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Merged Bitcoin - Part 3

Dr. Keith said:
Some time ago my brother was sharing an apartment with two guys who were bartenders but they were building mining rigs and mining bitcoin because their apartment was "utilities included". They had taken over the whole dining room with computer and cooling hardware, and moved it all onto the patio in the winter.

I think he said that bitcoin was about $400 at the time.

He first bought into bitcoin himself about two weeks ago without any sense that he may have joined the party a bit late.
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Any sense of how much Bitcoin they actually mined?
 
lomiller said:
The get any real currency out they would need to sell their bitcoin, when these whales sell their bitcoin the price drops lowering the value of bitcoin. Kind of a vicious cycle where only a few people can get their supposed earnings out and make a profit in real money.
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Real money like what, fiat currencies with infinite supply and retarded and malevolent MMT politicians and bankers behind them? The BTC cap as of today is over one trillion dollars. That's plenty of liquidity for many of the biggest whales to liquidate. BTC has institutional investors and ETF money flowing into the space now. Liquidity is less and less of a problem.
 
Tippit said:
Real money like what, fiat currencies with infinite supply and retarded and malevolent MMT politicians and bankers behind them? The BTC cap as of today is over one trillion dollars. That's plenty of liquidity for many of the biggest whales to liquidate. BTC has institutional investors and ETF money flowing into the space now. Liquidity is less and less of a problem.
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Weird logic. You complain about currency but still use currency to measure the value of it's supposed replacement.
 
psionl0 said:
Why is this in a separate thread?

And why in this section? Other than drawing attention to the excessive waste of energy devoted to bitcoin mining (and possibly the undue demand for mining technology) this has nothing to do with science, mathematics nor technology.

This thread should be merged with the bitcoin thread.
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It doesn't look like you have even read it. Climate change is barely mentioned in passing but there is a section on how people in some countries regularly experience blackouts as a direct result of bitcoin mining.

The whole article discusses the damage bitcoin in doing to online service providers, open source software, software projects in general, computer gaming, malware, etc.
 
lomiller said:
It doesn't look like you have even read it. Climate change is barely mentioned in passing but there is a section on how people in some countries regularly experience blackouts as a direct result of bitcoin mining.

The whole article discusses the damage bitcoin in doing to online service providers, open source software, software projects in general, computer gaming, malware, etc.
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It does seem to me that the whole premise of bitcoin as it exists today is a bit silly. It seems to me that today's bitcoin mining is based on the idea that if you use a lot of electricity, we'll give you money.

The author of the linked article from the OP adds that people latched onto that, and found a way to use someone else's electricity.

So, if you steal other people's electricity and cause enough pollution, you can get rich.

It just seems like a bad idea.
 
lomiller said:
It doesn't look like you have even read it. Climate change is barely mentioned in passing but there is a section on how people in some countries regularly experience blackouts as a direct result of bitcoin mining.

The whole article discusses the damage bitcoin in doing to online service providers, open source software, software projects in general, computer gaming, malware, etc.
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You haven't made a case for creating a new thread in a different section on this. The effects of excessive energy consumption have been discussed at length many times in the original thread.
 
Tippit said:
There was a bitcoin whale list that was published a few years ago, which included public keys. He was ranked #17 on that list. I know another HNW bitcoiner from Efnet IRC (although not personally) who is worth tens of millions of dollars. These people exist, and some of us know them. The BTC market cap is close to one trillion now. I don't know how many billionaires there are, but it seems that more are being minted.
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Show me well supported, documented evidence that there are more then 100 crypto billionaires. Better yet, show me there are more than 50. It's possible you're friends with one of them, but extremely unlikely.
 
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psionl0 said:
You haven't made a case for creating a new thread in a different section on this. The effects of excessive energy consumption have been discussed at length many times in the original thread.
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You haven't made a case why the technology issues raised in link should be discussed in the economics forum...
 
Dr. Keith said:
He first bought into bitcoin himself about two weeks ago without any sense that he may have joined the party a bit late.
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I'm actually considering getting a little.

I heard a financial expert talk about it about a while back and he said that it's incredibly unstable (of course), but that it's the most likely of the cryptocurrencies to stay around and become genuinely established (there are now a few bitcoin cash machines in the world, for example). So I'm considering following his advice - buying £100 worth of bitcoin and sitting on it for a decade. The worst case scenario is that I'll lose £100 which isn't a great deal of money, especially not for a decade. The other results range from making less than I would if I'd invested it in anything else, or even stuck it in a bank, right the way up to it being worth many times what I paid for it.

So I keep considering it. But, all that said, it has been months and I've still not done it, so I can't say I'm all *that* convinced.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
I'm actually considering getting a little.
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Consider getting something other than Bitcoin, which is about the least stable of the many, many different cryptocurrencies available. Etherium is one of the best, which is why it is the base for NFTs. It holds its value a whole lot better, and you can easily convert it to BTC when you need to actually use it.

I bought $100 in Bitcoin on one day, right before the 2018 bubble burst. Overnight it dropped in value to $15.
 
arthwollipot said:
Consider getting something other than Bitcoin, which is about the least stable of the many, many different cryptocurrencies available. Etherium is one of the best, which is why it is the base for NFTs. It holds its value a whole lot better, and you can easily convert it to BTC when you need to actually use it.

I bought $100 in Bitcoin on one day, right before the 2018 bubble burst. Overnight it dropped in value to $15.
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The instability is the point. I've already got stocks, which are far more stable. The point is investing in something that's unstable, but still likely to be around in a decade.

It's a bet, basically. Like playing the lottery, except you just pay a one-time fee and then sit back and wait. If the worst comes to the worst you're down £100. Which isn't the best thing ever, but over a timescale of 10 years isn't the biggest deal in the world, either.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
The instability is the point. I've already got stocks, which are far more stable. The point is investing in something that's unstable, but still likely to be around in a decade.

It's a bet, basically. Like playing the lottery, except you just pay a one-time fee and then sit back and wait. If the worst comes to the worst you're down £100. Which isn't the best thing ever, but over a timescale of 10 years isn't the biggest deal in the world, either.
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Oh sure. If gambling's your thing, get Bitcoin. Ideally, check its value every hour, because you literally never know what it's going to do.

Etherium is a more stable investment. Still not as good as some other investments, but better than Bitcoin for that purpose.
 
arthwollipot said:
Oh sure. If gambling's your thing, get Bitcoin. Ideally, check its value every hour, because you literally never know what it's going to do.
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Not true. Buying and holding for the long term is a much sounder strategy than day trading (at least it has been for over a decade now).
 
lomiller said:
Weird logic. You complain about currency but still use currency to measure the value of it's supposed replacement.
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I never claimed that bitcoin is the replacement of the US dollar. Bitcoin is a digital asset that people are using, among other things, to hedge against corrupt and failing fiat currencies. I have to use fiat currencies to live. I would prefer constitutional money, like gold and silver, but I don't have much choice.
 
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