Bitfinex sets record with titanic $4.5B and $5B BTC transactions

[EL02]

19 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

crypto is a joke when it comes to its environmental impact.

Most of them. Take a look at Nano

[Orcblood]

These Anti crypto people probably have not studied it in depth or the environment. Same people who think the life will end in 10 years.Okay not the last 10 years, or the 10 years before that, or the 10 years before those 10 years, but now the 10 years ahead of us. Probably mostly care about "I JUST WANT TO GAME WITH CHEAP GRAPHICS CARDS, SCREW WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE A GOOD THING FOR SOCIETY ".

 

Looking at some aantonop talks is a good place to start.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

6 hours ago, Sauron said:

You can't use it. It's completely useless. 

[Heliian]

47 minutes ago, Orcblood said:

These Anti crypto people probably have not studied it in depth or the environment. Same people who think the life will end in 10 years.Okay not the last 10 years, or the 10 years before that, or the 10 years before those 10 years, but now the 10 years ahead of us. Probably mostly care about "I JUST WANT TO GAME WITH CHEAP GRAPHICS CARDS, SCREW WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE A GOOD THING FOR SOCIETY ".

 

Looking at some aantonop talks is a good place to start.

It's ridiculous.  Even more ridiculous than holding gold bars under your bed.  

 

People are dumb and just want to make a quick buck with their limited skillset.  

 

[Drama Lama]

Imagine doing a transaction like this and making a typo so a random person ends up with 5 billions dollars in BTC or a wallet that has been long abandoned and is now unacessable

[Moonzy]

38 minutes ago, Heliian said:

It's ridiculous.  Even more ridiculous than holding gold bars under your bed.

so how would you invest your money?

 

38 minutes ago, Heliian said:

People just want to make a quick buck with their limited skillset

shouldn't this be a good point though? even middle class people can do it to make money and it's not reserved for the rich 1% or something

even timmy can mine on his PC to buy games or upgrade his next PC, which makes it mine better for more upgrades/games, now timmy don't have to sink in thousands of dollars into tech every few years.

 

if it's so easy, why don't you do it? why do you hate people trying to better their financial situation?

[Heliian]

26 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

so how would you invest your money?

 

shouldn't this be a good point though? even middle class people can do it to make money and it's not reserved for the rich 1% or something

even timmy can mine on his PC to buy games or upgrade his next PC, which makes it mine better for more upgrades/games, now timmy don't have to sink in thousands of dollars into tech every few years.

 

if it's so easy, why don't you do it? why do you hate people trying to better their financial situation?

I have long term vision.  

Little Timmy ain't making shit.

 

The secret is that there is no real money in it.  By the time you actually change it to a liquid asset you've lost most profit.

 

Profit comes mostly from illegal sources like power theft.  I doubt you could even produce an actual profit without a large scale setup. 

 

All the numbers I've seen are theoretical or straight up made up.

 

I liken it to a pyramid scheme, nobody actually has any physical assets, everyone wants you to buy in and most people get 0 out of it. 

 

I won't argue anymore with the financial wizards about it, you do you. 

 

 

[Moonzy]

8 minutes ago, Heliian said:

The secret is that there is no real money in it.  By the time you actually change it to a liquid asset you've lost most profit.

have you tried it?

i've been doing it since 2017 and boy do i wanna tell you how many GPU i have bought with the money i got from a i5 6600 + a gtx 970

 

8 minutes ago, Heliian said:

Profit comes mostly from illegal sources like power theft.

...? source?

 

8 minutes ago, Heliian said:

I doubt you could even produce an actual profit without a large scale setup.

have you used a mining calculator before? try it and come back to me

 

8 minutes ago, Heliian said:

All the numbers I've seen are theoretical or straight up made up.

source? because i surely am experiencing differently from what you're describing

 

8 minutes ago, Heliian said:

I liken it to a pyramid scheme

how...?

 

8 minutes ago, Heliian said:

nobody actually has any physical assets

true, but does it have to be physical to have value?

do you not have money the moment you put it in a bank?

 

8 minutes ago, Heliian said:

everyone wants you to buy in and most people get 0 out of it

source?

 

8 minutes ago, Heliian said:

I won't argue anymore with the financial wizards about it, you do you. 

i have an engineering background, nothing to do with financial

if you wanna make baseless claims about things, back it up

[Blademaster91]

Nah middle class Timmy isn't going to be mining, no one in the middle class are dropping 10 grand on GPUs to make a worthwhile effort mining, or have connections with retailers to even get GPUs in the first place.

[Heliian]

7 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

have you tried it?

i've been doing it since 2017 and boy do i wanna tell you how many GPU i have bought with the money i got from a i5 6600 + a gtx 970

 

...? source? What was your net income for that time from mining? 

 

have you used a mining calculator before? try it and come back to me

Which one?  They seem to spit out different ideas. 

source? because i surely am experiencing differently from what you're describing

 

 

 

true, but does it have to be physical to have value?

do you not have money the moment you put it in a bank?

You mean like an actual insured bank? 

 

i have an engineering background, nothing to do with financial

if you wanna make baseless claims about things, back it up

It's all out there.  How about the 100s of millions that just disappear from exchanges and other scams.

 

Show me real world numbers and I might be inclined to consider it. 

 

Actually never mind, the volatility alone is reason to avoid it. 

 

[Moonzy]

11 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

no one in the middle class are dropping 10 grand on GPUs to make a worthwhile effort mining

define worthwhile

because if investing $1000 on a GPU could get ROI within a year, that's pretty worthwhile to me

unless you're asking for $10000 from a $1000 GPU per month, then it's a bit unrealistic no?

 

i've been doing it since my gpu gets $2 a day, people said it's not worth my time

1) that's $60 a month, and 10 months for a high end GPU (i used the GPU to finance the GPU)

2) that $60 was during crypto slump, i hodl and sold it when value rose.

 

afaik, not much else can do 100% ROI within months of investment, and the scalability of mining is almost as much (or as little) GPU as you can buy

 

of course dedicated mining farms do get more money per dollar of investment, but im doing it from home and my ROI is around 3-5 months for my GPUs.

 

11 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

have connections with retailers to even get GPUs in the first place.

i definitely dont have connections, and i got GPUs

(i wish i had connections, hmu )

 

10 minutes ago, Heliian said:

How about the 100s of millions that just disappear from exchanges and other scams.

fair, exchanges do get hacked, crypto value drops (and rises) that's why it's not entirely risk free, just like any other investment

 

but if it's such a scam, why are people doing it? why are they buying GPU until it's literally 2-3x the MSRP and still buying them up?

is this a conspiracy?

 

10 minutes ago, Heliian said:

Show me real world numbers and I might be inclined to consider it. 

what would you like to know?

mining calculators are pretty accurate from my experience, but they're probably not real world enough for you

 

meanwhile you're saying people are theif and calling it a scam without backing up your claims, and i refuted based on my experience

you can hate all you want, but it is what it is

[tikker]

  

  

13 hours ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

I think the real relevant discussion is that official transactions via bitcoin are forcefully limited to under 7/sec across the entire network. Yeah that's really practical stuff guys. Western Union by itself (and not exactly every day use amongst normal folks) processes nearly 10 times the average of the BTC. VISA processes something like 1500 transactions a second.

 

Proof of work with arbitrary and near-completely useless transactional calculation difficulty in order to breed false scarcity is not an intelligent method for scaled systems. Blockchain as a technology should be the eventual future of financial record keeping, but these particularly popular cryptocurrencies are literally incapable to scale sufficiently. (as currently setup anyways).

If you are trying to convince people that Bitcoin doesn't scale, save your breath. You're preaching to the choir. Everyone is aware that Bitcoin does not deal well with scaling at all and is not suitable as an actual day-to-day currency. Ethereum neither for the moment, but expansions soon should alleviate it a little. This is the reason why there are multiple alts that aim to be actual usable currency with fast transaction speeds. Nano is one of them, and recent tests show a supposed 1500 transactions per second in the current beta.

9 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

The argument that it's not bad relative to something that is very bad is a poor one to make. Evidence below.

 

https://www.ecowatch.com/bitcoin-energy-consumption-climate-impact-2650844602.html

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7402366/

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/27/bitcoin-mining-electricity-use-environmental-impact

 

The saddest thing is that of all the things we have done over the past decades to ruin this planet, it's bitcoin that is the problem? They are right, though crypto is a problem, we have much bigger concerns than crypto mining when it comes to climate change...

 

Your first source also doesn't support your claim:

Quote

This doesn't necessarily mean that mining bitcoin is increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Bitcoin proponents say that the mining can be powered using renewable energy sources, according to The Guardian. However, the mining process does motivate miners to seek out cheap energy sources.

The CCAF said it does not yet have the data to determine the cryptocurrency's carbon footprint, since this would require accurate assessments of the energy mix behind mining. However, it pointed out that even if all bitcoin mining was powered by coal, an unlikely scenario, it would still only account for 0.17 percent of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions.

 

1 hour ago, Drama Lama said:

Imagine doing a transaction like this and making a typo so a random person ends up with 5 billions dollars in BTC or a wallet that has been long abandoned and is now unacessable

Haha my thoughts as well. I found that most (or at least a subset) of bitcoin wallets check addresses for validity first so you don't send it to the void at least.

35 minutes ago, Heliian said:

The secret is that there is no real money in it.  By the time you actually change it to a liquid asset you've lost most profit.

 

*looks at profit* must be fake money I guess.

35 minutes ago, Heliian said:

I liken it to a pyramid scheme, nobody actually has any physical assets, everyone wants you to buy in and most people get 0 out of it.

This holds for stocks as well, for example, and nobody has a physical asset there either. For every person that makes a profit, there is someone making a loss as you sold higher than you bought, but now the other person bought in expensively.

 

14 minutes ago, Heliian said:

It's all out there.  How about the 100s of millions that just disappear from exchanges and other scams.

 

Show me real world numbers and I might be inclined to consider it. 

 

Actually never mind, the volatility alone is reason to avoid it. 

 

All miners and crypto investors seem to disagree with you. You can't tell a whole market section they're wrong and then aks them to proof you wrong. What more numbers do you want to see. You can check a mining calculator yourself to verify that you indeed make more money than you spend on electricity. If you don't trust those you'll have to just start mining and verify. Exchanges list all of their fees for conversion and withdrawal, so you can calculate what you end up with as well.

 

Volatility is a fair argument. It's a risky investment. If you don't like that, then it's not for you. Does that make it immediataely bad because there are people who do enjoy betting on risky investments?

[Moonzy]

10 minutes ago, tikker said:

Volatility is a fair argument.

no it's not, not in my opinion

 

i'll give you 1 to 100 dollars every month, will you say no because it's not consistent?

[tikker]

1 minute ago, Moonzy said:

no it's not, not in my opinion

 

i'll give you 1 to 100 dollars every month, will you say no because it's not consistent?

From a mining perspective you're right. I wouldn't have joined if that bothered me. The market is volatile though. Seeing double digit rises and falls over short time scales isn't unusual. I'm in for the long term as well, so all I care about is that on average it'll go up. It still fluctuates a lot though and I can totally understand that one just isn't comfortable with seeing such fluctuations. So indeed it's not a reason to stay away from it on its own I think, only if you can't handle seeing it bounce up and down a lot.

[Curufinwe_wins]

1 hour ago, tikker said:

  

  

If you are trying to convince people that Bitcoin doesn't scale, save your breath. You're preaching to the choir. Everyone is aware that Bitcoin does not deal well with scaling at all and is not suitable as an actual day-to-day currency. Ethereum neither for the moment, but expansions soon should alleviate it a little. This is the reason why there are multiple alts that aim to be actual usable currency with fast transaction speeds. Nano is one of them, and recent tests show a supposed 1500 transactions per second in the current beta.

Actually most people have no clue that current mainstream crypto doesn't scale and won't without huge forks. The second you start talking about alt coins especially ones as niche as nano, you are far beyond the realm of what 'everyone is aware of'. BSV was showing off 9k transactions a second iirc, but still. 
 

I was simply making note that its a far bigger issue than transaction costs, which can be arbitrated away if the desire was there anyways. 

[tikker]

3 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Actually most people have no clue that current mainstream crypto doesn't scale and won't without huge forks. The second you start talking about alt coins especially ones as niche as nano, you are far beyond the realm of what 'everyone is aware of'. BSV was showing off 9k transactions a second iirc, but still. 

True. I was already talking from a crypto point of view. Most people indeed don't even know what Bitcoin is, let alone their alternatives.

[Stormseeker9]

22 hours ago, Kisai said:

Bitcoin is quite literately doing what everyone knew would happen. All the "value" ends up in the pockets of a few, who already had deep enough pockets to invest in the mining in the first place. So they will turn around and dump their speculative holdings when they see it won't rise any farther, leaving whoever is stupid enough to be left holding the bag with bitcoins with no value. So the "rich" people will have gotten out a month before the value crashes, and then everyone else will want out, but find nobody willing to buy it, so the price will rapidly crash.  Because bitcoin has no value in the first place, whoever is last holding it is likely just to abandon the wallets. Then that's it, Bitcoin and all competing cryptocurrencies are dead.

 

The "fees" for trading are far too high for anyone to be willing to use it for any purchase, and too slow to use for impulse purchases. So let's reverse the numbers here. If the crypto exchange fee is $20.00, and energy is $0.10 , $200 in energy is wasted per transaction regardless of the transaction's value (Assuming that was the break even point.)

So the amount of money you have to exchange to make it "better" than:

Western union (4% of principal, or around $50 per 1000, depends on country)  = $400

Walmart (10% of principal) = $200

Paypal ($4.30 +2.9% of principal) = $541

 

Like never mind shipping checks or other monetary instruments through the mail or courier.

 

If Bitcoin or some other crypto currency ever establishes itself, it will only be for very-high value exchanges, think mortgage payment or rent. And only as an interstitial. Nobody in their right mind would hold onto cryptocoins as a store of value with the kind of volatility it has. 

 

Have to agree with you on all points here!

 

well written out as well, and you say ‘rich’ people, I say ‘smart money’  

[Fnige]

13 hours ago, Orcblood said:

These Anti crypto people probably have not studied it in depth or the environment. Same people who think the life will end in 10 years.Okay not the last 10 years, or the 10 years before that, or the 10 years before those 10 years, but now the 10 years ahead of us. Probably mostly care about "I JUST WANT TO GAME WITH CHEAP GRAPHICS CARDS, SCREW WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE A GOOD THING FOR SOCIETY ".

 

Looking at some aantonop talks is a good place to start.

you sound just as bad as the people your mocking

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, Fooshi said:

 

Bitcoin is shit and inefficient and a crackdown on these farms will be for the better.

 

The thing is, by cracking down on wasteful things, that (in theory) should direct newer generations of e-currencies ideas and policies to operate that: 

a) perform fast transactions

with

b) less energy waste

and

c) less environmental impact (from both the energy cost of producing the hardware and operating the network)

and

d) cost next-to-nothing to use so it can actually be used for daily transactions and impulse transactions, not just big-ticket items. 

 

[Stormseeker9]

6 hours ago, Fooshi said:

Yeah, and this won't affect better cryptos that don't rely on that. Nano and XRP rely on low impact nodes that can process a significant amount of transactions compared to Bitcoin. It's like comparing a current gen mobile GPU vs a 3090 revving away in Furmark, except the benchmark scores are switched in the end.

 

Bitcoin is shit and inefficient and a crackdown on these farms will be for the better.

My point was here that crypto mining is not sustainable at the moment from an sustainability perspective. 
 

I did read about 34% of all mining is done by using renewable energies, still way too low and mining just plane uses way to much power.

[TOMPPIX]

The world can NOT run on crypto, if you can print money you will not work and will be of no use to society. You are the same as a 30 year old neet sitting in his mom's basement, living of other people's money. 

[Orcblood]

10 hours ago, SlimyPython said:

you sound just as bad as the people your mocking

I waited for this comment.Just tired of hearing these people so dishing it back. 

[Kisai]

I don't think this is super-newsworthy, but I felt it was relevant to this discussion.

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/05/john-mcafee-indicted-on-cryptocurrency-fraud-charges.html

 

Quote

Antivirus software creator John McAfee indicted on cryptocurrency fraud charges

 

Yes, THAT McAfee. 

 

Quote

In the “scalping” scheme, McAfee and his team allegedly bought large amounts of cheap cryptocurrency altcoins, then aggressively promoted them online with “false and misleading endorsement tweets” to artificially inflate their market prices.

 

“McAfee Team members collectively earned more than $2 million in illicit profits from their altcoin scalping activities,” the Department of Justice alleges.

 

The pair also used McAfee’s popular Twitter account to tout “various cryptocurrencies through false and misleading statements to conceal their true, self-interested motives,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in the release from the Justice Department.

 

As I've said. Beware of anyone championing cryptocoins. I don't think John McAfee had any creditability to being with, but that doesn't mean there aren't others out there doing the same thing.

 

 

 

[tikker]

10 hours ago, Kisai said:

I don't think this is super-newsworthy, but I felt it was relevant to this discussion.

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/05/john-mcafee-indicted-on-cryptocurrency-fraud-charges.html

 

 

Yes, THAT McAfee. 

 

 

As I've said. Beware of anyone championing cryptocoins. I don't think John McAfee had any creditability to being with, but that doesn't mean there aren't others out there doing the same thing.

 

 

 

This is indeed good advice. You really should research what you invest in. The fear of missing out is strong currently and people don't really think about crypto other than (mistakenly) "crypto -> bitcoin -> big money".