HN user
Def super successful. Crazy how the flaps held given how they seemed to disintegrate on re entry. They said they’d try and catch the booster for flight 5 if the booster splashed down successfully this time and it did so fingers crossed. That’ll be a pretty wild thing to see. Could happen soon too. Next flight might be within about a month.
Ok but what happens if they cross the streams??
Honored to get a reply from you sir!
I haven't personally done a deep dive on Satoshi's intentions probably for the specific reason I've always failed to see why former intentions or aspirations for technologies, even by their own creators would have any relevance towards their future use cases. If Edison had said light bulbs were for heating should we then oppose them being mostly adopted and optimized for lighting?
As a very passive but very interested stakeholder at the time of the block size wars it really felt to me there was heavy politicking and various degrees of !@#$ going on from all sides. The amount of viciousness certainly didn't surprise me given the immense magnitude of the stakes involved with potentially replacing a market in the hundreds of trillions of dollars.
I'm not sure I follow your last point. Stores of value certainly don't have to be mediums of exchange to build market cap (whereas the converse is true). That's true of the great majority of monetary wealth in the world. Most of fiat currency is held in treasury bond form (not a medium of exchange), real estate is heavily monetized and stocks to a degree. The actual dominant medium of exchange today is cash mostly in bank deposit form and it's a tiny fraction of that market which mostly sits on longer term horizons in assets that perform the function of storing value better. Are you saying a government might void converting stores of value to mediums of exchange? Or cryptocurrency specifically? In essence that they would make those assets illegal altogether? If they did it's true they would become worthless, at least for that jurisdiction, but some of the market obviously disagrees with that assumption, and landmark events like the bitcoin etfs continue to point the other way.
I'm not a tax expert so wondering, shouldn't the potential loss be computed off the non payment of exit tax at date of exit or 2014 levels? (which would have computed to much lower than 48mm)
Given the monetary policy Satoshi chose and the headline he picked to include in the genesis block, I really don't think you can infer what he himself thought bitcoin was meant to become, even if he referred to it as cash originally.
Beyond that I don't see how it matters what something was designed to do or what early adopters personally used it for or thought it was meant to be used for. The only relevance for a technology is what it's actually adopted for over time and the total addressable market cap for a store of value being 100x + of that of a medium of exchange, it makes perfect sense to me that that's the feature the market converged to by far as reflected amongst other things by the relative prices between current btc and bch...
Hmmm can’t speak to the likelihood of their actual inflows but tens of billions of usd from global participants that are functionally shut out from usd pipes is really very reasonable. It’s 0.25% of M2.
What amuses me a bit is how shocked it can seem to people for them to “sit” on 80 bn dollars. It’s literally what they’re supposed to be doing! And no one can imagine they’re actually doing it. I don’t know. I like to think that’s what I’d do if I said that’s what I was doing… I feel like I would. But apparently we now think when someone is entrusted with a pile of money to keep as such they’d be irrational not to risk their customer funds and yolo into mismatching risk to try and pick up some yield… when did that become the expected norm?
Very simply? If the conspiracy theories about their scamminess were wrong and they did what they said which was hold dollars without duration exposure (mostly cash and tbills). Then once rates got hiked they were basically the only bank equivalent in the world with captive depositors that couldn’t just take their money to competitors and they were able to keep all the interest (4-5 bn per year currently). Which incidentally they’re now using in part to load up (substantially) on btc with house money.
I don’t know what the truth is obviously for sure but this story is extremely possible and plausible. It doesn’t mean they were particularly good traders. It means if true basically they were disciplined and didn’t trade at all and are now benefitting from massive upside on their set up resulting from monetary policy and regulatory conditions driving their popularity.
EUR vs Dollar went as low as 0.82 ish in its early days (00) and was below 1 through roughly 02 so not a first no.
DOOMP EET
This is your opinion.
You made a straight up declaration about proof of work in a pretty condescending and unsubstantiated way. I literally applied your exact framing and wording to present that approach from my point of view, and you hated that version of exactly your text. I could reply it proves the exact same point about you. I think either of those versions are not helpful to anyone, which is what I was trying to illustrate.
It's a misconception to think a miner will only locate on energy sites with continuous supply. It can still make perfect sense for a miner to locate on a site with variable demand (which by the way is basically every energy production site in the world that is by design compelled to build to accommodate peak demand). What a miner will do is then negotiate energy costs (which are 80-90% of their variable costs) with the producer who is happy to sell his excess production at any cost above 0 for all excess power untapped. All it takes is enough excess production at a (much lower) price than conventional rates for this to breakeven positively vs full operation alternatives.
As chips commoditize and energy trends towards 100% of all costs, miners will step into these situations exclusively.
As far as your claim that bitcoin is useless that's a personal judgement. My personal judgement is that reintroducing sound fixed supply censorship resistant money to the world is of enormous benefit. But that's beyond the scope here. I don't think it's constructive to make judgements about what people value and chose to expend resources towards. If you have a problem with externalities then have a debate about that. But who are we to judge if someone wants to heat their pool? If they do so through carbon emissions then consider taxing that. The sustainability of the energy production is your issue really, not the energy use.
I agree it's not an argument for bitcoin. Whether bitcoin is a net positive environmentally or not is a different debate. I was just emphasizing how people point fingers at Proof of Work without considering the immense negative environmental externalities generated by the current fiat system.
It also demonstrates a basic lack of understanding of how the energy markets work and how as just about the only intermittent buyer of last resort, proof of work is about to positively impact the energy infrastructure in a pretty substantial way and will probably converge on tapping into exclusively stranded / wasted energy (about 30% of energy production vs less than 0.1% of global production used by pow today). If anyone is genuinely interesting in educating themselves on the topic I'd recommend the two fairly recent episodes of What Bitcoin Did with guest Harry Sudock.
Easy there big fellow. The petrodollar is certainly and undenyably a huge problem in and of itself, as you well know. Its horrible environmental impact is a huge problem, as are its effects on the mental health of the people who go online and shill it and rationalize it while ignoring and denying and marginalizing its environmental impact.
I see your point but my first bit just meant to highlight the unfair disproportionate energy attention PoW has been getting specifically vs just about any other use case.
I don't personally think you should be making moral judgements about energy use though. Let the market decide what's a good use of energy. If you have a carbon problem, tax / regulate that, PoW won't care. It will adjust through difficulty adjustments.
But if you are worried about PoW boiling the oceans if left unchecked, the numbers should comfort you it's at worst going to tap mostly into wasted energy / mostly renewable and probably not have a noticeable impact even extrapolated to a peak outcome (and probably even be a net positive).
I've been following this topic intensely for years and am very comfortable with these numbers but fair enough. I agree I should reference some official sources which I'll try and dig back up. Happy to discuss any assumption in closer detail though.
The math on the PoW energy FUD just doesn't check out.
- At current levels, bitcoin uses very roughly 0.1% of global electricity but electricity only represents 25% of fossil fuels emissions so current PoW contribution to global emissions = 0.025%, ie a rounding error. This issue is currently a total red herring. Now let's project into the future.
- bitcoin total addressable market cap if it took over the entire global monetary world (full global monetary premium): ~ 250tn or 300x from here implying a worst case outcome of 7.5% of global emissions, IF this happened TODAY and hashpower linearly tracked price. This is impossible off the bat because building out that infrastructure would take at least a decade. But more importantly it will take a decade or two for price to get there, by which time...
- The block subsidy will have gotten cut by ~ 10 (three halving cycles). Transaction fees might grow of course so let's say 5x lower which gets us back to 1.5% of global emissions.
- Add to that the following:
- 30% of CURRENT electricity production is stranded / wasted. All terminal bitcoin energy usage needs to do is tap into 5% of that to be emissions neutral. And it's heavily skewed towards tapping into that exclusively as that's the cheapest source and PoW is location neutral.
- the proof of work energy mix skews towards not only wasted / stranded but renewable which is trending towards being the cheapest form of energy.
- green power production is on an exponential adoption curve and enough sunlight hits the earth to power humanity for a year. Clean energy is there in amounts dwarfing societal needs, it's just a matter of harnessing it. This doesn't even include geothermal or nuclear.
- At an even higher level, if you got to this point, you would have replaced all the fiat systems in the world thereby: - eliminating the energy spent on maintaining the fiat system which is easily more than 1.5% of global emissions - flipping the world into a hard money world that is no longer incentivized to consume at all costs (read misallocate capital) ergo hugely reducing conspicuous consumption / GDP growth at all costs which is arguably the biggest driver of unnecessary emissions
- This final line of thought would have you conclude flipping to PoW would be emissions negative in the long run, but you don't really need to go there though, the energy numbers alone make this at best a chronically misunderstood narrative.
Random reply:
Or you can stay here on earth, go scuba diving and experience the exact same weightlessness... :)
Economists predicted 100 of the last 1 recessions.
“ In his 1979 history, The Alcoholic Republic, the historian W. J. Rorabaugh painstakingly calculated the stunning amount of alcohol early Americans drank on a daily basis. In 1830, when American liquor consumption hit its all-time high, the average adult was going through more than nine gallons of spirits each year.”
I think I remember hearing a similar stat on the ken burns prohibition doc. I didn’t quite understand why it was supposed to be that much though. 9 gallons of liquor is 36 liters is roughly 100 bottles of wine equivalent per year so less than a third of a bottle of wine a day which is what 1 or 2 glasses per meal equivalent? So the question then is are people drinking liquor drinking wine on top plus cider apparently? Or is it just a lot because that’s the average and plenty of people aren’t drinking much at or at all and that makes for the right tail of the distribution to be really drinking a lot?
My shower pays for itself :)
It's pretty brilliant actually. Case 1 electric space heaters blindly pass electricity through dumb wires. Case 2 instead of dumb wires you use ASICs. Case 2 is a win win that helps secure a decentralized monetary asset, get paid for it, and heat your home which you would have done anyway, all with the exact same carbon footprint (assuming you're expending equivalent amount of electricity to just heat your home as originally planned). You've basically turned PoW into proof of heating where the miner gets paid and gets the benefit of heating his home on top. And incremental environmental impact is exactly 0.
edit: quick google -> and here it is :)
The burden seems to be on the business side here. So I'm not sure what changes tax wise for end users who were using centralized exchanges to monetize their holdings. If they weren't assuming the IRS was monitoring everything they were doing to begin with they were fooling themselves.
It'd be interesting to see though if you opened a lightning channel with an exchange and transferred funds back and forth to yourself millions of times. Seems like that would create infinite spam and flood these reporting requirements.
I'm afraid this is the complete misunderstanding of what money is for.
You're describing the best medium of exchange, which you know today generally as base money of fiat currencies (cash). Acting as a medium of exchange is a property money can have but absolutely does not require to be used for its principal and only use which is to store value. Why is that its only function? Because the only way to use a medium of exchange is to find in turn someone who wants to store wealth himself. Absent that market participant your medium of exchange becomes worthless.
Acting as a medium of exchange is a transitory instant blip in the life of an asset that lives for the sole actual purpose of storing wealth.
Now if the average redemption horizon of monetary wealth was short as you seem to imply, then in effect all monetary assets would be used frequently as mediums of exchange and their capacity to preserve value over meaningful periods of time would be less of a consideration. Becoming accepted for payments everywhere would become the most important feature they could have. But this is absolutely not the case. The average redemption horizon of monetary wealth today is very long.
Some 200tn+ of monetary wealth sits today in various monetary instruments (100tn+ in fiat treasuries equivalent, real estate, 10tn in gold etc) that are absolutely never used as mediums of exchange. But they serve monetary assets' main and only role of preserving wealth through time, generally for long periods of time. Even the bulk of cash generally sits dormant as medium to long term investments by people holding onto the most liquid of reserve assets in case of crisis / emergency, very rarely to be used transactionally.
Whenever those investors need some transactional money, they simply then clip off a little bit of their monetary assets to buy whatever medium of exchange is en vogue to go about their daily spending habits. The rest sits idle to store wealth for as long as needed. And on that front, finding the hardest monetary asset you can find is your driving concern, and a digital new entrant like bitcoin with a hard cap is an extremely interesting alternative to other options available to this point which all have material drawbacks to that main goal, especially fiat currencies which get inflated by their central banks at a bare minimum of 25% per decade (but these days more like 15%+ per year).
Couldn't agree more. Very well said.
That’s fair, if the assumption is that false negatives are very low or 0 (in which case it’s a super high accuracy test at low contamination rates and super useful).
And yeah obviously we desperately need a decent test like three months ago.
This is a classic statistical fallacy. A test that is 50% accurate serves 0 purpose. You might as well consider coin flipping a valid test. If you tested America with this test you’d end up thinking half the country is infected. And within the ones that tested positive only half would actually be and within the negatives half would be and you would have missed them.
A test needs to be materially more accurate than the odds of having the disease to be worth anything.
Classic thought experiment: if 0.0001% of the population has a disease and a test is 99% effective and you test positive, what are the odds you have the disease? Answer: 1%.
Complimentary thought experiment: if an expensive preventive drug was available in limited supply (for 0.1% of the population only) and the earlier you took it the more preventive it was should you give it blindly to as many positives as you can? Probably not because 99% of that would be going to waste. And you would run out of drugs to cover the actual sick. Only 10% of the sick would end up actually getting the drugs.
Yes that was the joke :)
Nope, entirely with you. I listen to quite a few podcasts but I gave up on the daily pretty quickly. I absolutely cannot stand his delivery.