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Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin::US government tracking the energy implications of booming bitcoin mining in US.
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What a huge waste in times where we have global warming and urgently need to cut our carbon footprint a bunch of greedy people are living like there is no tomorrow.
There is no tomorrow, because of global warming.
For you, mega flora will be super stoked.
Yes, good, blame the poor, make them feel responsible. Forget corporations, forget who is actually burning the earth down. The earth is going to die because YOU drove a gas car, used bitcoin, and don’t like paper straws.
Bitcoin mining is a multi-billion-dollar business. The block reward along is 900 BTC = 38.7 million USD a day (at 43,000 USD per BTC as of writing), shared between half a dozen big mining pools. Bitcoin mining equipment costs thousands of dollars.
Mining bitcoin is solely a game for men with means.
Lol, $40 million USD. The actually rich people, the people standing up there laughing at all of us, are moving $40m themselves as pocket change. Zuckerberg just got $700M. They blocked Elon from getting $56000M. The 1% are laughing at the 99% and I’m starting to as well.
40 million USD per day. That’s 14 billion USD annually.
Also I’d like to point out that it’s not 1% of the population that’s like that, more like 0.01% or even just dozens. There are many rich people, but few are crazy rich like that.
Source: dunno just google it maybe you’ll find something
Ah yes, the poor who dig Bitcoin. Sorry but if you are having money to dig Bitcoin you aren’t exactly poor. And you know if we all as humanity change just our diet, the effect would be immense, so it is not only the corporation’s responsibility but also the collective.
Oh hey, it’s the guy Dan Olsen was talking about in that Folding Ideas video!
Is it not a way in which some governments could collaborate to end this Bitcoin madness?
Genuinely question.
Like maybe some big countries could agree to collaborate and join resources to make a 51% attack and bring Bitcoin price to 0 so people stop wasting resources on it.
2% of enery usage for something that do not add any value to society is INSANE.
I think the best solution would be to properly tax carbon. That way Bitcoin miners would either become unprofitable or move to greener energy.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to establish the precedent that gov’t can decide what you can and cannot do with your energy. You may think it’s a waste of energy, but if the externality is properly taxed, I don’t see the problem with letting it continue
Agreed, tax what the problem is not just one facet of it.
Then it’s just gonna suck up “green energy”. It’s still energy. We have already have provably secure PoS (not Ethereum btw, it’s PoS sucks ass).
Yeah I’m pro PoS in general, but I don’t think we should forbid people from running PoW on their own computers. Seems like a step too far.
Side note, what’s wrong with Ethereum’s PoS in your opinion?
Oh yeah, I was never for banning PoW. I just don’t like it since I know same or better can be achieved with a well designed PoS.
Ethereum PoS has slashing so people are scared to stake thus causing low participation rate. Also, in Ethereum, you need a minimum amount of 32 ETH to solo stake. Ethereum also doesn’t have a native liquid staking and has locking, unlike Cardano. And you can’t delegate your coins without giving up custody of them. Cardano PoS is designed completely differently and is natively liquid with no locking, no min amount to stake, native delegation and both delegation and self-staking is risk free when it comes to your balance. Worst case - you miss out on those 3.5% rewards for the period your balance is delegated to a pool that’s not doing its job. All of this is the reason staking participation is like 65% in Cardano. Would probably be even higher if it wasn’t for lost coins and large whale wallets that are not staking/delegating for some reason.
I think the 32 ETH lockup + slashing does make it riskier to stake, but it also makes the chain more secure. As a malicious Ethereum staker, every failed attack costs me a lot of money. As a Cardano staker, I can attempt an attack many times because there I don’t lost that much if it fails.
The lack of liquid staking is the only real drawback I see here, as it has allowed some centralization in the Lido token. Ethereum has yet to address that issue
Yeah, but people are just gonna leave your pool if you try to attack the network or miss blocks. (And good luck attacking the network where even the largest 2 entities Binance and Coinbase together only have about12% of block production (stake)).
Like… ye, it’s not happening.
And why would you attack a network (if you could) where your value is stored. It’s a suicide.
If you did have so much stake, it might be smarter to play by the rules.
If you destroy Bitcoin, another currency would take its place.
Good. Most don’t use proof of work anymore because they don’t feel the need to watch the world burn for no reason other than propping up techno bros.
A lot still do, and that’s where the miners would go
If governments started regulating bitcoin because it was proof of work based then people aren’t going to pump real money into another proof of work scheme to replace it - why would they take the risk of it happening again when there are alternatives? the mining profit margins would disappear and so would they.
It woulf take years and years to pass such a ban in a significant number of countries - assuming they would ever want to cooperate on this, that is
Oh I think that’s probably true, but the question assumed it taking place
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The economics of Bitcoin mining are a bit weird in that it impossible to make it more energy efficient.
The system auto adjusts the computational complexity of mining bitcoin so that it always costs a little less than one bitcoin to mine a bitcoin, and at scale the only variable expense is electricity so as the price of bitcoin goes up, so does the amount of money that must be spent on electricity.
Current 6.25 Bitcoin are mined every 10 minutes. So globally about $2 million must be spent on electricity every hour.
In a little over 2 months the block reward cuts in half to only 3.125 bitcoin every 10 minutes. That will have the side effect of reducing the money spent on electricity for mining bitcoin so long as the price of bitcoin remains the same.
“The System” is not really that intelligent. The statement that “It will always cost a little less than one Bitcoin to mine a Bitcoin” is only correct because the incentives in the system steer everyone toward that. There’s no direct link between the two. Bitcoin Miners are intently aware of how much energy they consume, and if the price of Bitcoin dips below what they are paying for electricity, they likely will shut down their rigs, because no one wants to mine at a loss.
The real issue with Bitcoin is that the algorithm used to find more Bitcoins is kind of basic in terms of its difficulty mechanism. It was the first one ever used for cryptocurrency. It was originally envisioned that owners could mine more bitcoin with spare cycles on their CPU, but since it was first designed, people have come up with custom mining chips that can mine faster and much more power efficiently. But paradoxically, this has made things worse, because the bitcoin mining difficulty simply scaled up to account for all that. So now the only way to mine Bitcoin is to have this custom hardware – it’s too hard to do any other way – and you need so much of it that you are just as power hungry as before.
There are other algorithms that don’t have these same problems. They have been designed to use other computing resources (like gobs of memory) that are much harder to concentrate on custom chips, making it much more expensive (monetarily and spatially as well as computationally) to simply spam more of them. Ethereum uses a totally different model now that doesn’t rely directly on power consumption at all.
OG Bitcoiners seem to think that the massive power consumption is a net benefit, because it is spent in making the overall network more secure, and less likely to be attacked. So they will never try to change their block algorithm, even though other projects are just as secure with less power consumed. And if that opinion holds, the only way to eliminate this source of power consumption would be to crash the price, and cause the Bitcoin miners to have to mine at a huge loss to continue.
Instead of using an independent RNG to determine the next block producer Bitcoin miners are essentially flipping coins and whoever manages to flip like 78 tails in a row gets to create the next block. How crazy is that?
What’s even more astonishing is that when someone creates a new Crypto wallet, it creates an obscenely long random number as a seed, and just starts using it. As long as the number is sufficiently random, the chance that someone else has generated the same random number is so small as to be functionally zero. So you don’t have to ask for anyone’s permission first before using Crypto. You only have to ask the Universe for some of its entropy, and off you go.
It’s the same math of large numbers that leads us to conclude that every time we shuffle a deck of cards, the result is a deck that nobody in the history of the Universe has ever seen before. 52! is an insanely large number, which is on the order of 10^67 .
https://quantumbase.com/how-unique-is-a-random-shuffle/
The math behind Crypto is sound, and ensures that everyone’s wallets stay secure. Noone but their owners can move funds out of their wallets, and once a transaction is sufficiently confirmed, it can’t be undone. The only real threat to this is Quantum Computing, which might be used someday to Crack the relationship between public and private keys which is unassailable now. We’ll see whether the people who run these Crypto networks are able to change their algorithms to be Quantum resistant in rhe future.
Oh yeah, Quantum computing won’t ruin crypto. Cardano already has plans to transition to quantum resistant crypto primitives. We just need to wait for some standards to form around which algorithms should be used in the future instead of current ones. I’m not worried about quantum computers at all.
Oh, I have confidence that we can develop quantum-resistant crypto. My concern is in the governance of all the projects. Cardano seems to be in good shape, but it put some thought into how to make decisions that have at least some community involvement. But the market is driven by BTC mainly, and they have some issues in how they run themselves.
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the massive power consumption is a net benefit, because it is spent in making the overall network more secure
I really have trouble understanding this argument. Joining a mining pool secures nothing.
The whole point of mining is to arrange transactions into blocks, and then generate a cryptographic hash of the block that meets some difficulty criteria. It costs some small amount of computing to do that. But an astonishingly large number of hashes won’t meet that difficulty criteria, which is why miners have to try a gazillion times to find one that works.
However, once a block has a valid hash, it is added to the chain. Then, the hash of that valid block must be used in the next block, which will be equally hard to find.
By “security”, what is really meant is “How can I be sure that a transaction can’t be undone once it is committed”? And it’s because all these blocks are stacked on top of each other, and cryptographically related. Once a transaction appears in a block, and a few blocks get mined on top of it, it becomes prohibitively difficult to un-do it, because someone would have to put in the computing power to re-authenticate a string of blocks, all while the rest of the network is adding blocks to the valid chain at a faster rate.
The security of this whole arrangement has so far been working good as well.
In order for someone to try and perform a 51% attack, they’ll need to either compromise a large swathe of existing miners (e.g if the government seized control) or create/acquire hardware totaling more than 100% of the existing network today plus growth while you attempt to build more than 100% and then maintain growth over the rest of the network.
As the network grows that becomes exceedingly more difficult to perform.
I have really high hopes for something like proof of
workstake, but it’s not without it’s own problems either, and with Ethereum, it’s the first massive scale test, so it’s not as battle tested as proof of work yet, although it’s been used in smaller projects so there has been some testing. With more money on the line though, comes more will to try and break it, or use an exploit you may have held back beforehand.One interesting difference with POW/POS is that if a miner/entity does somehow perform an attack, they keep the hardware and can continue to try. With POS, they should get slashed in which case the money is gone. But with POW you have the barrier of actually acquiring the correct amount of hardware, meanwhile in POS, you just need the money so there’s no manufacturing/lead time and will be easier to achieve by state actors.
Bitcoin has literally 2 pools who have more then half of the block production. Also not all PoS systems have locking and slashing btw.
Pools that people could leave if something suspicious was happening.
Very different than an individual entity.
Well… Cardano has like 30 different pools that add up to 50+% of the block production.
If something sus was happening with one or more of those - people can just leave them.
Same thing but 30 is better than 2.
My main issue with Bitcoin isn’t even the POW vs POS angle, it’s the fact that the core devs see no problem with their current POW algorithm, which is not designed to put any bounds at all on energy consumption. But I also think they should have increased the block size, and you can see where that discussion went.
I sometimes have a weird vibe like someone somehow crippled Bitcoin by making it not able to evolve and develop. I mean… If I wanted it gone and couldn’t just destroy it, I would cripple it. Idk, just feels sus.
Anything that makes bitcoin more valuable is a financial benefit to all people holding bitcoin. Anyone who has a brilliant idea is financially better off by making their own coin.
Miners, who have money tied up in bitcoin-specific hardware, have a vested interest in maintaining the POW system or else their capital loses value.
There are probably exchanges short on bitcoin that stand to profit from a decreasing price.
So yeah. Someone crippled bitcoin. That someone is Satoshi.
Fuck the core devs is really all i have to add to that without going into it…
Luckily things like Ethereum and others were born due to them.
I have really high hopes for something like proof of work
I just realized I wrote the above, but if it wasn’t clear, I meant proof of stake.
the power reqs keep the plebes out.
I remain convinced that crypto is just tech bros trying to redo the early days of the stock market so they end up rich instead
not a bad assessment.
I think what needs to be considered here is what we consider a waste of electricity. Efficiency calculations are dependent on waste, So I personally think electric cars are a waste of resources, they consume electricity to run and consume non renewable resources to produce just to move a maximum of 1-5* people per journey. Whereas an electric which still uses this resources can move over 10x that amount per journey, and trains over 30x that amount per journey.
So to me that’s energy inefficiency at the consumer point.
Now let’s look at energy generation and transfer. At the moment, alot of energy production is a for profit business, Company A builds a solar farm, Company B builds a Coal power plant and Company C (This would be overseen by the government, not a private company) builds a nuclear reactor. All 3 of these companies produce various amounts of electricity with different efficiencies, but all must be sold at the same price. It might only cost £0.01/KwH on the solar farm to produce, but must be sold for £0.33/KwH, the coal would be £0.27/KwH and nuclear would be £0.45/KwH.
You have 3 generation methods, each with strengths and weaknesses all being forced to sell for the same price. Normally in a capitalist system you see “Competition” (not really) on the market. Company A would say “We’re cheap, but can only guarantee 97% uptime due XYZ issues”, most homes would be fine with me this. Company B + C “We’re not as cheap but we can offer 99.9% uptime” This looks great for companies needing that security in uptime.
I’ve gone on a tangent and can’t be bothered finishing this post maybe someone else will.
Please don’t buy Bitcoin if you want the Earth to last.
I avoid it to not feel like a dumbass.
Saving the energy is just a bonus…
How can we expect North Korea’s criminal enterprise to flourish without it?
If the Kims are getting a little backscratching from Greg selling me LSD that’s a price I’m willing to pay for quality
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Nice dislikes. Can you point to even one factually incorrect thing I said?
Earth is fucked; I need money.
Buy Bitcoin.
I think bitcoin is a waste of electricity. Never got the hype around something that takes so much energy, but doesn’t even even actually exist to make it worth it. Disgusting.
Anything is only worth what someone will pay. Always. Nothing has value beyond that.
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Can I know why so many people disliked this? Did I said something that is not factually correct?
Honestly eth just made more progress between built in smart contracts and proof of stake, I’m surprised Bitcoin is still holding on. Sunk cost fallacy I guess.
I’m not an economist or anything, but I don’t think it’s a sunk cost fallacy I think it’s just a market. They’re all mining both. Just leaning heavier on whichever one makes them more money in the moment. The market is going to have a hell of a lot of inertia.
The market is run by people, and people have been proven not to be rational. So, sunk cost easily applies to the market
Come on, that’s logic 101
All a are b
some b are c
all a are not c.
You can’t even claim that most A are C with that logic
I can’t quite follow you beyond the fact that in your example “all A are not C” is correct
Yeah I think that’s our major problem here.
That’s a good point a lot of the crypto markets influence is still more focused as an investment vehicle for getting more fiat wealth, that’s more reasonable to me. I guess I am just a die hard engineer and the practical uses matters a lot more than the price of tulips.
I mean honestly you’re right. Nobody should be left on the Bitcoin side from an environmental or a cost standpoint. But I have no idea how long it’s going to take to catch up.
I will say that at some point if there is an awakening, bitcoin’s going to crash so f****** hard. And the first ones out are going to make all the money.
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PoS and PoW both suffer from a centralizing of power issue IMHO so that doesn’t sound implausible, TruthLabs seems to be throwing a lot of allegations towards the network though but I am not seeing the evidence yet.
Did you only skim through? They are literally presenting hard on-chain facts.
Honestly just couldn’t find them just second hand outlets saying they say.
Yeah, it still seems like a lot of unfounded claims, like they point to an account and say “this is the CCP” and it very well be but I keep failing to see where those claims are substantiated.
If you dig some deeper you will see it is. Ethereum Prometheum Wanxiang CCP
Yep, Ethereum uses less power than a debit/credit transaction or even a PayPal transaction.
Have you read some of the work Visa has been doing with EVM and zero knowledge roll ups? Pretty interesting stuff.
Fucking nightmare.
I wish all my the nightmares would be like this!
At first I thought the article was inaccurate but It sounds like there has been a huge increase in US Bitcoin mining since 2020.
Some interesting information from their source article:
“The CBECI estimates that the global share of Bitcoin mining occurring in the United States rose from 3.4% in January 2020 to 37.8% in January 2022”
“the CBECI estimates put electricity supporting Bitcoin mining in 2023 at about 0.2% to 0.9% of global demand for electricity.”
Who knew that fake money could do so much damage?
Tons of people. Tons of people did.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
While its analysis is preliminary, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimates that large-scale cryptocurrency operations are now consuming over 2 percent of the US’s electricity.
The EIA report notes that, in the wake of a crackdown on cryptocurrency in China, a lot of that movement has involved relocation to the US, where keeping electricity prices low has generally been a policy priority.
One independent estimate made by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance had the US as the home of just over 3 percent of the global bitcoin mining at the start of 2020.
Tracking the history of five of these plants showed that generation had fallen steadily from 2015 to 2020, reaching a low where they collectively produced just half a Terawatt-hour.
To better understand the implications of this major new drain on the US electric grid, the EIA will be performing monthly analyses of bitcoin operations during the first half of 2024.
But based on these initial numbers, it’s clear that the relocation of so many mining operations to the US will significantly hinder efforts to bring the US’s electric grid to carbon neutrality.
The original article contains 783 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Honestly surprised it is that low.
I can’t believe its that high, what a fucking big, stupid, dumbdumb thing. So wasteful and for what benefit?
The argument on the other side of the coin is that renewable electricity is often produced in excess, and when it cannot be stored, mining bitcoin is an effective way to convert that excess electricity into money. Normally, that energy would just be wasted, reducing the efficiency and economic viability of renewable electricity sources.
This argument is sound, but the problem is that it doesn’t describe reality. The reality is that Bitcoin miners set up shop wherever electricity is the cheapest and consume inordinate amounts of electricity whether that electricity is in excess or not, and whether that electricity was generated renewably or not.
First of all I doubt the profits generated from this go towards anything or anyone worthwhile, second, doesn’t bitcoin mining cause diminishing returns individually and across the network? Like aren’t the problems getting harder and more expensive computationally?
The mining difficulty adjusts automatically so that 1 block is produced every 10 minutes on average.
More miners join, more difficult and expensive it gets, to the point it forces the least efficient miners to be turned off, or seek cheaper electricity. If too many leave or the price of BTC raises, more people are incentivized to join.
More miners join, more difficult and expensive it gets, to the point it forces the least efficient miners to be turned off, or seek cheaper electricity.
So wealth continues to be concentrated by the wealthy while polluting a bunch.
So wealth continues to be concentrated by the wealthy
You know the business is legit, when the only complaint is “BuT ThE RiCh!!”
The cops used to find people growing marijuana in winter by the snow thawed on the roofs. Now there would be a mining rig under such a roof (also, most of the time there will be no snow, and then too much snow on occasion)
Benefit is a better world.
Maybe the larger American owned projects are located in places where energy is cheaper / cooling is easier
2% for the reliable independent monetary system seems like a good deal. How much does our current one consume with all its flaws?
Bitcoin is anything but reliable and independent. And it’s 2% for the miniscule inconsequential amount of transactions it does compared to the amount of transactions happening.
More like 2% for a casino.
Bitcoin is a SnitchCoin. Every detail of every person on every transaction is broadcast to anyone and everyone listening. All the way down to IP address.
Fantastic solution to force very gorramn business to conduct their bullshit in it and pay their fucking taxes.
Any REAL person can handle theirs in Monero and swap off Bisq for now until Monero has their own TOR Market.
How much goes to the dollar?
There’s a powered device or 5 in every store connected to a credit server.
All that energy for bitcoin only supports 7 tx/s. Digital dollar payments do tens if not hundres of thousands per second.
tx/s?
Transactions per second. Bitcoin is slow and expensive to get your transaction “approved”.
Transactions per second
You need the same infrastructure for any electronic payment system.
What you don’t need for anything is crypto “mining”, which is almost pure overhead. That’s what the article is about.
It’s not pure overhead. It’s the means of initial distribution and also mining is the backend for handling transactions. Not that I think it’s efficient by any means. It’s just that it was necessary for Bitcoin to ever become something that mattered.
Mining is barely transactional in nature. Pretty much all of it is calculating hashes, which, on one hand, is super important as part of Proof-of-Work consensus, the most decentralized one we have, but on the other we have other reasonably secure options that waste two orders of magnitude less power.
It’s not necessary to perform any of the functions of crypto, including money laundering. That makes it pure overhead; pure waste. There are offshore banks that facilitate tax fraud and other criminal activity. Crypto, somehow, allows exchanges to escape the scrutiny that falls on these banks. Objectively, there is no good reason why all this waste should let you avoid scrutiny of regulators or police.
This doesn’t mean we can’t do better than both.
We can do better than capitalism entirely. It’s just that we can’t. Gotta get rid of the mentality behind it first.
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Crypto capitalism is super bad idea exactly because it’s uncontrollable, i.e. all the bad stuff of capitalist economy, uncaged.
It encourages money hoarding, which cripples the capitalist economy, it does not allow to control emission, which is actually bad because it’s essential to driving economy out of crises, it does not allow to block criminals’ access to money and transactions, it severely complicates taxation and other important economic actions.
Crypto capitalism has the potential to exacerbate inequality, and cause a giant slew of problems sending modern economy into chaos. But yes, your 500 ADA salary will be truly yours.
I’m pro-crypto, by the way. While posing new risks, crypto can be super helpful as means of unsanctioned money transfer, breaching artificial limitations, keeping governments in check by always being able to support protesters, etc. But making it the world go-to currency is a bad idea.
Ok, but thinking crypto won’t be widely adopted is just wishful thinking. Do you honestly see a reality in the future where it’s not widely adopted?
If so, I would be curious to hear how that would work and what would people use instead?Uhm…people would use traditional finances? Banking system ain’t going nowhere, and CBDCs make their turn - as dystopian as they are, it’s super easy to force them upon people.
What would be wishful thinking is assuming most countries will happily adopt crypto. And besides - that’s even more of a dystopian scenario.
What makes you think the FIAT system won’t end up in a hyperinflation? And if it doesn’t (lol), what makes you think people won’t wake up and realize crypto only goes up against FIAT and it’s fixed supply? And if we do get CBDCs (which I believe we will, especially since that’s probably the only way they can try to save and transition the current system into something that doesn’t implode), what makes you think people will just gladly welcome them and not opt out for the alternative (crypto)? I hold strong belief we will live in a hybrid CBDC + crypto world fairly soon.
How is bitcoin still a thing? I thought it was a ponzi scheme and a scam that benefits drug dealers or something. Was it not those things all along?
I’m not an expert, just asking based on my mainstream point of view.
And if it’s a scam, why is it worth $40,000 when a few years ago it peaked at $20k and crashed to a few thousand dollars each.
Also this article is about electricity use. Who cares about that? Electricity is everywhere. Burning coal to generate electricity, though, is very stupid, given the state of the biosphere. So is the “problem” of bitcoin really just a hat on top of the problem with fossil fuels?
I think my point is that bitcoin has often been compared to beanie babies but nobody’s talking about beanie babies anymore so I’m really wondering why are people still talking (and mining) bitcoin? Was it not just a fad after all? Did they find some good use for it?
Edit: why is this comment downvoted? Is it beanie baby fans or what?
Well, so a lot of people call it a Ponzi scheme, and it certainly has been used as one before, but the thing that separates it from a true Ponzi scheme is there is a product, and it’s not you.
Places accept Bitcoin as a currency, there’s Bitcoin ATMs, all that. This makes it valuable as a method to make online purchases, specifically, as a third-party payment processor. First you convert your money to Bitcoin through a service of your choice that’s not related to the person you’re paying, then you transact, and eventually that person cashes out Bitcoin for money. This generates 3 transactions, which a Bitcoin miner can authenticate and be paid in Bitcoin for their efforts.
This seems convoluted but it’s about the same process as using a debit card, with MasterCard or Visa promising to balance everything in a bit and acting as an institution to verify trust.
This process is not the only positive thing about Bitcoin, but it’s a major one and ensures two things. The first is that those exchange services give everyone in this “Ponzi scheme” an out. While they’re running, you can’t be pumped and dumped in the usual way. This creates some confidence, which helps keep people in, which raises the value. A normal Ponzi scheme promises an out, but has none.
The second, because there’s people who trust in Bitcoin on actual merits, is that Bitcoin becomes a legitimate investment. It becomes equivalent to currency exchanges, where people exchange their money anticipating the value of USD or the euro to raise or fall. Again, very much like a Ponzi scheme, but since these people have an out, this is a risk, not a scam.
As far as I know (I’m not an expert) these two kinds of transactions are the bulk of the transactions in Bitcoin, but between the two, Bitcoin will remain alive with frequent usage and that enables bitcoin mining. None of this is stable, but it’s also not a scam.
During the big push to get some vendors to accept Bitcoin this system hadn’t formed, there were plenty of people willing to sell and mine Bitcoin, but few that were willing to buy it, and calling it a Ponzi scheme was appropriate. It’s just the end goal wasn’t to sucker someone into giving you money, it was to sucker them into supporting an economy that didn’t exist. They succeeded, so now it’s not a scam, just risky.
No. There is no out.
Charles Ponzi pretended that he had a way of getting extremely high yields on investments, so people gave him their money. In reality, he simply paid out early “investors” with money he got from new “investors”. That means he needed more and more money/more and more investors. That couldn’t work very long.
This is like bitcoin, in that any profit must come from new people. If someone bought bitcoin for $1000 and sold it for $1 million, that means that 1000 people must have paid them $1000 each. Even more people than that must have paid in, because the electricity bill and the hardware also need to be paid. To pay these people the same profit, you need over one 1 million people to pitch in $1000 and so on.
The cash flow structure is a lot like a Ponzi scheme. It’s not so much risky as unsustainable. That’s the point of calling it a Ponzi scheme. It’s all out in the open, so maybe it’s not a scam, as such.
Mind that the crypto space is full of unregulated and unaudited exchanges (=banks), beyond the reach of regulators or police.
I’ll grant that it does provide a service by facilitating money laundering. We couldn’t have ransomware without crypto.
Yeah the out is that you can buy goods and services with it. I could’ve paid for my VPN (Private Internet Access) with Bitcoin, Overstock takes Bitcoin, those ATMs exist.
If everyone suddenly wanted to cash out, it would crash and very few people would get money for it, but that’s also what separates it from a Ponzi scheme, the fact that I don’t need to transform it to USD to spend it. There was a hard push by Bitcoin enthusiasts to get some places to accept it directly for exactly that reason.
Yes, just like in a Ponzi, you can cash out as long as new money comes in.
Whether one exits the scheme by taking goods or money is a distinction without a difference. Involving goods may make MLMs legal but they are still pyramid schemes.
ETA: The difference to a literal Ponzi scheme is that profits are not guaranteed. When Ponzi could not pay, his scheme was revealed as a fraud. When new money stops pouring into bitcoin, then the line simply no longer goes up. The point about the Ponzi comparison is that you are throwing away your money. It cannot work. There is nothing behind it.
Under the spoiler is a more thorough explanation on why (non-fraudy) stocks are an actual investment and crypto is not.
spoiler
Let’s look at how stocks get their value.
A company sells shares to get funding. Say, you want to make microwave dinners. You need to hire people, an industrial kitchen, packaging and packaging machines, ingredients, and probably a whole lot more. The company takes in revenue from selling the dinners, which pay for the running costs. Anything above that may be reinvested or turns into profit. The profit is paid to the stock-owners to pay them for their investment.
Now the question is: What is the value of a stock?
Imagine you take out a loan. That gives you money right now, in the present. You pay back the loan with the money that you get from your stocks; your share in the profit. Now imagine that the company goes out of business (and the value of the stock becomes $0) right as you are done paying back the loan + interest. Then that loan was the present value of the stock.
In theory, the value of a share is the present value of the future money that you get paid. Of course, one cannot know how much that is, so this is useless for actual investing. Still, the market price of a share should be the best guess of people with money. If the stock is trading higher than someone’s guess, they sell. If it’s lower, they buy. So the market cap should reflect the future profits.
But what’s the value of a crypto-coin like bitcoin?
Let’s start by thinking only about a coin being used to transfer money. And to make it easier, let’s say that coins are only exchanged for money once a day.
Say people want to transfer 10 million USD each day. The senders buy coins for 10 million USD. They don’t care how many coins that gets them, only that the coins represent 10 million USD. If there are 2 million coins being sold on the market, then each coin must transport 5 USD and that will be the market value.
New coins are constantly being “mined” to pay for the upkeep of the system. Let’s say that’s 100,000 coins per day.
The intended receivers of the 10 million USD sell their coins to get the money. The miners also sell their coins to pay their bills. So the next day you have 2 million + 100,000 coins on the market. The senders again want to transport 10 million USD, so they buy the 2,100,000 coins on the market. The market value of a coin is now ~4.76 USD. Adding more coins lowered the value of the coins. That is inflation. The “missing” money goes to the miners to keep the system running. That’s not a problem for senders and receivers. Transferring money costs money, however you do it. (That crypto is an extremely expensive way to do this, is one underlying reason why it has no adoption as a payment system in the normal economy.)
So far, you wouldn’t expect anyone to store or “hodl” coins. The value is just going down. But obviously, this is only true as long as the amount of USD to be transferred stays constant. If the system is more widely adopted and more money is transferred (outpacing the inflationary effect of the newly mined coins), then each coin has to transport more USD and the “value” goes up.
Now, if you believe that adoption continues to grow, it becomes a reasonable strategy to stash some coins to sell them later at a higher “value”. Maybe the problem is already obvious, but let’s continue to take it slow.
So, let’s say, it’s a bit later. There are 15 million coins and they are to transfer 100 million USD. The market price of a coin is now $6.67. (Let’s also say that there are no more coins being mined and the upkeep is paid some other way.) Now we bring in some venture capitalists. One day, they buy coins for an additional $50 million. Now the coins trade at $10 per coin. 15 million coins bought for $100 million + $50 million, right?
The VCs now have 5 million coins. But note where the money went. It went to the transfer receivers when they sold the 15 million coins for $10 each. They got a windfall profit. That’s how it goes in crypto. All the money that people “invested” by buying coins is gone. It was either used to pay miners/for the system upkeep, or early adopters took it and ran. It’s all gone. That’s the big difference to shares.
If the VCs sell their coins again, they lose. Because when there is only 100 million USD in the market for 15 million coins, they would only get 6.67 USD per coin. The money that they spent is gone. If they want to make a profit, new money has to come from somewhere. There are only 2 ways to achieve this.
One is continuing adoption. If more money were to be transferred, with the same number of coins, the price goes up. They can siphon off some of that money by selling into that market. But that lowers the price again, so that only yields a profit if adoption increases enough.
The other is that someone else also removes coins from the market. If there are fewer coins for the same (or a decreasing!) amount of money being transferred, then the market price will also go up. (In this scenario, too, they would be siphoning off money that other people are trying to transfer. The cost of transferring money would be increased for no very good reason; not a great feature in a payment system.) But note that this, too, lowers the price again. That only yields a profit, if “hodlers” sequester the coins sold by the VCs for a higher price than the VCs paid.
I’m not saying this is a Ponzi scheme because everyone has heard that already.
So that’s it. If you want to know the effect of 50k bitcoin on price, you need to look at the trading volume (minus wash trades): How many bitcoin are actually “in use”? You also need to know how many of these coins will be promptly removed from the market by “hodlers”.
I mean it supposed to be a currency, so the point is supposed you spend it on actually good and services like at overstock.com or whatever
It recently got ETF approval by the US government, so hate to break it to you, but this “scam” is here to stay.
If you’re wise, you’ll buy in now while the price is still relatively cheap.
