What the hell is (a) bitcoin?
- AdmiralKird
- MBA, CPA, CFA, CFP, JD, PE, MD
- Posts: 9688
- Joined: March 7 07, 4:50 pm
- Location: Tycho Crater, Luna
Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?
Its not even that they own the photo/image either, it's just a URL address. And can you even own any address? The Fed Government owns the property at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, but anyone can still use the address to write a letter if they want.
If you want to [expletive] barf:
Skip to 3:48
If you want to [expletive] barf:
Skip to 3:48
-
- "I could totally eat a pig butt, if smoked correctly!"
- Posts: 27273
- Joined: August 5 08, 11:24 am
- Location: Thinking of the Children
- Leroy
- a bad penny always turns up
- Posts: 25112
- Joined: April 17 06, 12:27 pm
- Location: Hanging out with my redneck, white socks and Blue Ribbon beer.
- Contact:
Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?
Is that the hottie or the nottie?
- heyzeus
- Everday Unicorn
- Posts: 41342
- Joined: April 21 06, 10:14 am
- Location: Austin, TX
- Contact:
- G. Keenan
- Sucking on the Rally Nipple
- Posts: 23459
- Joined: April 16 06, 6:03 pm
- Location: Chicago
Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?
Procrastination is the only thing I'm good at.
- G. Keenan
- Sucking on the Rally Nipple
- Posts: 23459
- Joined: April 16 06, 6:03 pm
- Location: Chicago
Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?
I just got an email from Venmo telling me that "people mine crypto like diamonds" and that it is "protected by a complex security system with no single point of weakness."
And who owns Venmo? PayPal, owned by of course Peter Thiel.
But it's cool, because in the fine print they say:
Edit: in Venmo's defense they are correct that crypto doesn't have a "single point of weakness." It has many points of weakness, so technically that isn't a lie.
And who owns Venmo? PayPal, owned by of course Peter Thiel.
But it's cool, because in the fine print they say:
Well golly gee, thank you Venmo for providing me with this unbiased information comparing crypto to digital diamonds with zero security weakness and not taking a position one way or the other about whether or not I should buy it. I'm simply being informed that crypto is rare, completely safe, and they can sell me some if after reading that objective info I want to buy it.Trading cryptocurrency is subject to a number of risks and may result in significant losses. Please see our disclosure here for more details. Venmo does not make any recommendations regarding buying or selling cryptocurrency.
Edit: in Venmo's defense they are correct that crypto doesn't have a "single point of weakness." It has many points of weakness, so technically that isn't a lie.
- G. Keenan
- Sucking on the Rally Nipple
- Posts: 23459
- Joined: April 16 06, 6:03 pm
- Location: Chicago
Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?
Good to see celebrities have found something with a higher profit margin than child labor fast fashion and beauty products. Excuse me, wellness products.AdmiralKird wrote: Skip to 3:48
- haltz
- Hall Of Famer
- Posts: 22034
- Joined: November 9 06, 6:45 am
- Location: a proud midwestern metropolis
Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?
I'd like to also recommend this. I might watch it again. Extremely well done.
-
- Hall Of Famer
- Posts: 12317
- Joined: April 25 06, 6:43 pm
- Location: Austin
Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?
Thirded on that video. Really long, but excellent.
- AdmiralKird
- MBA, CPA, CFA, CFP, JD, PE, MD
- Posts: 9688
- Joined: March 7 07, 4:50 pm
- Location: Tycho Crater, Luna
Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?
–]Supercoolguy7 M H 128 points 3 days ago*
I tried to do the math (it was hard) and it look like yeah. My napkin math came out to about three times as much energy for roughly the same dollar amount of bitcoin mined to gold mined.
It takes about 48.6 MWh of energy to mine one kilogram of gold. That doesn't include refining gold but you specifically said "mining" so I'm going to make my life easier. One kilogram of gold is about $59,000 USD right now.
One Bitcoin costs about $34,000 (but that price is highly volatile as in it has dropped $2,000 in value in a day, and was $50,000 last week). In September it took about 9 years worth of the average annual electricity consumption of a U.S. residential utility customer to mine one bitcoin. Luckily the NY Times specified the average household electrical consumption at 10,649 kilowatt-hours. So 9 years of energy consumption or the electricity used for one Bitcoin is around 95.841 MWh. (Like gold this is also not a complete number because they did not include the electricity required to cool systems, only the electricity to do the computations, so the electricity needs could be significantly higher) So right off the bat we can see that gold mining take almost half as much electricity to generate almost twice as much in USD (if we ignore refining), but let's figure out the exact amounts.
So doing some napkin math to make those numbers comparable, we're going to want to figure out how much energy is required to generate the equivalent amount of value in USD. So first we want to know the ratio in USD of 1 bitcoin to 1 kilogram of gold. So 34,000 divided by 59,000 and we get 0.576, which means 0.576 kilograms of gold is equal in value to one bitcoin, which means that it only takes about 28 MWh of electricity to mine the equivalent of 1 bitcoin's value in gold.
28MWh in gold to 95.8MWh in Bitcoin. Even if we take refining into account, it would need to take more than twice as much electricity to refine gold as it takes to mine it for bitcoin miners to even break even on electricity costs. The actual number to break even could be even higher if we account for cooling arrays in bitcoin mining operations.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama ... e/hu1h0lb/