Team-BHP - The Cryptocurrency & NFT Thread

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Originally Posted by volkman10 (Post 4326232)

Audi and BMW can be bought in Japan with bitcoin:]
link

According to my knowledge all these sellers do accept Bitcoin but immediately convert them into country currency and then sell item. So essentially they are not dealing in Crypto, they have just added one more layer to the process so that people can bring in crypto instead of normal money. That is why they have tie up with exchanges to sell immediately otherwise why would they need exchange.

This is the case with Microsoft and other sellers as well. 'Bitcoin is accepted here' is a myth according to me because sellers do accept Bitcoin but they do not keep it.

Here is old article about the same 'No, Big Companies Aren't Really Accepting Bitcoin'

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In reality, it’s probably because they simply don’t trust bitcoin as a stable store of value. Since Dell began accepting bitcoin through Coinbase in July 2014, bitcoin’s value has dropped by over 54 percent. If Dell had actually kept the cryptocurrency it received, its revenue from bitcoin sales would have essentially been cut in half.

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Originally Posted by sushantr5 (Post 4326313)

On top of accepting Bitcoin, they stand a chance to gain from the appreciation of the BTC! If the prices of BTC start to fall rapidly, I wonder if they would still continue accepting BTC!

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Originally Posted by joe1980 (Post 4326350)

On top of accepting Bitcoin, they stand a chance to gain from the appreciation of the BTC! If the prices of BTC start to fall rapidly, I wonder if they would still continue accepting BTC!

Today also they are not accepting even if prices are increasing. They just convert into real money immediately. There is no guarantee that you will preserve value in Bitcoins/Cryptos. It can become big zero at any moment. Unless price of crypto becomes stable gets linked with real economics , till then it is not reliable medium to store value. So businesses keep away from this risk and only concentrate on business instead of believing in horse trading.

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Originally Posted by tsk1979 (Post 4326135)

Secondly, if enough people with wealth decide its much safer to "hide" wealth in crypto, what can governments do? As long as their peers are willing to accept crypto, it is untracable. Its like you have chickens and your neighbor having cows, and you willingly start using eggs and milk as currency. Its illegal and that would make you a criminal, but can you be caught?

Remember, to live and survive, you need very little cash. Its the spending which can be curtailed by the govt. So if a software engineer paying tax in 20L a year income buys a 1 crore car , taxman will come after him. So he has to hide cash (which can be lost due to demonitization), or in the bank (which will have a tax problem), or in a USB pen drive.

Wealthy people like to hoard wealth.

The macro aspects of an economy does not run like that. Bitcoin or for that matter any other Gold standard, which cannot be controlled by the Govt cannot infinitely grow in value when the majority starts to hoard. If the wealthy ( a very arbitrary term) people decide to hoard bitcoins, it simply means that the actual money is eroding away from the system to this technology concept. Many countries have faced this concept of their wealth eroding to other countries and there are political fixes to it. But for such underground bitcoin style item, the money just erodes. Which means when enough hoarders are there in the system, the economic activity stagnates for a while, in the sense that nobody moves money into the actual economy and would prefer to hoard it. Then it would move to a hopeful stagnation for a while, then to a stagnation+deflation because of the leverage the bitcoin holders have and then into a recession. This is unless government economic policy intervenes at any stage.

And once govt economic policy intervenes, the whole idea of hoarding away from govt and the banks is gone, and it would crash anyway.
In the other case where it leads to a depression without government intervention, there are two options. Either the lower strata of hoarders start selling because they to hit the effect of depression and it can start a collapse from there to sanity. The other case is that the non hoarders get into a political unrest.

There are two farfetched metaphors to compare bitcoins to.
a) Trump
There are many studies that show that all the voters wanted to choose was an outsider, just because they were pissed off with the classic politicians from both parties. So they elected an outsider as a revenge to the politicians. Only time would definitely tell, but the outsider screwing the very people who elected him is as probable an outcome as any. I mean avenging your politicians is better done by being a politician rather than selecting someone who is not at all a politician. :)

b) Sodexo coupons.
When demonetization hit, the sodexo holders had a very distinct leverage. In some circles, people sold coupons at a premium.
So, because of the social conditions AT THIS MOMENT, a thing of value x is being valued at 100x. But if it was sodexo, would you hoard it ? You would have a hundred logical reasons not to hoard. Most of them (logical reasons, not physical reasons like it would get wet) would be valid for bitcoin hoarding as well.

I would not use bitcoin for transactions even if the price was stable and had very low transaction fee. Why? Because I am disgusted at the amount of the energy it wastes to confirm one transaction.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...climate-change

One bitcoin transaction uses 215 KWh of electricity.
One ethereum transaction uses 45 KWh of electricity.
One visa transaction uses 0.00651 KWh of electricity.

Yes, bitcoin transaction uses 33000 times more energy compared to visa transaction.

And here is the real kicker. The energy usage by bitcoin/ethereum will continue to increase as the complexity of verification is designed to increase. Meanwhile, energy usage by visa transaction will not increase, and may even decrease due to faster processor, as computing complexity remains constant.

This is actually the problem with blockchain technology. Until now I was quite thrilled about blockchains, and now I am really bummed by the carbon footprint of blockchain.

Just read Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman's view on bitcoins, and couldn't stop laughing... :uncontrol

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Krugman: Well, the thing about bitcoin is there isn't actually a whole lot of stuff... there's not - in a way the fact that it's completely untethered to anything real means that it doesn't fall until it ... it can just hang there in mid-air for a long, long time. There's no obvious real - it's not like, you know, the housing crisis. If housing prices are unrealistic, then more housing gets built and you can see it. Bitcoin - the cost of producing of new bitcoins has gone crazily high. So that's not going to happen. So we're waiting for a Wylie Coyote moment. You know, the cartoon physics, he runs off the edge of a cliff and it's only when he looks down and realizes there's nothing under him and he goes ... So we're waiting for that sort of thing to happen. And that can go on for a long time. You know, a bubble is a natural Ponzi scheme, that's how Bob Shiller puts it. That it's - as long as it's going on everybody who bought in keeps making money and it looks good, and the fact that in the end somebody's going to be left holding the bag. Everybody assumes it's not going to be them.

Full interview on bitcoins is here.

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Originally Posted by Samurai (Post 4329333)

I would not use bitcoin for transactions even if the price was stable and had very low transaction fee. Why? Because I am disgusted at the amount of the energy it wastes to confirm one transaction.

It is unfair to compare a mature technology with a rapidly evolving one. Everyone accepts that the current scale limits can not sustain public blockchains in the future, and many communities are trying different solutions for scalability. Proof of Stake, like someone else mentioned, is one of those.

Blockchains in consortium settings (banks, B2B2B scenarios etc.) do not use proof-of-work anyway. They use Paxos like consensus algorithms, which have minimal energy footprint. So it's very unfair to use Proof of Work/cryptocurrency mania to attack the blockchain technology as a whole.

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Originally Posted by anku94 (Post 4331575)

Nobody is attacking block chain technology. Everybody agrees it is the technical invention which solves problem of proofing/validation/whatever.

The opposition is based on the philosophy where this technology being used, Currency and economy. People are talking that crypto currency is future and crypto currency is traded with a value through the roof. This is where argument is going on. Technocrats swear by technology and simultaneously ignore social and economic basics. The other experts on this forum have explained really well which has helped me to understand bits of this phenomenon better.

Maybe this was already discussed, but both Zebpay and Unocoin deal with only Bitcoins.

What about the 1300+ other cryptocurrencies in market? How does one buy/sell them?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samurai (Post 4329333)

......
One bitcoin transaction uses 215 KWh of electricity.
.....
Until now I was quite thrilled about blockchains, and now I am really bummed by the carbon footprint of blockchain.

Also, the amount of energy spent in mining is huge. Estimates say the annual energy consumption is 32 terawatt-hours, which is 'ahead of at least 159 other countries, including Ireland and most nations in Africa.'

Coal (which is still being used for producing electricity worldwide) should be the next hot item.