☮ Social ☮ PD Social Talk Thread: If 2020 Was the Dumpster, Can 2021 Be the Fire?

[Xorkoth]

These 'advances' seem to be coming up a little short in the modern era... The best Teslas can drive what, 250 miles before they need a five hour recharge? I'm just gonna level with y'all, I've lived in Texas most of my life; with our power grid down for the week prior and a state of emergency in effect... how in the FUCK would having an electric vehicle be practical? Are they gonna start offering multi-thousand dollar backup batteries you can swap out to make it the 5-600 miles in an emergency evacuation? What about when you're stuck in traffic and HAVE to run the A/C because it's 110F outside?

Until they can make car batteries that can meet gasoline mileage standards, electric cars are dead in the water. Both of my cars run on gas and can go further on a single tank, albeit both weigh well under 2600 lbs and lack modern 'safety' features and gadgets to weigh them down.

This is true, for now, but electric cars are certainly the future. Great strides are being made. Given some time, electric cars will be able to compete with gas cars for distance and the charging time will go way down. In fact Tesla already has "supercharging" stations of certain areas with a lot of Teslas that can do a full charge in 25 or 40 minutes (I forget which). There are some grocery stores where I live with charging stations which can apparently get you like a half charge while you're shopping.

Electric cars actually have a lot less routine maintenance on engine-related components than gas cars, too. And if we move away from coal power and into nuclear and renewables, the positive impacts on the planet will be profound. I think it is inevitable that in time, electric cars will be able to compete with gas cars for range and price, and then it will become a no-brainer.

Do y'all legitimately believe that BTC could replace fiat currencies?

No, no way. The main problem is its insane volatility. That, and the slow speed of transactions and cost of making said transactions. But even if this mystical "lightning network" ever actually happens, the price volatility will still prevent it from being used as a daily currency.

I mean I realize fiat currencies fluctuate in value, too, but very slowly, and only in relation to each other.

 

[Img_9999]

Wow you're right!

Jesus christ lol

Yaay, happy belated BL cake day Xork ... hehe. I know all of us appreciate your presence here .

Did you end up taking a PCR test? I hope you feel better soon ! How is your girl feeling? The upside is , if she does end up getting covid, she will realize that being young and healthy the chances of getting a severe case are very very small, and she will be immunized by exposition, so anxiety about it should be finally gone, lol.

Do y'all legitimately believe that BTC could replace fiat currencies? What happens to all my fiat liquid assets? Are my thousands of USD in savings gonna be worthless and only people who bought into BTC two years ago will be able to buy any equity? In an ideal future, the world would be unified, under one currency; however, humans are intrinsically self-defeating, divisive, violent. We will not unify in our lifetime, ergo how could BTC take the place of fiat currencies that already struggle to prop up other fake assets?

Nah, I don't think that is ever possible. The "store of value" narrative makes more sense to me. Digital gold is closer to an actual real world usage. Other cryptocurrencies will probably take over as an alternative to international bank transfer and credit card payments, because in the current banking systems moving money across borders is not as easy as crypto makes it possible. But BTC is not efficient as a payment method, so I don't see it replacing fiat in the foreseeable future. Or ever, in my opinion.

 

[Xorkoth]

Did you end up taking a PCR test? I hope you feel better soon ! How is your girl feeling? The upside is , if she does end up getting covid, she will realize that being young and healthy the chances of getting a severe case are very very small, and she will be immunized by exposition, so anxiety about it should be finally gone, lol.

I did take a test, it's weird, I got my test form the same place as everyone else (and that I have gotten before). All my bandmates now have positive results even when they got them before me. One of them got his results in 30 minutes. When I finished doing my test the lady was like now this will take up to 7 days, we don't do rapid tests anymore. Same exact place. Weird. So I'm still waiting but it's a foregone conclusion at this point. I know when I got it and all the people I was there with are now confirmed.

My girlfriend isn't showing any symptoms yet, she got a test yesterday but also waiting for results. She's making us both wear masks around the house and is staying in her room most of the day. I don't actually hope she gets it but if she doesn't, then she's going to still be really scared and try to get me to not do anything until vaccines happen. Though she is actually in the next vaccine group, it turns out, since she works in agricultural supply in a warehouse. Not sure when they're going to move to group 3. If she did get it now, it would probably make both of our lives easier, after a period of it sucking.

 

[Xorkoth]

I completely agree with this. I've always seen this man as the closest thing to a "supervillain" in real life.

I'm worlds away from idolizing the guy, but he doesn't strike me as a supervillain by any means.

Now Jeff Bezos... I could comfortably call that guy a villain. He certainly looks the part, too.

 

[Img_9999]

Good thing she'll be able to, in theory, get the vaccine soon. I got the vaccine myself a few weeks ago. Vaccination process is going pretty quickly here, mostly because we don't have the geopolitical pressure to exclusively deal with "western world" suppliers Moderna and Pfizer. So when the Pfizer stock ran out, the government imported a bunch of vaccines from China, and will be getting the Russian vaccine soon too. Kinda weird to think how politics can get in the way of health. Then again, public health is definitely a political issue. Regardless, I really hope the vaccine helps us to put a swift stop to this whole thing.

The pandemic has been really rough for people with anxiety. My girlfriend suffers from a generalized anxiety disorder, and for the first months of the pandemic she was also really scared about it, to the point that she almost developed some sort of agoraphobia. When strict lockdown restrictions were lifted here in the second semester of 2020, she still avoided going out at all costs. But eventually she started relaxing and now she's mostly over it completely. I wish you both patience and strength to deal with this. It's taxing for sure. I know that in one way or another, this last year has taken a mental health toll in all of us.

 

[perpetualdawn]

Personally, I don't think the less-than-ideal energy consumption of Bitcoin is enough to damn it. We have no realistic way of predicting the potential magnitude of positive impact resultant from the rise of Bitcoin. We're talking potential paradigm shifts, in numerous domains. It's difficult to imagine the first wave of consequences, let alone the second, third, and so on.

I think it is easily enough to damn it because we already have far superior and more energy efficient currencies - crypto and otherwise. I mean, it's not just less than ideal, it's colossally wasteful. Please look at some numbers:

Bitcoin network:
- the currency is using 121TWh/year at this time.
- BTC is supporting something like 144 million transactions per year
- This averages out to around 858kWh per transaction! The cost of one BTC transaction is equal to one American home's energy use for one month. Please note, this is not the cost to mine one bitcoin, this is the averaged cost of a single transaction.
- about $25 fee for transaction, and takes over 10 minutes to confirm.

Compare this to the visa network:
- 185 billion transactions per year
- Average energy cost per transaction 1.5Wh (572 000x more efficient than bitcoin)

If visa was the only other choice vs bitcoin, I'd go with Visa/fiat/digital banking because it's so much more efficient, fast, convenient. The main thing is that I care more about our planet than having a decentralized currency. And bitcoin isn't even that decentralized given that most of the hash power is in the hands of few large miners.

Bitcoin is a bad currency by any measure. Everyone is so focused on Bitcoin and thinks that we have to give it a free pass because it might lead to something better... well that better version is already here. We can have our cake and eat it too, we don't need to rely on centralized solutions like Visa. There are many cryptocurrencies that are decentralized, noninflationary, very energy efficient, low transaction fees, and fast.

Ethereum: is using POW and is basically just as wasteful as BTC. But at least they do have a path forward to switching to a POS scheme, which will use 99% less energy, when it comes

Stellar Lumens: uses a Federated Byzantine Agreement scheme. This is far more efficient and scalable. Transactions cost pennies and are fast (5s) and can process many thousands of transactions per second. I don't have energy stats handy, but it's multiple orders of magnitude more efficient than BTC. Ripple is meant to use roughly the same scheme.

Cardano: 37000x more efficient than BTC

Tezos: average transaction fee is $0.00232, uses delegated proof of stake (dPOS) for consensus which is many orders of magnitude more energy efficient than BTC

Nano: as mentioned by @Xorkoth uses a DAG and is super fast, scalable, free transactions (or just really cheap?), and extremely low energy usage.

This isn't a shill post, I don't own any of those cryptos. I've omitted the one project I'm hyped on because I don't want the purpose of this post to be about shilling my own pet project.

... I'm just scraping the surface here, there are many projects that are already solving this energy problem. We don't need bitcoin. What bitcoin has going for it is brand name recognition, hype, and belief. But those things can change, especially when the fundamentals (efficiency, scalability, utility) have major issues that are already solved by other cryptos.

 

[psy997]

I think it is easily enough to damn it because we already have far superior and more energy efficient currencies - crypto and otherwise. I mean, it's not just less than ideal, it's colossally wasteful. Please look at some numbers:

Bitcoin network:
- the currency is using 121TWh/year at this time.
- BTC is supporting something like 144 million transactions per year
- This averages out to around 858kWh per transaction! The cost of one BTC transaction is equal to one American home's energy use for one month. Please note, this is not the cost to mine one bitcoin, this is the averaged cost of a single transaction.
- about $25 fee for transaction, and takes over 10 minutes to confirm.

Compare this to the visa network:
- 185 billion transactions per year
- Average energy cost per transaction 1.5Wh (572 000x more efficient than bitcoin)

If visa was the only other choice vs bitcoin, I'd go with Visa/fiat/digital banking because it's so much more efficient, fast, convenient. The main thing is that I care more about our planet than having a decentralized currency. And bitcoin isn't even that decentralized given that most of the hash power is in the hands of few large miners.

Bitcoin is a bad currency by any measure. Everyone is so focused on Bitcoin and thinks that we have to give it a free pass because it might lead to something better... well that better version is already here. We can have our cake and eat it too, we don't need to rely on centralized solutions like Visa. There are many cryptocurrencies that are decentralized, noninflationary, very energy efficient, low transaction fees, and fast.

Ethereum: is using POW and is basically just as wasteful as BTC. But at least they do have a path forward to switching to a POS scheme, which will use 99% less energy, when it comes

Stellar Lumens: uses a Federated Byzantine Agreement scheme. This is far more efficient and scalable. Transactions cost pennies and are fast (5s) and can process many thousands of transactions per second. I don't have energy stats handy, but it's multiple orders of magnitude more efficient than BTC. Ripple is meant to use roughly the same scheme.

Cardano: 37000x more efficient than BTC

Tezos: average transaction fee is $0.00232, uses delegated proof of stake (dPOS) for consensus which is many orders of magnitude more energy efficient than BTC

Nano: as mentioned by @Xorkoth uses a DAG and is super fast, scalable, free transactions (or just really cheap?), and extremely low energy usage.

This isn't a shill post, I don't own any of those cryptos. I've omitted the one project I'm hyped on because I don't want the purpose of this post to be about shilling my own pet project.

... I'm just scraping the surface here, there are many projects that are already solving this energy problem. We don't need bitcoin. What bitcoin has going for it is brand name recognition, hype, and belief. But those things can change, especially when the fundamentals (efficiency, scalability, utility) have major issues that are already solved by other cryptos.

The problem with your argument is that Bitcoin is the crypto with momentum. Not even Ethereum is close to it, and for the foreseeable future, nothing else will be.

Not to be rude, but your argument seems naively idealistic. The numbers don't matter IMO.

 

[perpetualdawn]

@psy997 yes bitcoin has the momentum, and this is why I originally said in the comment that kicked off this whole discussion that I hope it fails, but that at this point such a hope is pissing into the wind.

The numbers don't matter because it's nothing to do with the numbers and facts at this point, and everything to do with hype. And this is the tragedy because the numbers point to a destructive hungry ghost. Oh well. Let's get rich! Lambos! Moon! Elon!

Seriously, I don't want to dissuade any of my fellow bluelighters from getting rich on bitcoin. I hope you do. You're the kind of people I want to do well off of this. I just want people to know whats actually involved in this game and for the knowledge to spread. And I hope you're all wise enough to get off the train early when the cracks begin to show so you can actually take some big profits.

 

[Buzz Lightbeer]

Oh man I found some more good Musk stuff, didn't even know some of it.
All copy and paste this one, from Reddit:
Elon Musk "predictions"
Elon Musk and unions "Elon Musk has said he is ‘neutral’ about a union but former employees blame their firing on their efforts to organize while current workers say a ‘culture of fear’ persists"
Forced to pay out ~$4 Million in a class action lawsuit to 4,100 SpaceX employees who say the company refused to allow them to take legally mandated breaks during the workday, as a consequence of how the company structured its shift patterns.
Uses public money to fund private ventures, costing taxpayers $4.9B. What a headline
Musk fires Tesla worker for testing positive for THC, then goes on the Joe Rogan show and smokes weed himself. In reality the worker was fired for her union organizing and supporting the United Autoworkers Union.
Wants to privatize space travel, leaving colonization and exploration to to the richest few.
Musk takes advantage of international crises to raise Tesla's stock price. In one case, Musk promised to "fix" Puerto Rico's power grid after it was decimated by Hurricane Maria.
Despite being hailed as a leader in the fight against climate change, he donates 7x more money to Republicans. “Is it any surprise that a union-busting capitalist donated heavily to the Republican Party? No,”
As a PR stunt, Musk promised to build a mini-submarine to rescue a boys soccer team that got trapped in a Thai cave in 2018. After receiving vitriol from the Thai and rescue community, Musk called one of the cave rescuers, a pedophile
Tried to destroy a whistleblower after his unsafe violations were exposed.

Some more classic Elon:
Elon Musk Charged With Securities Fraud for Misleading Tweets
add some of the crypto stuff to that as well

A "brilliant" quote to top it all off:

And if you're really into it, some good old tweets:
https://elonmusk.today/ "Like Donald Trump, but for nerds"

Every time I will ever seriously read the phrase "billionaire of the people" I will legit puke in my mouth. Guy is here to make tons of money, not at all for the betterment of humanity. Turns out understanding the developed technologies wasn't necessary to paint a bad picture. Another thing is that many of his old interviews (especially with Joe Rogan) are hilariously bad, I don't know enough myself to fully judge his knowledge of things, but I do know a thing or two about everything computer science related, and it's so obvious he's talking out of his ass. He does the same things when it comes to other topics so it wouldn't surprise me at all if he's just constantly talking out of his ass, except when about his specific rockets.

 

[Buzz Lightbeer]

I don't subscribe to Musk being a villain by any means though, I see him as a shitty dude that has somehow conned everyone into believing he is some sort of phenomenon out to save everyone. It makes it so that he gets away with a lot of stuff, + interest. I have to commend him for it, but I will never like him, no matter what his companies realistically do now or will do in the future.

Also, I am convinced he is a classic narcissist and his Twitter game is transparent, tasteless and sucks ass, but those are more subjective allegations.
I apologize for hammering so incessantly on many of the same point Vastness, it could very well be possible that I'm missing all sorts of stuff in my considerations. This was mostly the result of years and years of frustration, as well as listening too much to my boss talk about Musk lol.
For now, I will give up because I am too reliant on knowledge and research by others, instead I will let myself be inspired by one of Elons greatest quotes

 

[psy997]

@psy997 yes bitcoin has the momentum, and this is why I originally said in the comment that kicked off this whole discussion that I hope it fails, but that at this point such a hope is pissing into the wind.

The numbers don't matter because it's nothing to do with the numbers and facts at this point, and everything to do with hype. And this is the tragedy because the numbers point to a destructive hungry ghost. Oh well. Let's get rich! Lambos! Moon! Elon!

Seriously, I don't want to dissuade any of my fellow bluelighters from getting rich on bitcoin. I hope you do. You're the kind of people I want to do well off of this. I just want people to know whats actually involved in this game and for the knowledge to spread. And I hope you're all wise enough to get off the train early when the cracks begin to show so you can actually take some big profits.

I don't think it's necessarily hype. It is a generating a huge amount of wealth, and wealth is what is prioritized in modernity. It all lines up, to me.

Also, I really doubt BTC breaks. We're in another ATH cycle, like to hit $100k+ this year, and potentially much, much higher. And, after the price drops post ATH, we're going to see another ATH in another 2-4 years. No-one is letting BTC break considering the institutional investment and profit potential.

For instance, some models show $1,000,000 in a few years, and $7.5-8,000,000 in 5-10. The more conservative models say $1,000,000 by 2024-2025.

 

[Xorkoth]

The problem with your argument is that Bitcoin is the crypto with momentum. Not even Ethereum is close to it, and for the foreseeable future, nothing else will be.

Not to be rude, but your argument seems naively idealistic. The numbers don't matter IMO.

BTC IS indeed the one with momentum, so from an investing standpoint, yes, Bitcoin is where it's at. And if you're just talking about Bitcoin as a vehicle for investing in something that will make you a lot of money, then you're right, those numbers don't matter.

But in terms of a usable currency, it is about the very worst option there is, not only among cryptos, but among other options like banking systems and credit card transaction systems. How does it not matter that one single BTC transaction takes as much energy as an American home uses in a month? That matters a whole hell of a lot, it's obscenely wasteful, especially in a world where our level of wastefulness is leading to out of control environmental problems, and where we have billions of people wallowing in poverty and starvation and wealth inequity, while the first world nations are literally throwing away food (and energy).

So yeah, Bitcoin is the investment kind of cryptos, and will always remain so as long as there are no fiat pairings with any other cryptos (every other crypto is tied to the price of Bitcoin, at this time). But if we want to start actually using crypto as a transactional currency, there are so many better options. Like I said in a previous post, there is NANO, feeless and instant transfers, they stress tested the network and it outcompetes credit card processing systems and makes Bitcoin look like the stone age vs modern day. Even Etherum way outperforms Bitcoin in terms of speed and cost of transactions, and energy consumption, but there are much better options than Ethereum now, too.

To use crypto for its actual useful properties, we need to uncouple it from the idea of an investment vehicle. A dencentralized currency has to have a stable value and be able to compete in speed and affordability with existing options. Bitcoin fails both of these miserably. It's a great investment right now, but that's it.

I know there is a ton of BTC hype right now, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of valid criticisms. If you really believe BTC will ever be a currency used for everyday transactions, I have a bridge to sell you, it's in Brooklyn.

Every time I will ever seriously read the phrase "billionaire of the people" I will legit puke in my mouth.

Oh, you mean Donald J Trump!

 

[Deleted member 521610]

fuck elon musk making my bitcoin fall down im still making money on it but fuck that cunt he is insider trading again and make telsa stock drop hard. They should fine that cunt half his wealth i reckon.

 

[Xorkoth]

fuck elon musk making my bitcoin fall down im still making money on it but fuck that cunt he is insider trading again and make telsa stock drop hard. They should fine that cunt half his wealth i reckon.

You can't blame him for BTC falling right now lol. He caused it to suddenly jump up way higher than this, BTC was plugging around at about this level before he tweeted and caused it to jump really fast. It's just corrected that jump. You should never buy BTC when it's shooting up really fast and everyone else is buying it, wait til it dips.

Also Tesla is WAY overvalued, and rose absurdly high because of hype. I'm surprised it took this long to lose some of that value. It's not because of Musk insider trading, it's just how this shit works. Anyway why would he want Tesla stock to drop? He just lost $15 billion.

But I do think his tweets amount to market manipulation in some cases. He's not the first though. John McAfee was doing that constantly back in 2017, mentioning shitcoins and making them shoot up and then selling off his shares in them.

On the other hand, is it illegal when a famous person posts on social media that they think the price of an investment "seems high" (which is what he did)? If all it takes to destroy consumer sentiment and cause a massive sell-off is someone tweeting "the price seems high", then what it really means is that people are stupid. Tweeting that you think the price of BTC is too high isn't insider trading. In fact it's just an opinion, I wouldn't even consider that anything at all. Is it illegal when someone writes an article saying what they predict will happen with Bitcoin? What about those ads "blah blah so and so expert investor who predicted the XXX market crash says buy BTC now!" That's way more of a manipulation attempt than someone famous posting an opinion on social media.

Final word: you only lose money if you sell. Bitcoin investing (and stock investing anymore these days) is extremely volatile. The only way to avoid having mini weekly heart attacks is to decide you're in it for the long haul and don't watch the daily price movements too much. Sure it went up and down partly because of Elon Musk's tweets. In another month, 6 months, year 2 years, etc, basically at any point in the future, $57k and $45k are both going to seem insanely cheap.

 

[Deleted member 521610]

i bet he is insider trading with it though. They should heavily watch tesla and fine elon musk billions

 

[Buzz Lightbeer]

They should just impose some serious taxes, but no way they're even gonna seriously tax billionaires/billionaire companies in the US. In Elons case they even throw him some billions.

 

[Xorkoth]

I don't buy he's insider trading, it doesn't make sense. He's losing shit tons of money so he'd be the worst inside trader ever. Tesla was in a bubble, like many tech stocks are. Look at the graphs, actually of all sorts of stocks. If it looks like this:

You can be damn sure it's in a bubble and it's going to lose a good portion of its value when it corrects. There's nothing mysterious here. Honestly the stock market has been going nuts for a long time, 2020/2021 have been absurd, Tesla's price is not in line with the actual value of the company. It's only actually lost a small percentage of its value. One year ago it was worth like $150 per share, it's still WAYYY up, and the growth seen by many companies including Tesla this past year is absurd and unprecedented.

Honestly, buying in right after the very brief crash when COVID hit would have been a great move. I almost did it myself. At this point, buying in is buying at the top of a bubble. I mean don't get me wrong, I did it too. I was too nervous to buy in after COVID in case there was another drop. But I suspect that we're headed for substantial losses in value for a little while while this bubble corrects. So hold on tight.

 

[Deleted member 521610]

im holding my bitcoin for 5 years at least. though been outraged at elon musk it counter to my goals of trying to practice non duality. Since no human is ever the doer of anything.

 

[Xorkoth]

Holding BTC is a good call. I'm going to buy some next time I get some more funds for investing, and do the same.

 

[Zephyn]

Holding BTC is a good call. I'm going to buy some next time I get some more funds for investing, and do the same.

Same. I once owned 10, when they were worth just a few dollars. Watched it climb this whole time, wondering whether i should get in or if its too late. Wondering that again