Some people think it's good to trade some of bitcoin's security for extra features, or at least, think that enough people will feel that way in the future to make these tokens good investments today.
Those people look particularly silly on days like this.
Mea culpa, searching for the actual original name “Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications” pulls up a number of interesting stories about the origins of the company running telegraph lines along the rail tracks.
Example: https://www.npr.org/2012/10/15/162963607/sprint-born-from-ra...
However I do not see anything resembling cell phone service happening until the 1970s.
There is no reason PoW-incentivized energy development would have to be only used for PoW.
PoW means there can now be a buyer of last resort no matter when and where you are generating power. Newly developed renewable based electricity can be sold at "x" price when there is residential or commercial demand, and at "y" price (y < x) to a PoW miner otherwise.
In this scenario there may not have been enough demand at price "x" to finance the renewable development, but the PoW buyer of last resort makes it feasible.
In fact, it is precisely the reverse of that: it's not a buyer of last resort, it's an energy price FLOOR. Any energy that you could sell to a customer, must be sold above "y". And so it is with computer hardware - any top or near top wafer capacity item you may want to buy must be above "Y" (what a crypto miner would pay for it). And this is why we saw massive price hikes for consumer computer tech in the last two years.
And is this way - a price floor - and not the way you describe it, because of the economic incentives of miners. They have already paid for these captial intensive mining rigs, and to best turn a profit they must be running at all times. The marginal cost of mining is important, but given the capital costs (incl depreciation of hardware!) you cannot ignore it.
Basically, your explaination is a failure of first order thinking. To a first order approximation, only the marignal cost of mining matters and thus the scenario you describe is true. However, you must include the second and nth order effects of capex to truly match reality.
The miners don't need to be running at all times. If the cost of power exceeds mining returns then they definitely should not be running -- they'd be losing money AND wearing out their equipment. There is a middle ground where mining returns exceed power costs but don't fully cover capital expenditures, but the miner doesn't have to operate during that time if they think they are better off making no revenue but avoiding the wear on their machines. The question is whether you think you will have a period of cheap power in the near future, and in this case miners can benefit from the cyclical and predictable nature of power demand in answering that for themselves.
One can easily imagine a scenario where miners run overnight when power is cheap, turn their machines off during the day when power is in high demand and expensive (and you'd either lose money by having them on, or you would make less than you would by conserving your hardware and optimizing its usage), and earn a profit overall (while leaving the power producer better off too by letting them sell power that would otherwise be wasted).
>wear on mining machines
There is virtually no wear on mining machines from actual use. There is, but it's negligible compared the main cause of depreciation of mining machines: better hardware coming out every 2-4 years AND the reduction in mining reward rate[1]. A bitcoin mining rig is worth essentially 0 after 2 years due to this depreciation. Not failure from wear. This is also true for GPU miners.
Second, there are many better uses for cheap power - one could use it to store energy in a hypothetical future where we use lots of intermittent renewables. You could use it to produce highly energy intensive physical goods - aluminum, hydrogen gas, fertilizer. You could use it for intensive climate engineering with carbon capture.
Almost anything else you can think of would be better than running a proof-of-waste cryptocurrency network.
The free market hasn’t been operating and never will operate with the restrained controls on energy usage that you outline though.
Besides, there’s so many more useful things to do with that cheap renewable energy at times of low demand - synfuels, desalination, etc - that we should definitely see what else the free market can come up with given negative energy prices, rather than propping prices up by running pointless hash-computers for some speculative investment scam.
It's one thing to have excess power, and another to have excess power in the time and place that you want to do these things. For example excess solar energy in the middle of the country is never going to be able to be deployed to desalinate water in the ocean because you will lose it all in transmission and storage (or you will spend more than you would just generating new power near the desalinization plant).
This is what makes bitcoin mining so unique as a way to make use of excess energy. First of all, securing a censorship-resistant digital monetary system is not pointless nor a scam. Second of all, energy from anyplace on earth, at any time, can be deployed for this purpose -- all you need is a mining machine and an internet connection.
Yes he probably knew about Twitter's pervasive spam problem before but today has been a particularly bad day, as spammers are deploying a large number of hijacked verified accounts to impersonate the Ethereum founder coinciding with a major network change happening today.
While all spam is bad, scams posted from a fake "verified" account are particularly odious.
The spammers impersonate famous people and then spam the replies of other famous people, for example the fake Vitalik in the OP is a reply to one of paulg's tweets.
If you read the threads under certain people's tweets (or anyone's tweets containing cryptocurrency related keywords) you will have no choice but to wade through copious amounts of this muck.
I'm still not quite clear what qualifies this as "spam" given that you need to opt into viewing the tweets. It seems like a clear-cut case of impersonation. Spam is an entirely different concept that cannot be reduced to "I don't want to see this content" (which would, again, necessarily include ads...).
Granted, I would consider 99% of what pg would likely consider "legitimate" cryptocurrency content to be de-facto spam, but that's just a part of being on the internet at this point. The problem he raises seems negligible in comparison to the other commercial content that pollutes twitter.
That iPad has enough content, gamification, and social aspects that it keeps you motivated to work out on a consistent basis. For many people that effect (especially if it leads to health benefits) is worth paying a lot of money for, and it's easier to just spend the money than to try (and likely fail) to be self-motivated enough to do the same thing on a conventional stationary bike without the tricks.
In other words, better to pay ~$1500 + ~$44/mo on something that gets you working out hard every day, than to pay $150 for a big ugly clothes hanger.
I think one of the big advantages to something like peloton is how brief you can make it and how private it is. For some, it’s a more comfortable, realistic way to be eased into exercise. The gamification etc as you mentioned adds a lot to that too.
Also highly misleading is the phrase "crisis pregnancy center" referring to a facility which has the objective of dissuading pregnant women and girls from seeking abortions.
I would suggest journalists and other neural entities (and of course anyone on the side of women's rights) find a more accurate way of describing such places. I don't think there is any obligation to use their own dishonest framing.
Ronchetti's Wikipedia page has never had any other photos. And the article was protected[0] due to a series of vandalism edits on July 10[1] that had nothing to do with his page's photo.
You are right that his article has a poor quality photo, which seems to be due to it being the only free-licensed photo available, but it's simply wrong to use this article as evidence of some sort of "partisanship on Wikipedia". If anything it is an example of bias towards incumbents, who get professional taxpayer-funded public domain portraits that are easy to drop into Wikipedia pages.
?? I see him as having had a different picture as of this [0] edit (several years ago). The filename (MarkRonchettiNM.png) is a different filename than the current one, leading me to believe that the file was simply taken off the Wikipedia servers and redlinked.
Apologies, I did not see that image in the article's history. I assume it lacked a free license as the other commenter mentioned.
Interestingly, the current image on that article appears to also not be legitimately freely licensed. It is a screen shot of a Youtube video uploaded by a resort in New Mexico. The uploader[0] gives no indication on their user profile that they are affiliated with the resort, while putting a Creative Commons license on the screenshot that the Youtube page makes no indication of.
The uploader is also now suspended on all Wikimedia projects for abusively using multiple accounts, and their main account[1] has on their talk page lots of records of deleted political-oriented images with many instances of inaccurate licensing and poor quality.
(If someone has a Wikipedia account it would be nice to flag the image on Ronchetti's page for deletion!)
All this to say, Wikipedia's editing process can by its nature be pretty messy and often produce some suboptimal results, until such time as someone comes along and fixes it. This should not be confused with a concerted effort by the people running the project itself.
You may feel like your accounts are stable and nothing is disappearing but by CPI inflation calculations (https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm), any money you had in that account 30 years ago has lost half its buying power.
If you want to keep the money that you have worked for over the long term, your checking and savings account are not going to cut it.
Half in 30 years? That’s pretty good! Ethereum fell by that much in a couple weeks. On the way up in a bull market it’s all roses, but in a bear market, these things can crash hard.
Money losing value gradually — Demurrage — makes people actually spend money rather than hoard it. If you want the money to earn interest, you will have to take some risk. Invest in some assets. Usually, stocks or real estate or (finally thanks to the JOBS act) new startups.
I don’t know why people have “fat bank accounts”. Money isn’t meant to be stored. That’s a racket by the banks, along with the idea that you have to buy a home instead of renting. If you can rent and buy other assets that you understand better than real estate, then do that.
This is not magic .. money has to come from somewhere. It usually comes from banks themselves — who lend it to people and businesses who believe that they can pay back MORE money ! The only way everyone can pay back more money than is in existence is if the money supply is increased in the meantime. So inflation happens. The only alternative is having lots of people default and restructure their loans to owe less. This is what Ray Dalio says can be “a beautiful deleveraging”. I don’t buy it…
> he only way everyone can pay back more money than is in existence is if the money supply is increased in the meantime. So inflation happens.
or the lent money is used to produce more goods and services, which the increased money supply would represent (otherwise, you'd get deflation, which discourages spending, and spiral downwards towards depression).
Most of that sounds right, but the money to pay it back is not a zero-sum game. It can also comes from increased velocity, quantitative easing, the net present value utility function, or by temporarily exchanging it for other asset classes (eg building real estate is a form of increase to the money supply), and probably other sources too
The people getting wiped out by the collapse of Voyager, Celsius, etc. were not putting their money on bitcoin. They were giving it to a custodian who thought they could beat bitcoin by investing in altcoins (or lending to those who do so).
This is definitely not "everyone's strategy"; plenty of us bitcoiners have been warning against this sort of irresponsible activity for a long time.
> withdrawn your deposits from these platforms when UST and then Celsius collapsed
Which ironically, is why more of them keep (and will keep) falling. It'll be a cascade of withdrawals across the ecosystem, and all these weak platforms will rightly go under. Looking forward to it.
Once someone sends their bitcoin or "crypto" to a lending platform, they no longer own this asset. What they now have is an IOU for that asset that the platform may be unwilling or unable to fulfill in the future, as appears to be the case with Voyager and numerous others before it.
Yes, but setting aside direct ownership which is not a prerequisite for investing in any coin, how is bitcoin a better choice? It seems to me that is like saying, well you really should have invested in Exxon and you would be ok now.
My guess: from a speculative standpoint Bitcoin is finite and the only real competitor to fiat. There's also a large amount of sustained hype. It's unlikely to flatline unless something really major happens.
Blockchains like Ethereum are not (and aren't meant to be) alternatives to fiat. In fact, the best thing for ETH would be low price, since it's mostly used as gas. Altcoins are almost entirely vaporware until ETH tech matures and consumer services become feasible. Until then, any high valuation of either ETH or Altcoin is 100% Tulip Mania. I have no idea about any blockchains outside of Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Bitcoin has no concept of ownership. "Not your keys, not your coins" means exactly that. If you lose your car keys, you still own your car. This is not true of bitcoin.
No concept of ownership is a stretch. If you have the keys to a Bitcoin wallet, you own that Bitcoin wallet. If you lost physical cash or gold, it would be like losing your keys to a Bitcoin wallet. No one would replace your physical cash, gold, or Bitcoin, if you lost it. However, that doesn't mean that you don't own that physical cash, gold, or Bitcoin, at least while you have it in your possession.
Well, when it comes to bitcoins, you only own them as long as you have them in your possession—which means you don't own them, you only possess them. This is what I mean by no concept of ownership. The bitcoin network doesn't care who is the rightful owner of the bitcoins, it only cares about who has access to them.
Crypto is one of the biggest active victim-blaming communities.
"Not your wallet not your coin", or whatever they like saying, is just is just deflection from valid criticism that crypto is very easy to exploit without recourse.
I disagree. To me it's like saying passwords are broken because most people choose "password123". Or like saying dollar bills are bad because they can rip. Safety rails should be made of course, but if you aren't even maintaining basic hygiene within a system then I'm sorry but that's on you.
People are learning to use better passwords, and people learned long ago to keep their paper money in a wallet. The same will happen with crypto.
I have no idea. Certainly more than the cost of a pizza. There are 21 million, and if split evenly among the world population each person would get ~0.002625.
It depends on a lot of factors; like how important it might become for people to avoid using fiat or government controlled digital currencies, or how deeply integrated it could become in daily life.
BTC isn’t a security. “Crypto” securities are much riskier than sticking with the one cryptocurrency worthy of being called a commodity- according to Gary Gensler (SEC chair, former CFTC chair). Securities are dividend or interest bearing assets. Commodities do not give interest or dividends, it’s like holding gold or some other rock. BTC is volatile enough! “Stable” coins and other “guaranteed return but not regulated” instruments have a long history of collapsing, even before “crypto” was sprinkled on top.
Those people look particularly silly on days like this.