How to earn 21% risk free on USD

[Sig]

Hey Muppet!
How much energy do you think is necessary to run the USD currency system? The FED is spending ~900M USD in 2020 (https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12771.htm) just to print currency and coins. Not counting all the office rooms, the 6.3m people working in this industry and transport that waste a huge amount of electricity and gas.
How many million homes do you think can you power with all this effort.

Jesus...people don't have any perspective

Perspective is important. Let's use our old friend here, basic arithmetic. Average cost of electricity in the U.S. is $120/MWH. So let's assume we replace all currency with crypto currency and ignore how much extra electricity that's going to take. And let's assume that allows that $900M budget you cite to drop to $0. If you divide $900,000,000 by $120, you get 7,500,000 MWH, or 7.5 TWH. Back to basic math again, that's 16.7% of the 45 TWH used currently for bitcoin. Again, that ignores that if we replaced our currency with bitcoin we'd need orders of magnitude more electricity.

So to answer the question in your last sentence, the $900M used to print currency and coins could power about 16.7% of the homes that could be powered by current bitcoin mining, which in turn represents a tiny fraction of the currency the FED system represents. So what exactly was your point was again? Maybe you didn't do the math and just assumed $900M was a big number and didn't have an intuitive grasp of how big a number 45 TWH was? Or didn't think about how much electricity would be required to replace all currency with crypto currency? Because really, as we just demonstrated, the facts you presented actually all speak against your position.

 

[Overnight]

...Or didn't think about how much electricity would be required to replace all currency with crypto currency? Because really, as we just demonstrated, the facts you presented actually all speak against your position.

So this means, fossil fuels are good? Because from what I am reading, without electricity, cryptos will not work.

Gee.

 

[MrMuppet]

Perspective is important. Let's use our old friend here, basic arithmetic. Average cost of electricity in the U.S. is $120/MWH. So let's assume we replace all currency with crypto currency and ignore how much extra electricity that's going to take. And let's assume that allows that $900M budget you cite to drop to $0. If you divide $900,000,000 by $120, you get 7,500,000 MWH, or 7.5 TWH. Back to basic math again, that's 16.7% of the 45 TWH used currently for bitcoin. Again, that ignores that if we replaced our currency with bitcoin we'd need orders of magnitude more electricity.

So to answer the question in your last sentence, the $900M used to print currency and coins could power about 16.7% of the homes that could be powered by current bitcoin mining, which in turn represents a tiny fraction of the currency the FED system represents. So what exactly was your point was again? Maybe you didn't do the math and just assumed $900M was a big number and didn't have an intuitive grasp of how big a number 45 TWH was? Or didn't think about how much electricity would be required to replace all currency with crypto currency? Because really, as we just demonstrated, the facts you presented actually all speak against your position.

Next time read the text properly before you write a wall of text. 900m is only for production of notes and coins.

It doesn't include the energy consumption of the workforce, the transportation, the computing power necesary to run all these decentralized databases, water consumption and heating of all the buildings of the ENTIRE USD system.

By the way: it costs 1.7cts to produce a 1ct coin

If you try to nitpick at least be sober.

 

[Sig]

Next time read the text properly before you write a wall of text. 900m is only for production of notes and coins.

It doesn't include the energy consumption of the workforce, the transportation, the computing power necesary to run all these decentralized databases, water consumption and heating of all the buildings of the ENTIRE USD system.

By the way: it costs 1.7cts to produce a 1ct coin

If you try to nitpick at least be sober.

So first off I don't have any horse in the crypto race directly. I run a company in the electricity generation business, so if anything I benefit if crypto's eat up bigger and bigger chunks of electricity. From that experience I know that the vast majority of people haven't the faintest idea of the magnitude of a TWH. Let me ask to think about this in all honesty; before reading my reply if I had asked you what $900M equated to in terms of the 45 TWH we were discussing would you have guessed it was as low at 16%? The truth is that you learned something today, which among the emotionally mature is reason for happiness, not name calling dismissal.

I'm happy to do the math for you to convert workforce energy consumption, transportation, and computer power of the ENTIRE USD system into TWH. Showing my work would, however, necessitate what you dismiss as "a wall of text". Since you reject that, I'll just tell you the answer: it's 42. Again keep in mind, that's for a USD money supply of $5,149,527M, vice the bitcoin market cap is $350,000M which is currently less than 7% of the USD supply. So even assuming the growth of the bitcoin supply is linear in terms of energy use, which it isn't, you would need roughly 15 times the energy to have bitcoin replace USD assuming you eliminate the entire USD system.

TLDR for those with short attention spans, a TWH is a whole lot more energy than the average person would guess and bitcoin currently uses more energy than the USD system and would use vastly more energy than the current USD monetary system if it replaced it. The math and research to demonstrate that fact takes up space and requires a de minimums amount of intellectual curiosity to read.

Oh, and WTF the cost to make a coin has to do with anything I've been discussing is beyond me, talk about nitpicking! Heck, it's been years since I've used a coin to pay for something, bitcoin user or no. I'm all for getting rid of them and wouldn't mind getting rid of paper currency in general. That doesn't require cryptocurrency, I've barely used physical money for 20 years now.

 

[ScroogeMcDuck]

So I'm not getting how bitcoin and banks are inverse/substitutions of one another? If the world switches entirely to bitcoin then no-one will need loans or to earn interest on their money which is primarily what retail banks do? No one will need to do corporate bond offerings or structured finance or any of the other things investment banks do? Bitcoin isn't some utopian panacea that replaces the entire financial industry in any universe, we could switch entirely to bitcoin and "traditional banking activity" would still occur at much the same rate it does today and those employees would commute much the same way they do today. So not sure what bringing them up has to do with anything?

Unless you're holding cash under your mattress, you need a bank to custody your USD. This is not true of bitcoin. For a long time now, FDIC insured deposits of USD have earned much less than inflation (partly because of the banks' overhead costs, partly because of anticompetitive government policies, and partly because of the stupidity of the average consumer). Bitcoin is a lot better than that because the maximum supply is fixed, while GDP keeps growing, so in the long term limit the value of bitcoin will increase at the same rate as global GDP growth (currently 4.5%). Plus in the first 10 years you get an extra 50-150x while it transitions from being an obscure alternative to gold to being the world's reserve currency.

People will still need loans, but these will no longer come from a banking oligopoly that's subsidized by the government & protected from startup competition by the government & that reaps windfall gains by paying depositors 0.1% while gambling depositors' money on subprime real estate paying 5%. Technology will increasingly cut out the rent-seeking middleman, and good riddance.

 

[Overnight]

...Since you reject that, I'll just tell you the answer: it's 42...

But what was the question? *wink*

 

[Sig]

But what was the question? *wink*

It was too close not to use it even though the actual number is quite a bit smaller!

 

[Sig]

Unless you're holding cash under your mattress, you need a bank to custody your USD. This is not true of bitcoin. For a long time now, FDIC insured deposits of USD have earned much less than inflation (partly because of the banks' overhead costs, partly because of anticompetitive government policies, and partly because of the stupidity of the average consumer). Bitcoin is a lot better than that because the maximum supply is fixed, while GDP keeps growing, so in the long term limit the value of bitcoin will increase at the same rate as global GDP growth (currently 4.5%). Plus in the first 10 years you get an extra 50-150x while it transitions from being an obscure alternative to gold to being the world's reserve currency.

People will still need loans, but these will no longer come from a banking oligopoly that's subsidized by the government & protected from startup competition by the government & that reaps windfall gains by paying depositors 0.1% while gambling depositors' money on subprime real estate paying 5%. Technology will increasingly cut out the rent-seeking middleman, and good riddance.

It's odd, in a discussion of the electricity footprint of bitcoin mining, to state "the maximum supply is fixed"!

I get it, like the gold bugs you're hoping to strike it rich when you convince the world to switch to bitcoin and the value of your bitcoin investment goes up 50-150x. And it makes as much sense as the gold bugs with an equal chance of seeing that vision of utopia realized. The idea that having a fixed supply of a thing eliminates phenomenon like inflation is really a nonstarter, there's both a long history and a large body of work on the subject that I'm happy to discuss if you'd like to have a macro econ discussion.

Just like you already don't need to use cash even without bitcoin, you don't need bitcoin to have P2P loans, there are dozens of sites you can do it today and have been able to for a decade. The reason financial institutions make loans is because they have the capital, the risk pool size, and the risk assessment tools necessary to do so profitably. Switching to bitcoin doesn't automatically give any of those three necessary tools to anyone but banks. The wealthy and institutions already provide loans via various funds absent the deposit and lending model of banks. If you've ever been involved with those you know the terms and rates are generally substantially higher than what you could get at a bank, and that's not because of dollar inefficiency or their inability to compete with the government and the oligopoly.

Like I said, the only horse I nominally have in this race is that my business would benefit from the massive increase in electricity that switching to bitcoin would require. Quantifying and making clear exactly how much electricity that really represents is the one part of this discussion that's pretty indisputable. The bottom line question is if there are things you can only get with bitcoin that make that worthwhile. I remain unconvinced, but not inconvincible.

 

[Sprout]

The bottom line question is if there are things you can only get with bitcoin that make that worthwhile. I remain unconvinced, but not inconvincible.

Simply an increase in Status via the perception of having prescience.

 

[ScroogeMcDuck]

The idea that having a fixed supply of a thing eliminates phenomenon like inflation is really a nonstarter, there's both a long history and a large body of work on the subject that I'm happy to discuss if you'd like to have a macro econ discussion... The bottom line question is if there are things you can only get with bitcoin that make that worthwhile. I remain unconvinced, but not inconvincible.

There is no physical fixed supply currency. Gold and silver experienced massive fluctuations in physical supply, such as when Spain found 150,000 tons of silver in the new world, which caused massive inflation. And even later on when the entire world was explored and the supply of physical gold was stable-ish at single digit inflation and we still had a gold standard, the supply of "gold backed" currency fluctuated wildly because banks created far more "paper gold" than actually existed. The gold supply also can easily be confiscated by governments, like FDR in 1933. Gold can also be counterfeited with tungsten-filled bars. I agree with you that the goldbugs are nuts. Besides portability and a truly fixed supply, bitcoin is much more resistant to confiscation, and bitcoin makes it much easier to prove the quality and quantity of reserves.

Hypothetically fractional reserve banks based on bitcoin could drive up the supply enough to cause inflation (temporarily, until the credit cycle bust). But there wouldn't be any inflation over the long-term, unlike fiat currency, which is designed to lose 2%/year forever and has never lasted longer than the current 50-year experiment started by Nixon. The average value of a bitcoin over each credit cycle would be a fixed fraction of the world's GDP, and the latter should continue to expand from technological advances and population growth, so you get long-term deflation instead of inflation, with a credit cycle sine function superimposed on top.

Bitcoin is far superior to both gold and fiat in every fundamental characteristic of money:
1. fungibility (a bitcoin is a bitcoin, but there are many different sizes/grades of gold, and many different limitations on USD depending on where it is stored)
2. durability (can't be inflated away by the fed or asteroid mining, and the global p2p network is immortal. Much harder to confiscate than USD or gold)
3. portability (can be sent to anyone in the world, without trusting a third party, much more quickly and cheaply than a wire transfer)
4. recognizability (can't be counterfeited)

The final characteristic, stability, is the output of a Keynesian beauty contest rather than a fundamental constant, but it is increasing over time as more people become aware of bitcoin as the superlative solution to #1-4.