Its certainly true that a system that literally sets resources on fire to transfer and create magic internet money while pumping dangerous pollutants and greenhouse gases into the environment is extremely inefficient, but the belief that bitcoin is valuable in the long run because of its unique ability to encourage people to burn money is indeed fascinating.

For some people this decentralization is a big negative. I personally like being able to call "the help desk" if I need to. I like the idea of someone being in charge and liable. Besides if the government really wants your bitcoins they are gonna have them or at least deny you from them.

Most people will always be like you in that regard. That's one of the reasons why Bitcoin will never be the only currency in the world, but at best an influential alternative to centralized currencies.

The bolded does absolutely not have to be true, that is the entire point of the currency. For usage and ultimately price, it could however be a tremendous downward pressure if nation states decide to put their foot down. I don't think they will, for a long time at least.

I used to think this too. And for a lot of people it might actually still be better this way. But we're in a situation where there's potentially a new form of money being created, and you, as an individual can be part of it. Just this simple opportunity was enough reason for me to do a deep dive instead of being lazy (leaving a lot of opportunity on the table to being able to call a helpdesk is sorta lazy ).

And one of the beautiful things of Bitcoin is that it can't be seized or denied by a government. They could ban it, and outlaw it, but you'll still have the private key (read: access to your coins). The Bitcoins are NOT literally in your posession. You have a private key, which you can use to access an enormous database which is being maintained and secured by thousands and thousands of nodes worldwide. When you have your private key, you can leave your country, find a computer in another country, and access your wealth. This is one of the main reasons for the decentralization of the currency.

1. Who are you to decide what the market deems important? People see enough value in this technology to pay the current price and thus make it worthwile to expend the energy to mine Bitcoins.

You (and nobody) is in a position to predict what the future of Bitcoin will bring. Paying a price for Bitcoin gives it a future, energy expenditure is largely based off on this price. It's the beauty of a price mechanism, it has all the implicit and explicit assumptions of everybody in the market. It's shortsighted to look at it the way you do.

2. Energy expenditure isn't bad. There's a lot of energy used (or wasted in your opinion?) in the world. It's how civilization grew. Cars, eating meat, households all take up enormous amount of energy. Is this bad? No, the use of this energy has a function to a lot of people, it improves their standard of living. So using energy for something is just human.

3. This is more of a side-argument. But more and more of the energy used for Bitcoin (nearing 90% if I remember correctly) is actually energy coming from natural resources. This also makes a lot of sense, since energy coming from natural resources is cheapest, and mining Bitcoin is very competitive, miners will be forced to look for the cheapest solutions.

The last is bull****. Most energy for bitcoin comes from very dirty coal fired power stations in China. Which are also cheap.

And I'm sorry, but setting 30 gallons of gasoline on fire for a single transaction is an incredible waste when alternatives use 100,000 times less energy and do the job better except for some weirdos who want to ponzi speculate, look at child porn, gamble illegally or hide their money from the government. It's also incredibly expensive and makes bitcoin unscalable.

To put it another way, you could charge a 300 mile Tesla 12 times with the cost of a single transaction. You could run a normal US household for a full month on a single bitcoin transaction.

We both have no ***** clue to come to these conclusions. I got my info from this:

https://medium.com/cs-research/re-co...s-e3fcff1ce726

Which is the latest paper about the intricacies of Bitcoin mining. Based on their hardware # estimates it seems like a pretty legit paper. They researched this for several months, and worked their way through Chinese papers and resources to get to the heart of it. The link I posted is a TLDR of the paper itself.

Yeah, except it's written by someone deep in the bitcoin industry with a reason to lie, getting information from mining pools who also have reason to lie. Coal fired power is super cheap in China because it has none of the environment restrictions it does in the west, and is the power of choice. Again the propaganda you posted, we have articles like this:

A disused coal power station will reopen to solely power crypto

And estimates like this:

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Here's another article about a mining operation that runs purely on coal:

Coal is cheaper than hydro in China and it's more stable.

Also, even if hydro is largely used (it's not), the use of hydro represents the use of power that would otherwise displace coal. There's no free lunch there. And even if the article is right, there's not a whole lot of excess hydro capacity in the world, and the further scaling of bitcoin will involve coal.

At least have the courage to own that you're an extremely wasteful, selfish piece of **** for using bitcoin. Plenty of people are wasteful.

Ok, I guess the people have to decide for themselves which source of info is more reliable. I think if you're more of a numbers guy you'll like my source better. And if you're more into news/old school journalism sources your source will appeal more.

But there is a free lunch to some degree. This is a fact. It's hard to move energy over long distances, so a lot of hydro has surplusses. Miners can easily move their miner equipment to places where there are surplusses of energy which would otherwise be lost. If you cite an article where a 'disused coal power station will reopen', why wouldn't there be disused or underused hydro plants which can be used for this exact same purpose.

There are negotiations going on in certain industries where waste is being burned. There are miners (Hut8 for example) who are trying to tap in to the energy created by this burning process. And industry leaders are extremely happy to make money (!!) with their waste.

Oh god if we have to listen to this repeatedly proven liar pretend he knows anything about the energy industry now I'm going to shoot myself.

For the record the other profitable traders left these threads because they're exhausting and populated by aggressive stupidity.

lol @ still thinking the majority use coal or that upcoming projects will be using coal. Right up there with your brilliant assertion that the second biggest use case is for crime. It's like my grandfather read a few articles on this 3 years ago and just discovered internet forums.

You'd be doing everyone a favor with your zero content constant personal attacks. You're like a loser from a cult.

The HODL MOON guys have left these threads because they're utterly embarrassed at their long calls at $17K+ and most of them are underwater. But keep making **** up, please.

Also, evidence that there are any profitable "traders"? No one I see has posted real time entries and exits. Some rode the bubble up and then lost most of, but I don't see any assertion for your claim that there are profitable "traders" here, or were.

Coal is the cheapest power source in China. I mean, how much of a dickhead are you? I just quoted an article where an entire COAL power station is being started up in Australia to mine bitcoin. Coal is very cheap. I quoted another one where a major mainstream mining operation in China uses all coal. The only counter to this? Some study were I have to give my email to CoinOffers.co.uk or something (who sponsored the "study") to even read the study.

Illegal and gray market activities like gambling, sure. How is that even debatable? Bitcoin has very little use in the normal economy.

And you're like this guy:



How dare they provide reasoned arguments and evidence against my cult!

I can't imagine how weak your position would have to be to constantly try to throw shade and personally attack while providing zero content or counter argument. That's what losers who buy into cults do.

Anyway, the point of all this is that Bitcoin is an environmental disaster. That is an uncontroversial mainstream opinion. Why are you so desperate to throw shade on that idea? Do you feel it makes you look bad? Do you feel it makes bitcoin look bad? Either are irrelevant - it is a fact that bitcoin uses huge amounts of energy, and releases huge amounts of CO2. Even if we pretend that 80% of Bitcoin mining is hydro, AND this takes no power away that would otherwise be used/is replaced by coal, you still burn 5 gallons of gasoline equivalent for a single transaction.

Let me give you an example of how hydro isn't actually green at all. In the example below, bitcoin has basically sucked up a large amount of energy that was previously exported to the grid...which means more baseload coal being built.

The isolated hydro installation that produces pure excess is a pretty rare thing. Iceland may be one of the few exceptions as it doesn't export, but places like China, the US with interconnected grids, the use of hydro is identical to the use of coal and causes as many emissions.

This Is What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town
Keep whining though man, I know that facts don't matter to you - it's all about the holy Bitcoin and anyone who says anything bad against it must be caricatured. Because you don't have a counter argument and are deeply emotionally (not to mention financially) attached to it.

One of the difficulties with Canadian expansion in to this space is unfair competition from Chinese hydro. The future of this industry has very little to do with coal. It's a disingenuous and/or short sighted argument.

The second biggest use for BTC is as a trading pair with alts. This use case will inevitably shrink with ever-increasing fiat pairs but you pretending it doesn't exist while Binance prints hundreds of millions of dollars is laughable.

MVPcoin does not have the same properties as bitcoin. It has no mining power to secure the network, therefore it is worthless. The US dollar would also be worthless if 100% valid and verifiable counterfeits were possible. This is akin to mining. The US dollar would also be worthless if corruption inflated the supply. See Venezuela. This is akin to developers altering code.

The power of bitcoin is that over 9.5 years (a small sample size) it has not experienced either of the above.

Bitcoin has experienced massive dilution over the past year+. It doesn't matter if MVPcoin is "worthless" if people are willing to trade $300B worth of bitcoin for it.

Same goes for USD, it gets diluted by imperfect counterfeit money as long as someone is willing to accept it even if it's not at 1:1 and even if it's known to be counterfeit.

BTC was $2500 a year ago...

Most (smart) people gambling on altcoins are doing it simply to try and get more BTC.

The entire crypto market is less than $300b.

BTC dominance in July last year was 42%. Today it is... 42%.

It's almost as if you have zero idea what you're talking about.

Agree but think you skipped the most important part - individual nodes.

Individuals running nodes that validate blocks are the most important aspect of BTC. They ensure that users control the network. We saw this last year with segwit and #NO2X.

MVPcoin would be relatively worthless until it had hashpower and a large decentralised node count, ensuring that no one person or entity could censor transactions or inflate the currency etc.

Yeah and it was a lot more than that some months ago. Ignoring the fact that it's massively understated by your source.

In any case, a ton of money has left bitcoin for ****coins at insane valuations way beyond your $300B.

That would maybe be relevant if btc was the same price today and if there weren't a billion ****coins that you don't account for correctly in your market cap calculations.

I don't know if you quote irrelevant stats because you actually believe your own nonsense or because you're holding really heavy bags and are desperately trying to do your part to pump crypto, but it doesn't make you look particularly convincing when you tell people much smarter and more knowledgeable than you that they don't know what they're talking about.

How has money left BTC in the last year if BTC is higher in price? If you are saying that BTC would be even higher now if not for altcoins, perhaps.

However people enter altcoins because they want to speculate. They see 1000x gains and want a piece of the action. Many of these people would never have bought BTC in the first place if not for altcoin speculation.

I'm essentially a BTC maximalist and I loaded up under $400 so my bags are fine tyvm. Always convincing when a complete stranger asserts they are smarter and more knowledgeable than you though

You're talking about a small (in terms of capital injected) and mostly irrelevant subset of people wrt this discussion... if some people are doing that, great. What matters is the net capital flowing into ****coins that otherwise would have flowed into or stayed in BTC. That dilution is real and to think otherwise is very naive.

The entire crypto market is highly illiquid, and saying the total marketcap in the space is near 300BN is insane.

To OPs ?, I'd saying 10%-20% is reasonable since risk/reward is still insane at this stage for the upside.

What is the risk/reward at this stage?

Would love to see some probability curves of price (geometric x axis) vs probability. If the bulls knew what that was or how to draw it.

Stinky, take a guess? What does the outcome curve look like?

I would think bitcoin is still a good bet over the next 2-10 years, mostly because I think an ETF and mainstream adoption into managed portfolios is still fairly likely to happen and could cause the price to fly, while ****coins on aggregate are a terrible bet over any time period.

I wouldn't want to speculate on an outcome curve. I just see it fading away with occasional bumps from news until something major (ETF) happens.

In any case, bitcoin traders/"investors" are probably the dumbest group in all of finance by at least a few orders of magnitude so I expect there will be plenty of time to react to any super bullish news in the future.


On the other hand, if you or someone else wants to pick a specific date in the future and a bunch of us all independently draw our expected btc price distribution on that date, I'd participate in that.