Bitcoin, Blockchain, Battlestar Galactica

Too pitchy. That's a no from me, dawg.

The singer's movement is so wooden his nickname should be Redwood.

 

This post on the Effective Altruism forum from a few months ago isn't interesting, but the comment section is. There's lots of information about Alameda, FTX, and SBF being provided by insiders. Such as SBF's insane fearlessness of risk.

One of the comments shatters the myth of the creation of Alameda. There was no Korean arbitrage, and the Japanese one only made a small amount of money that didn't last. It was later spun to bring in investment money. Frankly, there's even doubt that the Japanese arbitrage happened - it difference wasn't big and would need massive trade volume to bring in this kind of money. SBF may just have been ponziing the initial investment money.

 

2022 numbers are in. And it is estimated that Bitcoin consumed about 161 Terawatt-hours of power in that year, about equal to the nation of Sweden. This is quite a bit up from last year, and is surprising because there were points when mining went noticeably down (after the spring crash, recently because of weather in Texas), mining machines became more efficient, and the number of transactions went down from 2021. There was just so much competition between miners this year.

Bitcoin counteracted all the CO2 emission reductions by electronic cars. One single transaction consumes about 1,700 kWh. Take a look at your electric bill to figure how many months of power that is for you.

 

You don't need to prove you are serious to send an email. There is no central authority that decides if you really need to send an email. You just do it. That's why you get 5 bazillion spam messages a day. The designers of Bitcoin didn't want a central authority, so they wanted to make sure you are very serious before trying to modify the blockchain. So you spend crazy power doing stupid math and if you do then you enter a lottery to decide who gets to add the next block of transactions to the ledger. This is "proof of work". You all know this.

Etherium recently switched to something different. You prove you are serious by locking up some of your ETH (the native coin of the Etherium blockchain). The more you lock up, the greater the chances of you winning the lottery to add the next block. If you are poor you can pool your money with others. This is "proof of stake".

But there's a slight problem. In the current state of Etherium, you can't unstake your coins. The upgrade to allow this is constantly delayed and there is no estimate on when it will be done. That means a lot of coins are not liquid. And there's a lot of crypto finance based on those staked coins, especially in exchanges who offer high interest rates and liquid alternate coins to customers who join those pools. This could get really messy if there is further pressure on the field (by, say, another major exchange collapsing). Their developers are in a bit of a race here.

 

The alchemy of our age.

 

That's because you are in league with THE MAN who is trying to keep people poor.

 

Maybe, by accident.

"Two words, just two words!

Vaginal.

Eggs."

 

You have no idea. Neither do I, but I have an inkling. There are hundreds of companies out there doing financial services and services for financial organizations in the crypto space. And I haven't even touched on things like Lightning Network. There is just so much imagination and effort being spent on something with a foundation of air.

It's not forever. The amount of venture capital going into the space has totally collapsed.

 

And Peter Gabriel will still just laugh at it all.

 

The previously mentioned Silvergate bank, the main legitimate connection crypto has to the real world, had their stock drop by almost 50% today. They had $8 billion in withdrawals last year as failing crypto companies took out money to pay creditors. They are in trouble.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/05/sil...to-bank-discloses-massive-q4-withdrawals.html

That loss is more than all their profits in the last decade combined. It's questioning them as a going concern time. And that's not including the legal trouble.