Bitcoin vs Gold: The Great Debate with Michael Saylor and Frank Giustra

Well I wouldn’t presume that just because its another cybercoin project that it had much of anything in common with the goings on here. Its an issue we’ll have to deal with in the coming decade so hopefully a solution presents itself idk

I imagine the banking system adds electricity for individual branches and ATM’s which are everywhere. Look around and see how many little banks you see in your town. We have 4-5 new ones in the last 2 years in a small town (40,000). There is a lot of propaganda against Bitcoin lately on the energy issue. Do these people want to destroy crypto in general or are they trying to pump their own coins?

Also a high percentage of the power miners use is renewable. Is that also a problem?

I’d bet you could run a dozen diebolds on the same wattage as one of newest high-end bitcoin asics, renewable energy isn’t the problem
New ATMs are energy efficient, new asics energy consumption is on par with like an air conditioner (with an indefinite duty cycle that is), not much but it isn’t cooling the air. Its constantly running calculations, almost none (by sheer comparison for 10+ TH/s) will be successful. It’s a cosmetic problem.

Banking is inefficient in general even more so than PoW. I don’t worship efficiency like a God as some technocrats do. I know corporations like efficiency and productivity since they can pay workers less. It’s kinda funny that the same political spectrum wants higher wages, but efficiency in power. A real centralized socialist dictatorship (modern technocracy) would want efficiency in everything. It’s also funny that technocrats, supposedly believers in science and technology, don’t care that progress has made things more efficient and inefficiency is only a temporary state of things. They must control and manage, things totalitarian states want to do.

But since this is leading to off topic subjects I’ll leave it here and say that it is temporary and innovation will happen in time. Mining uses less electricity than banking unless someone produces another graph that shows otherwise. If Bitcoin became the de facto banking standard and people did their own banking the power savings would be enormous. I wouldn’t support that mainly because it saves power, but because people would take control over more of their own lives and not rely on someone else to do it for them.

I did mention efficiency in context but that wasn’t the point. The idea I briefly described would effectively double the power usage while adding no more security but so that half of it all is at least being payed forward so hopefully they’ll shrug and say “thats fair”

Yes. That’s fine. It sounded like you didn’t care if it was renewable or not and it had to be efficient or else. I’ve been reading a lot of vitriol about PoW and Bitcoin lately. I don’t even own hardly any. PoW may be what kills Bitcoin when Ethereum is upgraded and Zcash probably moves to PoS. If it uses a lot of energy and it is slow it will be harder to convince people to keep using it.

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(Random idea or maybe just food for thought: what if the Sprout pool were forked to that gpu friendly work, one way, pre-zcash chain, then maybe the remained value and gpu mining can still be recovered idk, random like I said)

I’m sorry it can be a little out of topic but while checking information about Bitcoin and gold I came across with “gold tokenization”:

I’ve been thinking I’ve heard everything already about blockchain technologies, but this blowing my head. Is it gold recorded on blockchain? It’s how? You’d already opened my eyes before but can anyone explain this and what impact it ll have?

Blockchains are like a series of uneditable (usually) spreadsheets or that each block is like a new page of it anyways and you’d record gold quanties there like anything else, by serializing and entering them and will make exchanging and tracking everyones gold credit incredibly easy. The record is immutable but the gold isn’t and doesn’t necessarily affect the record becayse they’re of two different worlds. The big blockchain freakout that I recall was a few years ago when the idea of tokenizing all of existence seemed like a better idea than it does now.

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Why tokenize gold? Seems like a good way to get some headlines but not as good as Bitcoin (or Zcash) as a store if value because the supply is not fixed. Sure, it’s costly to mine gold and gold is rare in comparison to many other metals but they are constantly mining more. So even though you tokenize an underlying asset like gold, or platinum, or whatever it still suffers the same supply problems as the underlying asset, ie: not a fixed amount of 21M. And it’s inevitably going to be priced similar to real market rates for gold because nobody is going to want to pay a premium for a token when they could just hold the real thing for less.

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Not sure if you guys have seen … I saw the Perth Mint has their own ERC20 token supposedly backed by their holdings. You can redeem your tokens for physical gold as well. Never used the service myself but thought it was neat.

https://www.pmgt.io/

Well its not unlike silver certificates and dollars in general, they were redeemable for what backed them until they weren’t so the door swings both ways. Traders aren’t interested in the underlying value anyways which is who those tokens are for.

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Tweets like this are why I have lost all respect for this guy.

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If sum up what was written above, gold tokenization is not popular among investors and you don"t see sense in such kind of asset?
BTW thank you for replies

No they’ll probably love it. Its just that Zcash is about something different, its backed by science and you redeem it everytime you use it, ‘don’t trust but verify’ is axiomatic. If you asked these same questions somewhere else you might receive a totally different set of responses.

(Another thought; we do it with all the deprecated pools and if it supported UAs then maybe might more easily support all the different, subsequently added addy formats and since the txs are limited to only sending to mainchain then that may even be overkill since the mainchain will support that.) (Then maybe that way the pool lifetime is arbitrary since the value could be always be recovered (if at all) through the turnstile)

very interesting post here given the news today with Elons tweet. Yes, I have also been giving this some thought. Im curious to hear what yall think about what Elon said today in regards to Bitcoin and energy consumption. When/if Zcash switches to POS how much electricity will it consume?

Now Elon says he is working with Doge devs to increase transaction efficiency. I thought they weren’t working on it anymore?. Also, why not use Ethereum which will be PoS well before Doge could ever do it. He and Doge are both a joke.

I assume ZEC will move towards PoS once ETH has done it safely and Halo 2 and maybe one more upgrade after, which hopefully includes recursive proofs, is finished. Vitalik can advise the ECC how to do it more efficiently since the ECC I assume is also giving the ETH team their research from the projects the ETH Foundation funded.

There is a possibility that ZEC could displace BTC after all of this is completed. If they can do it all before the BTC halving in 2024 they would be in a great position. The same emission with privacy and much greater speed and lower fees, greener, but with a bit higher inflation.

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… smh

bitcoin team baby