No, it means you have done very well. Congratulations!!

I went back through all your posts on this thread, and I could not find the link that you refer to. Can you please post it again?

-Wayne

Wayne, legitimate question. What is the difference between Bitcoin and the USD other than familiarity of the masses?



Side note: The only reason BTc is a high energy consumption coin is because it was designed to be self limiting. If it wasn’t for all the ridiculous speculation it would be impossible to mine for profit and it would stop.

So the people responsible for the high energy use are the people driving prices into the stratosphere.

https://map.bitcoin.com/

You have to sort through the crap a little, as they list all the restauraunts that take online payments in crypto through a service, which doesnt really count in my eyes. But there are a lot of places that take payment through their coinbase commerce accounts too.

I see a locksmith in my neighborhood, and Papa John's (but you can't order it through their website - you have to use something external called "menufy"). But again, I will argue that no one actually uses it for any practical use, and as exhibit A, I present the following:


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1620958266.JPG

Its mania right now, 90% of the history of bitcoin the fees have been small, as in like 30 to 50 cents, and there are side chains like lightning network to fix fees and tx time

There's this - the transaction time required - those times are in minutes, so 300 minutes is 5 hours of course. Even the fastest (highest cost per transaction) has a range of 0-30 min. That seems a bit excessive for practical everyday use?

I'm sure no one remembers what I said earlier on this thread, so I will repeat it again. I think there is definitely a future for crypto currencies. I believe that Bitcoin is version 1.0.0, and has made major strides in acceptance and mainstreaming. Based upon it's (many) technical limitations (amongst them the *huge* energy cost of production), I do not think it will obtain widespread adoption and will, one day in the future, eventually die out.

Although I have not personally researched the current 1,000 or more crypto coins available for a perfect solution, I do believe that there is, or will be something that comes along that fixes many of these problems. For example, you do not need to have a hash / mining algorithm that requires a lot of energy / processing power if you have a time-based limiter on the mining process. Also, the speed of the blockchain is slow compared to conventional methods of payment (credit cards or PayPal, for example, which are routed through a central clearinghouse). I think it will be difficult for cryptos to take off in widespread use until some of these issues are solved?

-Wayne


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1620962579.jpg

Transaction fees to move in an out of secure wallets are the biggest sticking point, I grant you that.

...but folding cash in online vaults don’t cost lthat. I pay 2.50 to get cash out of the atm but $1.00 to make a Btc transaction out of my coinbase account.

Elon Musk argument for dropping Bitcoin is that it uses too much energy to mine, therefore increases CO2 emissions.
Kinda makes sense, when one makes cars to reduce CO2 emissions. Those dirty coal fired power plants powering all those PCs better be charging Tesla batteries instead ;).

Right, I get that, but Coinbase is to Bitcoin as PayPal is to dollars and Euros. When you send someone funds with PayPal, they don't actually transfer dollars or Euros - the reconcile internally - just like Coinbase does. I.E Coinbase is extremely similar to PayPal? I'm just curious, if holding Bitcoin in something like Coinbase, how is that different than holding US dollars or Euros in a PayPal account? The only advantage/difference I can see is that one capitalizes on the speculative appreciation of the crypto currency? Nothing wrong with that and all the power to people risking and investing in it - if they succeed, then I'm happy for them - that is what makes capitalism great. But, then all of the discussion about how Bitcoin is the next best thing and all of its built-in advantages - those seem to be negated by the fact that Coinbase is used as an intermediary?

Don't know. Again, I think the future holds something more advanced than Bitcoin 1.0.0. :)

-Wayne

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumption/
Bitcoin mining uses more electricity than 159 individual countries -- including more than Ireland or Nigeria.

It went from an alternative exchange platform and tax dodge to a massive pyramid scheme. So why wasn't Bitcoin shut down immediately by the Fed or IRS? I suspect the big players and banks are invested, and they will quietly sell off their gains over time if the USD remains stable. If the dollar falters they will exchange it into any real currency that is making gains. It's a no-lose situation.

That is ridiculous.

"62.07% of people (4.88 Billion) own mobile phones today" (Source: https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world)

For ONE example.

Musk is transparent, simple and predictable.

The ONLY reason tesla has ever shown any profit was because of California's carbon credit tax system.
They give him credits that he doesn't need, and tell other companies they need them but don't get enough.
That means that other companies have to BUY the free carbon credits from tesla for cubic $$$$ and that is enough for them to be profitable (barely).
Of course he tricked the chinese into paying him to build factories there too but that's a whole 'nuther scam.

And now ... he's pissed in his California cheerios by moving some of his stuff elsewhere like baja oklahoma.

Here comes the predictable part:
His next step will be all over the media calling for national cap and trade so he can get free tax credits from the fed gubmint even if he ain't in kalifornia.
You watch. He'll be the friggin poster child fer it.

And he knows that accepting bitcoins flies in the face of all that so he has to distance his company to look good to the greeniots.
But ya notice he isn't getting rid of the pyramids he is already holding, nooooo!

Predictable and he'll get richer, and you (we) will end up footing the bill again as gas and electricity and natural gas and everything else gets more 'spensive.

And the greeniots and muskateers will cheer and sing and be soo happy that they pulled off something dumb again. Yay.

A corrupt nation running on a cynical scam.

Mericans are not wearing the white hats no more...

You are playing with your erector set again.

Your analytic gets caught up in the minutia of the visceral reality. Look deeper into the primal causation of human behavior. Staying superficial keeps one from looking into the abyss..where one finds oneself staring at a barbaric little monkey with pretensions of being civilized in the mirror.

Push comes to shove Bit Coin doesn't even amount to a joke..it is a pretense..a fiction, an illusion or as Elan said on SNL a HUSTLE.

Give me sumthin TANGIBLE..that I can hold in my hands..



When the Guber mints passed the 1.9T Merican Recovery Act the USD WOBBLED...that is the core reality..people got spooked and started looking for an exit from the USD. Put that in your fkin bank as a core reality..

Let us deal in core realities and not this superficial visceral crapola...

Everybody is scared shyteless..and are run running around like ants on a hot tin plate looking for an island of safety..it is maniac behavior..there is no safety, you is along for the E ticket ride at Disneyland..

Don't you Boyz get it..You already have lost everything. There is no viable alternative to the hegemonic USD. Nothing can take it's place, and as such the Global economy of scale without that foundation of the USD is moribund.

Since 08 the rug has been pulled out from under you and every conventional wisdom in your bag of tricks.. It is in payment of 50 years of fiscal and monetary excess...and the dum fks say, "We can afford it..." Why do you think that evey trick in the bag has failed? And you are seriously contemplating Bit Coin.


It took roughly 160 years to build the trust in the USD to make it globally hegemonic. Solid as the Rock of Gibralter..and 50 years to fk it away. You are living in a BK nation and BK world and you ain't facin the facts that are staring you right in the face. You gots this delusion of Bit Coin...

The Chinese have been lookin to get away from the USD since 09.. the rest of the world is now starting to unload...the day that become a deluge is the day the illusion of being wealthy evaporates and you are plunged into abject poverty. one and all.

It is not a date and time situation, but when the process gets to a point..a time is an arbitrary notion..or as some have pointed out a Swiss confidence game.

The joke (or insult) only works if I actually get it. I don't speak fluid Tabulish.

-Wayne

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1620976223.jpg

U have an engineering degree..In other words you are playing with your numbers again..

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/off-topic-politics-religion/734011-adverse-shift.html

An Adverse Shift

Starting with the Financial Crisis in 2008 the United States Treasury embarked on a policy of massive deficit spending resulting in a now 6T USD increase in it's debt level, brining the upfront debt to roughly 16.5T USD. The Federal Reserve on the monetary front lowered interest rates and instituted a number of Quanatative Easings to increase the liquidity of the financial system in order to at first stabilize the system and then to promote economic growth in that system. The increase of liquidity to the system through Federal Reserve purchases of US debt instruments is roughly 3T USD. In September of 2012 the Federal Reserve embarked on OE3 whose tenents included the purchase of 85B a month in US debt instruments and mortgage backed securities with an open ended time frame of the US economy having a 6.5% unemployment rate.

What the concern in this is are the dislocations that these policies have caused in the stability of the global economy and the attendant political, social and cultural strata. Here one can postulate that as US debt levels climb, it destabilizes the above mentioned strata. This is because of several factors which include that the United States is the largest economy in a globally intertwined economy and that the USD is the Reserve Currency of the World. Being the Reserve Currency for the world means that every nation must hold reserves of USD in order to purchase oil. Further the USD being not only the Reserve currency but having a 200 year history of being a stable and thus responsible currency has made it the favored currency to be held by private concerns and individuals. This has been especially true in times of distress either globally or on a foreign national level. This has recently been a factor in the USD strength in the past several years as there has been a flight to the USD and US debt instruments in the face of a potential meltdown of the European Union due to the amount of leverage it has incurred and its slow response to rectifying it's problems.

However with the "unlimited" nature of both the European Central Bank and US Federal Reserves recent QE programs which for all intents and purposes means an unlimited printing of money to purchase sovereign debt, dislocations in the various economies are now beginning to appear which is resulting in their currencies seeking a new equilibrium. This is caused by a defacto devaluation of the large amount of USD being held either by foreign governments, held by private concerns or individuals which then puts pressure on those local economies. Further the real danger lies in the fact that as the USD becomes evermore diluted/devalued/debased those foreign holders of USDs will feel increasing pressure to divest themselves of those USDs or face continued pressure on their economies. Or going beyond this as Y. Aksoy and T Piskovski state in the conclusion of their paper "Foreign Holders of Dollars And The Information Value Of US Monetary Aggregates,"

"That if the leading role of US dollar as an international currency will be challenged by longterm
adverse shifts in the preferences of the foreign holders, the US Federal Reserve may face serious
obstacles in the conduct of monetary policy to stabilize the US macroeconomic environment."

Thus in conclusion the Federal Reserves recent "unlimited" QE program has the potential unintended consequence of being a WMD which could create an economic tsunami that would sweep the world with catastrophic consequences./...TABS 2/13/13

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/11/stanley-druckenmiller-says-the-fed-is-endangering-the-dollars-global-reserve-status.html

Sound errily familar...

Druckenmiller as a guest on CNBC has read at least one of my missives to CNBC in real air time

The conclusion that I draw from you Boyz rhetorical perceptions is that you almost to the man believe that MMT actually works...your behaviors certainly indicates that to be the case.

that the sky is without limit nor consequence.

I find it pointless to discuss the mechanism or process by which the system is devolving. It is a closed book. A done deal..what is worthy of commentary is the perceptional and behavioral causation of the schism between reality and delusion that is being manifested by individuals, society and nation states.

You must drink a lot of vodka to make it through the day...

-Wayne

Tabs I cant tell if you are for or against, Drunkenmiller seems to be coming around, as he thinks a cryptocurrency is what could take the throne as global reserve currency if the USD loses it.

I dont think this is true. Do you have anything to back up your internal reconcile claim?

https://www.fxstreet.com/cryptocurrencies/news/elon-musk-advocates-a-carbon-tax-praises-dogecoin-pans-bitcoin-202105140321

I'm not sure if you asked specifically about PayPal or Coinbase? For PayPal, this is how foreign exchange transfer houses actually work. They have accounts with dollars in them, and they have accounts with Euros in them, and if someone needs to trade into something else, they swap and reconcile internally. Then they charge a fat exchange rate for this privilege. If someone actually needs to "withdraw" from them, then they either pull from their actual reserves, or buy on the open market. If one Buyer has dollars and wants to sell to another Buyer who wants Euros, the system reconciles it automatically internally. This is why PayPal is a somewhat risky place to put large account balances - they are not considered to be a bank and are not regulated. Also interesting to note, this is how large brokerage houses work too - they reconcile most trades internally (when one customer of theirs wants to sell Amazon, and another customer of theirs wants to buy Amazon, they hook those two up internally if they can. You have to be quite large to make that work somewhat smoothly though. This is how some companies perform trades when the market is closed.

It's similar with Coinbase or the other "wallets" for crypto. That is one of the reasons why when Mt. Gox got hacked, the hackers ran away with the reserve accounts that were "allocated" to the account holders. Mt. Gox simply wiped out those balances and "readjusted" everyone's account internally. What a screw! That's called bank fraud here in the US, but apparently not everywhere else...

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/bitcoin-gox/

Coinbase has a relatively vague press release about how they "perform transactions" and then reconcile the blockchain in a batched process after the fact:
https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-rolls-out-bitcoin-transaction-batching-5f6d09b8b045

-Wayne

Are U talking to ME?

I find the more stupid a person is the less intelligent they think I am. .

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” Albert Einstein

Everything is a process, a mechanism an equation to me. I distill it down to the essential core. That takes being able to construct and deconstruct until it becomes a second nature.

And finally, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." - Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

I have been "woke" since I had an epiphany on the the road to Damascus when I was 20 years old.

The odd thing about him dropping bitcoin as payment is he just started accepting it back on March 24...has the energy use increased that much in 2 months, or did he just not care about it 2 months ago?

You missed on this one. I'll 'distill' it down for you. I meant, you must drink a lot of vodka because you have such a depressing outlook on the future.

-Wayne

I had this conversation with someone about this the other day. Elon's just a regular human like the rest of us, except he's involved with running SpaceX and Tesla, and a host of other things too. I'd be willing to bet he had no real concept of the amount of energy that Bitcoin mining takes up until he read some recent articles. I only realized this about six months ago. I thought when they said "it takes up a lot of energy", I thought it meant in your house on your electric bill. I had no idea that China had installed all of these mining operations and were using more energy than Sweden! I'm guessing that Elon didn't either.

-Wayne

The reason China is doing it is related to cheap energy costs. When you don’t care about polluting the earth, you can produce power at 1/12th the rate of anywhere else.

US? $0.12 per KWh. China? $0.01 per KWh.

Again, the issue isn’t Bitcoin. It’s speculators driving the price up. It’s the willingness of countries like China to allow for cheap dirty power production. They make it profitable? Want to fix the issue? Don’t ban Bitcoin, address the underlying issues.

(I wonder what percentage of the whole..or if sold back to themselves to encourage selling..)

https://www.rt.com/business/523669-bitcoin-plunge-market-cap-wipeoff/
The world’s biggest digital asset, bitcoin, has seen a huge price plunge that resulted in $365 billion being washed out of the cryptocurrency market.

Bitcoin dropped as low as $45,700 on Wednesday – its lowest since March 1. The token had recovered to above $50,000 at the time of writing, but is still trading at around 11% lower.

This type of reporting bugs me, as it's just not true. Appraisal theory needs to rely on the supply / demand curve, and the time factor too. If something is thinly traded, then the market value is not a good indicator of value. I believe that Bitcoin is relatively thinly traded (Google says only 19% is traded). It's like having a neighborhood with 100 houses and one house sells for $1M, then they would say that the neighborhood is now worth $100M. It's just not accurate. If everyone put their house on the market the next day, the price would plummet. If no one sold *ever*, then the price would go up. Appraisal theory just doesn't work on thinly traded assets...

-Wayne

I knew they did batch transactions but I think the coins still go to your individual wallet, but I guess no one knows for sure but coinbase.

Thinly traded and getting thinner, as more buy it up to hold long term.

You can do an experiment, I think to check? You can just check your individual wallet using a different method than Coinbase? I believe? Maybe?

-Wayne

You are right, you can just look up your wallet on the btc explorer. I just checked and you are right they only settle on outgoing and incoming txs. So they are like paypal in the inter account reconciled balance sense.

I'm pretty sure that's their business model - they perform the one withdrawal from your Bitcoin wallet, and then it goes into the Coinbase account (which is nothing more than digits in their computer system) and is reconciled from there. Then they charge fees on the inter-account transfers? As a risk factor, there is absolutely nothing preventing these coin trading platforms from just making up numbers and putting them into your account. I.E. they took the Bitcoin from you when you "added" amounts to your account. They can just run off with that Bitcoin to Bermuda if they wanted to.

The same risks exist with PayPal - it's not a bank and doesn't operate under any of the traditional banking rules. A "depositor" at PayPal would become a regular simple creditor if PayPal went bankrupt. This is what happened in the old days of banking - when miners (real miners like the ones in California in the 1800s) would deposit their gold at local banks. The banks would store the gold in their vaults and issue paper currency that would reflect that the miner had gold "on deposit" with the bank. The miner could then take that paper and use it in town to buy food, tools, equipment, etc, because the local supply store knew it could go to the bank with that bank's currency and collect the gold.

Well, what could go wrong with that? Lots, as history has told us. Reputable banks didn't have issues. But fly-by-night banks issued more "paper currency" than they had in the vault at the bank. Bank failures were somewhat common, and that is what was the impetus for the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the "nationalization" of the banking system. This was a good thing - it enabled people to have trust in the US currency instead of "Bob's Local Bank" notes. Yes, there are many additional problems with the Federal system, but insolvency (for now) is not really one of them. :)

My point is that PayPal and Coinbase, and the rest of the exchanges and "wallets" are like the wild west again, and there will be failures (as evidenced by Mt. Gox) in the future. Funny side note about Mt. Cox - it failed many years ago and is a Japanese company. Under Japanese law, the losses are capped at the current market value of the Bitcoin back in 2014 or so. So, people who lost their Bitcoin will possibly get reimbursed in the bankruptcy courts at the Bitcoin prices from then. Yet, in an interesting and frustrating quirk for account holders, the owners of Mt. Gox will have some Bitcoin returned directly to them - and it has appreciated tremendously since then. So, the account holders may be paid out at 2014 levels, and the owners may a big windfall (essentially after screwing up big time). Full story here, interesting reading:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/bitcoin-gox/

Bottomline, as someone mentioned earlier on this thread - it seems best to keep your Bitcoin codes written down on a piece of paper and don't put it all at one exchange (only keep a partial amount on account at the exchange).

-Wayne

-Wayne

I keep 85% in cold wallet storage most of the time for this exact reason, even if the exchange really kept the coins in your wallet, it makes no difference as they are not your keys.

Drinking a lot of hooch to get through the day has a pejorative connotation that such a libation is required. .

It is your very optimism that is leading you to the cliff. as that optimism keeps you from changing the behaviors that are destructive. There is nothing to be optimistic about when your behavior is destructive and is inexorability leading to a historically predictable bad end.

Bitterly clinging to the past perception of being a rich nation after 1980 has incrementally led Americans to the denouement of 2008. Since 2008 the requiem for a former champion has been playing itself out.

You might think of it as...The alcoholic continuing to indulge in the perceptional hooch of being a rich nation after the Md has told him the stuff is going to kill him. The alkie being optimistic can not bring himself to believe what the Md is telling him is true as he continues to indulge in the destructive behavior..Continuing the destructive behavior only exacerbates the condition hastening the day of the bad ending.

Is the Krystal?

While I can't specifically say that I disagree with most of what you're saying, the one thing I've noticed is that it takes a *long* time for things to deteriorate. They don't really happen quickly. Even the "fall of the Roman Empire" took about 250 years. For Venezuela, it took at least 20 or so years. So, I'm not sure anything significant is going to happen in my lifetime, based upon past history?

-Wayne