A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
FTA: "What happens if a bad actor is hiding out among the bunch, and simply disappears?"
Answer seems obvious, it's completely unregulated so you lose all your play money and have no recourse whatsoever.
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@cursorkeys The first time it happened, Etherium broke their own rules and did a "fork" of the currency to remove the value of the scammed currency. Because the people running it are nothing if not fucking hypocrites.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@cursorkeys The first time it happened, Etherium broke their own rules and did a "fork" of the currency to remove the value of the scammed currency. Because the people running it are nothing if not fucking hypocrites.
I just Googled that. That's amazing, I'd have thought that would have destroyed their cryptocurrency through lack of trust but it obviously didn't have much effect.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@cursorkeys The first time it happened, Etherium broke their own rules and did a "fork" of the currency to remove the value of the scammed currency. Because the people running it are nothing if not fucking hypocrites.
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@cursorkeys said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I just Googled that. That's amazing, I'd have thought that would have destroyed their cryptocurrency through lack of trust but it obviously didn't have much effect.
Well the only thing propping it up is bubble, and I guess that doesn't take much to maintain.
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I'm going to quote Bloomberg's Matt Levine for my reply:
The primary goal of all crypto exchanges is to get hacked and lose all their users' coins.
That said, I know this was an ICO and not an exchange but what's the difference? The money ends up in the same place
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
did a "fork" of the currency to remove the value of the scammed currency
How about that for timing, looks like this is happening again right now with another one:
“will reclaim the stolen tokens and return them to treasury.”
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@bb36e said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The money ends up in the same place
That'd be "someone else's pocket", I guess.
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It's not as if folding currencies are immune to weird decisions. This time last year, the Indian government decided the 500 and 1000 Rupee notes (roughly $10 and $20) were going out of circulation. Not entirely unheard of, but India did it at 24hours notice - i.e. they told their entire populace that any higher value banknotes they had in their possession would be unspendable the day after tomorrow, and completely worthless in six weeks.
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@gwowen Depending on how reliable access to banks is there (not very for large parts of the population I guess, but maybe those parts of the population don't deal a lot with high denomination bills either), it's an interesting way of fighting evasion and "black money" (not sure the English term, means proceeds from illegal activities). Since organized crime tends to keep a lot of cash on hand (can't exactly keep it in a bank until it gets laundered), eliminating the value of the cash forces them to either try to declare it, which may force them to make mistakes that can be tracked, or lose a significant amount of money.
Pain in the ass for everyone else though.
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@kian That's exactly the reason - and the reasoning - that the Indian government used.
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@kian Yeah, and they forget that nearly 70% of Indians live in rural areas, where they're not likely to get the 24-hour notice within 24 hours, or have anywhere to exchange it, or be already using a bank.
And 'black money' is applicable, if archaic - the common English term would be 'dirty money'.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Just saw that and was going to post it.
Another one bites the dust
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Tether knows the address used by the attacker to make the theft, but is not aware of either who the attacker is, or how the attack took place. The company is releasing a new version of its Omni Core software client in what it says is "effectively a temporary hard fork to the Omni Layer."
"We have no idea what happened, but it's all fine now". Yeah, I feel safe and reassured. I'm totally going to invest a lot in this.
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@el_heffe said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Non-redeemable tokens successfully prevented from being not redeemed.
Kraken's twitter PR successfully prevented from clear communication and not sounding like a scam.
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@adynathos said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
not sounding like a scam
It's a cryptocurrency exchange; not sounding like a scam isn't going to happen.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@cursorkeys The first time it happened, Etherium broke their own rules and did a "fork" of the currency to remove the value of the scammed currency. Because the people running it are nothing if not fucking hypocrites.
It's simple, really. You can make a lot of money with pyramid schemes, but you have to be in early enough that there's enough suckers after you whose money you can rip off.
So when people realize this Bitcoin bubble made some people a lot of money, they start wondering if they should jump on the train or if it's too late. And then along comes a scrawny Russian boi who's smarter than that and decides "I'll just make my own crypto crack. With blackjack, and hookers".
Filed under: I'm not as high as it sounds.
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@coderpatsy finally a use for RFC 1149.
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@cursorkeys said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@cursorkeys The first time it happened, Etherium broke their own rules and did a "fork" of the currency to remove the value of the scammed currency. Because the people running it are nothing if not fucking hypocrites.
I just Googled that. That's amazing, I'd have thought that would have destroyed their cryptocurrency through lack of trust but it obviously didn't have much effect.
Central banking and regulations are bad...
Unless we do it!
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Two of my colleagues were talking about Bitcoin somewhat enthusiastically. I promptly proceeded to rain on their parade.
I mean, this technology is just great from an environmental point of view. It currently stands at 30 TWh per year - which amounts to a powerplant complex continuously running at 3.6 GW. That's roughly three nuclear power plants.
Just look at this line:
Electricity consumed per transaction (KWh) 298.00
298 KWh per transaction!
And then there's also the rest. You are probably perfectly justified equating the current run to the Tulip Mania.
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@rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
298 KWh per transaction!
About 31 days of electricity use for an average worldwide household (2010 numbers, because that's what Google found for me).
About 9.3 days of electricity use for an average US household (2010).
About $37.40 at the average 2016 US residential price of $0.1255 / kWh.Great efficiency, there.
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@rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
298 KWh per transaction!
Let's convert that into more normal units: money! ;) At current rates of energy charges (Google says the US average is 12¢/kWh), a transaction costs $35.76 just to process. Before any profit at all for the people doing the work.
I guess I won't be using this to buy my newspaper and coffee in the morning; the transaction costs would be nuts…
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@dkf said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Let's convert that into more normal units: money!
much? :P
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@pie_flavor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Yeah, and they forget that nearly 70% of Indians live in rural areas, where they're not likely to get the 24-hour notice within 24 hours, or have anywhere to exchange it, or be already using a bank.
Also the banks didn't get any more warning than the people and didn't have enough replacement currency on hand, nor did the government send them more currency.
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@hardwaregeek said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@dkf said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Let's convert that into more normal units: money!
much? :P
Not my fault that energy prices are more stable in fiat currency than those new bastions of cryptographic numismatics!
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@hardwaregeek From the link, all transactions through VISA are about 1/3000th of all Bitcoin transactions.
Given the fact that VISA is much bigger than Bitcoin, yeah, great efficiency right there.
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@rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
It currently stands at 30 TWh per year
I agree that Bitcoin is a waste of energy.
However, the estimate in the linked article is not based on actual energy measurements, but rather on BTC price and assumptions about the portion of revenue used on energy:
- assume
60%
of the mining revenue is spent on energy - assume energy costs
0.05 $/kWh
- calculate
energy = 60% * revenue / energy_price
I see no reason to believe these assumptions.
The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index therefore proposes to turn the problem around, and approach energy consumption from an economic perspective.
The index is built on the premise that miner income and costs are related. Since electricity costs are a major component of the ongoing costs, it follows that the total electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network must be related to miner income as well. How the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index uses miner income to arrive at an energy consumption estimate is explained in the following infographic:
- assume
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@adynathos said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I see no reason to believe these assumptions.
Okay. So, what's your counterproposal? What's your estimate?
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@adynathos said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
assumptions about the portion of revenue used on energy
Yeah, that's dubious.
@adynathos said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
assume energy costs 0.05 $/kWh
Where are most miners? For the US, that's not even close to right, which means the energy calculation (for US miners) would be inflated by 2.5x. According to https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/average-electricity-prices-kwh.html (2011, more recent info is hard to find), even India and China, which are the cheapest places they list, $0.05 is about 60% low, which means their calculated energy usage is at least 60% too high (if their other assumptions were true).
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@rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Okay. So, what's your counterproposal? What's your estimate?
As the article points out, it is not easy to estimate.
Unlike the article, I will not treat the lack of good estimates as an invitation to form yet another bad estimate.In the past, energy consumption estimates typically included an assumption on what machines were still active and how they were distributed, in order to arrive at a certain number of Watts consumed per Gigahash/sec (GH/s). A detailed examination of a real-world Bitcoin mine has thought us that such an approach will certainly lead to underestimating the network’s energy consumption, because it disregards relevant factors like machine-reliability, climate and cooling costs. This arbitrary approach has therefore led to a wide set of energy consumption estimates that strongly deviate from one another, sometimes with a disregard to the economic consequences of the chosen parameters.
The information however is known to the people running the mining operations and the power-plants who sell them the energy.
But of course the owners are not eager to disclose how much energy they are wasting.
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@adynathos Can we all agree it's several order of magnitudes more energy than running a Visa card through a slot uses.
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@blakeyrat Of course, I agree it is a waste of energy.
I have seen some argument that for VISA one should also count their offices and employees, not just the servers.
However, with VISA you can pay for real things, so regardless of the energy it wins.
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@cursorkeys The first time it happened, Etherium broke their own rules and did a "fork" of the currency to remove the value of the scammed currency. Because the people running it are nothing if not fucking hypocrites.
It's simple, really. You can make a lot of money with pyramid schemes, but you have to be in early enough that there's enough suckers after you whose money you can rip off.
The only people who ever make any more than a negligible amount are fully in on the scam as co-conspirators who started the whole thing in the first place.
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@adynathos said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
assume energy costs 0.05 $/kWh
The first figures I found online were 0.12 $/kWh, but that might be a wholesale/retail difference.
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@dkf said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@adynathos said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
assume energy costs 0.05 $/kWh
The first figures I found online were 0.12 $/kWh, but that might be a wholesale/retail difference.
Well, the article linked to another one about a huge mining facility. When I took their consumption numbers and took their percentage of the mining total as reference, I arrived at 1.2 GW of total energy consumption as the lower boundary. The real number will be higher because of economies of scale and all that shit.
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@the_quiet_one said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The only people who ever make any more than a negligible amount are fully in on the scam as co-conspirators who started the whole thing in the first place.
Only guaranteed way to make money, but not the only way.
You could have bought it a year ago and have made 700% on it, that's not negligible. You could still buy and hope it'll climb to $50k or something, but without hindsight you don't know when you lose everything.
As we've established, Bitcoin is just a huge waste of energy, so unless you're trading in drugs it's actual value is negative. The bubble will pop, but there's no way to know when the market stops being irrational.
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@adynathos said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@blakeyrat Of course, I agree it is a waste of energy.
I have seen some argument that for VISA one should also count their offices and employees, not just the servers.
However, with VISA you can pay for real things, so regardless of the energy it wins.Of course you have to count their offices and employees.
Sounds hard? Not really. VISA is a company running a profit, so whatever their total operational costs are, it's bound from above by the transaction fees they charge.Now that's just VISA and not their clients, but the other side (amortized cost of buying card readers, servicing them, electricity, etc.) still doesn't make much of a dent.
The whole system is set up to be as cheap as possible to operate (at least for VISA, not for their clients) to maximize profits. On the other hand, for Bitcoin wasting energy is its fundamental principle.
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@adynathos That $0.05/kWh figure seems quite low. I pay double that (although there's a discount for monthly usage above a certain level), plus fees and 7% sales tax. Commercial customers are subject to demand charges which can be much more than that.
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@lolwhat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Commercial customers are subject to demand charges which can be much more than that.
If you're a big enough commercial operation, you buy power on the open market (and also buy whatever derivatives you need to protect yourself). You probably also have staff whose sole job is to look after that.
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@adynathos said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
However, with VISA you can pay for real things, so regardless of the energy it wins.
Don't forget you can get REAL money with it too! (Makes those cash advance fees actually seem reasonable compared to bitcoin!)
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@dcon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@adynathos said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
However, with VISA you can pay for real things, so regardless of the energy it wins.
Don't forget you can get REAL money with it too! (Makes those cash advance fees actually seem reasonable compared to bitcoin!)
Not to mention that with the Tulip Mania you at least had actual tulips you could plant in your garden.
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
You could have bought it a year ago and have made 700% on it, that's not negligible. You could still buy and hope it'll climb to $50k or something, but without hindsight you don't know when you lose everything.
@The_Quiet_One oh look, BTC has just reached $10,000. You can still jump on the before it reaches the cliff.
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@the_quiet_one said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The only people who ever make any more than a negligible amount are fully in on the scam as co-conspirators who started the whole thing in the first place.
Only guaranteed way to make money, but not the only way.
You could have bought it a year ago and have made 700% on it, that's not negligible. You could still buy and hope it'll climb to $50k or something, but without hindsight you don't know when you lose everything.Just for the record, I'm talking about traditional pyramid schemes, not this. You mentioned pyramid schemes in the original reply. These kinds of things are more analogous to market bubbles than pyramid schemes.
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@dcon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Don't forget you can get REAL money with it too!
I'm happy with fixed-precision money.
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@the_quiet_one said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
These kinds of things are more analogous to market bubbles than pyramid schemes.
Naturally. Market bubbles have a great history of being more analogous to market bubbles than pretty much anything else out there.
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@dkf Soap bubbles?