Elon Is Wrong About Bitcoin. Crypto Miners Are Key to Renewables' Success

Elon Is Wrong About Bitcoin. Crypto Miners Are Key to Renewables' Success(advisorperspectives.com)

7 points by garraeth 5 years ago

Anyone someone defends nfts/bitcoin/crypto in general I can't help but think of the classic.

> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Though in these cases it's not salary but rather a man's imagined future millions from his buy in to pyramid schemes.

emerged 5 years ago | |

I have a theory that people who made money through crypto speculation are also rationalizing why they “deserved” the windfall.

988747 5 years ago |

Right now in Poland home owners can get some free money from EU to install photovoltaic panels on their roofs, so many people are doing it. The catch is: once you install them and start producing electricity you can send it to the grid, but you won't get paid for it in cash. You will get a credit, which you can use later, at night, or in winter, when your panels produce next to nothing. So you can reduce your electricity bills to zero, but not below zero (i.e. make money)

So, I already got an idea: I will buy a PC and start mining Etherum - at least this way I can convert some of that photovoltaic electricity to cash.

EDIT: you can look at this both ways:

- on one hand it is a waste of renewable electricity, that could instead be made available to less fortunate citizens

- on the other hand, being able to make cash gives me an additional incentive to invest in those panels in the first place (with electricity bills reduction alone it would take 7-10 years to break even)

retrac 5 years ago | |

Likely not profitable. If you already have some surplus free electricity and free hardware, then yes by all means, you should be mining with it.

But even when electricity is free the economics on new mining hardware are often uncertain. I don't know what the long-term price of cryptocurrencies will be, but I strongly suspect that right now is a bit of a bubble. I'm pretty sure the return will not be like $5 a day on a standard gaming GPU a year from now.

And Ethereum in particular is moving away from proof-of-work consensus entirely, so the long-term future of mining is questionable really.

ratsmack 5 years ago |

>A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.

Please explain to me how Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme. I may be to old to fully understand, but I see zero underlying (intrinsic) value in any of these crypto coins.

And on top of it all, they burn through enormous amounts of electrical energy that is lost as waste heat.

retrac 5 years ago | |

> zero underlying (intrinsic) value

Cryptocurrencies, in general, do have value from their utility as a currency. They do sort-of-work in that regard. So perhaps as long as they're legal the value is somewhat above zero, as long as some are using it to settle transactions.

Can anything like the current prices, especially on thousands of competing currencies all serving the same effective role, be justified long-term? That's a rather different question. It's, at a minimum, an enormous speculative bubble, in my opinion. Ponzi might not be the wrong word for some of the wilder "store of value" claims.

cyanydeez 5 years ago |

anyone who takes elon at face value is a failed critic.

elons statement on bitcoin is green washing a failed corporate action.