There's a lot of misunderstanding in the comments so far regarding bitcoin mining incentives. I urge you to read this thread describing the split-second load-shedding response time from the POV of one of these miners:
It also goes into the other mechanism by which they make money (being natural sellers of future energy demand contracts during times of high demand). This mechanism is similar to how other commodity markets operate with producers, consumers with steady future demand, and consumers with unpredictable short-term demand.
Our energy grids need to keep an equal demand/production at all times, and on-demand load-shedding is a valuable part of this equation. The bitcoin miners are providing a service to ERCOT and being paid for it. If there were a more "productive" source of on-demand energy usage, then it will replace the bitcoin miners, this is how markets work (of which both energy production/consumption and capitalism in general are).
This is the reality of how the texas energy grid works at present. The bitcoin miners, for lack of a (subjectively) "better" option, are filling the two needs of elastic load-shedding and predictable future demand. The first is very hard to fill, the latter can probably be fulfilled more productively with steady demand from other industries (factories, data centers, other things that run 24h per day).
One more edit: this whole equation changes COMPLETELY if we have the ability to store energy production in times of low demand to be used in future times of high demand (batteries). We don't currently have this at any sort of reasonably useful scale, we need this, and the current "market" everyone is upset about is a bandaid on top of the lack of decent storage options. For the climate folks, the anti-bitcoin folks, whoever disagrees with what I've said here: Fix the storage issue and everything gets magically better. Good luck, it's a very hard problem with very nasty environmental impacts, I'm rooting for you.
Alternatively, a better option: as a human need, maybe energy production shouldn’t _strictly_ follow market incentives and shouldn’t be _solely_ governed by supply/demand dynamics
Totally agree! But this isn't the reality we live in today and you have proposed a potentially better option with no ideas on how to achieve it. What you need to focus on is how we can grow a better grid while achieving prepaid usage levels, guaranteed usage levels, and on-demand response. These factors are what lead to a more efficient, more climate friendly, more better etc etc grid.
Saying they're "providing a service" by turning off in peak times is kind of a ridiculous phrasing. Normal consumers in normal markets don't buy at peak because peak pricing is quite expensive. Flipping the equation to paying people to not buy something and calling it a service is outrageous. It exposes the grid as something that literally cannot work on free market principles. People are right to be outraged.
This just isn't how the grid works. Texas has added more than double the amount of renewable energy than any other state grid in the last two years. These investments introduce variable production and require on-demand response to keep the demand/consumption balance steady. Normal / residential consumers do not have a steady demand, don't prepay power usage, and don't guarantee future power usage. All of these factors are what make industrial demand response valuable and necessary for the modernizing, increasingly-renewable based, power grid. ERCOT isn't perfect, I think there are areas for vast improvement, but I think your comment is a little uninformed as to how the grid currently works and will be working in the future as we increase renewable production.
I get how the grid works. You don't get the market failure.
In a normal market, consumers aren't service providers unless they happen to also sell something separate from what they're buying. They're using a service. Sellers ostensibly take a risk that demand won't be sufficient.
With the grid, that's unacceptable. So there's an absurd solution of paying customers to influence their buying behavior, and even calling them 'service providers'. In a normal market, you charge more or less to steer consumer behavior, like what they do for human customers.
In this 'market', the government is providing much of the capital and the businesses are not taking on all of the risk. And some 'customers' are necessary to make the product work.
This is not an appropriate scenario for a free market. It's actually impossible for it to function as a free market.
This point is getting missed by a lot of people I think. FTX / Alameda had a part in funding almost all solana-based projects, and almost all of these fundings involved some kind of "use FTX as your bank" fundraising stipulation. So not only were they propping up the ecosystem with projects getting funding that might not have really deserved it, but now those projects have no treasuries.
The entire solana ecosystem is just nuked now and it isn't hard to see this in on-chain activity and project/dao comm's.
edit: as a dev solana had some nice implementation details and was a step forward over some other chains in some ways. IMO it's totally DOA now, but I hope the dev community (whoever is real and not an alameda-funded "anon" dev etc) continues on in some capacity on a fork or other chain.
Coinbase adds new assets to the pro option first, establishes a market, and then adds to the retail Coinbase "buy button" app. When a user hits the retail Buy Coin button, the internal market maker fills the order against the coinbase pro's order books.
Anyone have other resources (besides the who's hiring monthly thread which is my favorite) for remote work hiring that are worth checking out? Especially not just technical roles?
I don't really want to say more because I'm worried that the creator of both of these (Richard Heart) would somehow be litigious, but please do more research, especially into how the hex network handles fees and rewards flowing back toward the creator. There are very concerning behaviors of the hex network that enrich the creator at the cost of everyone else. Pulse is doing the same, it's a playbook being followed.
And this is coming from a very pro-crypto person, non-btc maxi etc, type of person.
Not gonna lie, you kind of lost me at "would be litigious." I have quite a bit of trouble believing that's he's lurking this board here, ready to go after you?
Looks like the rewards and fees go back to stakers. Sure, there's a big quiet wallet, but that's nearly all of them.
"PSA: 1B USDt inventory replenish on Tron Network. Note this is a authorized but not issued transaction, meaning that this amount will be used as inventory for next period issuance requests and chain swaps."
The tether CTO routinely comments on these seemingly large moves because people get very worked up about them.
Why does tether seem to bring out the tinfoil theories from people that have absolutely 0 background in finance or crypto market structure or econ in general.
> Why does tether seem to bring out the tinfoil theories from people that have absolutely 0 background in finance or crypto market structure or econ in general.
Hilarious. People with backgrounds in finance are for the most part the group of people that have made an issue about this, myself included.
But more curiously, I'm not even sure what you're attempting to to convey with this comment? Do you think that a background in finance, or econ, is necessary to understand the incredibly simple business that Tether operates, and the even simpler reasons of why it is likely problematic (if not an outright fraud)?
You might be attaching some temporal qualities to the phrasing, but that's not how I read the comment. Generally, if you want to make a government investigation go away, you cooperate by demonstrating your innocence. Of course, it's the government's job to prove guilt, but usually good actors have an abundance of mitigating evidence at their disposal, and it's usually just easier to say "here's the evidence, we're not guilty".
> but usually good actors have an abundance of mitigating evidence at their disposal
You must be joking. That's not how it works when the government has you in their crosshairs.
>and it's usually just easier to say "here's the evidence, we're not guilty".
And then the government will spend years and millions of dollars trying to poke holes in that evidence of innocence.
Anyone who follows the news has seen this repeated over and over again. Various government authorities routinely engage in witch hunts with little evidence.
Maybe Mansoor Adayfi should've just provided evidence of his innocence after being shipped to Guantanamo Bay? They would have immediately released him, right? What a stupid guy he must have been that it took the government 14 years to release him.
I am talking about white collar crime, which tends to be much more black and white than terrorism. And no, the government doesn't have a history of spending millions in trying to chase frivolous cases. Has it happened? Sure. But prosecutors are graded on their closure rate which is why you see so many settlements. The last thing they want is to waste millions on a witch hunt.
You only see the bad. You say "anyone who follows the news" which means you've probably followed a handful of these...out of the millions of cases which get referred to prosecutors: the vast majority are ignored, the remainder are mostly settled, and a small amount end up in court. Government is a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless. I'm quite libertarian myself, but let's not concoct ridiculous narratives to affirm our views.
Tether is obviously the kind of business the government fundamentally doesn't like. Whether or not what they're doing violates any current laws doesn't matter, they are yet another Liberty Reserve enabling large scale money laundering.
Even in an imaginary world where Tether is a completely legitimate business not operating in violation of any existing laws, there would be no way for them to make government investigations go away within any reasonable timeframe.
It is simply ridiculous of you to suggest that we could expect the government to play fair when dealing with Tether.
> they are yet another Liberty Reserve enabling large scale money laundering.
> there would be no way for them to make government investigations go away within any reasonable timeframe.
Yes, this is usually the problem with breaking the law (such as facilitating large scale money laundering). You seem to believe this is a bug, while every other citizen views this as a feature.
People breaking the law cannot making investigations go away. And?
Sorry, I'm not interested in taking part in your weird struggle against Tether.
I am obviously not defending Tether, I do not have a single good thing to say about Tether. But unlike you seem to be, I'm not emotionally invested in what happens to Tether.
I was simply calling out the obvious bad faith argument presented by wmf. Even if Tether isn't violating any laws, the US government is going to go out of their way to get them.
>You seem to believe this is a bug, while every other citizen views this as a feature.
I have said precisely nothing that could be interpreted by a person of ordinary intelligence to suggest such a belief. This is something you have created inside your own head. I wonder why?
There's a lot of back and forth about the general idea of NFT's, why would visa do this, the usual HN pros and cons of crypto, etc, in this thread.
To the software devs on HN that might scroll past this, before you close this tab because of all the crypto stuff when you want to read about coding, hang on a sec!
There are some really really cool new user experiences being unlocked with so-called "web3" tech. Micro transactions, wallets embedded in your browser, these technologies offer so much potential for things far beyond a punk NFT or cryptokitty.
Any front-end dev I talk to in person I urge to get in contact with some of these communities and try out a consulting project or two, so I'll urge the same here. The pay rates right now are outrageous and you will get to try out some tech that might end up being useless or might end up being the next major comms layer, exciting times!
some of the above are ethereum specific, but there are always new communities popping up and out of ethereum. for example, Avalanche is ramping up their dev community funding right now with over $170m committed to the ecosystem.
You can go down the list of projects on https://coingecko.com/ and they always need devs. Every project in crypto is remote-OK ("decentralized").
I know one of the people doing https://dxdao.eth.link/ DXDao is a collective of devs that work to build decentralized applications ("Dapps"). The decentralized treasury (~$30million USD) funds proposals that anyone can make. They do weekly calls. You can just join their Keybase and start contributing and earning for your efforts. There is no CEO or hierarchy and you can work your own hours and your own pace.
Why do you care if this company wants to take on the hassle of converting the bitcoin to $ for the customer? It's an additional source of revenue for them.
> Because it's a valid answer as to why would a business not choose to do this?
Exactly.
>> It's an additional source of revenue for them.
Not all revenue is good though. If I spend $1,000,000 to get $5,000 in extra revenue, it would be a pretty bad business decision. A lot of crypto is hype, and I'm not sure there's much actual real revenue in supporting it for anything besides speculation.
I buy a house with a mortgage, I owe $1k a month or whatever to this company to pay my mortgage. If I pay with bitcoin it is a capital gains event to convert it to USD and I would owe capital gains taxes on the $1k per month or whatever my payment is.
It's the same as if I were to convert the bitcoin to dollars on my own and pay via dollars. Taxes are still paid in this scenario just as they would be if I converted the bitcoin to dollars and did whatever else with it...
I actually did a pair programming session with JBrains on TDD to enhance my skill. What he explained to me was exactly this.
You need to test something, for example you want to test how regexp works. You start writing tests with your expectations and go on.
After you are satisfied, you actually keep this in a package for reference and documentation on works the library.
https://twitter.com/ogbtc/status/1699588007664275873
It also goes into the other mechanism by which they make money (being natural sellers of future energy demand contracts during times of high demand). This mechanism is similar to how other commodity markets operate with producers, consumers with steady future demand, and consumers with unpredictable short-term demand.
Our energy grids need to keep an equal demand/production at all times, and on-demand load-shedding is a valuable part of this equation. The bitcoin miners are providing a service to ERCOT and being paid for it. If there were a more "productive" source of on-demand energy usage, then it will replace the bitcoin miners, this is how markets work (of which both energy production/consumption and capitalism in general are).
This is the reality of how the texas energy grid works at present. The bitcoin miners, for lack of a (subjectively) "better" option, are filling the two needs of elastic load-shedding and predictable future demand. The first is very hard to fill, the latter can probably be fulfilled more productively with steady demand from other industries (factories, data centers, other things that run 24h per day).
One more edit: this whole equation changes COMPLETELY if we have the ability to store energy production in times of low demand to be used in future times of high demand (batteries). We don't currently have this at any sort of reasonably useful scale, we need this, and the current "market" everyone is upset about is a bandaid on top of the lack of decent storage options. For the climate folks, the anti-bitcoin folks, whoever disagrees with what I've said here: Fix the storage issue and everything gets magically better. Good luck, it's a very hard problem with very nasty environmental impacts, I'm rooting for you.