Red Mosquito

tragabigzanda wrote:

wease wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:

wease wrote:How do you mine bitcoin?

To do it effectively, you need lots of very large computers. But really anyone can try to do it, you just won't be successful (and you might break your computer)

So where does coal come into this?

to mine coin, you need very powerful computers to execute like a trillion calculations a second. To be profitable, you need lots of these computers. It's incredibly energy-intensive -- coin mining is already consuming the total annual energy needs of some small countries (I'm not kidding).

So there's a new crop of companies trying to mine coin in environmentally sustainable ways. And this particular company is using remediated coal in these anaerobic chambers (or something like that) that does not contribute negatively to the atmosphere, and actually has a beneficial byproduct in ash fertilizer.

tragabigzanda wrote:I put $200 into Bitcoin and Ethereum a few weeks back while I read up on the technology. Made a bunch of minuscule plays in some other alt-coins, that all offer white papers and promises of revolution, but very little beyond that. Overall, my coin value over the last three weeks tends to fluctuate wildly +/- 3%.

Meanwhile on Robinhood, the same amount put into crypto-adjacent securities is up almost 6% today.

I don't want to read too much into this based on one day of trading on Robinhood, but it seems like unless you're a total cryptogeek, the better approach to short gains is with conventional stocks in established companies that actually know how to make money on crypto tech.

tragabigzanda wrote:

4/5 wrote:4. Inflation hedge?

It's certainly demonstrated its ability to do this, but at $65K/btc, only the wealthiest investors are able to make that play to a meaningful extent, I'd think...

My guess is that Eth-derivative alt-coins could also serve as an inflation hedge, but they're just so volatile. An ETF would probably serve as the better hedge.

tragabigzanda wrote:All transactions are recorded in a public digital ledger. The ledger is comprised of a series of blocks; each block contains the record of the most recent transactions, and doesn't get created until there are enough recent transactions to fill the block (it requires a specific number of transactions to be generated as a new block).

The creation of each block includes a randomly generated "hash" number (basically a long serial number), which needs to be matched to the same number generated by a miner; this matching of hashes serves as a sort of digital handshake that confirms the block is legit, it's entered into public record, and the next block can begin generation.

The matching of a block's hash awards currency to the miner. The miner wins the right to create that block, and reap the coin award, by basically having their computer shake a bunch of digital dice a trillion times until it gets the hash number that the block is expecting.

"Mining bitcoin" just means that you're running a powerful computer(s) in hopes of coming up with the correct hash number so that you can claim authorship of the most recent block and get some coin. I believe once bitcoin is currently worth around $65K.

tragabigzanda wrote:

4/5 wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:

4/5 wrote:4. Inflation hedge?

It's certainly demonstrated its ability to do this, but at $65K/btc, only the wealthiest investors are able to make that play to a meaningful extent, I'd think...

My guess is that Eth-derivative alt-coins could also serve as an inflation hedge, but they're just so volatile. An ETF would probably serve as the better hedge.

Well, you just nailed one of the reasons the burden of inflation falls disproportionately on the poor. But there are other coins and you can own fractions of coins. So if, and it's a big if, bitcoin is an inflation hedge it'll protect my $10k just as well as it protects somebody else's $10m, won't it?

yes, but do you have another $10k to put into traditional securities to protect against the volatility of btc? And if not, and you're just doing $5K in btc and $5k in stocks, neither loss is going to dramatically change your life.

E.H. Ruddock wrote:Can’t wait to decide between getting the Norton or McAfee vaccine when i get digital COVID