Tesla’s Elon Musk asks about converting “large transactions” to bitcoin
Title says it all:
Bitcoin mining in Nadvoitsy, Russia. By end of day today estimates are this facility will have used, in 2021, as much electricity as Pakistan has used in 2021.
The above is from Bloomberg.
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The gross waste of energy is the part of this stuff that really repulses me.
Its just so horribly wasteful and doesn’t need to be.
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Not only the energy waste, which definitely did not help the power crunch in Texas last winter storm.
But think about all this silicon. Computing power of mining hardware doubles every 1.5 yrs, making miners replace ASIC hardware frequently. It’s beyond frustrating when you think that this contributes to the current chip shortage and that much of this nonsense could be done away with by switching to proof of stake.
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Human greed and stupidity knows no bounds, but at least this one is powered by hydro, which is no longer used by a recently shuttered aluminum smelter (I’m guessing, based on the visible bloomberg paragraphs and wikipedia).
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The above stolen from xerty’s post on another thread. Bitcoin was numero uno on his list in terms of gains for 2021.
Ethereum? I dunno.
If this “don’t getchue to thinkin’” I don’t know what will!
ETH was up almost 4x, looks like +375% or so.
I know some crypto enthusiasts who are retiring off ETH, taking some cash off the table this year and next.
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HFS!
Are you sure it’s a “waste”? You need to defend the integrity of your currency, crypto or otherwise. The US spends an awful lot on anti-counterfeiting and military abroad to maintain the value of our currency. Proof of work serves that function for Bitcoin. I’m not that sure on proof of stake and if it would be similarly effective, but some coins are trying to move that way.
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Thinking what? That it’s not the next Enron and an obvious ponzi scheme? 
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Sure thats a reasonable point. Also traditional finances have their other costs. All the banks and Wall street facilities and industry has various costs that crypto don’t.
But then how much time and money do we realy spend on anti-counterfeiting ? And I don’t know we can really say our milittary actions abroad are specifically about the value of the USD currency as much as our interests and security in general.
I find crypto wasteful of energy since there are undoubtedly better ways to do cryppto mining that don’t use gigawatts of energy.
Chia hardddrive mining is one option. That burns physical harddrives over time so not suere the trade off but its not CPU intensive and doesn’t require entire hydroelectric dams to run em.
I’m sure theres other ways to design mining so it doesn’t use the energy.
Regardless of purpose, it’s an intrinsic waste if there is an alternative way to accomplish the same thing at a lower cost of resources, isn’t it?
If you’re a farmer who uses 10 times as much water/fertilizer to produce the same amount of corn per acre as your neighbor, isn’t your operation wasteful?
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yeah exactly that.
There has to be a better way to make pretend money
(from Bloomberg)
Goldman Says Bitcoin $100,000 a Possibility by Taking on Gold
Bitcoin will continue to take market share from gold as part of broader adoption of digital assets, making the often touted price prediction of a $100,000 by advocates a possibility, according to Goldman Sachs Group.
Goldman estimates that Bitcoin’s float-adjusted market capitalization is just under $700 billion. That accounts for 20% share of the “store of value” market which it said is comprised of Bitcoin and gold. The value of gold that’s available for investment is estimated at $2.6 trillion.
If Bitcoin’s share of the store of value market were “hypothetically” to rise to 50% over the next five years, its price would increase to just over $100,000, for a compound annualized return of 17% or 18%, Zach Pandl, co-head of global FX and EM strategy, wrote in a note Tuesday.
Bitcoin traded around $46,000 on Tuesday in New York, after climbing about 60% last year. The largest digital asset by market value hit a record of almost $69,000 in November. It has surged more than 4,700% since 2016.
Although the Bitcoin network’s consumption of real resources may be an obstacle to institutional adoption, that won’t stop the demand for the asset, the note said.
Bitcoin has long been referred to as digital gold. And the criticisms levied at gold tend to apply to Bitcoin as well: It pays no interest or dividends, and it doesn’t imitate the performance of more traditional assets. Advocates say Bitcoin, like gold, serves as protection against the systemic abuse of fiat currencies.
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FOLLOW THE MONEY! 
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And soon to be out of business … unless Uncle Sam starts paying you not to grow corn. 
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I’m sensing a business model here… 
Get paid to not do work! Genius!
Could the government start sending me checks if I promise that I won’t be mining crypto? Oh wait they already are sending checks to everyone for doing nothing.
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New AMD design seeks to discourage crypto mining
From ARS Technica
AMD will begin selling its latest budget GPU, the Radeon RX 6500 XT, on January 19th. Its retail price is $199. But the ongoing GPU shortage, caused in part by cryptocurrency miners and scalpers who are snapping up every card they can get, has made it mostly impossible to get any graphics card at its list price over the past year.
Whether the 6500 XT will be any different depends partly on supply, but AMD has also apparently designed the card to make it deliberately less appealing to miners while retaining its usefulness as an entry-level graphics card. Speaking to journalists in a press roundtable earlier this week, AMD Radeon VP Laura Smith talked about how the 6500 XT had been “optimized” for games (a transcript from a now-apparently-deleted PCWorld article is preserved here).
“We have really optimized this one to be gaming-first at that target market,” Smith said. "And you can see that with the way that we configured the part. Even with the four gigs of frame buffer. That’s a really nice frame buffer size for the majority of AAA games, but it’s not particularly attractive if you’re doing blockchain-type activities or mining activities.”
The remainder of the article is here:
Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says
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Bear signal from: 3CCxFk5tDkzbbJ6qJ1j3XTchh6yBuNahFd
An anonymous cryptocurrency wallet holding $21,065,570 of Bitcoin
just transferred their funds onto Coinbase. The bitcoin wallet address tied to this transfer has been identified as:
3CCxFk5tDkzbbJ6qJ1j3XTchh6yBuNahFd
Confirmation is here:
That is quite a lot of money for one transaction.
From Benzinga:
Why it matters: Cryptocurrency transfers from wallets to exchanges is typically a bearish signal. Most high networth cryptocurrency traders hold their funds on a hardware wallet, as these devices offer better security than cryptocurrency exchanges. Hardware wallets store investors’ private keys offline, securing their digital assets from online hacks.
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What remains to be seen is whether the design decisions that make the 6500 XT sub-optimal for mining also make it sub-optimal for gaming.
They lowered memory but upped clock speed to make up for it. Not sure how 4Gb GDDR6 is gonna play out for displaying advanced visual settings though.
If intent is on replacing RX 570/580 or GTX 1650/1650S with minor upgrade, that means decent 1080p gaming but not much more. That’s a large enough market for sure considering the current state. But we’ll see if their plan works. MSRP price of $200 sounds attractive until you see pre-orders retailing at 70% over MSRP. $350 seems rather expensive for the meh specs.
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