So Elon Musk now no longer accepts bit coin for Tesla purchases because of energy bitcoin uses

[JohnSJ]

"
Elon Musk said Tesla had halted purchases of vehicles with bitcoin due to concerns over the “rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining.”

The cryptocurrency uses more energy than entire countries such as Sweden and Malaysia, according to researchers.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has also warned about bitcoin’s environmental impact, saying it uses a “staggering” amount of power.

Elon Musk’s decision to stop Tesla from accepting bitcoin as payment has led to fresh scrutiny of the cryptocurrency’s environmental impact.

Musk said Wednesday that Tesla had halted purchases of its vehicles with bitcoin due to concerns over the “rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining.”

He alluded to data from researchers at Cambridge University which shows bitcoin’s electricity usage spiking this year.

Tesla won’t sell its bitcoin — the automaker is sitting on $2.5 billion worth of the digital coin — and Musk said it intends to resume transactions with bitcoin once mining “transitions to more sustainable energy.”

“We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use

[PubliusEnigma]

1. He wants Dogecoin to rise as Bitcoin falls.

By buying up the Bitcoin when it did, "Tesla" gave Bitcoin a needed boost towards legitimacy.

Now, they have a certain amount of control over of its fate.

[lagomorph777]

4. He just sold a ticket to the Moon, paid for with Dogecoin.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/09/spacex-accepts-dogecoin-payment-for-doge-1-mission-to-the-moon.html

[PubliusEnigma]

19. Exactly. Dogecoin kills the Earth, too.

[Tommy Carcetti]

2. Cryptocurrency is stupid.

Full stop.

[lagomorph777]

3. +1 Bernie Madoff never dreamed of such a successful scheme.

[hauckeye]

5. I don't understand

How does Bitcoin use so much energy? My money is all electronic in my bank and retirement accounts and I just transfer it around to pay for things. Isn’t that what Bitcoin does?

[Elessar Zappa]

7. I think

mining for Bitcoin requires extremely powerful computers that are running at full capacity 24/7. That may be the reason. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.

[DetroitLegalBeagle]

8. You are correct

Mining for Bitcoin or pretty much any other cryptocurrency is basically using a computer to help process an extremely difficult and complicated calculation, and the reward for doing so is the bitcoin or whatever crypto you are mining. Because of the complexity, there are large server farms running thousands of computers that are dedicated solely to this mining and the power consumption is considerable. China is probably the top in the amount and size of crypto mining operations and the bulk of their power comes from coal plants.

[dalton99a]

10. +1. Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by 'entire countries'

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/27/bitcoin-mining-electricity-use-environmental-impact
Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by 'entire countries'
Bitcoin mining – the process in which a bitcoin is awarded to a computer that solves a complex series of algorithm – is a deeply energy intensive process
Lauren Aratani | Sat 27 Feb 2021 03.00 EST

Recent interest from major Wall Street institutions like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs probably culminated in the currency’s rise in value and an endorsement by Tesla’s Elon Musk helped drive its recent high as investors bet the cryptocurrency will become more widely embraced in the near future.

Earlier in bitcoin’s relatively short history – the currency was created in 2009 – one could mine bitcoin on an average computer. But the way bitcoin mining has been set up by its creator (or creators – no one really knows for sure who created it) is that there is a finite number of bitcoins that can be mined: 21m. The more bitcoin that is mined, the harder the algorithms that must be solved to get a bitcoin become.

Now that over 18.5m bitcoin have been mined, the average computer can no longer mine bitcoins. Instead, mining now requires special computer equipment that can handle the intense processing power needed to get bitcoin today. And, of course, these special computers need a lot of electricity to run.

The amount of electricity used to mine bitcoin “has historically been more than [electricity used by] entire countries, like Ireland”, said Benjamin Jones, a professor of economics at the University of New Mexico who has researched bitcoin’s environmental impact. “We’re talking about multiple terawatts, dozens of terawatts a year of electricity being used just for bitcoin … That’s a lot of electricity.”

[GregariousGroundhog]

11. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general are quite a bit different than electronic banking

The basic gist of it is that the bitcoin network publishes a mathematical hashing puzzle for someone to solve. The difficulty of the math puzzle is dynamically adjusted so that on average someone on the network solves it every 10 minutes. When someone solves it, they get a rewarded with something called a block reward (created out of thin air, currently 6.25 bitcoin, and halving every 210,000 rewards) plus the transactions fees for however many financials transactions they can fit on a block. The block size is limited, and so most miners will publish whoever offers the largest transaction fee (the person sending the bitcoin decides how much they want to offer).

The 6.25 bitcoin reward is currently worth more than $300,000 and so miners spend a lot of money on hardware capable of performing mathematical computations as fast as possible in the hopes that they can solve the puzzle faster than anyone else and/or band together and split the reward between themselves.

[fescuerescue]

17. Because it's -------EXTREMELY---- hard to mint bitcoin

In the beginning it took 1 average computer 10 minutes to make 1 bitcoin.

Now, because of it's popularity, by design it much much harder.

It now takes the equivalent of 23 trillion average computers to make 6.25 bitcoin in 10 minutes.

Of course computers are much more powerful than in 2009 and there are bitcoin specialized machines.


Today, the average bitcoin farmer has an entire warehouse dedicated to bitcoin farmer. It's all corporate ran now. (vs 2013 when I used a spare bedroom)

[tinrobot]

6. He sold $100 million in Bitcoin last quarter to pad Tesla's profits

Without that, the company would have lost money.

Classic case of pump and dump. Wonder if the SEC is looking at it.

[dalton99a]

9. Yep.

People should stop venerating him like some kind of enlightened genius inventor

[fescuerescue]

14. Well he is still a genius inventor

Just maybe not as elightened as we would like

[jimfields33]

16. He's good and bad.

Without him, electric cars never would have gained popularity. He is like Bernie who has completely changed politics with his policies that were panned (like 15 dollar an hour) but now truly accepted. Musk did this with electric cars. Both have naysayers but they both changed the world.

[greenjar_01]

12. Total pump and dump, and now doing it with Doge, with the help of various suckers downstream

What a clown show. There's seemingly no end to the amount of dupes...one born every minute, as they say.

[fescuerescue]

13. Yet Dogecoin is simply a clone of bitcoin

The developer spent 4 hours making changes to bitcoin code. Most of it to make it "cute".

He modified bitcoin code, and mined it as a joke.

[struggle4progress]

15. He should hurry up and jump onto one of his Mars rockets

[dawg day]

18. Crypto confuses me--

I sure don't get how it can use more energy than other computing tasks...

Also how can there be "Value" in these dumb computer tasks they do to "mine"?

What they call "Fiat currency" is actually based on a country's economic output (at least, ideally it is), not just some futile Pokemon Go type game or whatever it is they do.

Does the mining actually solve some problem or create some benefit?

[dawg day]

20. Okay, researched a bit- mining actually has a bit of benefit--

From Investopedia:
Miners are getting paid for their work as auditors. They are doing the work of verifying the legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions. This convention is meant to keep Bitcoin users honest and was conceived by bitcoin's founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. By verifying transactions, miners are helping to prevent the "double-spending problem."

--
Well, it sounds a bit masturbatory-- the only benefit is to Bitcoin world- but... well, it still sounds kind of futile.