Tesla's Bitcoin Investment Could Be Bad For the Company's Climate Reputation and Its Bottom Line (techcrunch.com) 129
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Tesla's $1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin may be good for Elon Musk, but it's definitely risky for the company that made him the world's richest man, according to investors, analysts and money managers at some of the country's largest banks. As a standard bearer for the consumer electric vehicle industry and the broader climate tech movement rallying around it, Tesla's bet to go all in on crypto could damage its climate bona fides and its reputation with customers even as other automakers pour in to the EV market. Given Bitcoin's current environmental footprint, the deal flies in the face of Tesla's purported interest in moving the world to cleaner sources of energy and commerce. Until the energy grid decarbonizes in places like Russia and China, mining bitcoin remains a pretty dirty business (from an energy perspective), according to some energy investors who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak about Musk's plans.
"We were talking about people doing this in Russia back in 2018 and how they were tapping coal power to run their mining operations," one investor said. "The cost per transaction from an energy intensity standpoint has only gotten more intense. I don't see how those things coalesce, climate and crypto." The stake makes Tesla one of the largest corporate holders of Bitcoin but represents a massive portion of the company's $19 billion in cash and cash equivalents on hand. "Given the size of their treasury it feels irresponsible, IMO," wrote one investor whose firm backed Tesla from its earliest days. The company's move could be seen as another example of the absurdity of U.S. capital markets in today's investment climate -- and the underlying cynicism of some of its biggest beneficiaries. "The announcement that Tesla has diversified its treasury through the addition of bitcoin is not surprising, nor is the assuredness implied by an 8% allocation of cash-on-hand. Equal to Tesla's R&D expenditure for 2020, this investment is significant to the Company and shows a commitment to maximizing shareholder returns," wrote Stillmark founding partner Alyse Killeen. "Elon Musk has a long history of operating at the precipice of what's possible technically and setting the trend of what's to later become common operationally. I suspect the same will be true here, and that Tesla is the first of a larger cohort of publicly-traded companies that will aim to optimize the returns of their cash via bitcoin."
"We were talking about people doing this in Russia back in 2018 and how they were tapping coal power to run their mining operations," one investor said. "The cost per transaction from an energy intensity standpoint has only gotten more intense. I don't see how those things coalesce, climate and crypto." The stake makes Tesla one of the largest corporate holders of Bitcoin but represents a massive portion of the company's $19 billion in cash and cash equivalents on hand. "Given the size of their treasury it feels irresponsible, IMO," wrote one investor whose firm backed Tesla from its earliest days. The company's move could be seen as another example of the absurdity of U.S. capital markets in today's investment climate -- and the underlying cynicism of some of its biggest beneficiaries. "The announcement that Tesla has diversified its treasury through the addition of bitcoin is not surprising, nor is the assuredness implied by an 8% allocation of cash-on-hand. Equal to Tesla's R&D expenditure for 2020, this investment is significant to the Company and shows a commitment to maximizing shareholder returns," wrote Stillmark founding partner Alyse Killeen. "Elon Musk has a long history of operating at the precipice of what's possible technically and setting the trend of what's to later become common operationally. I suspect the same will be true here, and that Tesla is the first of a larger cohort of publicly-traded companies that will aim to optimize the returns of their cash via bitcoin."
Could have legitimized a better alternative (Score:5, Interesting)
Something like IOTA that doesn't rely on miners and has no transaction costs would have been better.
Musk could have been the one to finally put BitCoin behind us and went with something that doesn't have the high environmental and transaction costs.
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I'm strongly opposed to cryptocurrencies in general, but I have to say, if you're going to pick one, at least Ethereum seems to be trying to deal with its moral issues. JPM Coin, an auditable (aka crime-resistant) coin built atop the Ethereum blockchain, combined with an Ethereum transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, would be the closest thing out there I could get behind. My constraints are:
* Environmentally / socially responsible: Energy consumption per transaction at least within an o
Re:Could have legitimized a better alternative (Score:4, Insightful)
(I also include "socially responsible" under energy consumption because it's worth pointing out that not only are 2/3rds of bitcoin transactions processed in China, but specifically, one in every five bitcoin transactions is processed in Xinjiang, thanks to the province's cheap power - said cheap power being generated by the XPCC [wikipedia.org], a "state within a state" which is under Magnitsky Act sanctions for its use of Uighur slave labour. The fact that said power is also physically dirty is a side point)
People pushing scams (Score:1, Insightful)
https://twitter.com/ProfessorM... [twitter.com]
https://twitter.com/mrcoolbp/s... [twitter.com]
fraction impact (Score:3)
You want to know what else is bad for the environment? Musk {...} and launching rockets.
There only a handful of organizations with launch capacities, and they launch at best every few days.
We're barely at 100 launch per year in total. [spacelaunchreport.com] (there's even a graph out of these numbers).
So yes, a single launch can release quite a bit of CO2.
But given how few of them there are per year, all together they are almost a rounding error on the scale of all other of humanity's emissions (mostly transport and industry).
And if you want to nitpick about tiny fraction of contribution no matter how large at the sc
Car company and good climate reputation (Score:1)
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The better alternative to Gold (Score:1)
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As an alternative to fiat currency, a cryptocurrency like BTC could have had
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Wine is water, alcohol and grape-related hydrocarbons, maybe mixed in with a little carbon-dixide and yeast. And a liter of that is worth $100,000? More? Really? It didn't take the investment market long to fall out of love with that, did it?
The trouble with wine as investment isn't its provenance, it's keeping its value. Even if you recork in a nitrogen environment on a regular schedule you still run the risk of having it lose its value by going bad.
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I think that before you can take a view on whether or not you approve of cryptocurrency in general, you need to decide whether you view it as an alternative to fiat currency [i.e. something broadly equivalent, but existing outside national jurisdictions] or an investment [i.e. given that the architecture of mining bitcoin is such that it is effectively a finite resource [given that the cost of mining is increasing progressively].
You're missing the actual answer: gambling.
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Of course, most issues of cryptocurrencies would go away immediately if you would rely on a central signing authority. No proof-of-work, easier auditing, etc. But their supporters generally obsess over decentralization for political-philosophy/worldview reasons, on the range from libertarian to anarchist.
Their supporters only obsess over decentralization because (a) they have no concept of what's required to make crypto appealing to governments (b) most of them are using crypto for illegal things anyway.
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If you're going to do legal transaction only, then why do you need crypto?
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Centralized "blockchain" would be not much different than the current international banking systems. Actually it would have all the disadvantages, and almost none of the advantages of crypto currencies.
That is why moving away from "proof of work" has been stuck in discussions for years. As long as I remember, Ethereum always wanted to move away, but never actually did do. (To be fair, they want to have decentralized proof of state, but just unable to come up with a reliable plan yet).
From their own project
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I'm strongly opposed to cryptocurrencies in general, but I have to say, if you're going to pick one, at least Ethereum seems to be trying to deal with its moral issues. JPM Coin, an auditable (aka crime-resistant) coin built atop the Ethereum blockchain, combined with an Ethereum transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, would be the closest thing out there I could get behind. My constraints are:
* Environmentally / socially responsible: Energy consumption per transaction at least within an order of magnitude of Visa (the latter is about 1,5Wh/transaction).
* Crime-resistant: Anonymous in transactions between normal parties but wallets can be demasked/associated with specific individuals and seized or reversed by due authorities in the individual's jurisdiction armed with a signed subpoena or court order.
* Comparable or lesser risk factor than conventional currencies (annualized risks of major bugs, hacks, wild currency fluctuations, etc lower than the historic risk of wild fluctuations of conventional currencies - as assessed by peer-review from experts)
Of course, most issues of cryptocurrencies would go away immediately if you would rely on a central signing authority. No proof-of-work, easier auditing, etc. But their supporters generally obsess over decentralization for political-philosophy/worldview reasons, on the range from libertarian to anarchist.
Loverly. A crypto-currency with all of the "features" crypto-currencies were designed to avoid.
I think I'll stick with Bitcoin. Just out of spite.
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It's nice when cryptocurrency advocates admit that their goals are to hurt the environment, take part in crime, and want an asset whose value gyrates radically.
I appreciate the openness.
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Re:Could have legitimized a better alternative (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean how every form of digital payment that's existed since the very concept of digital payments began has worked? Even predating digital payments (e.g. checks, analog wire transfers, etc)?
Yes, anonymity between individuals is a good thing, but the ability to hide financial transactions from criminal investigators is not. And it's amazing to think that you and people like you would argue that it is.
Re:Could have legitimized a better alternative (Score:4, Interesting)
It's obvious why you would want currency that a government can't track. Governments often make victimless crimes illegal. That leads to these dark markets growing large because the people who want to use them for crimes which do have victims blend right in with the people who want to use them for crimes which don't.
The only reasonable solution to this problem is for governments to stop criminalizing victimless "offenses". Then they can go after the dark markets without causing negative effects.
Re: Could have legitimized a better alternative (Score:3)
Whoa there cowboy, money laundering and tax evasion are "victimless crimes", if you meant to say governments should legalize drugs, then say legalize drugs. You can't say legalize victimless financial crimes, because that's a Pandora's box of stupid bad.
Victimless fits a lot of undesirable financial crimes, evading embargoes, sanctions, tariffs, bribery unregulated gambling, to name a few more.
And I don't want to hear it about gambling, it's legal where it's legal, so the government can go after where it's
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Tax evasion is not a victimless crime.
Re: Could have legitimized a better alternative (Score:2)
The only reasonable solution to this problem is for governments to stop criminalizing victimless "offenses". Then they can go after the dark markets without causing negative effects.
Let me remind everyone of the context here. The point isn't that this is victimless, or that isn't, it's that for financial crimes in particular, it's an incredibly bad way of dividing them. After deciding on tax evasion, go ahead and decide on everything else.
I'm not sure what the OP's intent was, drugs that should be legalized, imported meds for off-label use, non-FDA approved but safe.. something? I can only guess, but victimless is a bad way of describing them. Buying goods from a sanctioned entity
Re: Could have legitimized a better alternative (Score:2)
"Whoa there cowboy, money laundering and tax evasion are "victimless crimes","
No, they are not.
Re: Could have legitimized a better alternative (Score:2)
Money laundering? Or tax evasion?
Evading sanctions? Cheating tariffs? Offering bribes? How about a classic one, check fraud, Catch Me If You Can.
Categorizing financial crimes by victimless or not will undoubtedly include more than you intended, that is my point. There are a lot of financial crimes, ESPECIALLY financial crimes, that are just as victimless as buying illegal drugs... from people that are not making the world a better place with your money.
Nitpicking the examples serves no purpose. You re
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The problem with your car example is that when you register the vehicle the state knows who is registering it, and they also know who registered it last. So they are going to know who bought the car from the suspected drug dealer regardless.
Re:Could have legitimized a better alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
And the problems with cash are self-limiting. Apart from things like marked bills, serial number tracking, fingerprints, residues, etc, cash requires physical transport, large amounts are immediately flagged as suspicious (and often illegal, or all sorts of restrictions), etc etc, and only works in person. Drug cash has to be smuggled with the same sort of effort and secrecy as the drugs themselves.
(And also - for the record - gemstones aren't fungible in the same way that gold is. Some criminal gangs in the olden days, before cryptocurrencies, discovered this to their displeasure; if you're not part of a gem dealer network, you'll often face an order-of-magnitude difference in prices between your bid and your ask. Speaking of gold, even it can be impurity / isotopically tracked, if there's enough at stake in the case...)
By contrast, the advent of cryptocurrencies - not needing proximity, not needing smuggling, and easily launderable - led to a boom in (practically the entire creation of) industries like ransomware and other forms of online extortion. When was the last time you ever saw a ransomware gang take cash? Never, that's when. It's like it was practically designed for them. Same story with all those crypto scams they've had on Twitter and the like - when was the last time you saw something like that using cash? It's also proven invaluable to states seeking to evade sanctions. The state of North Korea has one of the largest known individually-held bitcoin hordes in the world, for example. It's also of course the prime target of online thieves - irrevocability combined with easy launderability and no need for proximity is a dream scenario for them.
It's also been associated with wave after wave of pyramid schemes, although that has more to do with the hype than with the nature of the product.
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Why they fuck is this getting downvoted? Guess we have a lot of "government can do no wrong" types on here today.
Civil forfeiture is a thing.
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It's important to have anonymous transactions to allow for civil disobedience at small scales but at large scales, it is useless for this and can be incredibly dangerous.
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Anonymity has been the default for 10,000 years. Only in the last 20 have non-anonymous transactions been a thing. Even today, 30% of US transactions are cash and 55% of transactions under $10. Don't act like anonymity is some dangerous precedent-breaking thing.
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Many horrors have run rampant across our civilizations for that length of time, would you like to bring back child brides too?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And while this may be nitpicking on the grander scale of things, we've had banks for a few hundred years now reducing the anonymity of transactions.
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Crypto advocate: "In our current system of feet, we sometimes stub our toes. Therefore, I propose that everyone chop all their toes off."
Everyone else: "Isn't that worse..."
Crypto advocate: "We need to fix the plague that is subbed toes!"
Everyone else: "Toes are useful, and stubbed toes are at worst a minor inc..."
Crypto advocate: "WHY DO YOU LOVE STUBBED TOES?!"
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Building up your opponents view? Are you saying that crypto is literally about stubbed toes, and that this wasn't an analogy?
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This. If he just had to get into cryptocurrencies, why oh why did he have to choose the clunky old dinosaur of the bunch?
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Looks like he did do DOGE, and it is quite likely he is building kind of portfolio. The problem is, he has influence on the value of these by his own superstar status, and drives this game of madness up, being positioned better than many to reap his profits. Creepy cynical activity. Glad, there are at least some bodies to point at the reputation issue with this.
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> Something like IOTA that doesn't rely on miners and has no transaction costs would have been better.
As long as it's not actually IOTA... It is still reliant on a central command node.
NANO is the something like IOTA coin that actually works as intended.
IMHO
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Nano got distributed via capture...
It's not XRP...
It does what bitcoin was meant to do... it's an actual decentralised digital currency.
HFSP
Solid statement (Score:2)
Most of that also applies to Kim K and Kanye.
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"The announcement that Tesla has diversified its treasury through the addition of bitcoin is not surprising, nor is the assuredness implied by an 8% allocation of cash-on-hand. Equal to Tesla's R&D expenditure for 2020, this investment is significant to the Company and shows a commitment to maximizing shareholder returns," wrote Stillmark founding partner Alyse Killeen. "Elon Musk has a long history of operating at the precipice of what's possible technically and setting the trend of what's to later become common operationally. I suspect the same will be true here, and that Tesla is the first of a larger cohort of publicly-traded companies that will aim to optimize the returns of their cash via bitcoin."
Counterpoint. [twitter.com]
A story about bitcoin that isn't about its price?? (Score:1)
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Why is it that everything cryptocurrency fans link to always contains a URL of the form "http://www.SomeLibertarianThinkTank.org/..."?
FYI: Governments are not going away. They will continue to tax, and they will continue to spend, and if you hope to avoid your transactions being subject to their policies via the use of cryptocurrencies, expect to be disavowed of that notion by the force of the law sooner or later.
Move away from PoW? (Score:5, Interesting)
Other cryptocurrencies (e.g. Etherium) are moving away from Proof-of-Work, which is what makes Bitcoin so environmentally unfriendly. I know there have been forks, but: is Bitcoin itself considering this? I've heard nothing to indicate it is, but this really may be Bitcoin's single biggest drawback.
Innovation vs scams (Score:1, Troll)
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Re:Innovation vs scams (Score:4, Interesting)
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Who cares? We know that Bitcoin is a scam. It can never become the world's banking instrument, and meanwhile it shits all over the biosphere. Fuck shitcoin.
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Could you at least prove that Ethereum is not a scam?
Could you first prove that your post is not a scam?
I think you are trying to scam us.
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Currencies in general are not "investment grade" assets. The way to make money in the currency market is through arbitrage, and arbitrage is not a long-term investment, it's something you do and are done.
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investment grade digital asset.
I'll have to add this to my list of oxymorons.
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Bitcoin won't change because the people heavily invested in it will lose out if it does. The price only stays high because it's very very expensive to mine now. All the time mining was cheap and easy there was a steady supply of new coins entering the system, but now only a few people with a lot of resources can generate new ones.
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All the time mining was cheap and easy there was a steady supply of new coins entering the system ...
The cost of mining does no really affect at all how many new coins are being made, nor directly the price (Except when some miners sell the rewards they got from mining, which dilute the value slightly) - the average rate of new coins being minted is adjusted by the algorithm towards a fixed, specific number every 10 minutes - currently 6.25 BTC; that decreases 50% every 210,000 blocks, so the number is
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I meant when the HR difficulty was low. There are a finite number of coins and the difficulty is now so high very few new coins are being mined.
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There are a finite number of coins and the difficulty is now so high very few new coins are being mined.
The difficulty increase does not reduce the Bitcoin network's overall rate of coins being mined - a difficulty increase is used to
compensate for new miners joining in or more hashing power being added to or removed in order to stop the average rate of coins being mined from increasing or decreasing.
Again.. basically, whether the entire bitcoin network was 3 devices CPU mining with a few thousand hash
Absolutist Confusion (Score:2, Insightful)
The only valid decision criteria is 'better', not 'utopian'.
Does Bitcoin use two orders of magnitude less energy than the legacy banking system? Yes, it's good for Tesla's mission.
Step 1: get on crypto
Step 2: optimize the Byzantine Generals problem for energy
If you never get past Step 1 then you can't do Step 2. If you think the world will adopt an obscure alt because "green" then you're doing absolutist thinking and it doesn't work with humans.
cf. Knuth
Re:Absolutist Confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Does Bitcoin use two orders of magnitude less energy than the legacy banking system?
Is that overall, or per unit of value? Every article I find is just comparing overall use which is a foolish comparison. And BTW, banking is running the world's economy every second while bitcoin is... doing whatever people do with bitcoin. Bitcoin could never keep up with the amount of transactions per minute that occur in the real world, if it did the energy consumption recording transactions would be astronomical.
If you are arguing that Tesla is in it to fix it. Well, I have a bridge to sell you.
Re:Absolutist Confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
It's even worse than that. Not only do they ignore the number of transactions, but they loop in everything tangential to "banking", even things like the footprint of the janitor who cleans out the bathrooms of a derivatives trading office as Goldman-Sachs.
They don't like to compare apples to apples - the Bitcoin network is only a digital transaction processing system and nothing more, so the comparison is to other digital transaction processing systems like, say, Visa. And the comparison is laughable; Visa uses a mere 1,5 watt hours per transaction, all computer systems involved combined. Bitcoin consumes hundreds of kilowatt hours per transaction.
And to that I say... duh? The latter is just an update in a database. The former makes you do a cryptographic proof-of-work challenge for every block. It's a massive energy hog by design.
Now, you can take any backend, whether a simple database, or some energy-gobbling proof-of-work blockchain and build whatever sort of ancillary services around it you want. Want to have some sort of "physical currency" tied to the digital assets? Fine, add it on. Want to insure products against theft? Sure, add it on. Want to add safe deposit boxes, loan offices, stock traders, derivatives traders, commodities markets, whatever the heck you want? Sure, add whatever you want on. But at the core of it, you have a choice to either deal with a digital system that's just an update to a database, or a system that by design devours huge amounts of power on every transaction.
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And the comparison is laughable; Visa uses a mere 1,5 watt hours per transaction, all computer systems involved combined. Bitcoin consumes hundreds of kilowatt hours per transaction.
Is that hundreds of kWh per BTC transaction or per BTC block? BTC averages about 2000 transactions per block. Also most transactions occur off-chain, which further decreases the cost.
I have no doubt that BTC is ridiculously wasteful, in addition to being a bad idea for other reasons, but I want to be sure we're making somewhat reasonable comparisons.
Sleight of hand (Score:2)
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Ignoring the fact that China constantly puts out these sort of things as a "Remind Companies Of Who's In Charge Here" act, Burry's logic is facetious on the face of it. Tesla started buying Bitcoin long before the Chinese government statement, so it's impossible for the two to be connected.
For whatever they're worth, JD Power ranked Tesla #2 in quality in China, and Tesla's sales in China have been growing tremendously.
No provenance (Score:2)
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EVs are fundamentally more efficient than ICEs. On the worst power grids in the developed world, you'll be roughly about breakeven with an ICE, depending on how you weigh different emissions, but generally even the worst grids can be expected to clean up significantly over the lifespan of an EV. On the average grid, it's about half the emissions of an ICE (and improving). On a clean grid, it's a tiny fraction (and still improving).
Bitcoin, by contrast, uses about six orders of magnitude more power per tr
Crypto currency is a fragile system (Score:2, Interesting)
Unlike cash, the fact that transactions happened cannot be hidden; there is no plausible deniability if transaction can be traced to an individual. Yes, anonymity is possible with digital transactions but only to the edge of legacy financial system.
Unlike legacy financial transaction systems, that have their own dedicated payment network, all crypt
Slush fund? (Score:2)
Tesla has diversified its treasury through the addition of bitcoin is not surprising
Probably quite a good way to lubricate deal making. I wonder just how "off the books" a company can make BTC transactions so as not to incur the wrath of financial regulators
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I wonder just how "off the books" a company can make BTC transactions so as not to incur the wrath of financial regulators
Literally not at all. Bitcoins are treated like any other asset. You are taxed on their current value.
Nobody knows how much Tesla spent on BTC. (Score:2)
Anyone have a valid source showing that Tesla actually PAID 1.5 billion for its bitcoin?
This article presupposes something that I still havenâ(TM)t seen verified.
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Check blockchain explorer for large transactions at the date.
its a feature not a bug (Score:1)
Bitcoin Monetary network allows to tap sources of energy that were not accessible.
Plug your miners in a desert, in remote cold icy weather, heat the city with Bitcoin miners. They are starting to do just that in Norilsk, Russia. Siberia.
Bitcoin mining provides economic incentives to create human settlements in remote areas.
Bitcoin mining also favors cheap clean energy. Smart money and engineers see that.
Could annual calculate EV/BTC carbon tradeoff... (Score:2)
as how much net carbon is saved by average Tesla EV (averaging carbon creation cost per watt across all sales markets multiplied by average total kWH consumed per EV) vs ICE vehicle fuel production and emission to get a net measure of carbon reduction consumption (one "Tesla")... against the amount of carbon how much carbon was released by the average power generation needed to do enough hashes to create one Bitcoin.
So in 2020, did all the Telsa EVs currently in operation save more carbon than was emitted t
No worries (Score:2)
Tesla's bet to go all in on crypto could damage its climate bona fides and its reputation with customers even as other automakers pour in to the EV market.
The value of owning an EV is the virtue signaling. The presence of actual virtue is optional. This won't hurt Tesla a bit!
You're referring to a group of people who are perennial whiners. Nothing any corporation could do would satisfy them, except maybe going bankrupt and out of business. If Tesla ignores them and continues to peddle their cars, they'll do just fine.
Do we know if Teslas didn't MAKE those Bitcoin? (Score:2)
Given that:
1) GPU in a Tesla's compute complex is relatively dormant most of the time
2) Tesla has complete remote control of software stack on compute engine
3) Tesla has fully networked communication with each EV
3) Millions of Teslas operating in unison might constitute a significant hashing pool
I guess you'd need to say Tesla BOUGHT 1.5 Billion BTC to explain where THAT came from.
Sounds like agenda-driven journalism against Tesla (Score:2, Interesting)
$1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin may be good for Elon Musk, but it's definitely risky for the company that made him the world's richest man, ... Tesla's bet to go all in on crypto could damage its climate bona fides and its reputation with customers even as other automakers pour in to the EV market.
Tesla's not gone "All-In". They are putting a tiny fraction of their assets in crypto - Going All-In would be putting 60% or 80% in crypto, which they aren't doing. Tesla putting a small percentage in cr
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Re: Sounds like agenda-driven journalism against T (Score:2)
What is Apple doing with their billions in cash reserves? Is it sitting in a savings account or is it invested? If invested, is it all invested in blue-chip stocks and safe bonds, or is some of it invested speculatively? Why shouldn't a company try to maximize returns on cash assets?
Objective issues with bitcoin (Score:3)
Every time there's a topic on bitcoin the topics focus on subjective issues or ethical issues. Should it be valued as high as it is, is it a good investment, is it bad for the economy, is it helping bad actors.
It's been a long time since I've seen discussions on the technical transactional limits of bitcoin. All of the above topics seem to extrapolate out to large scale normalized use of bitcoin but it's not clear it can scale.
According to https://www.blockchain.com/cha... [blockchain.com] there are roughly 300K transactions per day, that has been a flat amount for quite some time. You can see on the logarithmic plot here https://www.blockchain.com/cha... [blockchain.com] that daily transaction growth essentially stopped 3 years ago. That's not even enough to support a decent sized city let alone the planet's daily commerce.
So how is that the bitcoin is viewed as having any long term future. It seems to be a vehicle for speculation and little more. It's only interesting because it's value has gone up, not because it can technically address any aspect of the global economy.
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I totally agree. As of now, Bitcoin is useless as a means of payment as manifested by the fact that 300 K transactions per day doesn't even measure as a rounding error in the 10s of billions of transactions that are made daily. This fact makes Bitcoin purely a reserve commodity like gold, except it has no inherent value or utility like gold does. (At lease gold is used in some real products.)
This gamble seems to be a means for Tesla to double its $1.5 billion investment in a short period just so that it can
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Well yeah there's that :)
Obsolescence (Score:2)
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Bitcoin can't even scale to the point it could get everyone onto lightning...
Why not NANO which can scale natively?
Re:Pyrite Nano (Score:2)
I didn't listen to anyone but the whitepapers for either bitcoin or nano... I was a fairly early adopter of both... and have studied and considered them both very carefully.
Nano does what bitcoin said it could do but can't.
Solid companies don't play at being a hedge fund (Score:2)
Assuming for the moment this was not cynical market manipulation to pump and dump a position in Bitcoin based on the influence of Elon's media persona.
What does it say for a car company to start playing hedge fund and making huge speculative bets? It's not like they own the car market, there is plenty of growth potential, so why aren't they investing it in Tesla?
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Any decent hedge fund doesn't make speculative bets like going long billions of dollars in Bitcoin. They are much more sophisticated than that.
I think Musk is a visionary with many things, but what Musk is doing is here is unbelievably irresponsible from a fiduciary standpoint. This isn't his personal wealth he's throwing on the roulette wheel, but that of the company he is supposed to be the steward of. Whether you think Bitcoin will go up or down in the long run, what is certain is that it will continue t
Let me get this straight (Score:3)
Burning coal to power Bitcoin miners is bad, but burning coal to power your commute to work is virtuous?
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So, yes, "using" vs "wasting" is a distinction that many people would consider justified.
Re: Let me get this straight (Score:2)
And the purpose of their job is to make money, just like a Bitcoin miner...
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No, driving a coal powered car is also bad.
Re: (Score:2)
Coal? Coal is dying out. Welcome to the 2020's.
The argument is about the amount of electricity used for equivalent means. And bitcoin uses several magnitudes more electricity to process transaction than an alternate transaction network like VISA or Paypal.
How much power does Bitcoin consumes? (Score:2, Informative)
Ask yourself: How much power does Bitcoin consumes?
More electricity than Argentina [msn.com] ...
Enough said ...
Investment?? (Score:1)
Same scam as WeWork (Score:2)
Remember when WeWork CEO used company money to buy/rent his own properties above market value?
What about the TSLA CEO who used company/investor/shareholder money to buy his shitcoins at the highest price in decades ...but the shareholders actually thanked him and gave him even more money! Genius.
yes, all things bad for tesla and musk (Score:2)
We all know that everything that Musk touches will fail. After all, tesla Model S3XY have all failed.
Likewise, the F1, F9, and FH have failed, as has the re-usability of F9/Fh. And we can all bet that starship booster will never get off the ground, startship craft will never properly land nor go to orbit.
Gads. These stories are just total BS. The question is, doesn't the
Difference between bitcoin and a Ponzi scheme... (Score:2)
So far as I can see, the only major difference between Bitcoin and a Ponzi scheme is the carbon footprint of the fomer.
1.5B is pocket change, not "all in" (Score:2)
That number is not impressive.
The cars are mining equipment (Score:2)
How much you want to bet that the processors in the cars are mining bitcoin on behalf of Tesla when the car isn't in use?
"hodlers" (Score:2)