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Bitcoin miners win legal battle to keep mum about energy use [US]
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Bitcoin is currently at $57,000 and it's up 144% in the last year. Haters gonna hate
Make sure you keep your money in bitcoin so when it crashes we can all laugh at you. Again.
Right now I'm up over 400% on my bitcoin, it's by far my best performing investment. Come back to this comment in 6 months and see where it's at.
I once hopped cryptocurrency was going to end capitalism, democratize the financial system and help redistributing wealth. Instead it became yet another stock to gamble on.
Oh I will.
popcorn.gif
Gonna try this out
@[email protected] 180 days
There's a RemindMe bot on Lemmy?! Now I've gotta try this out.
@[email protected] 24 hours
@TheImpressiveX Ok, I will remind you on Wednesday Feb 28, 2024 at 1:39 PM PST.
@Gigan Ok, I will remind you on Sunday Aug 25, 2024 at 2:18 PM PDT.
I was a couple months off, but I wanted to let you know that bitcoin hit a new all time high.
If i recall correctly, the stock to flow model predicts that this cycle should peak in late 2025.
FTFY
All investments are gambles basically. For example, I chose to do the "safe thing" a few years back to "invest" some of my savings into an index fund (stock market diversification basically). This is commonly expected to yield about 5% return on investment over time, historically.
What actually happened is that my Gamble lost about 40% of its value over the past couple years. I'd have been far better off just putting those savings into a good savings account.
Wow, a volatile currency backed by nothing has large swings in value and if you pick the right date range you can tell any story you want? That’s pretty amazing.
What is fiat backed by?
Militaries, usually.
A nicer way to put that is that taxes are collected in national currencies. You can use any currency you want in private transactions but when the tax man comes calling, you better have the government’s preferred currency.
Also, what are cryptocurrencies backed by? Why do y’all exclusively call government money “fiat” when that just means it isn’t backed by a precious metal? Is there a Bitcoin Ft. Knox out there making it not a fiat currency?
It may require a bit of TradFi history to truly understand Bitcoin and why it was even created in the first place. Much too long to even attempt at concatenating in a lemmy comment. Bitcoin wasn't a get-rich-quick scam like the majority of shitcoins today. CypherPunk movement had been working on a trustless system without a governing authority pre-Bitcoin (see e-cash).
Government backed currencies require trust. In the US you are trading IOUs issued by the Federal Reserve, which isn't even a Federal branch, but privatized business. There have been numerous times where the heads of the Fed have outright stated they simply enter numbers into a computer to issue money to Central banks, etc. Since Americans were robbed of a tangible currency, backed by Gold, the money printer has quite literally gone "brrrrr".
I don't trust the government or the bankers who have repeatedly financially rape the citizens. Remember the 2008 collapse? No one was held accountable. So, they've found new loopholes to continue pillaging the fiscally uneducated. The trust has been long gone as we're repeatedly lied to.
This is what Bitcoin has sought to solve in that it's not debased due to over issuance, unlike most fiat currencies. It doesn't contribute to inflation, causing your purchasing power to be decreased. It quite literally removes the powers from corrupt bankers and gives it to the people.
On the subject of energy consumption, yes it has historically taken quite a lot for Proof of Work miners. However, in year's past the miners have done a significant job at only using either green power sources or buying overproduced energy from companies. This has seen it drop far below the energy consumption of legacy banking or the Military Industrial Complex.
So, what you're saying is, if fiat is backed by militarism, it's really backed by death.
Well, luckily, you don’t have to worry about explaining TradFi history to me since I studied a lot of it in college and after. To me, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocates haven’t read enough about the 1800’s, whether it’s the Free Banking Era or all the post-civil war panics (including the Panic of 1907 so don’t stop at 1899). A lot of hard lessons had to be learned before we created the modern system.
Yeah and look at how much things have changed since then... Why throw the entire concept of creating a digital currency/ledger? Why be so against it at the core? It's one thing to be against Bitcoin, or proof-of-work, or literally any other current method of digital currency, but why dismiss the concept outright as some kind of old-timey dog & pony show who will be another lesson we learn the hard way?
Sounds like Luddite thinking to me. Sounds like fear of new technology.
How many literally countless attempts at human flight were there, many that were awful, stupid ideas, before we finally figured out the best way to do it?
Or maybe we should have just given up on the idea of air travel altogether...
Fiat currency is controlled by the government over which we have a bit of power (for those of us who live in a democracy).
Bitcoin is by definition controlled by those who have the power and thus the money to mine. It's a bit like democracy only that the more money you have the more votes you have.
that's how proof of stake works too. more money, more votes
Bitcoin was specifically designed so no small group of actors has the power. That's also one of the reasons it's so hard to introduce any fundamental changes to it. Too many groups of people would have to reach a consensus on the new rules. Since each one of them is following their own set of incentives, they keep each other in check.
You have zero power as a citizen over the currency you use. You do not directly vote for the Central bankers, Federal Reserve board, etc. Even the politicians you might vote for who appoint them will almost always side in their own favor than their constituents. I'd hardly believe a word a politician ever utters. Just look at all the lies and false promising during the campaigns of the last 5 presidents and what they actually accomplished. Biden and college debt as a more recent example.
You are also confusing Bitcoin's Proof of Work with a shitcoin's Proof of Stake, which is where wealth gives you more votes. As for the hash rate you're contributing as a miner, there's no additional power you're given. Even if you attempted to 51% attack the network, it'd be gaining nothing beyond a double-spend by rewriting the blockchain transaction. Likely causing the currency's price to crash. Zero financial incentives for any rich people to do that, unless they're part of a nation-state hoping to try and destroy the currency.
I didn't say it's perfect, but it's not zero power.
Proof of stake is arguably even worse, but the energy required for proof of work isn't free either (and that's by design, if it was free Bitcoin wouldn't work).
There is more than double spending. Who decides how Bitcoin evolves? When new features are added, hard forks, etc. How much power do you have over that?
https://www.bitcoin.com/get-started/what-is-bitcoin-governance/#what-is-a-bitcoin-hard-fork
How ever you turn it, at best it's a shitty version of democracy.
Fundamentally money is all about trust, and I, despite all it's flaws trust my government much more than a random group of developers and miners.
Crypto's backed up by the gravy seals, the special farces
I tried to withdraw my troops the other day, but the lady at the banks just stared at me like I was speaking a different language...
That is a normal reaction when encountering a sovcit
Governments guarantee that their currency is worth something in various ways. Bitcoin is backed by the energy usage it costs to mine
It's not backed by energy usage. It's backed by pure, empty, meaningless market speculation. It's a digital baseball card. People use it in the exact same way. It has value because it's "rare", limited, and a bunch of people think so.
It also has the additional property of being able to easily transfer that asserted value anywhere in the world, free of censorship.
Spoken like a true moron with zero insight.
Yeah it's called a "dead cat bounce". Zoom out by about 7 years.
Take it from a veteran. They get longer and longer with each iteration of boom/bust cycle. I've been into this shit since 2012. Long before the cryptobros all piled in.
I don't know how much you know about bitcoin, but 7 years ago it was worth $1,100.
That's not my point. I was talking about the recent price rise.
Every boom/bust cycle so far (and there have been about 4 or 5 of them), you get an initial spike, followed by a second one, and then a long, drawn out "despair" period after a crash.
What you're seeing is the second bounce of a spike that has been ongoing since about 2019/2020. The "despair" phase is probably not too far off now.
I know the past is no indicator of future results, but when it happens over and over and over again, well...
Again, I'm not sure how much you know about bitcoin because the boom/bust cycles you're talking about are reflections of the halving cycle, not dead cat bounces. The next halving is going to happen in April this year, and after that the price is going to go up even more. I've been through this before, I'm not worried about the despair phase but that's not what's coming next.
I hadn't realized Lemmy was so anti-bitcoin.
Anyway, bitcoin etf's are a new thing and money is pouring in. Only time will tell, but with all the etf money and the impending halfing, the future looks bright.
Is bitcoin volatile? Undoubtedly.
Buy during the dispair period.
As a former Bitcoin user and fan, I am also anti-Bitcoin. Until they can figure out how to run the network without drawing the energy equivalent of an entire developing country just to check if some numbers are correct in a database, I can't morally justify myself using it any more.
They probably don't know much about Bitcoin, seeing how they have only been using it for 12 fucking years...
/s
Ransoms gotta get paid
Surely this time it won't crash and burn right?
You're right