That’s the issue, the initial assumption that trades are linked to Tether feels very wrong. I would even bet that most retail investors have never heard/used a stablecoin.
Institutions that are currently buying are purchasing btc outside exchanges using real fiat, they are not using tether (or any other stablecoin).
People are using Tether (or any other stablecoin) to either park money or transfer it to another exchange as it is the most efficient way to do it. It is also a good coin for lending money or peer to peer trading.
Not yet a lot is happening on the Lightning network layer. You can check Strike of Get Umbrel to get a feeling for it. What is happening is fascinating!
If you google “coal plant bitcoin” you’ll find plenty of articles about that issue. It is known for many years. It makes wondering why politicians are not interested in addressing it - as well as the fact that
cryptos are alternative currencies, competing with a country’s official currency
cryptos may be used to for tax evasion and money laundering
An explanation is that they don’t sincerely care about environment, are invested in cryptos or (a non-exclusive or) are evading taxes using cryptos…
My two cents, I won’t discuss the fact that he sees no value in btc as this is clearly intellectually dishonest (he owned btc in the past):
Stephen is the founder of Adjoint.io which bitcoin renders obsolete, he has a conflict of interest
Miners have an incentive to be efficient because of the halving cycles, hence the increased part of renewable energy in mining every year. They thrive on cheap energy (solar) and unused capacity
You cannot store energy and that’s why most of the mining rig are in places like Sichuan (2nd in hashpower globally) where you have too much hydro capacity. BTC mining is a great usage to not waste this electricity
Finally, when all BTC are mined in the future and the price is way up , Bitcoin’s energy expenditure might end up looking rather cheap in comparison (coins only need to be issued once)
We could even argue that philosophically speaking, using energy to create value is the essence of work, and btc is doing it very efficiently as a store of value (i.e. better than mining gold or building real estate or the well-named petrodollar).
I disagree. Netflix is quite efficient with resources for the services it provides. They even work together with ISPs to provide on premise servers to reduce network traffic over other hops.
I’m not even a Netflix subscriber but this comparison is far fetched. If there were no malicious actors ever (obviously there are, point being if trust wasn’t an issue) you could provide the services the Bitcoin blockchain provides with a centralized database at very low cost. Streaming video obviously uses more bandwidth and processing power than bookkeeping.
Indeed Netflix is doing a lot to reduce their bandwidth, it is just an example, but we could always argue about the value of using energy for leisure. Is it morally superior?
I could mention “datacenter” as a whole. It is very interesting topic actually, because a lot is done to transform this waste into “something”. It is true for datacenter and also Bitcoin. Overall, we are progressing as a society, it might not be perfect nor fast enough, but it is going forward.
As a side note, consuming electricity is not equal to producing CO2, which as far as I know is what we should fight in priority.
Right, if you don’t buy the value proposition, nothing matters.
Just as a store value the superiority of btc is massive, we are talking about a durable, portable, verifiable, divisible, scarce and censorship-resistant asset. That’s magnitude better than any centralized database for instance (or gold).
Just an example from today that is enabled by btc: Nalvany was arrested in Russia but his non-profit association can still received donation in btc. No one can confiscate this asset.
Like that’s the only thing that could have worked
USD or EUR or whatever would have worked just the same (and the BTC might not be super useful, esp. given how tracable it can be and they still need to convert it to an actual currency to use it).
And if people with gun show up, not sure how you non confiscatable assets will fare
USD and EUR can be seized or frozen by a bank if you are not living in a democratic country. Nalvany is just the most recent example I have seen today, there are tons of examples on how bitcoin is used by human rights associations in countries such as Belorussia, Salvador, Venezuela, Nigeria, Hong Kong, etc.
Gun is very efficient indeed but if you have a geographic separation between your keys and your multsig setup, the “confiscation” risk decreases drastically. However, your physical security is more problematic!
Wich non-democratic countries have USD or EUR as their official currencies? Obviously you’re not going to hold a USD or EUR account in Russia if you’re a political opponent at risk. Anyway I don’t really think bitcoin changes anything those people were using EUR, USD or CHF account in democratic countries in the past, and it solved the problem.
Many poor countries are using USD as official money (El Salvador, Zimbabwe, Ecuador) or quasi-official money (Asia, Caraibes, South America). It creates a lot of problem because these countries can use USD but cannot produce/manage USD, so how do you develop an effective banking system for the people? They will use international remittances that are in USD but are also a complete rip off. Bitcoin solves that out of the box.
For seizing and without going too far, you have civil forfeiture in the US in which law enforcement officers can seized your asset without charging you or the infamous Gold Reserve act in the 30s in which the US government seized all gold.
Anyway, we drifted a bit from the subject, El Salvador is a really cool example that you can check on this Forbes article if you want to learn more about it. This use case can be scale to billions.
In any case, even if there’s some usecase where bitcoin could be interesting, I’m personally fundamentally opposed as it would have disastrous outcomes if it ever were successful (at least for the large stable democraties).
I don’t think you can have a prosperous global economy while giving away monetary policies (think about what a crisis like covid would have done without monetary policies, at least it’s the general consensus that they are extremely useful tools). There’s a reason the gold standard was only around for a small amount of time.
I do care about having a good economy and retiring in a stable environment, so it’s in my interest to have working monetary policies being applied.
If the current “working monetary policies” happen to meet a less favorable environment (like 4% price inflation), they will stop quickly to be working at all.
Some people will be happy to have prepared alternatives like the barbarous relic, the crypto scam, etc., especially if they are retired.
Even at 4% inflation, where the real returns vastly different? We’re not talking about hyperinflation at 4%. 2% is a typical target. I’d rather hold something that depreciates steadily (and usually with relatively stable real return) than something hyper volatile.
And why would not having any monetary policy lever actually be better even at 4% inflation? How do you adjust the monetary mass to the needs of the economy? From a macroeconomic perspective, it’s like having a great tool and then deciding, you know what let’s not use it and just use stones instead
For me it’s not black or white. Something which is good for now can have undesired effects later. And of course once 4% inflation is crossed, people will begin to speak about inflation, see their savings melt, and it can go to 5%, 6%, the next year and so on - no limits!
About adjusting the monetary mass to the needs of the economy, I really doubt the Swiss economy really needs sixteen times more M0 mass than just twelve years ago.
It’s just an example. You see a similar pattern for the ECB, the Fed and other central banks. IMHO it looks more like trying to manage a global ballooning over-indebtedness issue…
Regarding Crypto energy efficiency, I know Ethereum is in the process of switching from proof of work (trying to guess the nonce by brute force) to proof of stake (randomly mining a block with the probability proportional to the pledged coins). This would make it possible to mine blocks on any hardware.
So in your mind, since you think that QE was a bad idea, what do you think should/would have happened with no monetary intervention during the 2008 and 2020 crisis?
It’s a balance sheet, if people outside of Switzerland want to buy CHF, why not give it to them? The alternative would have been to let CHF massively appreciate, Switzerland becoming non competitive quickly can have a big impact on the local economy (= us/our jobs).
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a lot is happening on the Lightning network layer. You can check Strike of Get Umbrel to get a feeling for it. What is happening is fascinating!
