https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-2Q23-Earnings-Press... IBM is getting killed in infrastructure, their margins look to be growing but losing ~15% of their revenue y/y. This seems like them just gouging the last of the customers who are either unwilling or unable to leave.
for context during the same period AWS grew 12% y/y.
I often wonder is AWS success due to paying top dollar to staff where as IBM seems to have gone down the cost cutting route and low salaries. I'm sure that isn't the only reason, but IBM's fall from the top has been pretty drastic over the last 30 years.
I guess it also could just be due to companies eventually get too big and bloated which causes them to innovate slower.
>I often wonder is AWS success due to paying top dollar to staff where as IBM seems to have gone down the cost cutting route and low salaries.
I think that's almost certain. Even if IBM finds and rewards the rockstars they have and promotes them quickly and gives them special treatment, i'm guessing a lot of them would prefer to work at Amazon or Google. Not only would they make good money, most of their coworkers would be of higher quality as well.
I bet IBM beats AWS handily on work-life balance, pressure from management, and most of the metrics of work satisfaction other than compensation and maybe office facilities
IBM probably doesn’t use Chime for meetings, either.
I always assumed a good chunk of developers derive satisfaction from either making software that is useful and used, or compensation. I don't see how IBM wins on either of those fronts.
I suppose for a narrow group of people might prefer IBM, but certainly not the majority of talent.
AWS is also charging a premium for the DDR5 hardware they just launched. The m6 family was the same price as the m5 equivalents. The m7 series is 5% more expensive on Intel, and while the AMD machines used to be 10% cheaper than Intel, they’re now 20% more expensive.
Most coiners conveniently ignore block reward when calculating the cost of a transaction - that's your missing factor. Consider that the only reason you need to secure the blockchain is because it is mutable, if it were immutable it would be sufficient to simply publish it with a known hash. Ergo, 100% of the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network is attributable to transaction processing and therefore can be quantized into and proportionally assigned to transactions.
The value of the block reward is proportional to the price of bitcoin, and this block reward determines the ceiling of the consumption of resources in mining. The floor is determined by prisoners dilemma and so likely approaches the ceiling at the limit.
So yes, the transaction cost does scale with consumption of resources, albeit in a tail-wagging-the-dog kind of way, because the price of the block reward changes with price allowing more resources to be consumed.
Currently the actual cost of a Bitcoin transaction is $2.44 in direct costs + (6.25 * 41000)/2750 = $93 in indirect costs, so right around $95.44 - and that's using I believe the maximum possible transactions per block, the reality is it's more expensive still.
Move over Bank of America, there's a new king in town.
You can do 1+ million lightning network transactions that will settle as 1 transaction on the BTC blockchain, so ~$93/1,000,000? Sounds amazingly cheap for uncensorable transactions.
ESG people are trying to solve something that is already solved. POW is here to stay and will scale tremendously well as we all move to layer 2.
As I mentioned upthread I can't possibly disagree more. PoW is designed specifically not to scale. The higher the price the more it wastes. It's an embarrassingly poor technology.
You completely synthesized $93/1000000 obviously, and as we discussed it would take 75 years to open a channel for everyone alive today and $300,000,000,000.
Sorry, that's not how it works. The network adapts the difficulty to target 1 new block every 10 minutes.
More mining → higher difficulty → higher electricity usage per block.
The transaction costs paid are independent of difficulty or number of miners. Transaction cost depends on the demand. A block has a limited size in bytes. If more people want to send transactions than there is room in the current block, the miner that mines that block will include the transactions that include the highest fee.
When sending a transaction, you can choose that fee. Higher fee → higher chance of being included. Bitcoin clients will usually calculate a reasonable fee for you, based on the demand.
Miners don't set the transaction cost, they can only maximize fee revenue by picking the highest fee transactions at that time in the mempool. So, if it becomes unprofitable or not profitable enough for the taste of the miner, hashrate will go down, which will lead to a difficulty adjustment, which means overall electricity usage per transaction goes down.
> it doesn't include things that don't have acute tech-driven inflation (housing/education/healthcare
80 years ago the President of the USA suffered from polio. A vaccine costs about $1 now.
Education at primary/secondary level is mainly salary, buildings, land, so tracks well with inflation.
As locations concentrate, attractive land increases in value. Land in the middle of nowhere decreases in value if population is stable (but of course population has increased too)
most people globally do hold most of their savings in cash, many people are unbanked and physical currency is the only way they have to preserve wealth.
Savings, yes. But those same demographics also save very little, and spend most of their income almost immediately with no opportunity for it to inflate.
Since debts/credits are made in nominal terms debtors are benefited by inflation, and creditors are benefited by deflation.
Example: in 2021 I borrow $100, with an agreement to pay back $105 in 2022. If inflation over that year is +10% (or any amount of inflation > 5%), then I benefit because the real value of what I pay back is only worth $105 * (1-0.1) = $94.5 in constant 2021 dollars.
If on the other hand, there is deflation (or any amount of inflation < 5%), I lose because the real value of what I pay back is higher than what I received. E.g. if there is 10% deflation, then the amount I have to pay back is now worth $105 * (1+0.1) = $115.50 in constant 2021 dollars.
Sorry you're absolutely right -- typo honest, not me brainfarting.
Inflation whittles away at your debt, which is why inflation is good for the average person who owns very little cash and has lots of debt (i.e. someone with a mortgage) - assuming that wages keep up with inflation so the cost of the weekly shop is still x% of the weekly pay slip.
Of course high interest rates offset that somewhat, but if interest rates are around inflation level, for those with debt (ie young people who haven't benefited from inheritence a lot) it's a good thing.
sure, if you think the US government is united against bitcoin and willing to step on the civil liberties afforded the ~30 million US citizens who own it.
but.... I really don't think either of those things is true. You should talk to people in the state dept or DoD and pay less attention to FED/Treasury. The current USD global reserve status quo isn't always great for the US gov.
so you're saying a black swan event might affect the price? gee well Im glad that doesn't currently happen with USD, CNY, JPY....
you can also use bitcoin like a physical bearer asset (gold bullion) by using things like https://opendime.com/ so even if the network was 100% down transactions could still happen IRL. You'd just be exchanging a hidden private key that can move UTXO's on the blockchain.
considering that I'd say bitcoin is much more anti-fragile than a bank statement, in most of the natural disasters you're talking about im not so sure banks will be letting you withdraw any significant amount of $
anyone throwing those critics at bitcoin needs to provide criteria for when their critic is no longer valid.
They need to provide:
- vol metric thresholds
- price targets
- adoption %
- etc...
We've had over 10 years of shifting the goalposts with bitcoin. At this point it's starting to sound like denial. Every meaningful metric has continued to improve in bitcoins favor yet we keep hearing the same critics.
for context during the same period AWS grew 12% y/y.