The cynicism of the average crypto coin investor saddens me. They are literally contributing to the extinction of our species to make a few more bucks. It's bad enough that corporations, which...
The cynicism of the average crypto coin investor saddens me. They are literally contributing to the extinction of our species to make a few more bucks. It's bad enough that corporations, which tend to be sociopathic by nature, invest similarly (see: oil companies). Now individual investors do the same thing—except with full knowledge of the costs to the environment.
I'm not sure cynical is how I'd describe most of the crypto people I've interacted with. And they definitely never seem to have full knowledge of what they're getting into. If the environmental...
I'm not sure cynical is how I'd describe most of the crypto people I've interacted with. And they definitely never seem to have full knowledge of what they're getting into. If the environmental cost is mentioned at all, it's done with excuses about how much renewable power is used for mining (without any understanding that wasting that power turning the magic money machine means those kWh can't be used for something else).
Don't forget people who buy in to get-rich-quick/free money scams are generally not the sharpest tools in the box to start with. Bitcoin couldn't exist without them though.
The trouble with this logic is that Bitcoin mining is often using stranded energy that others can't access, according to Bitcoin’s Carbon Footprint Revisited: Proof of Work Mining for Renewable...
without any understanding that wasting that power turning the magic money machine means those kWh can't be used for something else
Our findings show that renewable-based mining could potentially drive a net-decarbonizing effect on energy grids, although key adaptations in mining practices are needed to fully realize this potential. Overall, the paper suggests a re-evaluation of the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining, highlighting its potential role as a facilitator for renewable energy expansion, and decarbonization more broadly.
Bitcoin doesn't have a monopoly on renewables and net-zero carbon infrastructure. There's nothing stopping other industries and monetary assets from being built off volcanic heat, ocean thermal energy conversion, methane flare caps, hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, etc. like Bitcoin does.
In fact AI data centers are now starting to do this as well, because they can provide a similar flexible demand that curtails over-generation risk to RE infra like Bitcoin can, which brings reliability to the grid.
We demonstrate that the flexibility of cryptocurrency mining loads plays a pivotal role in the reliability of electricity systems and the stability of electricity markets. We show that while the reliability of electric systems with higher renewable penetration is more susceptible to the integration of mining loads, full flexibility at all times can significantly avoid the reliability concerns created by the mining loads. We also show that a profit-driven price-responsive mining facility that only mines when the real-time local marginal price (LMP) is below $40 per mega-watt-hour (MWh) can significantly mitigate extremely high LMPs across the system.
Crypto would have to only be mined when renewable energy is available in excess in order to mitigate the environmental impacts of its energy consumption, which is not how everyone does it by any...
Crypto would have to only be mined when renewable energy is available in excess in order to mitigate the environmental impacts of its energy consumption, which is not how everyone does it by any stretch of the imagination. It also ignores the rest of the environmental impacts from creation of the hardware and eventual ewaste that will result, etc.
Posting a ton of research papers isn’t really conducive to conversation unless you are deep in the weeds on a very specific things. There is a lot you have to evaluate to read a single paper, so bringing forth a ton of them kind of comes across as trying to gish gallop. I briefly skimmed through all of your links and found some from sources I was not familiar with and your last one seems to have been written by some guy who owns a crypto company and a YouTube channel.
Which monetary assets in history have survived on only excess energy? The post I was replying to specifically said crypto people did not understand these things, so I posted research papers which...
only be mined when renewable energy is available in excess
Which monetary assets in history have survived on only excess energy?
Posting a ton of research papers isn’t really conducive to conversation unless you are deep in the weeds on a very specific things.
The post I was replying to specifically said crypto people did not understand these things, so I posted research papers which explain them. I find calling it gish gallop to be dismissive of the topic.
That wasn't the goalpost. The goalpost was over here: And the difference between Bitcoin and other monetary assets is efficiency. Bitcoin is not efficient or capable of being a global monetary...
Which monetary assets in history have survived on only excess energy?
That wasn't the goalpost. The goalpost was over here:
Bitcoin mining is often using stranded energy
And the difference between Bitcoin and other monetary assets is efficiency. Bitcoin is not efficient or capable of being a global monetary asset, it just does not scale, either in time (as mentioned by @streblo elsewhere) or in usage, as it has a hard cap in transactions that Lightning cannot overcome.
Speaking of efficiency, that study you linked about Bitcoin's efficiency has some awful math in it. I didn't dive fully into it, I was turned off the interesting abstract pretty quickly by the bad math, but for energy usage of printing banknotes, they cited a source that says a 96 page magazine produces X amount of energy to produce. Ignoring that this cannot be compared to the process of minting banknotes, to get the amount of energy per banknote, all they do (and they don't mention it, I had to reverse engineer their numbers), is divide the whole-magazine number by 96, getting something approximately (but higher than) a per-whole-page energy value, then multiply that by the number of banknotes.
Even if you could equate these two different types of printing (and you can't. One is a flexible CMYK process that can print, cut, and bind anything, the other fabricates only a single design unwaveringly), that equates every single banknote to 1/96th of a magazine.
I certainly didn't mean to be dismissive. But given your stated intentions it seems your attempt was misguided. It seems to me that @mat wasn't including academics when they were talking about...
I certainly didn't mean to be dismissive.
But given your stated intentions it seems your attempt was misguided. It seems to me that @mat wasn't including academics when they were talking about "crypto people". They were responding to someone who was talking specifically about investors, so I'm pretty sure that's what they meant by that term.
I specifically said "most of the crypto people I've interacted with" but as OP almost immediately did exactly what I said crypto people usually do and threw a load of excuses about the...
I specifically said "most of the crypto people I've interacted with" but as OP almost immediately did exactly what I said crypto people usually do and threw a load of excuses about the environmental cost at me - based on what appears to be some fairly shaky science and dubious sources, as other comments have covered already - I'd say I have little need to revise that opinion yet.
I'm sure there are reputable academics studying crypto. I have yet to interact with any of them.
The use of stranded energy does make it harder to figure out the true environmental impact, but switching to Ethereum (for example) would solve the problem almost entirely. When there are close...
The use of stranded energy does make it harder to figure out the true environmental impact, but switching to Ethereum (for example) would solve the problem almost entirely. When there are close alternatives, I see little reason to invest in Bitcoin other than “number go up.”
AI algorithms are extremely inefficient, but I’m hopeful that it’s just a phase and algorithmic improvements will result in dramatic gains. For cryptocurrency, the algorithmic improvements are already here and deployed and the only excuse for not using them is inertia.
And specifically, the problem is new investment. If people actually looked at alternatives and chose a better one, the problem would solve itself.
I'm long-term bearish on Ethereum. I see it as the Sears or Kmart of crypto. Lacks the scarcity and PoW security budget that makes Bitcoin a hard monetary asset. Lacks the performance and...
I'm long-term bearish on Ethereum. I see it as the Sears or Kmart of crypto.
Lacks the scarcity and PoW security budget that makes Bitcoin a hard monetary asset.
Lacks the performance and scalability that makes Solana an effective hyperscale global state machine.
The internet will drive users to the two extremes, but likely less so towards the middle.
“Scarcity” is just “number go up” and “PoW security budget” is someone’s unconvincing justification for wasting huge amounts of electricity for no reason. I don’t know a lot about Solana, but it...
“Scarcity” is just “number go up” and “PoW security budget” is someone’s unconvincing justification for wasting huge amounts of electricity for no reason.
I don’t know a lot about Solana, but it seems to be proof of stake, so it presumably doesn’t have that problem.
It doesn’t matter what people choose as long as it’s not Bitcoin, that one is bad.
Yea, I'm certain about Bitcoin but as far as the other end of the spectrum goes... it's crazy over there. I don't want to have to look at tickers or stay up-to-date on what's new. Anything that...
Yea, I'm certain about Bitcoin but as far as the other end of the spectrum goes... it's crazy over there. I don't want to have to look at tickers or stay up-to-date on what's new. Anything that boots Ethereum out is cool with me though.
Also - having these conversations on this site is difficult! Very strong any-crypto sentiments among the folks on Tildes.
Just a note on Bitcoin: Cryptopayments Energy Efficiency, but wow that's a ... very weird paper? SSRN isn't a peer reviewed journal -- it's a preprint site like arxiv. Minimally, it seems to...
Minimally, it seems to equate running literally the entire financial system (i.e. creating physical currency, running banks, operating ATMs, etc.) to operating bitcoin miners. I'd imagine most folks looking into this crypto stuff are looking for an alternative payment processing solution, not a ground up refactor of the entire economy, so even if I trusted the results (I don't) it's not answering the question I'd naively ask of it.
Also, as a quick tangent, thank you for linking to resources :) it might be useful for other folks to frame some of them a little differently, though. E.g. Menati et al. 2023 is about the Texas power grid in particular, which afaik is fairly unusual (it's in a developed country with tonnes of electrical demand, but doesn't interconnect with other grids effectively).
I think they’re all pyramid schemes at this point. But ethereum dropping proof-of-work brings it out of the realm of environmental issues. So not all crypto deserves this much hatred. I’m not...
I think they’re all pyramid schemes at this point. But ethereum dropping proof-of-work brings it out of the realm of environmental issues. So not all crypto deserves this much hatred. I’m not going to fight too hard to protect people from themselves. I think casinos are fine and should be legal - as long as the house doesn’t cheat (although in reality they sometimes do).
I'm sort of in the same boat and I'm not above having a small crypto wallet. I think of it as part of my gambling allowance for the year. It's never going to be life changing money, but every once...
I'm sort of in the same boat and I'm not above having a small crypto wallet. I think of it as part of my gambling allowance for the year. It's never going to be life changing money, but every once in a while I can cash out a bit for a little luxury or an unexpected bill.
The problem is that all of this is completely unregulated. The culture and people pushing this technology are just plain predatory, while many of the people investing in it are desperate and uninformed to various degrees. In that last crash, every one with dubious morals and a following were pushing crypto casinos to kids. People believed making NFTs of someones work magically gave them copy rights. There were weirdos building tributes to Elon Musk in the hope he tweets their meme coin. People were investing in jpegs of the first tweet and pokemon cards.
I'm not saying these people are stupid and they absolutely should take responsibility for their actions. But we have to acknowledge that it was a bad time and I believe there was a coordinated effort to manipulate people into the system. I'd also argue that people are even worse off now and with an even bleaker outlook. It's nice to think that the lessons were learnt and we'd be smarter in the future. But I'm looking at this headline and thinking that maybe I could get in early now.
Imagine if it was someone recently fired and sitting on a severance pay. Or that person who's loved one just got a bad diagnosis. Or teenagers, gambling addicts, uninformed pensioners and anyone else who might need a quick buck.
Exactly. I think the recent ECB paper on it, although obviously not an impartial entity, did a good job at summarizing the issue highlighting what is, for me, probably the biggest problem with...
Exactly.
I think the recent ECB paper on it, although obviously not an impartial entity, did a good job at summarizing the issue highlighting what is, for me, probably the biggest problem with crypto in general (Bitcoin or otherwise).
Coiners can keep ignoring all the flaws and obvious lies in their arguments and pretend it's all fake. Namely:
The energy/environmental issues
BTC cannot and will never be used as an actual currency due to it's inherent technical limitations (capacity, speed, etc.), which Lightning doesn't solve either.
BTC payments are slower, more expensive and more inconvenient than the myriad of modern fiat-based systems to move money around.
As an investment, it has no intrinsic return (no currency does) and it only holds speculative value.
Something can be a currency (with a stable value and no expected return) or an investment (with volatility but a prospect for future returns). But it cannot be BOTH at the same time, because those features are mutually exclusive. I'm never going to pay a coffee today with an asset that I expect to be worth twice as much tomorrow, and no coffeeshop is going to accept payments in an asset that could be worth half as much tomorrow.
"Scarcity" doesn't contribute to the value of an asset on its own. It needs to be actually useful for something first, which creates demand for it (which is not happening, as seen above). Only then does scarcity start to increase its value. I have a drawing I made when I was 5, supposed to be a car although it looks like a dog. Totally scarce, only one copy exists in the whole world. Unfortunately people are stubborn and won't give me 50k for it...
It's price/value/market cap numbers are largely the result of wash trading and price manipulation, and there's no way a significant amount of people can actually "cash out" at any given price without that price tanking hard.
Its only real, successful use cases have all been about carrying out illegal activities: money laundering, ransomware payments, human trafficking, etc. Why? Because those are the only real cases where the subjects are willing to put up with all the drawbacks and price volatility if that makes it slightly harder to get caught.
And yet... I'm fine with all of this. Like you said, if people still want to throw some of their hard-earned money at it or just give it a shot like they would with sports bets, that's their choice.
What really bothers me, though, is that due to all the above reasons, in practice crypto has become one main thing for most people who take part in it, whether they want to admit it or not: a huge, ridiculous speculative bubble driven by FOMO and super aggressive marketing targeted towards uneducated, financially illiterate people. And that bothers me because:
If they don't understand what they're getting into, they're defenseless against the huge marketing machine that is sucking all their life savings. It's not every day that you see Matt Daemon in prime time TV telling you how brave you will be if you flush all your savings down the toilet.
When those people lose everything, as they inevitably will, it will be us (the rest of society) that will have to pick them up and give them a house and some food. It is ultimately my taxes, not theirs, that will cover the damage that these companies and their predatory tactics are inflicting on people who don't have the means or the knowledge to tell apart a random line that goes up from an index fund that buys the largest 9000 businesses in the world and collects the long-term returns generated by the goods and services they produce.
I don't know what the solution is, so I'll stop the rant there. But it just irritates me that the people who look you in the eye today and tell you that you just "don't get it" and to "have fun staying poor" are exactly the same people that will be begging you for help in a few years. And it irritates me because it's not even their fault... I would've fallen for it too when I was 20 year old. It's the lack of regulation and proper safeguards that's allowing this to happen.
It’s funny reading that stuff given I was involved with Bitcoin as early as 2011, mining a whole Bitcoin every other day. Someone from my High School became like this. He jumped on the bandwagon...
you just "don't get it" and to "have fun staying poor"
It’s funny reading that stuff given I was involved with Bitcoin as early as 2011, mining a whole Bitcoin every other day. Someone from my High School became like this. He jumped on the bandwagon with NFTs. I’ve made and sold my own NFTs. He’s just a sucker.
I would argue the same point towards Bitcoin - people are going to continue investing money into it. The energy is being burnt to secure the blockchain, and whether that ends up being a colossal...
I would argue the same point towards Bitcoin - people are going to continue investing money into it. The energy is being burnt to secure the blockchain, and whether that ends up being a colossal waste of resources or a necessary investment towards a finite digital resource depends largely on what we do with the end product.
Are we going to use the power of open-source currency to become our own banks and stop being complicit in the trillions of dollars that banks pour into fossil fuels, or are we going to continue relying on the existing power structure to avoid personal responsibility and agency in the world we live in? It's up to each of us to make that decision for ourselves.
You dont need to invest in cryptocurrency to get rid of banks that invest in fossil fuels. You could simply choose to bank with one who pledges not to invest in those operations. In fact it might...
You dont need to invest in cryptocurrency to get rid of banks that invest in fossil fuels. You could simply choose to bank with one who pledges not to invest in those operations. In fact it might end up doing more good than crypto since if fiat currency in general were to collapse it wouldn’t matter much because many banks are already invested in crypto as well; if we were close to collapse their investment in crypto would have probably been one of the reasons for it to begin with.
In any case, the majority of the $3.6Tn invested is from just two Chinese banks. Those of us without Chinese citizenship are already boycotting the worst offenders without even trying.
Those oil companies are what allows fiat money to hold their purchasing power for longer. This is why the US offered military protection to Saudi Arabia in the 70s as long as they promised to only...
Those oil companies are what allows fiat money to hold their purchasing power for longer. This is why the US offered military protection to Saudi Arabia in the 70s as long as they promised to only do global oil trade in dollars, and why China is trying to get more oil trade to happen in Yuan.
Why does that state how “borked” fiat currency is? Is it not the opposite? People who are into bitcoin not only still don’t use it as a currency, but even track its “progress” with the fiat...
Why does that state how “borked” fiat currency is? Is it not the opposite? People who are into bitcoin not only still don’t use it as a currency, but even track its “progress” with the fiat dollar! Many people argue you should buy bitcoin with the eventual intention to exchange it back for dollars so you can actually buy things you want.
I'm as green as they come, but unless were are enacting laws across the board to make carbon emissions illegal, then I don't care what crypto uses up. We need laws that force 100% of of people in...
I'm as green as they come, but unless were are enacting laws across the board to make carbon emissions illegal, then I don't care what crypto uses up.
We need laws that force 100% of of people in 100% of industries to stop polluting. Now way I'm singling out one single Taylor Swift or one single Bitcoin.
I mean sure, a carbon tax would do wonders for emissions, but even then I think it's reasonable for governments to pick and choose some winners and losers based on their negative effects. I...
I mean sure, a carbon tax would do wonders for emissions, but even then I think it's reasonable for governments to pick and choose some winners and losers based on their negative effects. I largely agree PoW is a collosal waste of resources, so I'm fine with governments making electricity more expensive for mining.
On the other hand, there’s something to be said for fixing loopholes that result in electricity rates that are too low in some places and finding alternative uses for stranded electricity. Going...
On the other hand, there’s something to be said for fixing loopholes that result in electricity rates that are too low in some places and finding alternative uses for stranded electricity. Going after Bitcoin in particular is treating a symptom in a less robust way.
From today's news: US judge halts government effort to monitor crypto mining energy use. Of all the get-rich-quick schemes in history, Bitcoin in 2024 may be one of the most destructive. There's...
Of all the get-rich-quick schemes in history, Bitcoin in 2024 may be one of the most destructive. There's enough financial backing from crypto scamfluencers to add still more distortion to U.S. politics. Sam Bankman-Fried was the just the most conspicuous example. An influential lump of lobbyists and donors are pushing cryptocurrencies as the hottest thing for technological innovation since the birth of the Internet.
We've seen how that turned out for FTX. It's a coin toss at this point whether the long-term damage from Bitcoin's continued mining, eventual collapse, and destruction of economic value, would be worse than just setting a trillion or two paper dollars on fire. But we'll get to find out, if there isn't regulatory intervention soon.
Until someone explains to me how Bitcoin won't self-immolate as it becomes closer to being fully mined I refuse to take it seriously. AFAIK basically the entire budget of securing BTC currently...
Until someone explains to me how Bitcoin won't self-immolate as it becomes closer to being fully mined I refuse to take it seriously.
AFAIK basically the entire budget of securing BTC currently comes from mining new coins. Transaction fees are effectively subsidized heavily by this, and even when subsidized users still try to avoid layer 1. As Bitcoin approaches being fully mined (~2032+), transaction fees are going to start having to cover more of the network's costs.
Either you think it's realistic that until 2140: Bitcoin double in price every four years; transaction fees climb 32x ~320x, double every four years and the same level of transactions are maintained; miners burn tens of millions a day (and growing) to altruistically secure the network; or there is some consensus on an alternative and Bitcoin is hard forked.
Perhaps the last option is most realistic but it still seems unlikely to me. The amount of misinformation that will be poured such a campaign would be huge. Nation states (who probably have a good idea who the miners are at that point) are going to be trying to shape the outcome in their interests and actual users have no say anyways. Whatever emerges, assuming it's possible to manufacture consensus, is probably not going to reflect anything close to desirable.
And by ~2140, if it's still around, it gets even more ridiculous: miners must keep up with technological advances in hash rates and all of that investment has to come from fighting over fewer and fewer transaction fees. Or Bitcoin becomes the world's safest investment and is guaranteed to only go up, which seems unlikely for a bunch of obvious reasons. When transaction fees start to represent single digit percentages of your wealth and show no signs of slowing down, people will try and sell their coins and you have a death spiral.
That’s what journalists and other people who don’t understand the algorithm often miss: the declining block subsidy. This results in Bitcoin’s inflation rate going down, along with miner revenue as a percentage of Bitcoin’s total market capitalization until it reaches more of a steady state based on transaction fees alone.
Ironically, some analysts and critics of the network are concerned that Bitcoin won’t use enough energy to remain secure in the future when it relies mostly on transaction fees. I don’t view that as a primary concern either, but it has a higher likelihood of being a problem than the reverse situation of the network using too much energy (which by design is almost impossible; it can only use energy if people are getting a lot of utility out of it).
I'm sorry, but neither the highlighted quote nor the extended rambling about the basics of Bitcoin really address my point. I understand the block rewards get smaller, the ramifications of that is...
I'm sorry, but neither the highlighted quote nor the extended rambling about the basics of Bitcoin really address my point.
I understand the block rewards get smaller, the ramifications of that is the entire premise of my post.
Edit: I'll lay out the math as I understand it:
There's a new block every 10 minutes. Currently we're at 6.25 Bitcoins per block, so 900 new coins are mined per day. So collectively, miners are currently pulling ~$50M a day.
The amount of daily transactions recorded varies, but let's use an average of 400,000 transactions per day. At ~4$ per transaction, that represents just under 4% of their current income. So basically, the entirety of the cost of securing BTC is currently being supported by newly mined coins.
Every halving, miners have less new bitcoins available to subsidize their electricity costs. Prices of bitcoin, could double to offset, but exponential doubling gets very silly rather quickly. So whenever Bitcoin hits its price ceiling transaction costs have to come up sharply to meet the budget. Which is hard, because higher transaction costs will push transactions down to other layers and reduce BTC utility and attractiveness overall. There's also a fundamental maximum on transactions per block, so even if the usage is there transactions are ultimately supply constrained as less and less coins are mined so fees will be astronomical.
And if you don't meet those costs, miners are going to be dropping out. As miners drop out, the difficulty needs to drop as well because where you once had 1000 miners before a halving, you'll have 500 afterwards so blocks will take twice as long. In the meantime, you have all this hashrate sitting on the sidelines because it's been priced out of mining, potentially going on the market for pennies on the dollar.
Basically, POW is fundamentally broken as block rewards trend towards zero. The incentive structures that keep BTC working when you can mine $50M of coins a day just don't apply when you can only mine a fraction of that.
I understand your argument up to this point. Can you help clarify? All else being equal during a reduction of total block rewards, as long as there isn't a catastrophic collapse of hash rate* the...
I understand your argument up to this point. Can you help clarify?
And if you don't meet those costs, miners are going to be dropping out. As miners drop out, the difficulty needs to drop as well because where you once had 1000 miners before a halving, you'll have 500 afterwards so blocks will take twice as long. In the meantime, you have all this hashrate sitting on the sidelines because it's been priced out of mining, potentially going on the market for pennies on the dollar.
All else being equal during a reduction of total block rewards, as long as there isn't a catastrophic collapse of hash rate* the difficulty will be reduced after enough work has been done. This will in time restore the ratio between work and mined bitcoin to the same level as before the block reward reduction. If half the hash rate disappeared at once, this would take about four weeks for the remaining half of the hash rate.
Yes, there would be a lot of mining hardware becoming electronics waste due to not being profitable to use any more, and it would be a potential liability for the security of the network if a well-funded attacker were to acquire a significant part of it, but the primary function of generating blocks for transactions would continue to operate at a constant rate after the transitory period.
That is, your list of things that may change to maintain bitcoin mining included
Increasing the value of the mined rewards by increasing the value of bitcoin,
Increasing the value of the mined rewards by increasing transaction fees,
All miners operating continuously altruistically at a loss at a maintained total aggregate hash rate; and
Hard forking bitcoin to change how mining works
but it should also include
Miners being progressively priced out from mining such that the hash rate is maintained at a level where the difficulty is adjusted (up or down) such that the cost per block mined is below the value of the total block rewards, with some expected short-term loss periods when block rewards are adjusted.
To be clear, I don't know that option 5 will happen. It could be that at some point margins are too tight for all miners such that a block reward halving causes a hash rate collapse from which it's not economically feasible to return in any reasonable time frame.
* i.e. as long as there's enough miners that either 1) have margins large enough to still be profitable, or 2) are willing to operate on a short term loss to maintain long term profits
I think I didn't make my point very well. I understand the difficulty will be reduced. It's late here so I'll expand tomorrow but I'll leave you with a question that I think gets to my point: You...
Miners being progressively priced out from mining such that the hash rate is maintained at a level where the difficulty is adjusted (up or down) such that the cost per block mined is below the value of the total block rewards, with some expected short-term loss periods when block rewards are adjusted.
I think I didn't make my point very well. I understand the difficulty will be reduced. It's late here so I'll expand tomorrow but I'll leave you with a question that I think gets to my point:
You have 1000 miners mining bitcoin at some difficulty level X
There is a halving. 500 miners become priced out, leaving only 500 more efficient miners.
The hash rate drops, and over some time period the difficulty drops to <X to accommodate
How is the network not less secure at this point?
You have less miners and a lower hash difficulty, not to mention all the ASIC hardware sitting around whose owners would probably be happy to sell if they could. Now repeat this cycle every ~4 years for whatever percentage of miners increases in fees and price in fiat can't accommodate. It's impossible to know by what factor bitcoin is currently secured but surely at some point the damn would break.
Thank you, I missed that you were focusing on the security as opposed to the block generation, which I absolutely agree would be impacted by such a reduction in hash rate. I had some comments...
Thank you, I missed that you were focusing on the security as opposed to the block generation, which I absolutely agree would be impacted by such a reduction in hash rate. I had some comments regarding well-funded attackers in my reply along the same lines of thinking.
No problem, yea I didn't make that very clear. My guess is the only hope for bitcoin rests in a hard fork at some point, but that probably sounds a lot easier than it is. Usually bitcoin...
No problem, yea I didn't make that very clear.
My guess is the only hope for bitcoin rests in a hard fork at some point, but that probably sounds a lot easier than it is. Usually bitcoin proponents will focus on point number one, well obviously, the price must just go up because it must go up but to me that's the most ludicrous option. Just to maintain the current security budget, assuming minimal growth in transactions, bitcoin would have to be valued at:
$120K by the end of 2024
$1.9M by 2040
$122M by 2060
$1.9T by 2076
and so on, just to maintain a network security budget of ~50M.
Can you elaborate on your calculations? I'm using some very rough numbers here, but good enough for hasty estimates, I think. If we assume transaction fees remains constant as denominated in...
Can you elaborate on your calculations?
I'm using some very rough numbers here, but good enough for hasty estimates, I think.
If we assume transaction fees remains constant as denominated in bitcoin, and we're looking at some source for average transaction fees per block [1], we could look at 2022 where the transaction fees were fairly low and constant throughout the year. Here they averaged about 1% to 2% of the block reward. That's 0.0625 - 0.1250 BTC in transaction fees per block. Taking the lower of about 1% for the calculations, having a constant 0.0625 BTC in transaction fees per block, we get the following:
Year
Block reward (BTC)
Total reward (BTC)
% of 2020
Inverse
Price-equivalent
2020
6.250000
6.312500
100.00%
1.00
$60 000
2024
3.125000
3.187500
50.50%
1.98
$118 824
2040
0.195313
0.257813
4.08%
24.48
$1 469 091
2060
0.006104
0.068604
1.09%
92.01
$5 520 854
2076
0.000381
0.062881
1.00%
100.39
$6 023 237
So for the dollar-value of the reward per block to remain constant by 2076 - and thus the revenue for miners which provide security to the network - bitcoin would need to be valued at about 6 million dollars. Account for maybe an average of 2% yearly inflation in USD over 50 years and the numbers might be three times as big, but still in the millions, not billions or even trillions.
To be clear, I'm not presenting this as "this is how much bitcoin will be worth", just that I can't find how to reach your numbers given the data.
I am effectively ignoring transaction fees, keeping them fixed in USD at current levels. It’s just a thought experiment and I’m not claiming its realistic, but it serves to differentiate scenario...
I am effectively ignoring transaction fees, keeping them fixed in USD at current levels. It’s just a thought experiment and I’m not claiming its realistic, but it serves to differentiate scenario 1 from scenario 2. I think that makes more sense than fixing them at current % of block reward. It’s hard to imagine transaction fees stay fixed in BTC (or transaction amounts) when, in your example they’re about $375k in 2076.
As someone who participates in the network by running their own node, I would welcome a significant decline in the required hashrate to mine blocks - I'm sure I'm not alone in this, either. I'm...
As someone who participates in the network by running their own node, I would welcome a significant decline in the required hashrate to mine blocks - I'm sure I'm not alone in this, either. I'm pretty sure that a 'death spiral' would involve a bunch of people moving their coins and upping the value of mining blocks, boosting the rewards for anyone who is actively participating in the network.
Right now, the barrier of entry is way too much for me to want to participate in PoW. If there's a collapse in the industry of Bitcoin mining, I would happily take it up as a side-hobby - maybe just in the winter so that I can use it to heat up the basement :)
Bitcoin retook the $57,000 level for the first time since late 2021, supported by investor demand through exchange-traded funds as well as further purchases by MicroStrategy Inc.
A net $5.6 billion has poured into a batch of landmark Bitcoin ETFs that began trading in the US on Jan. 11, signaling a widening of demand for the token beyond committed digital-asset enthusiasts. An upcoming reduction in the token’s supply growth, the halving, is adding to the optimistic sentiment.
MicroStrategy, an enterprise software firm that buys Bitcoin as part of its corporate strategy, said Monday that it had purchased another 3,000 or so tokens this month. The company now owns about $10 billion in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has outperformed traditional assets like stocks and gold this year. A ratio comparing the price of the token to the precious metal is at the highest level in more than two years.
Shares of crypto-related companies gained in the US on Monday. MicroStrategy rose 16%, trading platform Coinbase Global Inc. increased 17% and miner Marathon Digital Holdings Inc. jumped 22%.
Why is this comment collapsed, did someone label it as Noise? It's literally just quotes from the article. I get from the comments here that Tildes is generally anti-Bitcoin but this seems like a...
Why is this comment collapsed, did someone label it as Noise? It's literally just quotes from the article.
I get from the comments here that Tildes is generally anti-Bitcoin but this seems like a misuse of the label system.
There is a segment of Tildes that is anti-'summary quotes' provided with no commentary. You'll see them collapsed on many topics but it definitely doesn't help if the topic is unpopular.
There is a segment of Tildes that is anti-'summary quotes' provided with no commentary. You'll see them collapsed on many topics but it definitely doesn't help if the topic is unpopular.
The cynicism of the average crypto coin investor saddens me. They are literally contributing to the extinction of our species to make a few more bucks. It's bad enough that corporations, which tend to be sociopathic by nature, invest similarly (see: oil companies). Now individual investors do the same thing—except with full knowledge of the costs to the environment.
I'm not sure cynical is how I'd describe most of the crypto people I've interacted with. And they definitely never seem to have full knowledge of what they're getting into. If the environmental cost is mentioned at all, it's done with excuses about how much renewable power is used for mining (without any understanding that wasting that power turning the magic money machine means those kWh can't be used for something else).
Don't forget people who buy in to get-rich-quick/free money scams are generally not the sharpest tools in the box to start with. Bitcoin couldn't exist without them though.
The trouble with this logic is that Bitcoin mining is often using stranded energy that others can't access, according to Bitcoin’s Carbon Footprint Revisited: Proof of Work Mining for Renewable Energy Expansion, which also states:
Bitcoin doesn't have a monopoly on renewables and net-zero carbon infrastructure. There's nothing stopping other industries and monetary assets from being built off volcanic heat, ocean thermal energy conversion, methane flare caps, hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, etc. like Bitcoin does.
In fact AI data centers are now starting to do this as well, because they can provide a similar flexible demand that curtails over-generation risk to RE infra like Bitcoin can, which brings reliability to the grid.
From Advances in Applied Energy: High resolution modeling and analysis of cryptocurrency mining’s impact on power grids: Carbon footprint, reliability, and electricity price:
From Resource and Energy Economics: Can Bitcoin mining increase renewable electricity capacity?:
In Promoting rigor in blockchain energy and environmental footprint research: A systematic literature review, there is a large debunk of Bitcoin negative externalities, which mostly come from Dutch central banker de Vries. Bitcoin is 28x more efficient than the banking sector according to Bitcoin: Cryptopayments Energy Efficiency
Crypto would have to only be mined when renewable energy is available in excess in order to mitigate the environmental impacts of its energy consumption, which is not how everyone does it by any stretch of the imagination. It also ignores the rest of the environmental impacts from creation of the hardware and eventual ewaste that will result, etc.
Posting a ton of research papers isn’t really conducive to conversation unless you are deep in the weeds on a very specific things. There is a lot you have to evaluate to read a single paper, so bringing forth a ton of them kind of comes across as trying to gish gallop. I briefly skimmed through all of your links and found some from sources I was not familiar with and your last one seems to have been written by some guy who owns a crypto company and a YouTube channel.
Which monetary assets in history have survived on only excess energy?
The post I was replying to specifically said crypto people did not understand these things, so I posted research papers which explain them. I find calling it gish gallop to be dismissive of the topic.
That wasn't the goalpost. The goalpost was over here:
And the difference between Bitcoin and other monetary assets is efficiency. Bitcoin is not efficient or capable of being a global monetary asset, it just does not scale, either in time (as mentioned by @streblo elsewhere) or in usage, as it has a hard cap in transactions that Lightning cannot overcome.
Speaking of efficiency, that study you linked about Bitcoin's efficiency has some awful math in it. I didn't dive fully into it, I was turned off the interesting abstract pretty quickly by the bad math, but for energy usage of printing banknotes, they cited a source that says a 96 page magazine produces X amount of energy to produce. Ignoring that this cannot be compared to the process of minting banknotes, to get the amount of energy per banknote, all they do (and they don't mention it, I had to reverse engineer their numbers), is divide the whole-magazine number by 96, getting something approximately (but higher than) a per-whole-page energy value, then multiply that by the number of banknotes.
Even if you could equate these two different types of printing (and you can't. One is a flexible CMYK process that can print, cut, and bind anything, the other fabricates only a single design unwaveringly), that equates every single banknote to 1/96th of a magazine.
I certainly didn't mean to be dismissive.
But given your stated intentions it seems your attempt was misguided. It seems to me that @mat wasn't including academics when they were talking about "crypto people". They were responding to someone who was talking specifically about investors, so I'm pretty sure that's what they meant by that term.
I specifically said "most of the crypto people I've interacted with" but as OP almost immediately did exactly what I said crypto people usually do and threw a load of excuses about the environmental cost at me - based on what appears to be some fairly shaky science and dubious sources, as other comments have covered already - I'd say I have little need to revise that opinion yet.
I'm sure there are reputable academics studying crypto. I have yet to interact with any of them.
The use of stranded energy does make it harder to figure out the true environmental impact, but switching to Ethereum (for example) would solve the problem almost entirely. When there are close alternatives, I see little reason to invest in Bitcoin other than “number go up.”
AI algorithms are extremely inefficient, but I’m hopeful that it’s just a phase and algorithmic improvements will result in dramatic gains. For cryptocurrency, the algorithmic improvements are already here and deployed and the only excuse for not using them is inertia.
And specifically, the problem is new investment. If people actually looked at alternatives and chose a better one, the problem would solve itself.
I'm long-term bearish on Ethereum. I see it as the Sears or Kmart of crypto.
Lacks the scarcity and PoW security budget that makes Bitcoin a hard monetary asset.
Lacks the performance and scalability that makes Solana an effective hyperscale global state machine.
The internet will drive users to the two extremes, but likely less so towards the middle.
“Scarcity” is just “number go up” and “PoW security budget” is someone’s unconvincing justification for wasting huge amounts of electricity for no reason.
I don’t know a lot about Solana, but it seems to be proof of stake, so it presumably doesn’t have that problem.
It doesn’t matter what people choose as long as it’s not Bitcoin, that one is bad.
Yea, I'm certain about Bitcoin but as far as the other end of the spectrum goes... it's crazy over there. I don't want to have to look at tickers or stay up-to-date on what's new. Anything that boots Ethereum out is cool with me though.
Also - having these conversations on this site is difficult! Very strong any-crypto sentiments among the folks on Tildes.
Just a note on Bitcoin: Cryptopayments Energy Efficiency, but wow that's a ... very weird paper? SSRN isn't a peer reviewed journal -- it's a preprint site like arxiv.
Minimally, it seems to equate running literally the entire financial system (i.e. creating physical currency, running banks, operating ATMs, etc.) to operating bitcoin miners. I'd imagine most folks looking into this crypto stuff are looking for an alternative payment processing solution, not a ground up refactor of the entire economy, so even if I trusted the results (I don't) it's not answering the question I'd naively ask of it.
Also, as a quick tangent, thank you for linking to resources :) it might be useful for other folks to frame some of them a little differently, though. E.g. Menati et al. 2023 is about the Texas power grid in particular, which afaik is fairly unusual (it's in a developed country with tonnes of electrical demand, but doesn't interconnect with other grids effectively).
I think they’re all pyramid schemes at this point. But ethereum dropping proof-of-work brings it out of the realm of environmental issues. So not all crypto deserves this much hatred. I’m not going to fight too hard to protect people from themselves. I think casinos are fine and should be legal - as long as the house doesn’t cheat (although in reality they sometimes do).
I'm sort of in the same boat and I'm not above having a small crypto wallet. I think of it as part of my gambling allowance for the year. It's never going to be life changing money, but every once in a while I can cash out a bit for a little luxury or an unexpected bill.
The problem is that all of this is completely unregulated. The culture and people pushing this technology are just plain predatory, while many of the people investing in it are desperate and uninformed to various degrees. In that last crash, every one with dubious morals and a following were pushing crypto casinos to kids. People believed making NFTs of someones work magically gave them copy rights. There were weirdos building tributes to Elon Musk in the hope he tweets their meme coin. People were investing in jpegs of the first tweet and pokemon cards.
I'm not saying these people are stupid and they absolutely should take responsibility for their actions. But we have to acknowledge that it was a bad time and I believe there was a coordinated effort to manipulate people into the system. I'd also argue that people are even worse off now and with an even bleaker outlook. It's nice to think that the lessons were learnt and we'd be smarter in the future. But I'm looking at this headline and thinking that maybe I could get in early now.
Imagine if it was someone recently fired and sitting on a severance pay. Or that person who's loved one just got a bad diagnosis. Or teenagers, gambling addicts, uninformed pensioners and anyone else who might need a quick buck.
Exactly.
I think the recent ECB paper on it, although obviously not an impartial entity, did a good job at summarizing the issue highlighting what is, for me, probably the biggest problem with crypto in general (Bitcoin or otherwise).
Coiners can keep ignoring all the flaws and obvious lies in their arguments and pretend it's all fake. Namely:
And yet... I'm fine with all of this. Like you said, if people still want to throw some of their hard-earned money at it or just give it a shot like they would with sports bets, that's their choice.
What really bothers me, though, is that due to all the above reasons, in practice crypto has become one main thing for most people who take part in it, whether they want to admit it or not: a huge, ridiculous speculative bubble driven by FOMO and super aggressive marketing targeted towards uneducated, financially illiterate people. And that bothers me because:
I don't know what the solution is, so I'll stop the rant there. But it just irritates me that the people who look you in the eye today and tell you that you just "don't get it" and to "have fun staying poor" are exactly the same people that will be begging you for help in a few years. And it irritates me because it's not even their fault... I would've fallen for it too when I was 20 year old. It's the lack of regulation and proper safeguards that's allowing this to happen.
It’s funny reading that stuff given I was involved with Bitcoin as early as 2011, mining a whole Bitcoin every other day. Someone from my High School became like this. He jumped on the bandwagon with NFTs. I’ve made and sold my own NFTs. He’s just a sucker.
Good luck not contributing to the extinction of our species while living under capitalist materialism
-- average crypto coin investor
It's not an "all or nothing" situation - it's a matter of degrees. You can contribute a lot or a little to our extinction, depending on your choices.
I would argue the same point towards Bitcoin - people are going to continue investing money into it. The energy is being burnt to secure the blockchain, and whether that ends up being a colossal waste of resources or a necessary investment towards a finite digital resource depends largely on what we do with the end product.
Are we going to use the power of open-source currency to become our own banks and stop being complicit in the trillions of dollars that banks pour into fossil fuels, or are we going to continue relying on the existing power structure to avoid personal responsibility and agency in the world we live in? It's up to each of us to make that decision for ourselves.
You dont need to invest in cryptocurrency to get rid of banks that invest in fossil fuels. You could simply choose to bank with one who pledges not to invest in those operations. In fact it might end up doing more good than crypto since if fiat currency in general were to collapse it wouldn’t matter much because many banks are already invested in crypto as well; if we were close to collapse their investment in crypto would have probably been one of the reasons for it to begin with.
In any case, the majority of the $3.6Tn invested is from just two Chinese banks. Those of us without Chinese citizenship are already boycotting the worst offenders without even trying.
Those oil companies are what allows fiat money to hold their purchasing power for longer. This is why the US offered military protection to Saudi Arabia in the 70s as long as they promised to only do global oil trade in dollars, and why China is trying to get more oil trade to happen in Yuan.
Why does that state how “borked” fiat currency is? Is it not the opposite? People who are into bitcoin not only still don’t use it as a currency, but even track its “progress” with the fiat dollar! Many people argue you should buy bitcoin with the eventual intention to exchange it back for dollars so you can actually buy things you want.
It's really not. How are you pulling $1T out of Bitcoin? Who's buying it?
I'm as green as they come, but unless were are enacting laws across the board to make carbon emissions illegal, then I don't care what crypto uses up.
We need laws that force 100% of of people in 100% of industries to stop polluting. Now way I'm singling out one single Taylor Swift or one single Bitcoin.
I mean sure, a carbon tax would do wonders for emissions, but even then I think it's reasonable for governments to pick and choose some winners and losers based on their negative effects. I largely agree PoW is a collosal waste of resources, so I'm fine with governments making electricity more expensive for mining.
On the other hand, there’s something to be said for fixing loopholes that result in electricity rates that are too low in some places and finding alternative uses for stranded electricity. Going after Bitcoin in particular is treating a symptom in a less robust way.
From today's news: US judge halts government effort to monitor crypto mining energy use.
Of all the get-rich-quick schemes in history, Bitcoin in 2024 may be one of the most destructive. There's enough financial backing from crypto scamfluencers to add still more distortion to U.S. politics. Sam Bankman-Fried was the just the most conspicuous example. An influential lump of lobbyists and donors are pushing cryptocurrencies as the hottest thing for technological innovation since the birth of the Internet.
We've seen how that turned out for FTX. It's a coin toss at this point whether the long-term damage from Bitcoin's continued mining, eventual collapse, and destruction of economic value, would be worse than just setting a trillion or two paper dollars on fire. But we'll get to find out, if there isn't regulatory intervention soon.
Until someone explains to me how Bitcoin won't self-immolate as it becomes closer to being fully mined I refuse to take it seriously.
AFAIK basically the entire budget of securing BTC currently comes from mining new coins. Transaction fees are effectively subsidized heavily by this, and even when subsidized users still try to avoid layer 1. As Bitcoin approaches being fully mined (~2032+), transaction fees are going to start having to cover more of the network's costs.
Either you think it's realistic that until 2140: Bitcoin double in price every four years; transaction fees climb
32x~320x, double every four years and the same level of transactions are maintained; miners burn tens of millions a day (and growing) to altruistically secure the network; or there is some consensus on an alternative and Bitcoin is hard forked.Perhaps the last option is most realistic but it still seems unlikely to me. The amount of misinformation that will be poured such a campaign would be huge. Nation states (who probably have a good idea who the miners are at that point) are going to be trying to shape the outcome in their interests and actual users have no say anyways. Whatever emerges, assuming it's possible to manufacture consensus, is probably not going to reflect anything close to desirable.
And by ~2140, if it's still around, it gets even more ridiculous: miners must keep up with technological advances in hash rates and all of that investment has to come from fighting over fewer and fewer transaction fees. Or Bitcoin becomes the world's safest investment and is guaranteed to only go up, which seems unlikely for a bunch of obvious reasons. When transaction fees start to represent single digit percentages of your wealth and show no signs of slowing down, people will try and sell their coins and you have a death spiral.
The block subsidy goes down as Lyn Alden writes in https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/
I'm sorry, but neither the highlighted quote nor the extended rambling about the basics of Bitcoin really address my point.
I understand the block rewards get smaller, the ramifications of that is the entire premise of my post.
Edit: I'll lay out the math as I understand it:
There's a new block every 10 minutes. Currently we're at 6.25 Bitcoins per block, so 900 new coins are mined per day. So collectively, miners are currently pulling ~$50M a day.
The amount of daily transactions recorded varies, but let's use an average of 400,000 transactions per day. At ~4$ per transaction, that represents just under 4% of their current income. So basically, the entirety of the cost of securing BTC is currently being supported by newly mined coins.
Every halving, miners have less new bitcoins available to subsidize their electricity costs. Prices of bitcoin, could double to offset, but exponential doubling gets very silly rather quickly. So whenever Bitcoin hits its price ceiling transaction costs have to come up sharply to meet the budget. Which is hard, because higher transaction costs will push transactions down to other layers and reduce BTC utility and attractiveness overall. There's also a fundamental maximum on transactions per block, so even if the usage is there transactions are ultimately supply constrained as less and less coins are mined so fees will be astronomical.
And if you don't meet those costs, miners are going to be dropping out. As miners drop out, the difficulty needs to drop as well because where you once had 1000 miners before a halving, you'll have 500 afterwards so blocks will take twice as long. In the meantime, you have all this hashrate sitting on the sidelines because it's been priced out of mining, potentially going on the market for pennies on the dollar.
Basically, POW is fundamentally broken as block rewards trend towards zero. The incentive structures that keep BTC working when you can mine $50M of coins a day just don't apply when you can only mine a fraction of that.
I understand your argument up to this point. Can you help clarify?
All else being equal during a reduction of total block rewards, as long as there isn't a catastrophic collapse of hash rate* the difficulty will be reduced after enough work has been done. This will in time restore the ratio between work and mined bitcoin to the same level as before the block reward reduction. If half the hash rate disappeared at once, this would take about four weeks for the remaining half of the hash rate.
Yes, there would be a lot of mining hardware becoming electronics waste due to not being profitable to use any more, and it would be a potential liability for the security of the network if a well-funded attacker were to acquire a significant part of it, but the primary function of generating blocks for transactions would continue to operate at a constant rate after the transitory period.
That is, your list of things that may change to maintain bitcoin mining included
but it should also include
To be clear, I don't know that option 5 will happen. It could be that at some point margins are too tight for all miners such that a block reward halving causes a hash rate collapse from which it's not economically feasible to return in any reasonable time frame.
* i.e. as long as there's enough miners that either 1) have margins large enough to still be profitable, or 2) are willing to operate on a short term loss to maintain long term profits
I think I didn't make my point very well. I understand the difficulty will be reduced. It's late here so I'll expand tomorrow but I'll leave you with a question that I think gets to my point:
How is the network not less secure at this point?
You have less miners and a lower hash difficulty, not to mention all the ASIC hardware sitting around whose owners would probably be happy to sell if they could. Now repeat this cycle every ~4 years for whatever percentage of miners increases in fees and price in fiat can't accommodate. It's impossible to know by what factor bitcoin is currently secured but surely at some point the damn would break.
Thank you, I missed that you were focusing on the security as opposed to the block generation, which I absolutely agree would be impacted by such a reduction in hash rate. I had some comments regarding well-funded attackers in my reply along the same lines of thinking.
No problem, yea I didn't make that very clear.
My guess is the only hope for bitcoin rests in a hard fork at some point, but that probably sounds a lot easier than it is. Usually bitcoin proponents will focus on point number one, well obviously, the price must just go up because it must go up but to me that's the most ludicrous option. Just to maintain the current security budget, assuming minimal growth in transactions, bitcoin would have to be valued at:
and so on, just to maintain a network security budget of ~50M.
Can you elaborate on your calculations?
I'm using some very rough numbers here, but good enough for hasty estimates, I think.
If we assume transaction fees remains constant as denominated in bitcoin, and we're looking at some source for average transaction fees per block [1], we could look at 2022 where the transaction fees were fairly low and constant throughout the year. Here they averaged about 1% to 2% of the block reward. That's 0.0625 - 0.1250 BTC in transaction fees per block. Taking the lower of about 1% for the calculations, having a constant 0.0625 BTC in transaction fees per block, we get the following:
So for the dollar-value of the reward per block to remain constant by 2076 - and thus the revenue for miners which provide security to the network - bitcoin would need to be valued at about 6 million dollars. Account for maybe an average of 2% yearly inflation in USD over 50 years and the numbers might be three times as big, but still in the millions, not billions or even trillions.
To be clear, I'm not presenting this as "this is how much bitcoin will be worth", just that I can't find how to reach your numbers given the data.
I am effectively ignoring transaction fees, keeping them fixed in USD at current levels. It’s just a thought experiment and I’m not claiming its realistic, but it serves to differentiate scenario 1 from scenario 2. I think that makes more sense than fixing them at current % of block reward. It’s hard to imagine transaction fees stay fixed in BTC (or transaction amounts) when, in your example they’re about $375k in 2076.
As someone who participates in the network by running their own node, I would welcome a significant decline in the required hashrate to mine blocks - I'm sure I'm not alone in this, either. I'm pretty sure that a 'death spiral' would involve a bunch of people moving their coins and upping the value of mining blocks, boosting the rewards for anyone who is actively participating in the network.
Right now, the barrier of entry is way too much for me to want to participate in PoW. If there's a collapse in the industry of Bitcoin mining, I would happily take it up as a side-hobby - maybe just in the winter so that I can use it to heat up the basement :)
The magical self-reinflating bubble rises again. I predict another crash before 1 June.
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/bitcoin-tops-55-000-price-level-for-first-time-since-late-2021-1.2039575
Why is this comment collapsed, did someone label it as Noise? It's literally just quotes from the article.
I get from the comments here that Tildes is generally anti-Bitcoin but this seems like a misuse of the label system.
There is a segment of Tildes that is anti-'summary quotes' provided with no commentary. You'll see them collapsed on many topics but it definitely doesn't help if the topic is unpopular.
If this keeps up I'll be able to quit my day job.