That’s at least 6 Delorean time travels!
And just like that the used GPU market gets flooded…
KevinC
1950
All that energy going to something so useless makes me sick.
I find the whole Bitcoin thing to be a kind of mild exaggeration of what most market financialization is about: “Let’s find/invent another thing we can sell to people and then speculate on what people will pay for it!”
There must be more of us right? These cryptocurrencies are just insane. No value and yet sucking up so much power AND taking away our GPUs.
No, it’s well past lulzy bullshit funny money gambling and into actual, demonstrable evil.
It’s shit like this that makes me think that, you know, maybe Xi Jinping is right. While looking upon the incoming global warming apocalypse… Democracy is insufficient.
It’s unwieldy when hard or fast decisions need to be made, which is why, afaik, most democracies are representative democracies and not “true” democracies.
I have always wondered if a government could exist that was a true democracy up to city level, starting at housing block or street level, so every 10 houses or block of flats is a political entity and the people there have to vote on things like frequency of window cleaning,. Allocation of parking etc. That is how ‘comunidades’ work in Spain, with the residents voting on how much to contribute to the building fund every year and for what. Recently we hd to replace the lift due to new regulations that the 20 year old previous lift couldn’t comply with, so we voted to raise our contributions by a bit for one year, instead of slot for one month for example( “true” here meaning all citizens vote on all decisions within the city, e.g. house taxes, police funding for that level etc) and then an autocracy above that, i.e every province or county (as I am in the UK let’s use counties,) had a governor appointed centrally.
And central government would take care of national and international decisions, e.g
Funding the national police, taking care of the road system, going to war but cities would decide on the rubbish collection rates etc.
Now in theory city councils already do this and we do vote for the council every so often, but those are incredibly dull election affairs and in effect people don’t really know who’s in charge of what and who does what at the local council.
In my case, we apparently have a new mayor for MK but that passed me by and I can definitely say the rubbish collection has gotten worse and my council tax rates have gone up and my requests to the council go nowhere.
:(
ShivaX
1957
I suspect it’s like Communism. It works up to size X and then it goes completely to shit.
True Democracy also has the problem that people have shit to do. Imagine if you had to spend every day voting on and researching specific street repairs and similar random crap.
As a Californian I don’t have to imagine that hard. I just loove researching random-ass bond issues.
I suspect that this principle applies to most human created institutions and systems.
So back in the beginning of Feb Tesla’s SEC filing became public where they said they purchased $1.5B of bitcoin for the reason of (in their own words):
“more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on our cash.”
While I know they sold at least once to get a profit of $100m or so since then, I wonder if they are still holding, as the price is now close to the January low.
RichVR
1962
Read The Stand. As well as being a fine novel it has a lot of discussion about this very thing. When the survivors in, I believe Boulder, Co, first got together, they had a what is essentially a town hall. They all had a voice in how the town was run. And even then they had to sort of, fix things, with their own shills.
But later they found that the town hall was too full of strangers. The votes were marred by there being too many members that nobody knew personally.
So several of the main characters took off. The pure one vote one person system broke down. As, I believe, always will. Does the USA have the best version? Hell no.
Does this work better than a dictator? I don’t believe so.
ShivaX
1964
Ultimately this is the end result.
If you know everyone, then votes are more easily understood.
“We need to extend the road out to where the Smiths and Andersons live and hook up to the highway so that the factory can get their products out.”
You know the Smiths, you know the factory owner, sounds good or bad, you get the context and effects.
“We need to bulldoze the houses of some people you’ve never met or even heard of so that the factory you didn’t even know existed can ship their products, also we need to adjust the regulations on something you don’t understand, also there are 2 million of us, so there isn’t time for debate or discussion.”
Is less effective. It’s easier to ignore/demonize/etc people you don’t know and use your power to oppress them or violate their shit. Hell that happens in a democratic republic pretty easily, but there are protections to stop most of that oppression.
Their last financials were published in late April, so they won’t say anything until late July, unless they offload them all or something like that. Well, Musk might tweet out something, but a normal company wouldn’t.
Rward
1967
My Personal Bitcoin Story from last Friday:
I had some decimals of bitcoin that I purchased a bit back that has been sitting in a wallet for a bit.
I also work for overseas clients and get paid into an online platform that I can request withdraws from.
Last Friday I needed cash for an emergency situation so I:
-
requested a bank deposit from the online platform and decided to cash in on some of the bitcoins.
Being a Friday, the online platform withdraw came through on Tuesday (it gets sent on Friday, picked up by my local bank on Monday and put in my account either Monday night or Tuesday morning. Things have gotten better as it used to take 5 days minimum.)
-
about 8:40- logged into my online account1 wallet and looked at the withdraw option - I had to send them $1 from my bank account and that would then “authorize” me and allow me to withdraw.
That would take too long and require me to go into the bank to send money overseas.
So I created an account on a local bitcoin exchange (took 5 minutes) and send the coins from my online account1 wallet at 8:47 to my local account wallet (received at 9:18).
I cashed out the bitcoin at 9:23 and had the money in my bank account an hour later.
THAT is what I’ve always seen as the strength of “cryptocurrency” and I really hope it doesn’t get lost.
I transfer money internationally multiple times a year. It’s a transfer between two accounts I own, at different banks. The transfer takes less than 24 hours. No cryptocurrency is involved.
Rward
1969
What is the reason that it should take more than a couple of minutes and cost a couple of cents…?
It’s a couple of API calls with some business logic thrown in to say “yes/no” - that shouldn’t take long, even at scale. If credit card companies can verify a transaction within a couple of seconds, what is the difference to sending money from 1 account to another.
I do think the current state of bitcoin should die but I also hope that a crypto/currency does rise up to challenge certain existing banking practices.
