i’m mainly holding alts - hex and axion. small amount of tron and algorand.
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I’ll come back to gloat when you’re all broke.
jokes on you, I’m already broke!
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No you still have gear! 
I sold a bunch of gear to get me through this pandemic. The crypto bubble and the stock market are obscene and won’t hold up.
Not against blockchain or crypto per se.
I may regret saying this publicly but I can see bitcoin at $100,000 usd by this time next year. Lots pushing it forward. Even short term you have $600 Trump bucks last week and $2000 Biden bucks some of which people may dump into the market. The profit taking at 40k seemed unavoidable.
Part of the reason why I am broke. Haha.
Sorry to hear you’ve had to sell during pandemic. I’ve been close a few times. Still might yet before we’re out of it.
Everytime I see the words Crypto Currency my gut aches. Had a chance to start mining in 2010, but my friend was barely making enough to cover the electric bill, nevermind the cost of gpus. Placed money into it and held it even when it hit 19000, thinking it was going to go all the way to 50000. Then it dramatically dropped. Waited for years, and when it finally reached 12000, bought a synth (forgot which one), and then I see this past months events. I guess some aren’t destined to get a Lamborghini. Ah well, I guess it could have been worse. I could be the guy who used the equivalent of $100,000,000+ in BC today, to buy a pizza back in 2010.
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As long as your gains are tied to fiat money, you’re not safe: inflation, regulation, revolution. It’s all on the horizon.
Good luck.
Sending you strength.
I hope at least some good music might come of this.
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I’m one of the skeptics who thinks the long-term value of Bitcoin and other existent crypto will drop to 0 in the medium term. There’s no limit to how high the price can get before that, though. Lotta money to be made if you aren’t left holding the bag when it goes kaput.
Turning uranium into a virtual something with no inherent value that will probably vanish out of its bubble… yeah, great move.
Humanity is a cancer.
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Any recommendations for a good platform for a total novice to wager a little bit on crypto for the new year?
100% understand the risks and that it’s a gamble. Kicking myself for not getting into it years and years ago, but the best time to plant that tree is now.
Plant an actual tree, instead of making the crypto-sharks richer and richer.
Thanks.
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Coinbase is what I used. Although there are various other trade groups. Some have cheaper service fees but take longer to issue the transaction. I’ve personally never had problems with CB though.
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Dont know if crypto is the solution
But it made problems with our financial system and our economy clear for a new group of people.
Every halfing, the price must go up
If not, mining will not be paid enough to make money with.
Then the crypto will (i think suddenly) go to zero.
Its al about believe. If enough people believe in the value of bitcoin
It will go to 1 M in the next 10 years, otherwise it will be zero.
I think it is super interesting, but i prefer hanging around with my family and friends, making music and actieve with sport is much more inspiring
I share your point of view.
Cryptocurrency in itself is an interesting concept.
But it has turned into this gigantic greed-fueled nonsense that resumes quite well our current society: good intentions turned into a reality devouring virtual void.
As more and more human (with money) want a part of the cake, it makes this system more real (and its impact bigger).
Why would I “invest” money in such a reality-eater void to satisfy my greed? It affects the place we all live in…
We all know this, we all have conscience of the consequences of the toll to pay for our current way of living, this climate change most impacts of which are still to be witnessed.
And people keep being excited by this.
Disappointing Homo Nihil Sapiens.
(And I’m still more a part of the problem than of the solution)
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For years I’ve been pretty pissed at myself for not taking Bitcoin seriously when I first heard of it. Turns out it wasn’t even Bitcoin; was either some other failed proto-crypto or only theoretical at that point (late 90s, early 2000s) so I’m off the hook!
recently read an article that this is only true on paper but in fact miners use mainly cheap power and that’s nowadays mostly from renewable energy.
I translated it here for you if you’re interested:
Summary
Small digression electricity + bitcoin. Sounds conclusive:
Bitcoin consumes a lot of electricity. But this does not mean that the cryptocurrency is destroying the climate. After all, Bitcoin’s ecological footprint is probably much smaller than one might think at first glance.
Recently, economist Alex de Vries published a paper on “Bitcoin’s Growing Energy Problem” in the scientific journal Joule. Vries, who works at the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, has been studying Bitcoin’s power consumption for some time. On his website Digiconomist, he plots this with the Bitcoin electricity index.
According to Vries’ paper, Bitcoin miners currently consume at least 2.55 gigawatts, but more likely about 7.67 gigawatts. This means that Bitcoin could consume almost as much electricity as Austria (8.2 gigawatts). This value is, of course, a scandal that finds an echo in the German media. For example, T3N, Die Zeit and the Süddeutsche Zeitung have reported on the paper. Spiegel Online carries an interview with de Vries, in which he even calls for “an international agreement, preferably under the leadership of the UN” to get a grip on the energy consumption of mining.
Is mining really that bad? How reliable are de Vries’ values? Is Bitcoin threatening to undo the successes of the energy transition, as Der Spiegel asked back in late 2017? Or is reality once again a bit more complicated?
In the following, we will try to bring a little clarity to these questions.
No matter how you calculate it - it’s a lot
Let’s start with how to measure Bitcoin’s power consumption. The very largest portion of power consumption goes back to the miners competing to append a new block to the blockchain. How much they consume is hard to figure out.
We do know what Bitcoin’s hashrate is - about 35 million terahashes, which means that all the miners combined perform about 35 trillion hash operations per second. But we don’t know what devices are used to generate them. Is it the modern, energy-efficient antminers S9? What share do older generation miners make up? Are there even graphics cards connected? Power consumption depends in an extreme way on what devices are used. And this we do not know.
If you start with the hashrate, you can at best calculate a minimum value: Take a current miner - the Antminer S9 - and pretend that the entire mining network consists solely of it. An S9 generates 13 terahash with a power consumption of 1300 watts. This would require about 2.7 million Antminer S9s to raise the hashrate of Bitcoin, giving us a power consumption of 3.5 gigawatts. This would be, as I said, a lower bound that can be multiplied by any estimated value (x1.5; x2; …).
De Vries, on the other hand, starts his estimate at the other end: with revenues. He assumes that miners will produce hashpower until they make only a marginal profit. He then estimates how much money they invest in mining, what portion of that goes into electricity, and what prices the miners pay. He assumes a 60 percent share of electricity and an electricity price of 5 U.S. cents per kilowatt hour.
Using these values, de Vries concludes that Bitcoin consumes at least 2.55,
but probably closer to 7.67 gigawatts. The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index on its website translates this value (7.67 gigawatts) into an annual consumption of 69 terawatt hours. That’s about as much as six to eight decent nuclear power plants produce and more than the country of Czech Republic consumes.
Of course, one can doubt de Vries’ method. But as we have seen, even an optimistic minimum estimate based on Antminer’s S9 power consumption lands at 3.5 gigawatts. This makes it relatively likely that de Vries’ values are relatively correct. What is often radically wrong, on the other hand, is the interpretation of this result.
Cheap electricity is mostly green electricity
At first glance, this doesn’t sound good at all. We’re replacing incandescent bulbs with LED lights, building refrigerators and washing machines that use less and less electricity, and putting up thousands of wind turbines - and then along comes Bitcoin, suddenly consuming 69 terawatt hours a year. Is the cryptocurrency ruining everything with that? Was the energy transition and all the electricity saving for nothing?
Such questions are obvious, but they are wrong, because they compare things that cannot be compared. Because there is no direct relationship between the amount of electricity produced and the ecological footprint.
A simple comparison: If someone lives near coal-fired power plants, say in the Rhineland, he will pollute the environment with every kilowatt hour he consumes. If he lights up with an LED lamp for one hour a day, he causes more environmental damage than if someone wastes renewable energy, such as when the Icelandic capital Reykjavik heats its sidewalks in winter with energy from geothermal energy. It’s not how much that matters, but where from. It is better to waste electricity from renewable sources than to save electricity from coal power.
Of course, with Bitcoin, we don’t know where the miners are located or what electricity they use. The only thing we do know is that miners go where the electricity is cheap. While other industries are more tied to location and dependent on a mix of cost factors, miners are highly mobile and understand the cost of electricity as by far the most important competitive factor. There may be no industry that is as attracted to low electricity prices.
Countries with strikingly low electricity costs include Sweden, Finland and Canada, according to Statista. What these three countries have in common is that they have a relatively high proportion of renewable energies, primarily hydropower. In Canada, according to a study by the Fraunhofer Institute, electricity prices are lowest in the province of Quebec. Quebec has one of the world’s highest shares of electricity from hydropower - and is considered a miner’s paradise.
The situation is similar in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the U.S. and, most notably, Iceland: electricity is cheapest where it can be generated most easily and with a surplus. This usually doesn’t mean building a coal-fired or nuclear power plant - both of which are usually only competitive with government subsidies, once you add in the follow-up costs - but using natural conditions to tap energy. This is true even in Germany, where wind power is now the cheapest way to create new electricity capacity. Internationally, of course
hydroelectric and geothermal power are still much cheaper, so it is reasonable to assume that a large part of Bitcoin’s hashrate comes from these environmentally friendly types of energy.
At this point, one could make a not entirely far-fetched assumption: that Bitcoin’s biological footprint, despite its huge energy consumption, is better than that of a Rhineland industrial area. After all, German electricity is often not only expensive, but also dirty.
Cheap coal power as a result of the wrong policies.
We’ll stick with this argument, but let it slide in a roughly different direction.
Bitcoin miners inevitably settle in locations where electricity is cheap. Any type of electricity that sells at prices below 5 or 6 dollar cents is eligible for miners. In most cases, such power comes from hydroelectric or geothermal sources, as it is relatively easy and inexpensive to generate and scale if the natural conditions are met. In many northern countries or provinces, there is a surplus of clean energy that is skimmed by miners. The environmental footprint of such mining farms is zero. An LED light in a southern German household causes more damage.
When mining is profitable, it means that there is an oversupply of electricity in a region: that a generator is willing and able to produce more electricity than citizens and businesses consume. It means that a region either produces an extreme amount of electricity but has no businesses that consume it - such as in Iceland or Quebec in Canada - , or that industry in the area is idle, such as in the so-called Rust Belt in the northeastern U.S., but the energy infrastructure has not yet been sufficiently deconstructed.
In most cases, the waste takes place before the miners settle. If there is indeed a nuclear or coal-fired power plant somewhere that is running without any demand driving electricity prices to prohibitive levels for mining, that in itself should be an environmental scandal. Today, when a government expands or maintains non-renewable power generation on a scale for which the market has no need, it sets serious economic-environmental disincentives. Miners exploit these, but usually also correct them relatively quickly.
Venezuela, for example, subsidized electricity generation to the point that the country had some of the cheapest rates in the world. This attracted miners in droves, some of whom used old - i.e., extremely inefficient - equipment to profitably generate Bitcoins. As a result, electricity became increasingly scarce locally, and when a mining farm once even caused a blackout in an entire neighborhood, the government intervened and had the farm shut down.
Similarly, in China, miners had spread to wherever the government’s planned economy provided abundant power for new industrial sites. In some cases, miners reaped the rewards of planning mistakes, such as setting up asic farms in ghost towns with large power plants, but in others they siphoned off electricity needed by other industries.
needed by other industries. As soon as the miners come into conflict with the “real” industry’s hunger for electricity, the government intervenes here as well. The result is that more and more Chinese miners are moving their machines to places where renewable electricity is cheap and in surplus in large quantities.
So under normal circumstances, misaligned incentives usually correct themselves. Sometimes, however, it probably still happens that a region or government creates or maintains excess capacity from coal or nuclear power. In this case, in the very worst case, the miners prevent such overcapacity from being removed due to lack of demand.
Such a grievance is fairly easy to eradicate. All the government has to do is what goes without saying for a modern, ecologically oriented energy policy: Ensure that electricity from non-sustainable production is more expensive than renewable energy. If this were the standard, bitcoin mining could not be environmentally harmful at all.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
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I tried (for 2 weeks) to buy crypto in 2010, but failed. From our company, some people did buy, but only one person made big money, i think.