bitcoin in its finite, pre-determined supply and halvings every ~4yrs (formed through consensus) while going through s-curve adoption brings forth its unique number go up technology that has economist around the globe stumped
I'm personally buying bitcoin to hedge against possible inflation in the next year. The COVID relief packages are just the government printing more money, making existing money worth less. Once the vaccines are showing their effect in stopping the pandemic there will be a lot of pent up spending people are going to want to do which will lead to higher prices. Bitcoin seems like a good inflation hedge due to its fixed amount.
This is exactly what I do not understand. How would a system with a fixed amount of coins work in real life, i.e. in a case like we currently have, when you just need to get money into people's hands so that they can pay their rent and do not starve?
And gold was awful money which is literally why we stopped using it as money. Trying to bring back a digital gold based money is just making new crap digital money.
The current fiat system has be around for about 50 years. Don't you think it is a little premature to compare it with 5000 years of monetary history and declare it a winner?
In any case, the fact that fiat money has not been able to prevent the business cycle from creating devastating crises would seem to imply otherwise.
The World Wide Web has only been around 30 years don’t you think it’s a little premature to compare it with 5000 years of carrier pigeons and horse drawn letter delivery? I for one remain unconvinced. Ooh my pigeon just arrived! I wonder what news she brings from the Capital! ;)
I’m just saying the length of time it’s been around isn’t the sole determining factor of whether it’s demonstrated value, or of whether the system it replaced is better or worse. You have to evaluate that on its own merits, and yeah I do think 50 years is long enough to begin to draw some meaningful conclusions. Otherwise "50 years is too soon" seems like some arbitrary conclusion you've reached without a real basis?
Fiat money isn't new, in general the transition between hard money (gold/metal), paper money, and fiat is cyclical. The transition from fiat to hard isn't always pleasant.
People stopped using gold because of greed and power. They introduced a usurious system in order to collect wealth to a small group of people, resulting in the mess we're in today. Gold, silver, and commodities are the superior solution.
The answer is of course that the question does not apply, because printing "money" and giving it to people is not the one and only way to ensure people do not starve (don't get me wrong it is a way, but is probably the most detrimental in the long run because of all the unintended side effects, some of which we have already been witnessing)
If the goal is to not starve, the government could give, you know, actual edible food to people and not pieces of paper. (I am not suggesting this, it is just another possibility)
But to your more broader question, the fixed amount of bitcoins is only a problem if you intend to keep the system working as it has, but bitcoin advocates favor a new way (or the old gold-backed way) to look at the economy on which savings is the bedrock of it and not debt like we currently "enjoy".
That means nothing if the wealth distribution is somehow worse than that of US dollars, which it is, and there’s no mechanism to create new dollars to give to folks to even it out.
Nope you’re not understanding my point and that could easily be my bad.
That’s part of what inflation does. It allows the monetary system to react to shocks and changes like population growth and global pandemics. Deflation without creation of monetary units benefits the existing concentration of wealth as you and your children get to fight each other for scraps. These pieces are all connected. This system will lead to the existing moneyed class of coiners becoming more and more wealthy as a function of economic productivity forever.
>This system will lead to the existing moneyed class of coiners becoming more and more wealthy as a function of economic productivity forever.
This, along with depriving The Great State-an of a means to operate an effective revenue collection system, has been the real objective since the beginning. Decentralization has never been anything other than a mantra, a fig leaf to be casually dropped when no longer useful or credible. "Hyperbitcoinization" means never having to say you're sorry for selling a fraud to 'the masses'
Well, there’s nothing stopping subdivision of a currency by any means available. Bad money drives out good as well, so in practice, people cash in bitcoin and pay with dollars in order to pay small fraction of what 1 bitcoin is worth. In theory, a “sub coin” could handle this but I guess it hasn’t been desired enough for anyone to bother specializing in it. All I am saying is theoretically there is no issue.
Oh and others mention subdividing bitcoin directly so there is that.
With fiat currencies, money is basically an IOU from the central bank. So it is easy for them to give loans by "printing money", since a loan from the central bank is just as good as cash.
You could still layer a system like that on top of Bitcoin. However, you might have trouble getting people to accept your bitcoin IOUs as equivalent to real coins.
That said, why would you want that? Why not just use fiat currencies where they are appropriate, and leave Bitcoin for the use cases in which it's appropriate? It doesn't need to replace the whole economy to be useful as a technology.
>The COVID relief packages are just the government printing more money, making existing money worth less.
The thing is, it only causes inflation when that money circulates. But the Fed is just pumping it directly into the stock market. The result is sky high valuations and asset prices, but very little change in the actual day-to-day economy's monetary supply. This is why inflation is still under 2%. And sure, people could sell out and take their cash to invest elsewhere, but with 0% interest rates there's literally nowhere else to put it.
The simplest way to think about this is in terms of supply and demand. The supply of dollars is going up, so the price will go down, unless the demand for dollars also goes up. If people are selling stock, taking out loans, doing other things in order to demand and obtain dollars, then we won't see inflation. Yet.
> If people are selling stock, taking out loans, doing other things in order to demand and obtain dollars, then we won't see inflation. Yet.
Isn't it plausible that the dollar supply isn't actually reaching consumer markets, and consequently inflation stagnated because a drop in purchasing power leads to a drop in aggregate demand?
Inflation hedges work because their value is (theoretically) unchanging over the long term and so by comparison it seems like they appreciate in value compared to fiat currencies which experience inflation.
But really, inflation hedges don't grow in value during times of high inflation, they just don't lose as much value as the fiat currencies do. That is how they protect against inflation.
Like clockwork, the "muh tether" FUD continues on HN.
If you think tether is the only reason cryptoassets are increasing in value, you are simply not paying attention.
While I would very much like to agree with you, I still haven't read a convincing debunking of the "tether is used to manipulate Bitcoin's price" argument.
The facts, AFAIK are:
- Bitfinex (or rather some entity controlled by the same folks who own Bitfinex) can emit as much Tether (USDT) as they like.
- They claim to have, in a reserve bank account somewhere, one dollar for each USDT ever emitted (which - in itself - is problematic because of counterparty risk).
- They have never - so far - provided a proper third party audit of said reserve bank accounts.
- Even if they do *actually* have one USD stashed for each USDT in circulation, it's highly unlikely they're just letting it sit there, it's likely invested, therefore risk, therefore the equation 1USD==1USDT is iffy at best.
- emitted USDT can easily be used to buy BTC and pump the price up
I'd be very happy to be proven wrong on any of the points above.
I generally agree that they should allow a proper 3rd party audit and disclose their USD asset management strategy.
The biggest counter-argument is just the orders of magnitude of the two. Tether's market cap is 20b whereas bitcoin's is 350b. While that's large enough to cause a temporary shock and can be used for short-term manipulation, it likely not enough to cause long-term damage.
Ah you misspelled “muh reality” - I know it’s hard to reason through but let me put it to you this way. Give me one single solitary shred of evidence that they have the money they claim to have. The burden of proof is on them and I’m sure as confident as you are you’ve seen some?
For instance if I told you I had a trillion dollars in an offshore bank account, and that if you gave me $1 I’d give you a funbuck and throw it on the pile with no obligation to redeem it, would you up and believe me right away? If so I may just get into this crypto business after all.
Totally, ezpz. Here's a study [1]. And here's Tether creator and alleged sex offender Brock Pierce saying so [2]. You may also want to review the evidence submitted in the lawsuit brought by New York and Georgia, such as the time Bitfinex' "Merlin" (CFO Giancarlo Devasini) sent $1.5 billion dollars to a money launderer, CCC [3], claiming they didn't know his real name - and in an increasingly desperate conversation with CCC while attempting to get some of that money back, he said this leaves the entire global crypto market at risk. [4]
Merlin [15.10.18 10:02]
please understand all this could be extremely dangerous for everybody, the entire crypto community
Merlin [15.10.18 10:03]
BTC could tank to below 1k if we don't act quickly
I don't know, honestly, if none of this convinces you, then I'm not sure even a direct literal admission of the scheme would anyways.
You at least smell smoke dontcha?
I guess this makes it your move! I expect that audit shortly!
1. A "market cap" doesn't mean anything for a currency. But let's say it did. You know that a market cap is simply defined as the most recent transaction price times the number of outstanding assets yeah?
2. So that means if you control the most recent transaction you control the price.
3. Tether is minting $1B of new coinage per month and accelerating. They then use this money to buy bitcoin. They structure it at opportune moments to prop the price up.
4. There isn't $512B in value you can actually extract from Bitcoin. If you began to sell, the value would rapidly deflate towards zero.
This is part of why market cap is such a poor way of measuring a currency. A small amount of transaction volume on the margin defines a false sense of value for the community.
Why not TIPS, gold, real estate or basic material stocks? Bitcoin seems to be the most insane choice for inflation hedging. It may be a good trade, but not for the reasons you've listed.
(not to mention that so far there has been absolutely no broad inflation almost everywhere around the world, though this can of course change)
I love that BTC is supposed to be correlated with inflation - when if you take one second to look at the price chart - it obviously has no correlation with inflation whatsoever.
> I love that BTC is supposed to be correlated with inflation
Is it really? BTC is renowned for being systematically and thoroughly manipulated. It makes no sense to expect any correlation that is based on the assumptions of a free market.
Well, to be honest there hasn't been any serious inflation in any developed country since ~2009, since Bitcoin was created. Gold is short term pretty much uncorrelated with anything, but long term keeps up with CPI very well. Even on extremely long time scales, several centuries.
You can literally buy anything to hedge against inflation. Anything. If you don’t own physical dollars the inflation thereof doesn’t affect you. This is ECON101. Your only job is to pick an asset you believe in.
Then there’s the whole thing of you way overstating the impact of printing money and of stimulus on inflation. Inflation remains on track for a perfect bulls eye 2% per annum. The velocity of money is a huge factor you aren’t considering. It’s dropping and these are measures to counteract its drop. A lack of printing and stimulus would be deflationary and that would be way, way worse than inflation.
Literally anything!? Like baseball cards and beanie babies? I am set!
In all serious, why is a little deflation way way worse than inflation? To put it another way, if inflation is good and deflation is bad, why do I need to buy deflationary commodities as a hedge against it?
Yea once you have beanie babies inflation doesn’t matter. What matters is it’s performance as an asset class relative to your other options.
[edit] The point of inflation is manifold but to answer your question specifically inflation is meant in part as an incentive to invest. It’s function in a capitalist society is to encourage group evaluation of equities and help pick winners and trim losers. It sets the benchmark rate of performance for your investments.
Money is only useful when it moves. If it’s not collateralizing loans, and changing hands, economic activity slows and stops. This economic activity is jobs people do day to day.
Deflation slows activity because if your money is worth more tomorrow than today it encourages inaction. In its worst incarnation you get a deflationary spiral where prices fall to stimulate buying but deflation continues anyways, and so on.
We can talk about whether that’s a good thing or not but it’s very much not what the coiners are advocating for.
Oh, you added more after the beanie baby topic . Yes, I understand that inflation is a way to motivate certain behaviors. Some of us resent the coercion.
I still don’t understand the extreme fear of deflation. Like, if the value of dollars increases over time, nobody will buy anything and the entire economy will collapse? I just don’t see that happening. People can’t eat dollars, or sit and stare at them in the evenings when they are bored.
In spite of trillions of dollars printed for Covid aid, and presumably much more to come, inflation as measured by CPI has not budged, for several reasons:
There is insatiable demand for treasury bonds and dollars, and as well dollar reserve currency status means that the govt can find buyers for its bonds without yields rising, hence tempering inflation. A strong dollar makes imports cheaper, hence also lowering inflation.
Studies show only 1/3 of the stimulus is spent on consumer goods. The rest is saved, invested, or used to pay down debts. Such deleveraging is deflationary.
The amount of money is still relatively small and infrequent compared to the vast size of the US economy and total consumer spending and other activity.
Even if inflation was to rise, you would not need to hedge, because everything would be shifted higher, such as stock prices, home prices, wages, etc. Because the US dollar is implicitly understood as the global and standard benchmark/unit of wealth (the Forbes 400 list is in dollars, not euros), it means Americans do not lose wealth if price levels rise or if the US dollar falls. Bitcoin and precious metals could be an effective hedge if you live in a country that does not have reverse currency status and you need to stave off loss of wealth relative to the US dollar due to the local currency falling against the dollar.
why was this even voted to the front [page. all of the stuff he is concerned about was addressed 5+ yrs ago. nothing new here. Even if you are not a fan of Bitcoin you have to admit these arguments are stale and he provides no new evidence.
hacker news readers are notorious for missing obvious value propositions. their comments on crypto will be remembered similarly to their comments on dropbox. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
While the top comment is certainly skeptical, I think it's worth pointing out that the majority of comments in that thread are positive:
> This is genius. It's is problem everyone is having, and everyone knew it (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup ). If it really works as well as it looks in that demo then they nailed it. I'm both envious and inspired. I'll be surprised if YC does not fund them
> I saw your short demo at BarCamp and I must say Dropbox looks great! Are you planning on having a Linux port as well, or is too early to talk about that? Also, as another SFP applicant I have to tell you that I really hope you get the funding - you deserve it.
> You know, your app is something that I've been wishing someone would make for some time now. Congrats!
> Cool stuff indeed. I would give 5 stars for such an useful application.
> It looks great man. I know you'll be accepted. The writing is on the wall. Posting your video here just seals the deal, and puts yourself out there. I didn't apply to YC, but if I did, I'd be putting my stuff up here as well. I'm surprized nobody else has posted like you did. That takes some balls and self-belief.
> Kudos from myself as well. In fact, just today I was having problems with ftp and samba, and was wishing for a more graphical rsync. Perhaps it is true that a good way to do a web app is to implement a unix command. :) Good job. can't wait until it's out for the rest of us.
> Looks wonderful. You might want to check on the trademark 'dropbox'. I know dropsend used to be called dropbox but had to change due to trademark difficulties. Otherwise excellent work.
> Nice job! I was thinking something like this for a while and wonder why no one did it. It looks like dropbox just scratches the right itches for me.
> Great job guys, hope to see you get picked up in the next session. Keep me posted for the mac version.
> This definitely qualifies as Something People Want, and it looks nicely executed. Very cool!
> Great demo, great product, great business, well done.
Bitcoin seems completely irresponsible to me because of the amount of electricity it uses:
"Mining companies that run lots of ASIC miners as businesses claim to use only one watt of power for every gigahash per second of computing performed when mining for bitcoins. If this information is correct, the bitcoin network in 2020 consumes 120 gigawatts (GW) per second.
[EDIT]: I see this needs elaboration ... watts are already "per second". Watts per second implies some sort of acceleration of energy consumption. Just wondering if I'm missing the point.
Which is about 0.3%, and not 1% as the source claims.
I bet some of that goes into heating residential and non-residential buildings, that require heating regardless. So if one to speak about waste, it should be even less than that.
For comparison, I guesstimate ~6% is used for heating homes.
With that said, if you could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 0.3% with a flip of the switch literally nobody would notice, you'd be mad not to do it. All you'd turn off is crime, and speculation.
Yes and it’s amazing that there’s such a big overlap between the environmentalist electric car owning, composting granola munchers and Bitcoin. They’re burning tires in the back yard each time they make a transaction and driving a Tesla to work.
Sounds like you’re just advocating for basic income with extra steps. I’m a fan of UBI, but it has to apply to everyone not just the folks on the right crypto forum in 2010.
Absolutely, I wholeheartedly support a UBI. But that's not mutually exclusive with wanting to be financially independent now, instead of some indeterminate time in the future, once the political will for UBI becomes strong enough. And if/when a UBI does come to pass, I might be in a better position due to my decade-plus of hodling.
How do you feel about Porn? Movies? Video Games? Skiing? Driving to a party or vacation spot?
Pretty much any kind of entertainments uses energy. Bitcoin just uses energy to perform an (arguably) useful function. Is that a more irresponsible usage of energy compared to our other reasons of using energy?
Totally unproven, fraught with peril. The rolling out of proof of stake was delayed years as new challenges were discovered. It’s good that somebody is giving it a try, but it’s no slam dunk. Bitcoin would be irresponsible to jump on proof of stake right now.
I agree that proof-of-stake systems are an interesting and promising development on top of existing cryptocurrency technology.
But how does that make Bitcoin "completely irresponsible" just because it might not be as good as the best, newest available technology? Today's proof-of-stake systems probably never would have existed without Bitcoin.
When proof-of-stake systems become mature then Bitcoin could adopt one, or perhaps if Bitcoin users can't reach agreement on that then maybe a new proof-of-stake based cryptocurrency will gain enough trust to overtake Bitcoin. Either way, it serves the purpose of a relatively mature decentralized store of value until then.
There was an article just a day or two ago talking about how our currency is currently a petrodollar. Look that up. Think about the wars we’ve fought over oil, and global warming. Those are the costs of our fiat currency. Bitcoin is cheap!
"An accepted method for deriving an estimate of the energy consumption of mining is to assume that all miners use the most energy efficient mining device available on the market.(3) Commercial devices are accompanied by published specifications listing the number of hashes that can be computed per second using the device, as well as the power consumption of the device in watts. It is then straightforward to calculate how much power is required to compute 50 billion billion hashes per second using the most energy efficient devices available. I performed such a calculation and obtained an estimate of around 5 gigawatts for Bitcoin mining alone today.(4) This is slightly under 1% of world electricity consumption, or slightly more than the electricity consumption of the state of Ohio or that of the state of New York."
The footnotes in turn refer back to Alex de Vries.
The numbers rely on the assumption that the majority of mining is using hardware with efficiency similar to the published specifications upon which they made their calculations. Given the nature of the rate of development and the immediate financial benefit to higher efficiency, it is likely that any published hash-per-joule number is obsolete by the time it is read.
Nevertheless It can be accurately said that Bitcoin miners consume a _lot_ of power and as long as the value of Bitcoin increases at an average rate of about 20% per year, that consumption will stay high. On the other hand, you shouldn't expect Bitcoin to increase in value at 20% per year forever. In that respect the fix to the energy consumption problem is embedded within Bitcoin halving itself. Eventually the value will not be increasing at a rate that will keep up with halving
> Dams can only store so much potential energy in the form of water before they must let it out. It’s an open secret that this otherwise-wasted energy has been put to use mining Bitcoin. If your local energy cost is effectively zero but you cannot sell your energy anywhere, the existence of a global buyer for energy is a godsend.
> [detractors] are mum when it comes to the energy used to illuminate Christmas lights, to power the data centers behind Netflix or to distribute untold millions of single-serve meal kits. It’s clear that because Bitcoin’s footprint is so easy to quantify...it is singled out for special treatment.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadIt's a meme among speculators and others who don't see bitcoin as providing an actual value proposition.
No need to go all ad hominem. I've been pretty avid about BTC for some years now.
In any case, the fact that fiat money has not been able to prevent the business cycle from creating devastating crises would seem to imply otherwise.
No. It is almost as if the two situations are not related.
Some nice graphs from Ray Dalio that show it plotted out for various currencies throughout history if you scroll down: https://www.principles.com/the-changing-world-order/#chapter...
If the goal is to not starve, the government could give, you know, actual edible food to people and not pieces of paper. (I am not suggesting this, it is just another possibility)
But to your more broader question, the fixed amount of bitcoins is only a problem if you intend to keep the system working as it has, but bitcoin advocates favor a new way (or the old gold-backed way) to look at the economy on which savings is the bedrock of it and not debt like we currently "enjoy".
So, there's a fixed amount, but in practice, there quite a lot of it (2.1e15 if I'm not too drunk).
That’s part of what inflation does. It allows the monetary system to react to shocks and changes like population growth and global pandemics. Deflation without creation of monetary units benefits the existing concentration of wealth as you and your children get to fight each other for scraps. These pieces are all connected. This system will lead to the existing moneyed class of coiners becoming more and more wealthy as a function of economic productivity forever.
This, along with depriving The Great State-an of a means to operate an effective revenue collection system, has been the real objective since the beginning. Decentralization has never been anything other than a mantra, a fig leaf to be casually dropped when no longer useful or credible. "Hyperbitcoinization" means never having to say you're sorry for selling a fraud to 'the masses'
Oh and others mention subdividing bitcoin directly so there is that.
You could still layer a system like that on top of Bitcoin. However, you might have trouble getting people to accept your bitcoin IOUs as equivalent to real coins.
That said, why would you want that? Why not just use fiat currencies where they are appropriate, and leave Bitcoin for the use cases in which it's appropriate? It doesn't need to replace the whole economy to be useful as a technology.
The thing is, it only causes inflation when that money circulates. But the Fed is just pumping it directly into the stock market. The result is sky high valuations and asset prices, but very little change in the actual day-to-day economy's monetary supply. This is why inflation is still under 2%. And sure, people could sell out and take their cash to invest elsewhere, but with 0% interest rates there's literally nowhere else to put it.
This was the downfall of Hertz already and it will be interesting in 2021 with the banks...
https://www.investors.com/news/stress-tests-bank-stocks-divi...
Isn't it plausible that the dollar supply isn't actually reaching consumer markets, and consequently inflation stagnated because a drop in purchasing power leads to a drop in aggregate demand?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25576634
If spending is up, wouldn’t the stock market outperform Bitcoin anyway?
If we have rapid inflation, wouldn’t money go into something tangible and of value before something intangible and perhaps of value?
But really, inflation hedges don't grow in value during times of high inflation, they just don't lose as much value as the fiat currencies do. That is how they protect against inflation.
The dollar is way down. It doesn't matter if the DOW hits 1 million if the dollar is worthless.
... until Tether explodes, and then it's musical chairs to figure out who the bagholders will be.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16298999/in-re-tether-a...
The facts, AFAIK are:
I'd be very happy to be proven wrong on any of the points above.The biggest counter-argument is just the orders of magnitude of the two. Tether's market cap is 20b whereas bitcoin's is 350b. While that's large enough to cause a temporary shock and can be used for short-term manipulation, it likely not enough to cause long-term damage.
For instance if I told you I had a trillion dollars in an offshore bank account, and that if you gave me $1 I’d give you a funbuck and throw it on the pile with no obligation to redeem it, would you up and believe me right away? If so I may just get into this crypto business after all.
You at least smell smoke dontcha?
I guess this makes it your move! I expect that audit shortly!
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jofi.12903
[2] https://twitter.com/brockpierce/status/961044456421183489
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/hantb2/buttfinex_...
[4] https://cryptonews.com/news/how-merlin-lost-patience-trying-...
1. A "market cap" doesn't mean anything for a currency. But let's say it did. You know that a market cap is simply defined as the most recent transaction price times the number of outstanding assets yeah?
2. So that means if you control the most recent transaction you control the price.
3. Tether is minting $1B of new coinage per month and accelerating. They then use this money to buy bitcoin. They structure it at opportune moments to prop the price up.
4. There isn't $512B in value you can actually extract from Bitcoin. If you began to sell, the value would rapidly deflate towards zero.
This is part of why market cap is such a poor way of measuring a currency. A small amount of transaction volume on the margin defines a false sense of value for the community.
(not to mention that so far there has been absolutely no broad inflation almost everywhere around the world, though this can of course change)
Is it really? BTC is renowned for being systematically and thoroughly manipulated. It makes no sense to expect any correlation that is based on the assumptions of a free market.
The only downside is you can sell a small portion of your house.
Then there’s the whole thing of you way overstating the impact of printing money and of stimulus on inflation. Inflation remains on track for a perfect bulls eye 2% per annum. The velocity of money is a huge factor you aren’t considering. It’s dropping and these are measures to counteract its drop. A lack of printing and stimulus would be deflationary and that would be way, way worse than inflation.
In all serious, why is a little deflation way way worse than inflation? To put it another way, if inflation is good and deflation is bad, why do I need to buy deflationary commodities as a hedge against it?
[edit] The point of inflation is manifold but to answer your question specifically inflation is meant in part as an incentive to invest. It’s function in a capitalist society is to encourage group evaluation of equities and help pick winners and trim losers. It sets the benchmark rate of performance for your investments.
Money is only useful when it moves. If it’s not collateralizing loans, and changing hands, economic activity slows and stops. This economic activity is jobs people do day to day.
Deflation slows activity because if your money is worth more tomorrow than today it encourages inaction. In its worst incarnation you get a deflationary spiral where prices fall to stimulate buying but deflation continues anyways, and so on.
We can talk about whether that’s a good thing or not but it’s very much not what the coiners are advocating for.
Oh, you added more after the beanie baby topic . Yes, I understand that inflation is a way to motivate certain behaviors. Some of us resent the coercion.
I still don’t understand the extreme fear of deflation. Like, if the value of dollars increases over time, nobody will buy anything and the entire economy will collapse? I just don’t see that happening. People can’t eat dollars, or sit and stare at them in the evenings when they are bored.
There is insatiable demand for treasury bonds and dollars, and as well dollar reserve currency status means that the govt can find buyers for its bonds without yields rising, hence tempering inflation. A strong dollar makes imports cheaper, hence also lowering inflation.
Studies show only 1/3 of the stimulus is spent on consumer goods. The rest is saved, invested, or used to pay down debts. Such deleveraging is deflationary.
The amount of money is still relatively small and infrequent compared to the vast size of the US economy and total consumer spending and other activity.
Even if inflation was to rise, you would not need to hedge, because everything would be shifted higher, such as stock prices, home prices, wages, etc. Because the US dollar is implicitly understood as the global and standard benchmark/unit of wealth (the Forbes 400 list is in dollars, not euros), it means Americans do not lose wealth if price levels rise or if the US dollar falls. Bitcoin and precious metals could be an effective hedge if you live in a country that does not have reverse currency status and you need to stave off loss of wealth relative to the US dollar due to the local currency falling against the dollar.
> This is genius. It's is problem everyone is having, and everyone knew it (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup ). If it really works as well as it looks in that demo then they nailed it. I'm both envious and inspired. I'll be surprised if YC does not fund them
> I saw your short demo at BarCamp and I must say Dropbox looks great! Are you planning on having a Linux port as well, or is too early to talk about that? Also, as another SFP applicant I have to tell you that I really hope you get the funding - you deserve it.
> You know, your app is something that I've been wishing someone would make for some time now. Congrats!
> Cool stuff indeed. I would give 5 stars for such an useful application.
> It looks great man. I know you'll be accepted. The writing is on the wall. Posting your video here just seals the deal, and puts yourself out there. I didn't apply to YC, but if I did, I'd be putting my stuff up here as well. I'm surprized nobody else has posted like you did. That takes some balls and self-belief.
> Kudos from myself as well. In fact, just today I was having problems with ftp and samba, and was wishing for a more graphical rsync. Perhaps it is true that a good way to do a web app is to implement a unix command. :) Good job. can't wait until it's out for the rest of us.
> Looks wonderful. You might want to check on the trademark 'dropbox'. I know dropsend used to be called dropbox but had to change due to trademark difficulties. Otherwise excellent work.
> Nice job! I was thinking something like this for a while and wonder why no one did it. It looks like dropbox just scratches the right itches for me.
> Great job guys, hope to see you get picked up in the next session. Keep me posted for the mac version.
> This definitely qualifies as Something People Want, and it looks nicely executed. Very cool!
> Great demo, great product, great business, well done.
> That's hot!
> I'm impressed.
> brilliant!
"Mining companies that run lots of ASIC miners as businesses claim to use only one watt of power for every gigahash per second of computing performed when mining for bitcoins. If this information is correct, the bitcoin network in 2020 consumes 120 gigawatts (GW) per second.
https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...
[EDIT]: I see this needs elaboration ... watts are already "per second". Watts per second implies some sort of acceleration of energy consumption. Just wondering if I'm missing the point.
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
I bet some of that goes into heating residential and non-residential buildings, that require heating regardless. So if one to speak about waste, it should be even less than that.
For comparison, I guesstimate ~6% is used for heating homes.
With that said, if you could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 0.3% with a flip of the switch literally nobody would notice, you'd be mad not to do it. All you'd turn off is crime, and speculation.
Pretty much any kind of entertainments uses energy. Bitcoin just uses energy to perform an (arguably) useful function. Is that a more irresponsible usage of energy compared to our other reasons of using energy?
"Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Absurd Energy Consumption by 99 Percent"
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/ethereum-plans-...
"How One Of The Largest Free Porn Sites Uses More Than 6 Million KWh To Power Streaming Services"
https://fightthenewdrug.org/what-if-porn-is-bad-for-the-envi...
But how does that make Bitcoin "completely irresponsible" just because it might not be as good as the best, newest available technology? Today's proof-of-stake systems probably never would have existed without Bitcoin.
When proof-of-stake systems become mature then Bitcoin could adopt one, or perhaps if Bitcoin users can't reach agreement on that then maybe a new proof-of-stake based cryptocurrency will gain enough trust to overtake Bitcoin. Either way, it serves the purpose of a relatively mature decentralized store of value until then.
There was an article just a day or two ago talking about how our currency is currently a petrodollar. Look that up. Think about the wars we’ve fought over oil, and global warming. Those are the costs of our fiat currency. Bitcoin is cheap!
Some are better than others but Alex de Vries's numbers are the most quoted and quite questionable.
The article you linked to refers to https://www.energy.senate.gov/services/files/8A1CECD1-157C-4... which contains
"An accepted method for deriving an estimate of the energy consumption of mining is to assume that all miners use the most energy efficient mining device available on the market.(3) Commercial devices are accompanied by published specifications listing the number of hashes that can be computed per second using the device, as well as the power consumption of the device in watts. It is then straightforward to calculate how much power is required to compute 50 billion billion hashes per second using the most energy efficient devices available. I performed such a calculation and obtained an estimate of around 5 gigawatts for Bitcoin mining alone today.(4) This is slightly under 1% of world electricity consumption, or slightly more than the electricity consumption of the state of Ohio or that of the state of New York."
The footnotes in turn refer back to Alex de Vries.
The numbers rely on the assumption that the majority of mining is using hardware with efficiency similar to the published specifications upon which they made their calculations. Given the nature of the rate of development and the immediate financial benefit to higher efficiency, it is likely that any published hash-per-joule number is obsolete by the time it is read.
Nevertheless It can be accurately said that Bitcoin miners consume a _lot_ of power and as long as the value of Bitcoin increases at an average rate of about 20% per year, that consumption will stay high. On the other hand, you shouldn't expect Bitcoin to increase in value at 20% per year forever. In that respect the fix to the energy consumption problem is embedded within Bitcoin halving itself. Eventually the value will not be increasing at a rate that will keep up with halving
Personally I’d rather own diversified stock portfolio to hedge inflation.
https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co...
> Dams can only store so much potential energy in the form of water before they must let it out. It’s an open secret that this otherwise-wasted energy has been put to use mining Bitcoin. If your local energy cost is effectively zero but you cannot sell your energy anywhere, the existence of a global buyer for energy is a godsend.
> [detractors] are mum when it comes to the energy used to illuminate Christmas lights, to power the data centers behind Netflix or to distribute untold millions of single-serve meal kits. It’s clear that because Bitcoin’s footprint is so easy to quantify...it is singled out for special treatment.