~8 days ago), and before that last on January 28 (~11 days). (Before that, such transactions stalled for about 12 days in October/November; other than that, it looks like such transactions never stalled for even a week back to the January 2018 craze, to say nothing of 50¢ being more satoshi per byte back then anyway.)
And if your transaction expires after a week——
It turns out that people were right when they said that it would take a long while for it to be adopted.
The miners then choose the transactions they want to include in a way, as to maximize their gains. As a block can only hold a certain amount of transactions and the limit being set by the weight-units [1], miners will want to prioritize the transactions that offer them bigger fees per weight unit, or usually expressed as sats/vbyte (satoshis per virtual bytes).
So if you don't need a transaction to arrive in the next 1-2 hours, you can lower your fees, and the transaction might pass in the night (although BTC is international, congestion is less on US night time and especially week-ends) or if not, probably in the week-end. If it doesn't clear fast enough, or as fast as hoped, then RBF (replace-by-fee) or CPFP (child-pays-for-parent) might help (manually or an increase of the fee could be automated by the wallet every set amount of time).
TL;DR: there is a free market for transactions, but the price is not dictated by the market (and there is no real bidding system), instead you suggest a fee, and see if any miner around the world wants to include it in a block (and you can adjust if the outcome isn't achieved, which has similar results to a bidding system... but is more like natural supply/demand mechanism, as miner do not guarantee to include a transaction).
Helpful to see current unconfirmed transactions (and sats/vbyte): https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d [info: the legend is clickable, and makes it easier to view how many higher paying transactions there are]
If you buy an option for a barrel of oil, Robinhood doesn't even deliver it to you. Same for wheat and gold. What a scam!
In all seriousness, if you want to speculate on the price of Bitcoin, Robinhood may be better than using some of these more sketchy exchanges that offer decent amounts of leverage.
If you want to actually purchase Bitcoin, there's regulated exchanges where you can do so, though that'll probably land you on some FBI watch list.
Even if the government didn't have that, they might still be able to deanonymize you via your transactions. Pseudonymity is not anonymity. If a single merchant identifies you as the buyer in a transaction, the government might be able to figure out the rest of your transactions in that chain.
I definitely would not call that a scam. I have no reason to move my BTC.
Besides, if you really want to own a given amount of bitcoins that you have in your robinhood account, you just liquidate your position in RH and use those funds to purchase bitcoins directly.
If you're transferring smaller amounts, why are you using Bitcoin? Use Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin or one of these newfangled proof-of-stake currencies. Then it'll be a couple of cents flat.
Power to the people?
The story seems to rapidly shift between "BTC will save Venezuelans from an oppressive government" and "we never said it mattered if people could use BTC for transfers of non-huge amounts of money".
Of course people have trouble pricing Bitcoin, but the same is true for many other assets. If literally the only use for Bitcoin would be to speculate on all the cryptocurrencies, that would be enough to make it valuable.
A wire transfer is a realtime transfer between banks. The only time I've used it was while buying a house. I've never done a wire transfer under $20k.
All free
I don't see an inherent problem with this. People who were too gullible to believe influencer crap and caused bitcoin's price to go down by panic selling are now gone from the market, and the believers stayed in and made money. That's a good thing, and weeds out gullible people from the system. This isn't the stock market where fundamentals matter.
So when the price goes down due to influencers, people are dumb for selling.
But when the price goes up due to the very same influencers, people are smart for buying?
> This isn't the stock market where fundamentals matter.
Amen to that.
The way I see it, Bitcoin is all about hype and modelling hype, so if you can correctly model a particular influencer's effect on a bunch of sheep, I think it's fine to reward that modelling prowess.
As for the sheep themselves, they might win or lose, it's a coin toss, but at the end of the day, they're just sheep.
That's a part of the crowd. Another part is in for speculation and sold on negative message then bought in the dip. We don't know the proportions. The first part could be close to 0.
Hardcore tech people and those who don't (or can't) trust institutions with their Bitcoin will pay the transaction fees to get their money out of exchanges and into their own wallet. The average retail investor, however, doesn't want to be their own bank. They just want in on the price action, while letting the exchange manage their money. Does anyone really think the person buying crypto $100 at a time in their Robinhood account wants to pay $18 (current average transaction fee) every time they want to move that BTC into their wallet? Of course not, which is one reason why Robinhood doesn't even have an option to withdraw Bitcoin.
As with any frenzy, the misinformation being circulated by people who want everyone to buy Bitcoin is getting out of control. How many average people buy Bitcoin because they think Bitcoin is the only way to avoid losing purchasing power? Meanwhile, everyone else has been protecting against inflation by purchasing stocks, real estate, or virtually any other investment long before Bitcoin was even invented. (Yes, I'm aware of the 21 million maximum BTC cap). The current Bitcoin narratives are more like a religion than reality.
That said, Tesla's Bitcoin purchase does make a lot of sense. Elon Musk went on Twitter and called Bitcoin "BS" to drive the price down so they could buy at a discount. They then announced their Bitcoin purchase with fanfare that drove the price up, marking a quick return on their investment. They used Elon's influence to make a quick profit on the frenzy.