Bitcoin Mining Giants starting to shut down,

[sackot]

42 minutes ago, Data Dave said:

Wow, ive never heard a story of someone using BTC to pay for everyday items. I think thats cool. How do you pay, out of interest with a dumbphone? 

The dumbphone is a piece of whimsy, just to enjoy the double-takes.

A company called Coincorner provided local outlets with PoS terminals which use Lightning as the payment rail. They can use normal Lightning invoices with a QR code, but also a protocol called LNURL which works with the contactless cards they also provide.

The contactless cards encode an LNURL on an NFC tag.

The crude way is to cut down the card (I got myself a second one which I didn't mind destroying) and tape it in or on the back of the phone.

There's now an opensource version of this, discussion here:
https://stacker.news/items/56843

You can also get standard NFC tags and program them to point at the LNURL of your own Lightning server.

I started to play with this but fell at the hurdle of making my LNbits server publicly visible rather than Tor, which is the default. Will try again one day.

There's a Welsh guy making all sorts of variations on this concept, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZpK4xfGcuY&t=5s
or his other videos. He does offline PoS terminals for pop-up events, among other things.

 

[Staffsknot]

16 minutes ago, sackot said:

The dumbphone is a piece of whimsy, just to enjoy the double-takes.

A company called Coincorner provided local outlets with PoS terminals which use Lightning as the payment rail. They can use normal Lightning invoices with a QR code, but also a protocol called LNURL which works with the contactless cards they also provide.

The contactless cards encode an LNURL on an NFC tag.

The crude way is to cut down the card (I got myself a second one which I didn't mind destroying) and tape it in or on the back of the phone.

There's now an opensource version of this, discussion here:
https://stacker.news/items/56843

You can also get standard NFC tags and program them to point at the LNURL of your own Lightning server.

I started to play with this but fell at the hurdle of making my LNbits server publicly visible rather than Tor, which is the default. Will try again one day.

There's a Welsh guy making all sorts of variations on this concept, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZpK4xfGcuY&t=5s
or his other videos. He does offline PoS terminals for pop-up events, among other things.

 

You are paying in pounds sterling not btc.

Also are you seeing a price labelled in BTC or £ at this apparently revolutionary place that can afford to invest in new tech that is about 2 years old...

[sackot]

10 minutes ago, Gigantic Purple Slug said:

They won't happily agree to it. They will do it if they are forced. Otherwise they just have a load of hardware that they have invested in siting around doing nothing - or not running at full capacity. How can they be happy with that.

Once you invest in the ASICS you want them to run at max output 24/7 to get the purchase cost recovered ASAP. Because if you don't within a relatively short timespan they will be made redundant by more up to date/powerful chips that will outperform them.

The ideal bitcoin farm probably is hardware on a load of racks that can be wheeled onto a plane and shipped into the place with the cheapest electric. Those places are invariably large fossil fuel producers.

 

We could work up a semantic tiff over "happily" and "forced", so for a quiet life I propose a truce. I will rephrase happily if you rephrase forced...

The fact is that the miners, in a highly competitive environment make large investments which will be motivated by considered financial calculation, do exactly what I'm saying. Therefore, I believe what you are asserting on the tradeoff between equipment and energy costs must be wrong. I don't even find that surprising, I was a miner back in 2011, and the thing which made me turn off my gear was the cost of electricity, it was the dominant consideration, it outweighed the cost of equipment.

Of course they would prefer to run 24/7, but given a tradeoff, they still go for the opportunities I'm citing. Proving this to you is beyond my abilities, but I'm trusting reports from authors who have surveyed the energy sources cited by public companies which in the US are obliged to reveal this information in their prospectuses. IIRC there is a  heavy concentration in Texas, where marooned solar and flared gas are all significant things.

[Dorkins]

On 22/11/2022 at 21:26, scottbeard said:

Whereas burning energy day and night and risking people's lives digging up gold, only to re-bury it again in a bank vault, does...?

About half of gold dug up goes into making jewelry and another 10% to industrial applications

[scottbeard]

9 minutes ago, Dorkins said:

About half of gold dug up goes into making jewelry and another 10% to industrial applications

And jolly useful that all is too - as I said above if you'd bothered to read that.

It's the other half that i'm saying is not really much better than bitcoin.

[Data Dave]

1 hour ago, sackot said:

The dumbphone is a piece of whimsy, just to enjoy the double-takes.

A company called Coincorner provided local outlets with PoS terminals which use Lightning as the payment rail. They can use normal Lightning invoices with a QR code, but also a protocol called LNURL which works with the contactless cards they also provide.

The contactless cards encode an LNURL on an NFC tag.

The crude way is to cut down the card (I got myself a second one which I didn't mind destroying) and tape it in or on the back of the phone.

There's now an opensource version of this, discussion here:
https://stacker.news/items/56843

You can also get standard NFC tags and program them to point at the LNURL of your own Lightning server.

I started to play with this but fell at the hurdle of making my LNbits server publicly visible rather than Tor, which is the default. Will try again one day.

There's a Welsh guy making all sorts of variations on this concept, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZpK4xfGcuY&t=5s
or his other videos. He does offline PoS terminals for pop-up events, among other things.

Oh thanks - this is my evening reading/watching for sure! 

Shame in the vid I can't see his phone screen that would have been intriguing. 

When you say you had a play around with this, do you mean you were unable to make it so you could sell 'an item' and then receive payments? Or unable to make payments?

[nero120]

32 minutes ago, scottbeard said:

It's the other half that i'm saying is not really much better than bitcoin.

Well it is useful as we keep saying, yet you insist on denying history itself. Shouldn't you be out throwing beans on a painting or something?

Saying stuff... i can do it to!! Oil isn't useful, why bother trying to find it and pull it out of the ground?! It's not useful because I said it on the internet!!

[sackot]

1 hour ago, Data Dave said:

Oh thanks - this is my evening reading/watching for sure! 

Shame in the vid I can't see his phone screen that would have been intriguing. 

When you say you had a play around with this, do you mean you were unable to make it so you could sell 'an item' and then receive payments? Or unable to make payments?

I was trying to make payments, but I would not be able to do either.

The payment flow goes like this:

You present to the merchant a URL which links to your Lightning node, and gives context which will persuade your node to trust it. The merchant presents that to your node along with an invoice requesting  payment. Your node makes the payment.

This is not all built into standard Lightning, so an extra layer is added called LNbits. It has useful facilities like presenting a virtual sub-wallet of your main wallet, which means I don't have to risk the whole content of my wallet to an experimental system. It does a lot of other things too.

By default it uses Tor, to give security through obscurity. That won't do for the merchant, they need a normal IP address with an LNbits server behind it. LNbits produces the original URL, and includes the Onion address, but we need it to use a valid IP address instead.

Doing that seemed to require adding something called reverse proxy to my main Apache setup, and changes in some address records at my internet provider. I got muddled and never got it to work right more than briefly. LNbits is written in Python, I tried to hack it to do what I wanted but I'm sure there is a proper way for people who understand the networking side.

LNbits is a user-provided layer to solve real-life requirements. I believe some of the ideas are to be folded into Lightning proper in something called Bolt12, though the two are not at all the same in how and what they do. I've not got myself up to date on the details.

[sackot]

3 hours ago, Staffsknot said:

You are paying in pounds sterling not btc.

Also are you seeing a price labelled in BTC or £ at this apparently revolutionary place that can afford to invest in new tech that is about 2 years old...

In your hurry to dismiss Bitcoin I believe you are missing the point. Instead of discussing in the abstract what "paying in bitcoin" means, let's look at exactly what happens and why it seem significant to me.

I wave a card at the retailer and bitcoin go from a Lightning wallet I nominate to a Lightning wallet they nominate. The payment rail is Lightning. I may have converted from pounds or I may already own bitcoin, only I know. They may convert instantly to pounds, or may keep the bitcoin, only they know.

What is not involved? VISA are not involved. Banks may or may not be the ultimate repository at both ends, but are not involved in the payment.

Lets assume what you are suggesting. I convert. The item is denominated in pounds (of course). They convert. At Coincorner, who they will probably be using, there is a 1% fee for the merchant (not just for the conversion, running the whole automated system). If they use VISA there will be, AIUI, something like a 3% fee. The Lightning fee is tiny, and for the merchant included in the Coincorner service. It's to the advantage of the merchant to use this rather than VISA.

In the US there is a provider called Strike. Their fees are even lower. I suspect they can do that because they are providing both ends of the service, so don't even need to convert, just net out. Also they operate on a much larger scale. They don't operate in the UK yet, it keeps getting put back. 

The significance to me is that Bitcoin is providing the base layer of an extensible financial system, which is what it's for.

Bitcoin is not supposed to depend on trusted third parties. The example above uses trusted third parties, but that isn't obligatory. Either end can just run their own nodes and wallets if they want to.

[Staffsknot]

47 minutes ago, sackot said:

In your hurry to dismiss Bitcoin I believe you are missing the point. Instead of discussing in the abstract what "paying in bitcoin" means, let's look at exactly what happens and why it seem significant to me.

I wave a card at the retailer and bitcoin go from a Lightning wallet I nominate to a Lightning wallet they nominate. The payment rail is Lightning. I may have converted from pounds or I may already own bitcoin, only I know. They may convert instantly to pounds, or may keep the bitcoin, only they know.

What is not involved? VISA are not involved. Banks may or may not be the ultimate repository at both ends, but are not involved in the payment.

Lets assume what you are suggesting. I convert. The item is denominated in pounds (of course). They convert. At Coincorner, who they will probably be using, there is a 1% fee for the merchant (not just for the conversion, running the whole automated system). If they use VISA there will be, AIUI, something like a 3% fee. The Lightning fee is tiny, and for the merchant included in the Coincorner service. It's to the advantage of the merchant to use this rather than VISA.

In the US there is a provider called Strike. Their fees are even lower. I suspect they can do that because they are providing both ends of the service, so don't even need to convert, just net out. Also they operate on a much larger scale. They don't operate in the UK yet, it keeps getting put back. 

The significance to me is that Bitcoin is providing the base layer of an extensible financial system, which is what it's for.

Bitcoin is not supposed to depend on trusted third parties. The example above uses trusted third parties, but that isn't obligatory. Either end can just run their own nodes and wallets if they want to.

Hold on there in your rush to push that person must disclose any non- conversion as per sales in foreign currency.

Also your transaction needs logging and recording for VAT purposes in the payment currency.

There needs to be a transaction record and a trail that can be audited by a regulator.

The PoS is nothing to do with if you are paying BTC and just an alternate to VISA.

You also just gave up all those supposed benefits of BTC to achieve it.

You literally outsourced the conversion to a fintech same as paying for a pint with your GBP Revolut card in a Spain.

There is nothing revolutionary here that requires BTC.

[Mikhail Liebenstein]

I reckon they made mistakes and got in trouble after Kevin Turner (ex Microsoft) left.

I've done business with them, when they were more focused on blockchain solutions and AI. Not sure why they got so heavily into mining; selling the tech equivalent of picks and shovels was always a better long term model.

 

 

 

[sackot]

1 hour ago, Staffsknot said:

Hold on there in your rush to push that person must disclose any non- conversion as per sales in foreign currency.

Also your transaction needs logging and recording for VAT purposes in the payment currency.

There needs to be a transaction record and a trail that can be audited by a regulator.

The PoS is nothing to do with if you are paying BTC and just an alternate to VISA.

You also just gave up all those supposed benefits of BTC to achieve it.

You literally outsourced the conversion to a fintech same as paying for a pint with your GBP Revolut card in a Spain.

There is nothing revolutionary here that requires BTC.

Your comment seems unresponsive to mine.

> Hold on there in your rush to push that person must disclose any non- conversion as per sales in foreign currency.

> Also your transaction needs logging and recording for VAT purposes in the payment currency.

> There needs to be a transaction record and a trail that can be audited by a regulator.

I didn't say the advantage of bitcoin is that you don't need to keep appropriate records for compliance, nor do I think that. I half-remember that the (opensource) LNbits has facilities to do it, but if not, there is no reason why it shouldn't.

> You also just gave up all those supposed benefits of BTC to achieve it.

> You literally outsourced the conversion to a fintech same as paying for a pint with your GBP Revolut card in a Spain.

> There is nothing revolutionary here that requires BTC. 

I said that if you choose to use a third party, there are fees but they will be much smaller than VISA. This provides an incentive for retailers to use Bitcoin rather than VISA. I also said that you don't have to use a third party, you can do the whole thing yourself. Maybe you don't believe me?

> The PoS is nothing to do with if you are paying BTC and just an alternate to VISA.

I don't understand this. The whole point of the Lightning PoS is that it enables you to pay with bitcoin and the Lightning payment rail is massively more efficient, and so cheaper, than VISA.

[Staffsknot]

20 minutes ago, sackot said:

Your comment seems unresponsive to mine.

> Hold on there in your rush to push that person must disclose any non- conversion as per sales in foreign currency.

> Also your transaction needs logging and recording for VAT purposes in the payment currency.

> There needs to be a transaction record and a trail that can be audited by a regulator.

I didn't say the advantage of bitcoin is that you don't need to keep appropriate records for compliance, nor do I think that. I half-remember that the (opensource) LNbits has facilities to do it, but if not, there is no reason why it shouldn't.

> You also just gave up all those supposed benefits of BTC to achieve it.

> You literally outsourced the conversion to a fintech same as paying for a pint with your GBP Revolut card in a Spain.

> There is nothing revolutionary here that requires BTC. 

I said that if you choose to use a third party, there are fees but they will be much smaller than VISA. This provides an incentive for retailers to use Bitcoin rather than VISA. I also said that you don't have to use a third party, you can do the whole thing yourself. Maybe you don't believe me?

> The PoS is nothing to do with if you are paying BTC and just an alternate to VISA.

I don't understand this. The whole point of the Lightning PoS is that it enables you to pay with bitcoin and the Lightning payment rail is massively more efficient, and so cheaper, than VISA.

BTC is supposedly anonymous. That's one of its many touted functions. You cannot use anonymous transactions for purchases in the UK due to AML.

So it is literally doing a full transaction history and needs to for VAT records and HMRC... so much for 'escaping the gov'.

Bitcoin is not legal tender in the UK that is why stores that allow 'purchases' do so via conversion to gift card then purchase via gift card only in almost every instance.

This is the bit you don't seem to understand they cannot sell you something priced in bitcoin its priced in GBP and there will always be a conversion until its legally recognised.

This is just more dancing around and you must be hyper bitcoin as the card only became available in May this year.

So you are a full on BTC pusher by sounds of it going in hard.

Bitcoin is too volatile to be a legal tender and cheaper PoS devices do not have to rely on BTC - that is the function you are pushing.

[canbuywontbuy]

15 hours ago, Up the spout said:

I don't think you'll find even a large minority holding gold, apart from in countries with a rickety banking system (e.g. Venezuela)

Asia (China, India, SE Asia) covers about half the population of the planet, all big on gold.

Quote

but what about the huge opportunity cost of holding it? 

That assumes you can either invest ALL of your wealth, or save ALL of your wealth.  Some wealth you want to grow (risk attached), some you want to preserve (much less risk).  The gold I hold isn't an "opportunity cost".   It's part of a balanced set of assets I hold. 

Quote

Fair play, if you can live very comfortably and are looking for something which will have value for centuries, but I would invest in decent land and the biggest index funds, before considering PMs. 99.9% of people unfortunately aren't in that position. 

The best play is to spread your wealth amongst different asset classes. 

[Data Dave]

15 hours ago, sackot said:

This is not all built into standard Lightning, so an extra layer is added called LNbits. It has useful facilities like presenting a virtual sub-wallet of your main wallet, which means I don't have to risk the whole content of my wallet to an experimental system. It does a lot of other things too.

I'm with you and I was wondering where LNBits fitted in, it's an extra layer. Sub wallet is cool, so something like a hot wallet or a burner, to, as you say, not risk the main wallet. 

 

11 hours ago, Staffsknot said:

Bitcoin is not legal tender in the UK that is why stores that allow 'purchases' do so via conversion to gift card then purchase via gift card only in almost every instance.

Ah I didn't know this was how retailers 'did it'. Is it the same process in the US though...

 

How long will be until we can shard a property i.e divide it up into fractional ownership. Hold that ownership as an non fungible token but have it denominated in, say, the price of Gold, or a 'crypto', or just GBP of course. Then be able to transfer ownership of your token i.e your property claim to someone else, using 'a' DL, all done through a smart contract.

For this to happen, well a few things need to happen first, but HMLR would need to build an online database that could be interacted with I guess. Hmm Id love to start a thread on this, I reckon there is someone who would be able to contribute or set me straight!!

 

[sackot]

3 hours ago, Data Dave said:

I'm with you and I was wondering where LNBits fitted in, it's an extra layer. Sub wallet is cool, so something like a hot wallet or a burner, to, as you say, not risk the main wallet. 

 

Ah I didn't know this was how retailers 'did it'. Is it the same process in the US though...

 

How long will be until we can shard a property i.e divide it up into fractional ownership. Hold that ownership as an non fungible token but have it denominated in, say, the price of Gold, or a 'crypto', or just GBP of course. Then be able to transfer ownership of your token i.e your property claim to someone else, using 'a' DL, all done through a smart contract.

For this to happen, well a few things need to happen first, but HMLR would need to build an online database that could be interacted with I guess. Hmm Id love to start a thread on this, I reckon there is someone who would be able to contribute or set me straight!!

 

I hope you'll be successful  with setting up your own server and connecting a card to it. In the meantime, if you want to play, go to lnbits.com where they offer all the functionality hosted on their own website. You can make a wallet, put sats in it, and enable payments with lnurl-withdraw, for example.

Once you have a working system, you will need places to use it. I'm on the Isle of Man where there are dozens of places close to me, but there are some in the UK, depends where you are. The map below is hosted on the Coincorner website.  It's a user-generated list and is not exhaustive. To use the card you're looking for a "coincorner checkout" logo. I've run out of allowed image size for this post, but go to

http://www.thecubanembassymoseley.co.uk/news

and scroll down a little to see an example. If you live near Birmingham and want to look cool while buying overpriced cocktails, look no further...

[14stFlyer]

On 11/24/2022 at 8:50 AM, scottbeard said:

Mining gold to use for electronics and jewellery - fine.

Mining gold to re-bury it in a bank vault - I understand why people do it, but what I'm saying is: just like Bitcoin mining it is people spending humanity's resources in a speculative attempt to preserve or increase their own wealth.  It's no different.  That's my point.

Agree with you Scott.  Mining gold just for storing in a bank vault is also not increasing human endeavour or happiness and can be considered a waste of energy, just like mining Bitcoin. 
 

Fortunately only 1/3 or so of mines gold is used in this way.  But you are right, focussing efforts on more useful metals mining (like Rare Earths, Lithium or Copper) would be an advantage to us all.  

[canbuywontbuy]

7 minutes ago, 14stFlyer said:

Agree with you Scott.  Mining gold just for storing in a bank vault is also not increasing human endeavour or happiness and can be considered a waste of energy, just like mining Bitcoin. 
 

Fortunately only 1/3 or so of mines gold is used in this way.  But you are right, focussing efforts on more useful metals mining (like Rare Earths, Lithium or Copper) would be an advantage to us all.  

Doesn't matter what you think, it matters what a huge number of people think (called a market) about gold.  And they've liked it over the last 5000 years.  And as if to endorse this fact, central banks have been buying gold like crazy over the last 12 months (fastest pace in 55 years).

Edited November 25, 2022 by canbuywontbuy

[scottbeard]

2 hours ago, canbuywontbuy said:

Doesn't matter what you think, it matters what a huge number of people think (called a market) about gold.  And they've liked it over the last 5000 years.  And as if to endorse this fact, central banks have been buying gold like crazy over the last 12 months (fastest pace in 55 years).

You're muddling up "is Gold a good store of value for the lucky few humans who can afford it" with "is digging up Gold and re-burying it in bank vaults a good use for the human race of the limited fossil fuel energy we have"?

[nero120]

31 minutes ago, scottbeard said:

You're muddling up "is Gold a good store of value for the lucky few humans who can afford it" with "is digging up Gold and re-burying it in bank vaults a good use for the human race of the limited fossil fuel energy we have"?

How much gold you can buy is irrelevant. Gold is money, hence whatever amount you can buy will gold it's purchasing power, i.e. you'll be able to buy as much with it when you first bought it compared to when you want to exchange it for another good or service.

Anyone can buy gold, there is no law against anyone buying it regardless of personal wealth.

No offense but you really don't seem to get it.

Edited November 25, 2022 by nero120

[pandabear]

As the phrase goes "never invest in a business you don't understand".  I don't understand bitcoin.

What i do understand is a financial instrument which is valued based on demand, and lots of people here telling me it is a good idea to invest in it.

When the shoeshine boy starts telling you where to put your money, it is time to exit the market, was a popular phrase post the wall street crash, and it seems to me that perhaps we are reaching that point.

[shlomo]

Eswar Pullela, a 32-year-old IT worker based in Sydney, invested his family’s life savings with cryptocurrency platform FTX. With the company’s collapse, he has lost up to $60,000 – including $40,000 in Australian dollars and $20,000 in cryptocurrency.

Pullela invests most of his savings into cryptocurrency, he says, because he “believes in the crypto space”.

Even before FTX’s spectacular fall from grace, Pullela had tried to withdraw his funds from the exchange – to no avail.

He is one of about 30,000 Australian FTX customers who will be seeking the return of their funds after local company FTX Australia went into administration earlier this month, just as bankruptcy was filed in the United States.

The administrators in Australia, KordaMentha, have received hundreds of emails from customers who have been left out of pocket by the collapse of the company, with claims of up to $1m to date.

Mary*, who works as a cleaner, says she will struggle to pay rent and with Christmas expenses after losing almost US$5,000 of investments in FTX.

“I hope FTX take action to refund me my money ... I am not a rich person,” she says.

Julian Mark, a self-employed Sydney man, says he started with around $30,000 but that had dropped down to $9,000 before the collapse. While he hasn’t been able to extract any of those funds from FTX, he says he isn’t concerned.

“It’s part and parcel of investing, especially [in] crypto.”

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/nov/26/i-am-not-a-rich-person-30000-australian-ftx-customers-left-out-of-pocket-after-collapse

[shlomo]

Rahul Ligma posing as a laid off FTX employee in the Bahamas.

Rahul Ligma did it again. This time the prankster posed as a laid off FTX employee in the Bahamas. He even gave a byte to a journalist and muttered some random statements. Now a video of the incident has surfaced online, and as expected, it is going viral through several reshares. The video shows Rahul Ligma standing outside the FTX headquarters in the Bahamas with a box with headphones, a diary and some other stuff. He says that the crypto exchange has sacked the entire team of data engineers at their headquarters in the Bahamas and that it is very tough for him and his family as it was his 'second job in a month'. He adds that he respects FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman and is open to new opportunities.

[Lagarde's Drift]

On 24/11/2022 at 14:09, sackot said:

One could, though there are assumptions required. Did the the article referred to, though?

I ask because the stupid implication in that one quoted sentence has definitely been used in the past to come up with ridiculous conclusions of the form "bitcoin will soon warm the planet by two degrees" and such nonsense was even published as a discussion paper (ie non peer reviewed waffle) in Nature.

The assumption required to convert from hash-rate to electrical energy is the efficiency of the miners. As you go from the first ASICs to newest chips that varies by an order of magnitude. I read that some anti-bitcoin papers have used that to exaggerate the likely usage by a factor of several times. I've not spent time looking at this, but you can find discussion if interested.

There's another issue being ignored when people compare competing uses of energy (as implied in the Bitcoin uses more energy than country X statement).

Bitcoin mining is on average a low margin activity, the invisible hand drives it that way. A miner does not compete with Angola, he competes with other miners for profit margin. If the other guy has an edge, he will go out of business.

The edge is usually electricity price, so miners will go anywhere for cheap watts. Electricity is cheap or expensive for a reason. One common reason is that it's being produced somewhere that transmission capacity to customers is not available. Examples of that are flared methane from mining activities, waste management, etc. Others are geothermal or hydropower in remote areas.

A slightly more subtle version of the same thing occurs with fluctuating renewables. You want to put up a wind or solar farm to supply a town. The renewable fluctuates unpredictably, and the town has a varying load over the day. This means you have to overprovide by a large factor so the peak demand is covered by your lowest expected output, and this may be financially unviable.

Bitcoin miners for the sake of cheap electricity will happily agree to modulate their load, so your oversupply is never wasted and your transmission infrastructure is not overloaded.

You might think this is special pleading and does not happen IRL. It does, though, and it has another desirable result. The miner with the best edge puts the others out of business. That tends to mean that miners powered by fluctuating renewables destroy the ones powered by Chinese coal, making Bitcoin overall trend towards clean as well as cheap.

To anyone interested, all of the above has been studied and written about by one Nic Carter.

Dont bother. Peeps don understand it. A lot don't understand gold either lol.

[Ballyk]

It seems obvious to me that Bitcoin will eventually collapse under the [ever growing] cost of energy needed to operate it.  The current high electricity price will accelerate this, but the outcome is a given.

Frankly it amazes me that there are still cash inflows into BTC, ie keeping the electricity paid for and the price held aloft.