Asset Values

[Blue Yonder]

From CNN article

"It's a lucrative business for Tesla -- bringing in $3.3 billion over the course of the last five years, nearly half of that in 2020 alone. The $1.6 billion in regulatory credits it received last year far outweighed Tesla's net income of $721 million -- meaning Tesla would have otherwise posted a net loss in 2020.
"These guys are losing money selling cars. They're making money selling credits. And the credits are going away," said Gordon Johnson of GLJ Research and one of the biggest bears on Tesla(TSLA) shares."

CNN that explains it.

They seem to be confusing income with profit.

 

[toeknee]

Simplified version...
Anyone can earn Bitcoin by processing Bitcoin transactions and doing the accounts/bookkeeping...this is called Bitcoin mining.
Computers compete against each other for the privilege of doing this work, by solving a pointless cryptographic puzzle. The first one to solve it gets to do the bookkeeping and is therefore paid and makes the money.
The puzzle they have to solve takes a huge amount of computing power, which uses a huge amount of electricity.

It is estimated that Bitcoin mining currently uses the same amount of electricity as a medium sized country like Switzerland or the Netherlands.

Crazy really

Be interesting to know what will happen when/if quantum computers enter the scene. In theory it could solve these puzzles instantly and devalue Bitcoin massively in seconds. I assume the puzzles are quantum safe to avoid this.

 

[Amarillo]

Bitcoin mining now consumes about as much energy as the Netherlands.

How Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble - BBC News

Could the cryptocurrency's huge electricity consumption also sink it?

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[haydnw2]

Be interesting to know what will happen when/if quantum computers enter the scene. In theory it could solve these puzzles instantly and devalue Bitcoin massively in seconds. I assume the puzzles are quantum safe to avoid this.

Ooh, that's a really interesting question. Most of the articles out there focus on whether you could use QC to break the security/encryption around BitCoin; there's less about the scenario you describe. I did find this which comments on the suggestion that Google's QC could mine all remaining BitCoin within two seconds (the total number that can ever be created is capped)! A more realistic worry seems to be that the puzzles get harder each time a block of them are solved, so the first QC to join the network could solve a block in a very short period and effectively make the next set of puzzles too difficult for the rest of the network, i.e. the classical hardware, to solve. I was able to find plenty of random websites commenting on this, but little academic attention. General consensus at the moment seems to be "QCs are too far away, and the speedups won't be as great in magnitude in reality as everyone expects on less-specialised tasks vs. those being used in high-profile QC-related press releases".

 

[willwander]

Bitcoin mining now consumes about as much energy as the Netherlands.

How Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble - BBC News

Could the cryptocurrency's huge electricity consumption also sink it?

www.bbc.co.uk

Achilles heel. Can’t really argue with that.

 

[GrumpyGranddad]

CNN that explains it.

They seem to be confusing income with profit.

The old adage:-​

Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, but cash is king for any business​

 

[willwander]

John McAfee
The stories about this guy....Legend.

John McAfee charged with fraud over cryptocurrency

The businessman is accused of promoting cryptocurrency to his followers to inflate prices.

www.bbc.co.uk