- Location
- London and Connecticut
I see that Bitcoin has shed 20% after China cracks down on cryptocurrencies - others have done even worse. Several exchanges have ceased to function in the rush for the door.
I heard Ethereum took a 40% knock today (or thereabouts).... Wild swings in the cryptos....I'm in Ethereum now not BTC FWIW
Thought this was interesting insightI must stress: Bitcoin going up or down is almost never due to macroeconomic reasons or news announcements from the wider world. The last time it was, was COVID-19.
It’s almost always shenanigans inside the tiny, thin, unregulated, manipulated crypto market.
Indeed, that was my thought....and has Elon sold or still ”hloding” (sic) diamond hands.Random discussion down the pub yesterday, how did Tesla buy $1.5 billion of bitcoin without anyone noticing? Is there really that level of liquidity in the market?
It would have only been between 30-40,000 bitcoins depending on when exactly they bought them, potentially upto 50,000 I'd say. Something like 8-900 or so are being mined a day at the moment so yeah, I think this would have been easily achievable. Trading volume for the last 6 months is easily in the hundreds of thousands a week: Bitcoinity.orgRandom discussion down the pub yesterday, how did Tesla buy $1.5 billion of bitcoin without anyone noticing? Is there really that level of liquidity in the market?
Well that’s it! China bans it in order to avoid cutting electricity during the Winter. No such measure here… people just need to buy blankets… we’ll use the small gas we have to trade Bitcoins
I mean this is just a daft loaded question isn't it? This isn't a choice that is being made.Still, it will be either trade bitcoins and buy blankets or give priority to useful uses of scarce gas and electricity. Which should we do?
Something of a false dichotomy there Antoine. There's no denying Bitcoin uses a huge amount of electricity, but there's a big movement to using renewable power, if only because it's fundamentally cheaper. Most new mining capacity is built with its own solar or wind power generation, or situated close to hydroelectric plants where it uses cheap off-peak power. The big dirty facilities using coal-generated power and the like were largely in China, and enormous amounts have been taken offline over the last couple of years. Of course power use is still power use, no matter how it's generated, but it's a problem that's actually getting smaller, although definitely still a problem.
Additionally there are moves to reducing power consumption - the world's second-largest cryptocurrency, Etherium, will move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake at the end of this year - which means mining rate is governed by how much Etherium you already own, not by how much computing power you have. A smallish step in itself but an example of how things are changing.
Decentralised finance is inherently unbannable, precisely because it's decentralised. There's no Bitcoin "central bank" to shut down. Even if mining facilities were all shut down tomorrow, that wouldn't affect Bitcoin particularly - we'd just go back to how things worked years ago when mining was a hobby for kids in their basements. Due to the scalability at the core of the Bitcoin design, it makes no real difference whether the global mining power use is the equivalent of <pick some random country here> or a small hobby - either way Bitcoins get generated at the same rate. But, like it or not, Bitcoin has a huge market value, even if you might think it has no real value. So by all means ban power-hungry organised mining if you like but that'll just close down relatively (and I only say relatively!) "green" Western mining facilities, while countries that just don't care and criminal enterprises will throw up loads of dirty powered mines and fill the void.
I'm no apologist for Bitcoin and I don't own any cryptocurrency, but I do think DeFi is here to stay one way or another.
- Bitcoin has probably ensured secure supply (plenty of money) so unless HMG takes the decision to force them to stop operating, the shortfall will it other users: industry, Business operations, people home consumption (central heating, light, cooking...)