Frankly I think Fairphone would be crazy to accept a currency whose exchange rate has changed by 1600% within less than one year.
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There is very little change we will support bitcoin anytime in the future.
But we do pursue other ways to leverage the good sides of blockchain technology.
You can learn more about it by watching this movie.
If you want to know more, you can ping @anon73900052 who is involved in this project as a member of our Value Chain team.
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There are services that you can use that basically give the vendor euros/dollars and accept Bitcoin as payment option. Steam used this and many many other services that accept Bitcoin use these. I wouldn’t know of any (bigger) companies that actually keep the Bitcoin they get from selling things. And the (fluctuating) exchange rate has no impact on these services.
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Complete project is to be found here on DevPost.
What triggered this research is in the report of this workshop we co-organised in June this year.
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While plain money already fails its purpose to facilitate the trade of good and labour since it is being largely (ab)used to generate profit without actually delivering any work, Bitcoin appears to me as the perfection of this failure.
I might be idealistic and since you use Bitcoin you probably know better, but I don’t think it goes well with the idea behind Fairphone (in particular, to make things more transparent) and personally I don’t feel like using it at all.
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Tax avoidance doesn’t seem to fit very well with the Fairphone philosophy…
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The context is not about tax avoidance, but about the downside of bitcoin as a “money-printing machine”. As @Stanzi put it [quote=“Stanzi, post:2, topic:36078”]
1st if you stay with your Bitcoins you will probably earn money
[/quote]
I rather doubt it fits with the Fairphone philosophy to invest in a currency, that - to the uneducated me - seems highly speculative as @Torsten_Romer already pointed out.
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Here’s another point of view on the energy consumption:
Not sure if it’s wishful thinking, but Andreas definitely raises some interesting points. The main argument is that the energy used for Bitcoin mining can be used to make the demand more consistent, thus stabilizing the energy supply and also possibly incentivizing the creation of new (and thus in most cases renewable) power plants.
Also, energy (especially coal) in China has quite a bad image, but actually coal based power plants in China are much cleaner than coal in the US:
Quote:
[China] is on track to overdeliver on the emissions reduction commitments it put forward under the Paris climate agreement, and making coal cleaner is an integral part of the process.
(I still think divesting from fossil fuels is badly needed, but clean modern coal plants are still better than old coal plants.)
You mean someone has figured out how to burn coal without producing CO2?
Oh, no, they haven’t.
Clean coal is a lie.
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Read again what I wrote. I never said coal is clean. I said coal in China is much cleaner than coal in the US.
Furthermore, even the article says that from an ecological perspective it would be best to turn off all coal power plants immediately. But unfortunately that’s not how economy works. However, by looking at the development of renewables in China at the moment, that will probably happen much sooner than in the US.
(A fair Fairphone is also a lie. A fairer Fairphone however is what we all paid for.)
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Technically that may be true, but you are kind of comparing apples and oranges.
“Clean coal” is not just a lie, because it’s not clean, but because it’s not nearly as clean as existing clean energy (and not all that much cleaner than regular coal).
“Fair-phone” is not so much a lie as it is the fairest phone that exists.
No, I compared modern coal power plants to old coal power plants. I did not compare coal to other forms of energy.
The fairphone is a fairer phone than most other phones.
China’s coal power plants are cleaner than most other coal power plants.
Don’t take that as an endorsement of coal, that was definitely not my intent. I’m very much in favor of renewable energy and think that we should divest from fossil fuels as much as possible, and as fast as possible. All I was trying to say with that article is that there is a huge difference in coal power plants that are 60 years old, and modern coal power plants.
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Good summary of the discourse about sustainability of Bitcoin:
This is simply untrue. Bitcoin uses far, far, far more energy then cash, and likely gold as well. Idk, article didn’t give numbers for how much energy gold production costs, but I can prove it for cash.
Here’s the articles error…
Bitcoin mining will consume 8.27 terawatt hours this year. … [cash production consumes] 11 terawatt hours of energy per year.
While this is true, it’s disingenuous as all get out to say when arguing bitcoin uses less energy, as these numbers actually prove the opposite. There is 70-80 trillion worth of US dollars on the planet in the form of paper moneys. There are around a quarter trillion bitcoins in existence. So, assuming the numbers from this article are correct for power consumption–I have no reason to doubt them–bitcoin has produced, like, one two hundred and eightyth the amount of currency, with three quarters the power of the global cash supply. They “forgot” to scale their numbers…
Haha doesn’t surprise me this info comes from Bloomburg–he’s a very tricky guy. I agree with a lot of what he says, but his actions rarely bare that out his words. I also am probably more aware of his actions then most of yall, as he governs a state that’s ninety miles north of me… He’s an real jerk for the horrid forms of gentrification he presided over in NYC too…
Oh, and if you haven’t figured it out yet, vibe and trx are pump and dumps–you can make a lot buying and selling quickly with the trends daily.
Haha, and to debunk myself a little now, what I just said is sort of disingenuous too. This article was ONLY talking about bitcoin. Other coins–such as ripple–use far less energy to complete transactions then bitcoins original blockchain. I have no idea how much energy they do use, and it seems unlikely that all crypto put together is more efficient, but certain coins are certainly more efficient.
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Finally someone I trust explains this whole cyptocurrency thing to me:
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I think that calls for an 
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As there was some discussion about bitcoin and the energy demand of sourcing this cryptocurrency, I thought, it might be of interest to some, that there’s a new study published a few days ago on this topic in the journal nature sustainability:
Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C
Admittedly I haven’t read this study yet, as I found it via a daily newspaper, that cited the study saying, that the energy demand for bitcoin for the first half of this year nearly equals the energy consumption of Denmark for a whole year (30.1 Million kWh vs. 31.4).
The site Digiconomist (cited in the newspaper-article as well) shows a huge increase in energy consumption for bitcoin in 2018.
This article has some quite interesting numbers and comparisons as well.
Judging from this: At least bitcoin is not the way to go.
As the newspaper also reports, the reason for this is “bitcoin” using an outdated technology (proof-of-work-algorithm) while other cryptocurrencies using proof-of stake-algorithm or others are more energy-efficient.
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