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Bitcoin Twitter Businesses The Almighty Buck

Twitter Has Studied Using Bitcoin, CFO Says (wsj.com) 53

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
Twitter's finance chief said the social-media company has thought about how it might pay employees or vendors using the popular cryptocurrency bitcoin. From a report: Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, in speaking Wednesday with Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC's "Squawk Box," said the company continues to review potential uses of the digital currency. "We've done a lot of the upfront thinking to consider how we might pay employees should they ask to be paid in bitcoin, how we might pay a vendor if they ask to be [paid] in bitcoin and whether we need to have bitcoin on our balance sheet should that happen," Mr. Segal said. "It's something we continue to study and look at, we want to be thoughtful about over time, but we haven't made any changes yet."

Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey is a bitcoin advocate. Payment company Square, which Mr. Dorsey also leads, recently acquired about $50 million worth of bitcoin for its corporate treasury. Mr. Segal's comments came days after electric-vehicle maker Tesla said it had purchased $1.5 billion in bitcoin. Tesla also said Monday that it expects to start accepting the cryptocurrency as payment from customers soon. The Twitter CFO said the company is weighing a number of factors in considering what role, if any, the cryptocurrency might play in its business.
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Twitter Has Studied Using Bitcoin, CFO Says More

Twitter Has Studied Using Bitcoin, CFO Says

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  • And Jack Goebbels Dorsey.

  • Blind? (Score:4, Informative)

    by MrL0G1C ( 867445 ) on Thursday February 11, 2021 @03:22PM (#61053024) Journal

    Has the Twitter CFO just posted this memo from deep inside a cave? Right now a large amount of the Bitcoin mining is done in the area of China that is also persecuting the Uyghurs and that Bitcoin mining is using large amounts of dirty electricity.

    I'm not against all cryptocurrencies, just the ones that require stupid amounts of electricity just to process 1 transaction and at the same time is contributing to the shortages of CPUs and GPUs.

    • Reddcoin FTW!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        No. Another nasty cypto that needs to be mined and wastefully uses dedicated hardware in order to waste electricity.

        • Your information is out of date [redd.love].

          HOW IS POSV V2 DIFFERENT FROM BITCOIN’S POW ALGORITHM?
          PoW systems rely on hashing power to validate electronic transactions (commonly known as mining) which consumes a large amount of energy and makes mining prohibitively difficult for those that do not have access to powerful hardware and money for electricity. PoSV and the evolution to PoSV v2 is a method of securing the digital currency network through requesting users to show ownership and through rewarding both own

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

            Can I have 1 wallet for each of my email addresses?
            Can I have 1 wallet for each of my phones and computers?
            Can I set up VMs and have a wallet for each VM?
            Can I set up 1 billion VMs on Amazon cloud and highjack redcoin?
            Can I set up a wallet on behalf of another person and gift it to them a few months later? What if it turns out they already have a wallet?

            I'm not against Reddcoin but these are important questions. I Googled it and got a blank wiki page which led to a blurb page that wasn't a FAQ. I don't see

    • I'm not against all cryptocurrencies, just the ones that require stupid amounts of electricity just to process 1 transaction and at the same time is contributing to the shortages of CPUs and GPUs.

      Came to say basically this, and to point out the irony of a prime mover in the electric car business investing a bucket of money in a currency whose entire value base is derived from raping our planet.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        It's also a dumb move because Tesla needs lots of chips for it's cars and then it's putting it's money into a system which will help to deprive it of those chips. Selling cars is more important to Tesla, it needs to prioritise and not buy bitcoin.

  • Dumping the gold standard got us out of the Depression, and now it's time to abandon the crypto standard. Moving to a fiat currency (I propose "quatloos") will free crypto holders to use their value for financial transactions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      How many kilowatt-hours does 1 bitcoin transaction currently take? Someone mentioned on a previous bitcoin thread that conventional financial transactions take a few watt-hours each.

      • This is the new slashdot argument against bitcoin and it's too funny. Now the tulip argument is over we are down to how much electricity is wasted. From the crowd that hates electric cars and renewable energy.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          Have you actually got any argument for wasting huge amounts of electricity? You went with attack the messenger fallacy and still got it wrong.

          I've been a strong proponent for renewable energy many times.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mcsynk ( 896173 )

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

            Andreas Antonopoulos
            Bitcoin Q&A: Energy Consumption

            To summarize :

            Bitcoin mining can be done anywhere that electricity is available cheaply and thus allows energy arbitrage. Say you build a 50 Megawatt power plant in anticipation of future demand. The current demand will be below that and the excess energy can be used to mine bitcoin and pay off the power plant set up costs. You often don't have a perfect match between power production and power consumption, geographic

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

              I missed the bit where there is a valid argument for bitcoin. This is so far as I can see an argument against bitcoin - obscene levels of energy usage for no good reason.

        • I would rather be using renewable electricity to charge an EV than transacting and mining useless numbers in fairy tale land.

        • We were already talking about this years back.
          https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]

          If anything things have only gotten worse and will continue to get worse. Bitcoin's coin generation was devised like that.
          It generates less and less coins as time goes by and it requires more and more energy.

          Just think about it. The algorithm assumed Moore's Law would scale infinitely and then made the coin generation even slower by that. Given that processor speed has increased slower than Moore's Law over the past decade and tr

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        A quick search says: 26KWH per transaction and that information is of course out of date already, the real amount now is closely related to the $140 average amount per transaction miners make and half or more of that $140 is likely being spent on the electricity used to mine bitcoins and process transactions. That would imply that each transaction is currently on average using $70 worth of electricity.

        SourcesL
        https://securitygladiators.com... [securitygladiators.com].
        https://www.blockchain.com/cha... [blockchain.com]
        https://coinmarketcap.com/alex.. [coinmarketcap.com]

      • Large energy use is not a fundamental property of all secure crypto-currencies. Just of first-gen ones like bitcoin.

        Proof-of-stake chain validation, as done in the upcoming Ethereum 2.0, does not use large amounts of energy to secure the blockchain.

        So please just remember if you're critiquing bitcoin's energy use, you shouldn't extend your criticism to cryptocurrency / blockchain in general, because your argument would be invalid.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          The energy usage criticism still applies to the biggest cryptocurrencies currently in use and it currently still applies to Etherium.

          Cryptocurrencies are a solution without a problem, they're not needed and are horribly inefficient compared to traditional financial transactions. Unless you're into black market goods, money laundering or speculating AKA pyramid scheme gambling.

          Blockchain may be more useful in some obscure cases than traditional computing but all the current hype isn't about that.

          • One problem I think they might be good for (Score:4, Informative)

            by presidenteloco ( 659168 ) on Thursday February 11, 2021 @05:21PM (#61053676)
            Cryptocurrency and global decentralized DEFI, voting applications etc might serve the role of slightly humbling nationalistic, overreaching nation-state governments. Business activity, and environmental destruction, currently operate on and are organized on a global scale.
            However there is no democratically legitimate global governance structure in the world. Should one arise, as it should, perhaps blockchain infrastructure could underpin its workings.

            Not a popular opinion I know. Doesn't mean it's any less correct though.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

              My opinion is that the larger the organisation becomes, the less democratic it becomes. When one 'democratic' representative represents 50 million people, how much does one constituent voice count? And which does the representative pay more attention to, the individual voices of voters or the corporation that pays them $1,000,000 and mentions that they're just the kind of person they would like to see working for them in the future.

              So, I'm not a fan of global government.

              • The issue, though, is how do you legitimately regulate activities that are being conducted and co-ordinated at a global scale, and are having global-scale impacts?

                My contention is that you need a scale of legitimate governance equal to the scale of activity that is to be regulated.

                These days, powerful but not global entities like the USA and EU and China are each trying to regulate the world.
                E.g. the EU GDPR privacy law, under which they claim to be able to fine foreign companies not even doing business in

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

                  You have trade agreements that are decided upon democratically. Those agreements harmonise standards by picking the better standard.

                  I stand by my previous post that the bigger the government, the less democratic it gets.

                  • I don't buy the "the bigger the government, the less democratic it gets" thesis.

                    If a government was directly elected by 8 billion people, you'd have roughly a 1 part in 8 billion say in how the government was composed.

                    Where as if your strata corporation has 80 owners, you have a 1 part in 80 say in how the government is composed.

                    If there are rules against corporate or large-money influence in the elections, these two cases are equally democratic (in that your amount of power / influence over the government
          • The energy use criticism has been heard and is being effectively resolved in the rapidly emerging next-gen cryptocurrency and blockchain insfrastructure.

            i.e. large energy use is not a fundamental issue of crypto/blockchain technology. It is an incidental issue relatively easy to innovate around, at the speed of software innovation. So best not to spend too much energy fretting about it.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

              Yeah but the hype isn't about that next gen crypto, it's mainly about Bitcoin.

              • I think most crypto long term investors see bitcoin as a long term asset, to be used to transfer large chunks of value at once, or as a long term value store. Stuff like buying a car, a house, or transferring chunks of accounts from one bank account/bitcoin/other cryptocurrency to another. So they would hold bitcoin, then transfer chunks at a time to a more lightweight modern cryptocurrency that they can then use for smaller faster purchases. It is like a bank account, except it gains value, instead of l

                • Re: (Score:1)

                  by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

                  It's called gambling on a pyramid scheme. It probably takes > 100KWH right now on average per transaction, whereas normal financial transactions take a few watt-hours each.

                  • At this point? It really isn't a pyramid scheme. It has proven itself. People who keep parroting this are going to be left in the dust, and fast. The main issue is that modern banks offer no value whatsoever to the average consumer. It used to be that banks wanted they privilege of taking care of your money, and they would pay you for it, in terms of interest. Modern banks see the average consumer as a liability instead. They must insure each account under $100k, the vast majority. The end result is

                    • Re: (Score:1)

                      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

                      Still a pyramid scheme, it has the potential to completely collapse. The price is far too volatile for usage as a storage asset and to anyone with ethics the carbon footprint is terrible.

                    • You can literally say the same for any fiat currency. It is a complete non argument. Think of how much money we would save by getting rid of all the banks, all their small satellite offices, all their data centers, all the stock brokers, all the high frequency traders, all the corrupt credit card vendors and their operations. Going all in on crypto would save electricity in the long run. Plus, once we hit 95%+ renewable generation, this is a moot point anyway. But we are then free of leagues of corrupt

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

                      You can literally say the same for any fiat currency.

                      No, you 100% can't because countries fiat currencies are solidly backed up by the whole countries economy, all the peoples wealth, all the businesses etc.

                      Crypto-currencies than don't require mining or massive numbers of computations are ok by me but IDK which ones those are or if that's at all possible.

                    • How is Venezuela's fiat currency working out for them? Your argument that fiat cannot fail does not follow reality. Plenty of countries around the world have issued fiat, even controlled alternate currencies as much as they could, and it has failed miserably. Also, as I already said earlier, bitcoin is more of a long term value store, less computationally intensive cryptos would be more common in the future, and they would be used for daily transactions, not bitcoin. But having a 'gold standard' to fall
              • Well that's the nature of hype, isn't it. Enthusiasm by the relatively uninformed.
                But when critiquing, critique any FUNDAMENTAL problems you find, not transient, easily fixable problems, I'm saying.

                Here's an analogy. Dolts critique a transition to electric vehicles because they complain that they run on dirty coal-fired electricity.

                While still true, it is not fundamental to the nature and benefits of EVs.
                To get to a very low emission transportation system, you need to A) switch to EVs and B) switch out the

  • will accept pay in crypto currencies? How about tulip bulbs?
    Call me an old fuddy duddy/neck beard but I prefer my pay be stable and not subject to market whims.
    It's easier to make rent that way.

  • Bitcoin is too volatile and also suffers from being deflationary: Because there is a fixed supply of it, its value would inevitably keep increasing if it starts being used to transact a lot for goods and services in the growing economy. You would be better off hoarding (HODLing) your bitcoins than spending them, and that's not good for creating cycling (churn) in the economy.

    There is a decentralized finance (DEFI) infrastructure emerging, run on Ethereum and denominated in stablecoins. Why wouldn't you star

  • Excellent Twitter threads about Bitcoin (Score:4, Informative)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Thursday February 11, 2021 @05:30PM (#61053732)

    Here's a couple of good Twitter threads [twitter.com] by Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) about what Bitcoin really is (with an earlier one further down below).

    *** TRIGGER WARNING The Bitcoin boosters might want to avert their eyes! ***

    Let's discuss the environmental cost of bitcoin. Because despite all the push for sustainable and green investment in the tech sector, there's a giant smoldering Chernobyl sitting at the heart of Silicon Valley which a lot of investors would prefer you remain quiet about. Thread (1/)

    TLDR on bitcoin economics: It's a pyramid-shaped investment scheme backed by the collective delusion that value can created out of nothing by convincing greater fools to buy it after you do. [references earlier thread, also down below] (2/)

    That alone is sufficiently awful on its own merits, but on top of this the environmental damages of bitcoin are enough to make even Greta Thunberg weep at the pointless waste of it all. (3/)

    The underlying technology of bitcoin is based on the notion of "mining", a technical term for a process that keeps the network running and processing transactions. (4/)

    I won't cover the details of the algorithm, suffice it to say the premise of bitcoin mining is to prove how much power you can waste, and the more power you can waste, the more tokens you can probabilistically secure in exchange for your energy waste. (5/)

    And so people have set up entire warehouses of computer hardware dedicated to run 24/7 consuming power and performing the trial computations required by the protocol. Globally this consumes *nation state* levels of energy to keep it all running. (6/)

    Bitcoin mining is essentially a fucked up version of Candy Crush where you solve puzzles for coins, except the coins go to buy darknet fentanyl, launder money for warlords and provide gambling for hedge fund managers. (7/)

    And the scale of this waste has some scary numbers attached to it. A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh, or half a million times more energy consumption than a credit card payment. (8/)

    The bitcoin network annually wastes 78 TWh (terrawatt hours) annually or the energy consumption of several *million* US households. WolframAlpha gives some scary comparisons to help you relate to how much energy this is (think nuclear weapons). (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=77.78+terrawatt+hours [wolframalpha.com])(9/)

    Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste. It is a pure speculative activity of people gambling on the random movements of prices and the only output is simply shuffling numbers around in a computer at insane cost. (10/)

    In addition to the energy waste and CO2 emitted, the mining process itself requires constant replacement of hardware and produces a steady stream of waste from broken and exhausted computer parts. All of which are full of toxins and rare earth metals. (11/)

    The network produces 11.27 kilotons of waste annually or 96 grams of electronic waste per transaction. This is the equivalent annual e-waste as several small countries and equivalent to the waste of 482,456 people living at the German standard. (12/)

    Try to imagine a future where paying for your morning coffee involved smashing an iPhone and burning enough fossil fuels to run your entire household for 60 days. That's the environmental cost of the "revolutionary" technology behind #Bitcoin in a nutshell. (13/)

    Climate scientists have estimated that #Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2C. And this is just one of *hundreds* of other cryptocurrency networks that run on this apocalyptically wasteful set of ideas. (14/) (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 [nature.com])

    Climate change is not some abstract threat happening elsewhere, it is very

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