Does anyone know of any macos transcription apps that allow you to do speech to text live? Eg, the text outputs as you are talking? Older tech like the macos dictation as well as dragon does this, but seems like theres nothing available that uses the new, better models.
Wow, when I was a kid back in the early 2000s, howstuffworks was my favorite website. I bet I read every article on how various things work (there were many hundreds).
I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind. I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing things to this website.
Back then, the site was clean and had very good clean and expertly written explanations of how various mechanical, everyday and scientific equipment worked. Nowadays that website is not the same, seems riddled with SEO spam and fluff articles like a content mill.
Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, thank you for all your contributions to my (and likely others) life
Same story for me. I got into electronics as a kid, and he had articles on how components such as the capacitor worked[1]. It opened up a whole new world for me. Sad news to hear.
I had the same experience, as I’m sure many others did. It’s easy to forget now how much rarer it was to find high quality and engaging educational content on the internet back then. Howstuffworks got me interested in so many different things, and exploring the articles was a lovely way to spend the time as a kid.
And there needs to be someone willing to pay for the water more than the electricity used, transport and capital and operational cost. And such price needs to be lower than alternatives. No one is going to build such an infrastructure for charity, or overpay for water "because it helps balance the grid".
The thing with miners is also that they are highly portable. The moment it's banned, heavily taxed or simply better uses for electricity out-competed it, they will pack them on shipping containers and off they go, so capital risk is lower.
The fact that cryptocurrency users are willing to subsidize production and deployment of such a flexible and portable load balancers is an opportunity, irrespective what one thinks of cryptocurrencies, but most minds are too narrow to go over "uses electricity == bad" narrative.
Is this even an issue? Presumably without a steer by wire system a human would not be able to turn the wheel this fast. Also the delay looks longer than it actually is because of the slow-mo. Say this is playing at 25% speed and it is delayed by 1/2 a second, that means at regular speed the delay is only 125ms.
1/8 of a second is terribly slow. Delays like that fuck up your perception/feedback loop. If you put on headphones, and listen to your own speech delayed by that amount of time, you can hardly speak (delayed auditory feedback). If you have to control a device that delays that much, you're prone to overreacting, and then entering a run-away correction cycle, which isn't nice in a heavy, fast moving machine.
Yeah, it's really not great. To be fair, though, in the dialup days, many of us learned to cope with that ping while still playing Quake 2 or whatever. You can adapt, it just takes a while, and you learn to lead your target. You can make similar adaptations to vehicle control (like playing a racing game on a really laggy old-school plasma TV), but it's not pleasant.
I really wouldn't want highway drivers in that monster truck to have any barriers to their reactions, especially with its nontraditional crumple zone :(
Power assist lets you turn a wheel with one finger at any ratio the manufacturer chooses... at most you'll get a lag in the assist but not in the mechanical movement (and I'd be amazed if that is perceptible with electric assist let alone hydraulic)
There isn't really any excuse for this.
It's hardly a performance car so perhaps it's not a big issue, but it really should not the there and should be fixed.
Because the steering ratio is variable, the movement shown in the video is about the equivalent of two full turns of a normal steering wheel. I tend to agree with the parent, it'd be hard for a human to equal this performance.
You know, I rewatched the video, and you convinced me.
There's not actually THAT much latency (delay between input and response). There IS some acceleration curve being applied (X degrees of input = X^Y degrees of steering, buffered over time), but that's totally different. It's probably safer this way vs suddenly jerking the actual wheels back and forth.
Steering backlash is always non-zero but for a new vehicle should be imperceptible. But that isn't a direct analogy for lag. With backlash, once you've taken it up it's gone. Any continued turn in the same direction translates to wheel movement without delay.
125ms is...horrendous. Electronic steering controls are part of my day job and usually you're going for about 5ms delay. If you're more than 10ms, it's a problem.
I agree with your observation, although it seems unpopular at the moment. It’s clear the video is slowed down and seeing how his hands respond at the end of his action, it looks like he’s throwing the wheel very quickly.
The tires start moving immediately, so it looks more like a limit in how quickly they change direction. It appears laggy because they don’t finish the movement when he does. They do respond right away when he shifts his arms a little in the middle of the video.
Leaving stuff on when you are away is completely different than how bitcoin mining demand response works.
Firstly, at regular electricity prices, bitcoin mining is profitable and it is profitable for the utility to run renewables (which in turn means it is/was profitable to build renewables). When there is substantial demand or low supply, then it is profitable for the utility to pay the bitcoin miners to turn off, because the alternative to import power is more expensive. This in turn makes your electricity cheaper. In addition, the additional steady state demand for power allows for more renewables to be built, which further increases the supply during low supply periods. Your AC does not automatically turn off when this happens.
I am one of those enthusiasts making "strange logic" claims. I've been making this claim well before others but I feel that I keep getting downvoted on them off of people's emotion rather than rational logic.
The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources has altered the environmental impact of additional electricity consumption. Where once any increase in consumption was considered harmful due to its reliance on fossil fuels, the rise of renewables introduces scenarios where the marginal environmental cost of electricity can be beneficial if the demand is flexible.
Bitcoin mining has the potential to act as a load balancer for the electricity grid. By increasing its energy consumption during periods when renewable energy production exceeds demand, and reducing consumption during peak demand periods, Bitcoin mining could help stabilize the grid and make renewable energy generation more economically viable.
Bitcoin mining's demand for electricity is unique in that it is primarily cost-driven. Renewable energy generation capacity is particularly volatile. Bitcoin mining power usage can be flexible and responsive to the availability and cost of electricity.
The ability of Bitcoin mining to consume excess renewable energy when it's available (and potentially at low or negative prices) could improve the financial viability of renewable energy projects by increasing the floor price these new projects can sell electricity at. This can encourage the development of additional renewable energy capacity by providing a reliable demand for their output during otherwise unprofitable periods.
To understand why people don't find this compelling (and are sick of hearing it), you probably need to first understand that people consider Bitcoin's profitability a false economy.
In other words: your scenario is identical to GP's except that someone is paying you to run your AC while you aren't at home, rather than just doing it because you can. The logical question is then to ask why they're paying you to run your AC, and that is the uncompelling part: it's not clear that we should be paying people to burn energy to crack hashes.
People’d find it outrageous if beanie baby collectors were sacrificing 2% of US food production on altars to their beanie babies, because doing so made the beanie babies more valuable to other collectors. Even if some of the collectors were growing their own food for the purpose, et c, et c—it’d still bother a lot of people. Maybe most people.
> it's not clear that we should be paying people to burn energy to crack hashes.
In particular when we artificially increase the energy require to crack said hashes. If hash-cracking was, for instance, bid out on a competitive marketplace[0] instead of limited by difficulty bitcoin would need far less power to perform its 'role' as a 'currency'.
[0]Want to mine a block? Bid for the mining rights (in USD or BTC).
The carbon fee would lower and possibly sometimes completely remove the incentive to mine Bitcoin on a grid that is coincidentally emitting CO2, when the current electricity generation mix has a large share of fossil generation.
As most (if not all) uses of electricity, Bitcoin mining is sensitive to the electricity price. Introducing a a carbon tax / carbon dividend, doesn't magically make any particular use of electricity economically unviable all of the time. It just pushes the cost equilibria to different values.
Money is just another technology. As a technology it has existed in various forms over thousands of years.
Technologies see continual innovation and change, with various actors and various motives influencing their use, function, reach.
Governments of various forms are our current best method- govern-ance- for managing human-scale assets, resources, and technologies with collective purpose and implication.
Moneys- currencies- as a technology are one of those human assets owned and managed by governments, like land, and other resources. There are over 200 distinct currencies in the world.
The mechanism for this management is based on the notion of a ledger- the record of balances, of debts, of interest, and the creation- inflation- of money supply in the context of that management.
Most governments are poor at this management when measured by how well their implementation of this technology that is money serves the needs of most of their populations.
Governments themselves- both "democratic" and non- in their current form are fragile and vulnerable, with the powers of governments utilized against portions of theirs and other populations.
BTC is a technology, a cryptographically-secured system of record- a ledger- that can be used as a money. It is not under the control of an existing government.
By collective agreement of its participants, a complex balance of users playing different roles with different incentives and risks, the rate of creation of assets recorded there is managed to a low level of inflation. As such, as a technology utilized for money, it is a stable "store of value" in contrast to the moneys supplied by literally every government.
The ledger, the system of record can be preserved- secured- if and only if it is too expensive for attackers to change it. The turning of energy into hash minting is the security for that system of record.
That's it.
Adopting a mindset where the above argument takes hold involves a kind of leap of faith. It is a belief. Sure, a religion. The game theory/mechanism design behind BTC is a true innovation, the first demonstrated solution to the Byzantine Generals problem.
There is an argument- won't people stop believing in it?
Maybe? I would suggest evaluating that argument against the lifespans of other innovative beliefs.
Is it something that comes and goes, or is it like the eye, an invention of evolution that solves a specific problem and appears distinctly and repeatedly in different organisms once they hit certain levels of complexity.
One thing I don't get about the "store of value" belief in Bitcoin is: why specifically this chain? It has only network effects going for it. Mindshare is a fickle thing.
It was first, and first mover advantage is significant, which has turned into network effects and inertia, and now with the ETF recognition has gained "official" validation;
Anti-inflation is one of its core design principles, is the basis for store of value, and commitment to it has remained solid;
After ETH PoS changes it remains the only proof of work chain. PoS has belief failure modes that can lead to collapse of value. PoW-based value by definition is secured by the cost of the work. It is a financial equation- a ledger can be maintained at the underlying cost of recoverable energy- not a political/fashionable one.
Mindshare can be fickle, and if purely based on fashion, if there is no inertia and there are adjacent equivalents, value can be lost quickly. With BTC there is inertia, because at a deeper level there are no adjacent equivalents. BTC continues to occupy a unique niche in the design space of these artifacts/assets.
Sure as long as people believe in Bitcoin it will keep existing. Like other currencies.
I can see the inertia argument. Why switch when it works. I still don't see the store of value argument when Bitcoin requires such exorbitant amounts of energy to keep up. That's a tax on the value. "Look how much energy it's using, it must be worth a lot!"
Yeah, the store of value idea is pretty abstract and most people are completely unfamiliar with the various functional aspects that make money in general a store of value, or, rather, a lack of store of value, given the pervasive practice of currency inflation practiced by every central bank.
People can wrap their heads around there being "value" in an "asset" because it has "revenue streams" associated with it- that's what property and being a landlord is about. You can charge rent, so your property has value. That is very familiar because everyone either owns property or rents property. And then they look at BTC and are like- there are no revenue streams, any "value" is just made up.
Gold, a scarce/low supply inflation asset, and former money, is a good mental model for BTC, but it is completely unfamiliar to most folks, and not even the notion of metal coin being intrinsically valuable applies in any economy any more. In fact if anyone thinks about gold, they probably think people who put value into it are deluded.
People also can understand different currencies having different relative values, some being stronger, some being weaker. Why that is is generally a complete mystery. People think of strong currencies coming from "strong" countries with "strong" economies and weak currencies coming from "weak" countries with "weak" economies, where strong and weak roughly correspond to military capability and economic industrial capacity and diversity.
There is some truth in that mental model, but since BTC is not really "used' as a currency, it doesn't get to be slotted in to the currency mental map.
The actual function that BTC is starting to serve and that is critical to the functioning of all modern economic entities, whether governments or private enterprises, the notion of a "financial settlement layer", is completely unfamiliar. So yeah. It is hard to get traction when the machine is mysterious, to abuse a metaphor a bit.
The unnecessary energy waste argument though is an interesting one, eg where BTC is wasteful like just running your A/C unnecessarily or whatever. The most relevant comparison is looking at something called "home idle load" which in the US is basically the background appliance energy use. BTC total electricity use is in fact a tiny fraction of home idle load, which people don't really get exercised about and many when buying new appliances pay little or no attention to.
If one doesn't see the purpose for the use of BTC energy- which again is an unfamiliar concept of the need for "security" for a system of record- people do see the purpose for the wasted home load energy. They need home appliances, they just wish they were more efficient. That BTC mining becoming more efficient would not result in the network using less energy, in fact, the opposite would occur- this is also strange.
Anyway- I agree with you, it is a set of completely novel concepts that interoperate in ways that are very different from existing related and familiar mental models.
That is why to my mind the only way "in" to arriving at an understanding is to look at money- all moneys- as technology, as technical machines that are different implementations of accounting rules.
BTC is a "store of value" "secured" by burning energy because it is an asset system of record, a ledger, that uniquely for the first time in human history cannot be changed either directly or indirectly (e.g. by inflation) by a political actor who "governs" it. The "value" of a BTC is mathematically related to the cost of energy, and to the demand for use of that sort of ledger. What we have seen is that there is significant and growing demand for this sort of ledger, a ledger that is independent of the political processes that exist in every government, and were some problem with BTC itself to emerge, there are now different implementations of the idea that this demand would shift onto. But most of the brains that have the capacity to study and find such problems in BTC's implementation have done so and have not yet found them, so its value is really as the best known solution to a problem that we didn't know we had, and now we do.
Not sure if that makes sense. Thanks for the engagement.
I don't like the comparison to gold, because gold just sits there. It's a stable element. Bitcoin needs a variable amount of watts for upkeep. Who is paying for those watts and why?
If we're talking about the value of a currency, we're talking about what we can get in exchange for it. And when we talk about the store of value, it's what we can get in the future. With Bitcoin, we know it must burn energy, so we can get something only less that energy. The currency may get more "believable" due to the burning, when you look at sacrifice as commitment. But what are they committing to? Burning more in the future, because they now have coins they want to keep their value?
The funny thing is that most people trade in virtual Bitcoin they don't control. Because it's more comfortable and the ledger doesn't support the volume. So they need a government to assert their claim on their coins. I guess one can't even get Bitcoin from their ETF and needs to round-trip to some other currency.
The market is settling out of chain, because it's cheaper.
Thanks for the engagement. Not sure if you are asking rhetorical questions to make a point about why BTC seems pointless. I don't necessarily disagree, it's speculative. But for the sake of clarity will say that I think there is a real innovation in BTC and those questions, rhetorical or not, do slightly miss the framing of the innovation.
Will try it this way. The store of value is a derivative result of the actual innovation, which is- BTC for the first time is a computationally secure mechanism that provides a system of record, the contents of which are somewhat resistant to political attack and manipulation.
A system of record is the basis on which rule of law exists, the basis for accounting and financial transactions, the basis for property, etc. Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake vs others as the "costs" for maintaining those systems of record, are experiments, empirical discovery processes to see which one(s) over what timeframe hold water.
Specifically to the points:
> BTC vs Gold
Yes. BTC is a technology that has wider use cases than gold. Store of value is just one use case.
> Who is paying for those watts and why?
Right now, people who want to make money, it is economically viable to turn stranded energy into "mining". Who is benefiting from the use of the ledger for store of value and medium of exchange? Often, not always, elements considered criminal by most governments as well as people whose legitimate needs are not being met by their governments.
> store of value...we can get something only less that energy
This is where I think the disconnect between the mechanism that BTC is, and these "rhetorical" questions, is greatest. BTC is a system of record platform. We have lots of other ones. All systems of record require upkeep. They are out there, they are expensive, we don't think about them. They are just people's jobs. Every county has a system for property and title maintenance. Every single financial institution has a ledger- many ledgers. etc.
Many of these ledgers are private. Oracle, the database company, originally became a big business on being the underlying mechanism for millions of private systems of record around the world. In every one of those ledgers, there is a DBA who can do UPDATE X SET VALUE = Y WHERE KEY = Z and often does- certainly "legitimately" governed by the various policies and protections and business rules and so forth that apply to the ledger. But sometimes those UPDATE SQL statements are "illegitimate" and those often occur when the political and governance mechanisms in the business or in the country are breaking down.
There isn't any of that SQL manipulation in BTC. Storing asset holdings is again, just one use case. Attestations, like on off-chain ownership, are another.
And to be sure:
> The market is settling out of chain, because it's cheaper
Absolutely- or rather, there is a lot of implicit cost hiding and inertial convenience in existing systems, as one would expect. And they work "well enough" in a "worse is better" sense. BTC may be too good, too "perfect", too expensive, as a system of record, long term. We'll see.
My questions are not rhethorical in the sense that I do wonder what makes people think Bitcoin represents something useful.
At the same time I have a hard time accepting that people could see use in the inherent waste of energy. And it irks me when it's framed as use of "stranded energy". Because that's far from reality.
I've heard two voices so which is it to you? Is Bitcoin useful now and worth the lost energy? Or is it an experiment of an interesting tech gone too far?
I think it's here to stay. I buy the thesis that money is a technology, and BTC is a step in that evolution. Whether I think BTC is "worth the lost energy" is not really a useful question in that larger context. It is a technology that cannot be legislated or controlled to the point of shutdown, even by/in China. As a technology it has unique use cases, so even in the face of political pressure it will just shift and move and crop up in new contexts. It is a virus we are stuck with now. It can't be unmade.
Relative to other blockchains, like PoS ETH, etc- the question of whether BTC is "worth the lost energy" does have meaning. I think when one looks at the full spectrum of use and failure cases, the "lost" energy is an important part of the value proposition that BTC as technology offers. I don't see ETH or other PoS replacing it. Instead they are kind of complementary.
As a technology, like all technologies, BTC certainly has costs and externalities. Money as a technology is as important, say, as transportation technologies. So look at cars. Cars powered by internal gas-fueled combustion engines could definitely fit into the classification of "experiment of an interesting tech gone too far" given the incredible waste, ecological and sociological damage, and climate impact car-based travel and -based societies incur that, for instance, are lessened in mass transit-based societies. But we are stuck with cars, their global use continues to grow, and we're adapting, introducing and scaling electric, more efficient materials for roads and the vehicles themselves, safer automated driving, etc.
There is no going backwards. BTC and its ilk are part of the future, for both good and ill, IMO.
Specifically as a store of value, I do think BTC has a bright future. I have a small portion of my net worth in BTC, small because there are still non-nil risk and failure cases that could impact it specifically, and diversity across risks is important. It is also important to understand what one is getting oneself into in terms of one's investments. It is an "active" investment, not "passive." People who are looking for passive-like benefits should not look for them from anything in the "crypto" space.
Well thanks for answering! I still can't see the "value proposition". It feels weird when Bitcoin's properties are posed as sort of a natural law. Like when people compare it to the rareness of gold. Even though it's a cultural artifact!
One thing I'm wondering: did you acquire actual Bitcoin, or title to it?
Re: cultural artifact- yes, it is, but- if you are familiar with "mechanism design"- BTC is a game that incentivizes and rewards narrow-only adherence to the rules that are in fact established by culture/behavior and seemingly could be easily changed- but won't be, because the incentives are all aligned against change. This is kind of how "inertia" in the sense from earlier in the conversation comes about. And that the game was structured this way by the author "Satoshi" I think, again, is a genius-level innovation. The first solution to the Byzantine Generals problem. Now we have a lot of them but that one was first.
In the crypto space there is data to quantify the cost of divergence. People who want to just get off the train- fine- there are others willing to play/drive.
Re: actual BTC vs title- the BTC I count is that which I only have title to, e.g. held by a custodian. Yes, not your keys, not your coins- but as both a technologist who has had to manage- and has lost data- and as someone also with a background in the financial space- custodianship is one of those essential cultural/behavioral features- it only works if people follow certain rules, and those who do not are punished. My custodians have been around for a while and are I believe properly incentivized. As such they will be better suited to asset management than I am, as a single point of failure. Once more mature multisig/social auth workflows are worked out I will probably move to those. I am lucky to have partners who can play parts in those.
I'm not arguing whether the use of electricity is compelling or not.
I'm arguing that the unique energy demand characteristics of bitcoin mining allow it to support building renewable energy projects and balance electricity costs and thus it has effective positive contribution to the environment.
Whether it's used to mine bitcoins or cool a house is irrelevant, except that the demand for cooling a house is location and time sensitive, whereas bitcoin mining is cost sensitive. This flexible consumption gives it unique properties that support deployment of renewables.
Please explain what you mean by "false economy". Is the economy for skins in a game you don't care about "false" because you don't like that game?
> except that the demand for cooling a house is location and time sensitive
Not if someone paid me to do it. That's the point. If there was money in hauling ACs around the US and running them on the cheapest electricity the local market could provide, we'd have exactly the same false economy.
(Besides: the GP points out that Bitcoin appears to be sufficiently profitable on NYC electricity prices, which are not cheap. They also appear to be sufficiently profitable on "retiring coal plant" prices[1], which undermines any kind of unique incentivization of renewals argument.)
> Not if someone paid me to do it. That's the point. If there was money in hauling ACs around the US and running them on the cheapest electricity the local market could provide, we'd have exactly the same false economy.
How is such a purely hypothetical scenario useful as an argument?
It's like saying: "If nobody ever did physical harm to anybody, we could get rid of some part of law enforcement." Not useful because it's simply not the case and very likely never will be.
> They also appear to be sufficiently profitable on "retiring coal plant" prices[1], which undermines any kind of unique incentivization of renewals argument.
Bitcoin mining incentivizes any kind of generation that cannot be consumed by a more profitable process or use case.
If the price of electricity on a mostly fossil powered grid is low enough, then Bitcoin mining will be profitable.
Same goes for a mostly renewables powered grid.
There are two ways, politics can handle this:
A) Impose a high enough carbon tax on fossil generation. This will lead to higher electricity prices for the fossil grid, possibly making Bitcoin mining unprofitable. But it will also make other uses of electricity unviable.
B) Regulate that Bitcoin mining is prohibited under certain conditions (location, grid generation mix, ...)
B doesn't appear wise to me. Since it's highly subjective what kind of energy/electricity use one deems useful/legitimate. I personally find the use of a > 100 horsepower private car or a private jet totally illegitimate and would welcome regulation that drastically hinders these absurd uses of energy.
I think the underlying argument also misses the “willingness to pay” on at least a couple parts of the transaction. Specifically assuming the grid provider is going to pay you to use their electricity. (Transmission is still costly and maybe turning off capacity is a better option.) Further, missing the core “willingness to pay” for btc or any other cryptocurrency.
Gold worked as a currency as it was independently verifiable from either side of a transaction. Modern currencies work so long as they’re backed by credible assurances of their value. Ie passing off fakes is dangerous and they may be used as “legal tender.” (That term could itself be further defined via google.) crypto currencies seem to lack this functionality. (Not wanting to abide by any law outside core network mechanics is functionally close to establishing a new form of sovereignty. Only sovereignty doesn’t work like that.) Also note how hyperinflation is dangerous to the assurance of value of a currency. Similarly, any form of instability could shake those assurances.
Modern currency is also almost trivially, embarrassingly parallel.
Bitcoin mining is not just an economic activity but a catalyst for innovation in renewable energy. By inherently seeking the most cost-effective power sources to maximize profitability, Bitcoin miners are driving the demand for, and thus the development of, cheap, renewable energy worldwide. This process aligns perfectly with the goal of expanding humanity’s energy supply, a necessity for continued growth and technological advancement. The decentralized, uncensored nature of Bitcoin provides invaluable financial infrastructure on a global scale, while simultaneously incentivizing the energy sector towards efficiency and sustainability. Viewing Bitcoin mining’s energy consumption as a problem overlooks the broader benefit: it acts as a buffer in energy markets, ensuring there’s always an incentive to increase supply and reduce costs. Criticisms focusing on environmental impacts should address the real issue—regulating harmful energy sources—not curbing the innovative push for more and cheaper energy that Bitcoin mining embodies. Condemning Bitcoin’s energy use echoes failed collectivist approaches, ignoring the potential for positive, market-driven environmental and economic outcomes.
There is a finite amount of energy though, so even if it would be optimal to have infinite supply, we can't.
And even if that weren't the case, your argument still makes no sense. Every watt that Bitcoin mining incentivizes is then consumed on Bitcoin mining, it's a zero sum game.
It's like building heaters in the desert: if you're willing to spend money for 1GW of electricity to run your heater, someone will build a 1GW plant for you. Now there is nominally one more 1GW plant in the world, but there is 0 extra available power, you're using up all of it to heat the desert.
Your argument reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of both energy markets and the role of Bitcoin in the modern economy. Asserting there’s a ‘finite’ amount of energy oversimplifies the issue and ignores the capacity for human ingenuity to tap into ever-more efficient and renewable energy sources. The notion of energy being a zero-sum game is a defeatist and static view that hampers progress.
Bitcoin mining, far from the wasteful ‘heating the desert’ analogy you propose, incentivizes the development of excess energy infrastructure that can be redirected or scaled based on demand fluctuations, acting as a catalyst for innovation in energy production and management.
Moreover, your argument smacks of a dangerous ‘divide the cake’ mentality, suggesting we should cap our aspirations and limit access to energy and technological advancement to maintain a status quo. Should we tell emerging economies that they must forego the benefits of modern technology because we’ve decided there’s simply no more room for energy growth? That’s not only patronizing but inherently regressive.
The beauty of Bitcoin and its underlying energy consumption is that it encourages the search for more efficient, cost-effective, and often greener energy solutions. This is not about wasting resources; it’s about driving forward a future where energy is more abundant, accessible, and sustainable for all. To stifle this under the guise of protecting resources is to deny the very essence of human progress and innovation.
> ignores the capacity for human ingenuity to tap into ever-more efficient and renewable energy sources
> Bitcoin mining, far from the wasteful ‘heating the desert’ analogy you propose, incentivizes the development of excess energy infrastructure that can be redirected or scaled based on demand fluctuations, acting as a catalyst for innovation in energy production and management.
You do realize that the article here is directly pointing to evidence that the bulk of large bitcoin mining operations are being driven from existing fossil fuel plants that seemed to be on their way to decommissioning?
This is what I don't like about your argument: it's a standard Bitcoin talking point, but people struggle to point to actual examples of Bitcoin mining spurring investment in renewable energy, while it's easy to point to actual examples of Bitcoin mining spurring investment in decommissioned/decommissioning fossil fuel power plants. The facts on the ground just do not support your argument, period.
Yes I am aware of the propaganda article contents.
Blaming Bitcoin for enabling these fossil fuel plants to continue is a red herring that distracts from the real issues: ineffective global energy policies and the threat Bitcoin poses to centralized financial systems. It’s easier for governments and critics to scapegoat Bitcoin than to admit their failure in promoting renewable energy or to face the uncomfortable truth that Bitcoin challenges their control over monetary policies. The narrative that Bitcoin only supports dirty energy is a convenient oversimplification, ignoring the broader economic incentives at play and the potential for technological innovation to drive a shift toward renewable energy sources. Let’s not mistake symptom for cause; the focus should be on fixing flawed energy policies, not demonizing a technology pushing for decentralization and innovation.
I’m still stuck on the first bit; you seem to sincerely believe that bitcoin is good for the environment, whilst also acknowledging it’s mainly powered by coal.
One can justify all sorts or environmental destruction with this your argument. Pouring oil on the beach is pushing local regulators to act, spurring the creation of less harmful lubricants.
Comparing Bitcoin mining to pouring oil on the beach is intellectually lazy. Bitcoin incentivizes the search for the cheapest energy, which increasingly means renewable. Unlike oil spills, Bitcoin’s ‘harm’ is driving a real search for energy innovation, not just cleanup. Moreover, it’s serving a crucial economic function, providing a decentralized financial system that aligns incentives with human progress. Trivializing such a groundbreaking innovation overlooks the broader benefits it offers in terms of both economic freedom and the push towards sustainable energy solutions.
The energy isn’t making anything and it’s causing harm mining due to its vast energy usage. Buzz words and greenwashing don’t change that. Scrounging for the cheapest power source doesn’t make it special, everyone wants cheap energy.
We have money whether or not you mine crypto and time will tell whether or not its groundbreaking innovations free us. So far it’s been scams, hacks, failures and waste. Let’s see what happens next.
Your dismissal of Bitcoin as mere ‘buzzwords and greenwashing’ overlooks its tangible achievements and real-world impact. Bitcoin is not about ‘scrounging for cheap energy’; it’s about fostering a decentralized financial system with over 100 million users worldwide and a market cap surpassing $900 billion. Beyond finance, Bitcoin’s transparent, immutable ledger offers unparalleled resistance to fraud, censorship, and corruption. Its technological innovations, like the Lightning Network and Taproot, are pioneering advancements in cryptography, economics, and beyond. With an uptime of 99.98% and a network secured by a record-high hashrate, Bitcoin’s resilience and reliability are indisputable. Dismissing it as scams, hacks, and failures not only ignores these significant contributions but also trivializes the global movement towards financial sovereignty and innovation. The real waste is in failing to recognize Bitcoin’s value and potential in driving forward not just financial, but societal progress.
Every industrial power user inherently makes the most cost-effective choices to maximize profitability. Some can't be selective, eg if you run trains or a steel mill you have to keep your power flowing whenever people want to move or prevent your furnace cooling off. But many industries can adjust production to fit power availability.
It's not clear to me that Bitcoin delivers sufficient economic value to justify the vast power demand. What utility do all these hashes provide, except to other people who bought into crypto trading? If there were some positive externality that'd be great, but there's no inherent value to crypto beyond the artificial scarcity.
Those who espouse the views you adhere to, which, let it be known, represent the prevailing orthodoxy, do so out of a marked deficiency in their comprehension of the true nature of currency. Their understanding is not founded upon rigorous study, nor is it informed by an appreciation of history and the lamentable legacy of state governance—the manifold tragedies it has authored, encompassing widespread destruction and the lamentation of countless souls. The auspicious circumstance in which humanity presently finds itself has been attained not because of, but rather in spite of, the modern nation-state and its fiat currency.
The worth of a decentralized and uncensored monetary framework is beyond imagination; it promises to unleash the inherent vigor and potential of an organic market-driven capitalism, unfettered and boundless. Such a system stands poised to precipitate the downfall of the fiat regime—a mechanism that has empowered governments of every stripe to engage in warfare and to subjugate their citizenry, not excluding even the most free and illustrious nation such as the United States.
Spare me the GPT-generated pomposity, and try making an argument in your own voice instead. Are you seriously going to claim that all war has been caused by governments and private interests have never engaged in violence? What nonsense.
While I have not claimed that private entities are exempt from engaging in violence, the essence of the state, is it not, lies in its exclusive dominion over violence, ostensibly to foster a non-violent society?
This assertion is far from nonsensical; it is a veritable truth, one conspicuously absent from educational curricula, likely because states find the acknowledgment of their historical predilection for violence too ignominious to bear. Taxation stands as the state’s principal means of amassing resources. Yet, for those states compelled to engage in warfare, mere taxation proves insufficient. Here, the utility of modern fiat currency becomes apparent, facilitating the acquisition of resources beyond what a transparent tax rate would permit. Through fiat, the dilatory effects of inflation serve the dual purpose of either being dismissed as unrelated in the event of victory—perhaps offset by the spoils thereof—or, in the case of defeat, rationalized as a war’s consequence. Regardless, the result is the same: a surreptitious expropriation of the populace’s wealth.
State-initiated actions, notably famine and war, rank as the foremost causes of human mortality, surpassing even health crises and natural calamities.
The inception of the modern fiat system, marked by the establishment of the Bank of England, was explicitly intended for waging war. Indeed, the very creation of the contemporary British Pound was predicated on this bellicose objective.
P.S.: Please excuse the grandiloquence of my discourse; consider it a charming anachronism. I hail from the future, having spent several delightful decades marooned in the 1800s. Only recently have I elected to grace the early 2020s with my presence, and it appears my linguistic preferences have yet to acclimatize to the present era’s vernacular.
The issue with your argument is there's no real evidence that Bitcoin mining is spurring investment in renewable power plants, and quite a bit of evidence that it is deterring disinvestment in dirty power plants. Furthermore, the links you point to start out by talking about how Bitcoin miners are being paid to not mine.
It's actually rather more like "we'll rapaciously use energy to bring the grid to its utmost limits, but don't worry, if you pay us lots of money [in some cases, more than we get from our regular business!], we'll happily not use quite enough to actually cause it to buckle and fail." Sounds like an extortion racket, doesn't it?
> Where once any increase in consumption was considered harmful due to its reliance on fossil fuels, the rise of renewables introduces scenarios where the marginal environmental cost of electricity can be beneficial if the demand is flexible.
This is a major flawed assumption. Even in a 100% renewable world, every extra watt consumed carries an environmental cost. It is of course less than when burning fossil fuels, but it's still there, and not necessarily even that small.
> The ability of Bitcoin mining to consume excess renewable energy when it's available (and potentially at low or negative prices) could improve the financial viability of renewable energy projects by increasing the floor price these new projects can sell electricity at.
The world has not run out of useful things to do with energy yet, so this is already a bizarre claim. But even ignoring the uselessness of Bitcoin for a moment, this clearly incentivizes the wrong kind of renewable development. If you need to turn your power to Bitcoin to be profitable, that means you can't afford to store this power even as the technology to do that improves. And if you can't store the power, then you can't be part of a fully renewable grid, so you're essentially building the wrong thing and it's better to leave the resources alone to be used in other projects that can actually be self sustaining.
> Bitcoin mining has the potential to act as a load balancer for the electricity grid. By increasing its energy consumption during periods when renewable energy production exceeds demand, and reducing consumption during peak demand periods, Bitcoin mining could help stabilize the grid and make renewable energy generation more economically viable.
Lots of things have the potential for lots of things. But we need to operate on the reality as it exists, and that reality is that Bitcoin uses a phenomenal amount of power, to the point that people are paying Bitcoin miners to not use electricity when the grid is at capacity (as mentioned in the article).
I see your point but disagree with it. It's not load balancing because you're not putting anything back to the grid at times of high demand. Yes, you're incentivizing production of renewable energy (good), but that could be done equally well by investing more in batteries, whether of the chemical or gravitational variety.
Has anyone looked into the theory that SO2 is an "anti-greenhouse" gas and that much of the greenhouse effects of CO2 have been negated by SO2. Essentially SO2 particles stay in the air for a long time and reflects a large spectrum of light so it fails to be absorbed by land or sea/converted to infrared (infrared is primarily what the CO2 reflects).
Recently (since 2010ish but moreso since 2020 in shipping) there has been a global effort to reduce SO2 emissions (eg by installing scrubbers) which has caused the CO2 increase over the last 150 years to actually "take effect" since the SO2 is no longer negating the effects.
I stumbled upon this theory recently and it sounds compelling but am curious if better informed people could shine a light about this.
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that it is the most-researched solar geoengineering method, with high agreement that it could limit warming to below 1.5 °C”
There’s a risk it’d affect the ozone layer. But Paul Crutzen, who won the Nobel Prize for his ozone research in 95, said the sulfur plan is “the only option available to rapidly reduce temp rises and counteract other climactic effects”.
We’d also need to add shockingly little SO2 to the stratosphere. We currently emit 200m tons per year (25% is humans, rest is volcanos and other natural sources). We’d need to add an extra 100k per year.
Edit: I think one of the Microsoft co-founders was looking into it, the problems of proving it would work were political - not engineering-related.
It always strikes me as odd that the geoengineering experiment that got us into the predicament (dumping boatloads of CO2 into the atmosphere), the politics were so much easier.
I've generally come to the belief that it's related to how humans think about cause and effect.
Dumping boatloads of CO2 into the atmosphere is second order from the actual goal of producing electricity so most people just can't/don't/won't think about it.
In this case we'd be intentionally dumping SO2 so people are capable of thinking "wow that's not moral" or whatever issue they might have with it.
I think the biggest concern with something like releasing SO2 as a geoengineering project, which needs, quoting someone else in the thread "very little" to be released to have a big effect, the concern is over-correction or unforeseen effects caused by an insufficient understanding of the system as a whole.
Don't want to accidentally start an ice age by trying to prevent a hothouse planet from forming :P
And we want to stop releasing CO2. We don't want to wind up charging onwards to 1,000 ppm CO2 just because we released enough SO2 to compensate for the climate change.
Eh, don't worry, the rich among us will bottle up the 'good' air and, well, just watch the clip from the documentary "Spaceballs" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz0xULQIaSU
The current predicament we are in was not produced by a deliberate attempt at global geoengineering. It was a global economic project with a byproduct of climate change.
I'd say that we need to discover a source of energy that produces SO2 as a byproduct, but given our species' track record we would probably trigger an ice-age in a few decades.
Or maybe if some billionaire could figure out a way for their space-tourism project to “accidentally” produce SO2, then we’d give them the moral mulligan.
It'd be a smaller amount that gets injected into the stratosphere, as opposed to what we normally release into the troposphere. A quick skim of the wikipedia link seems to suggest 5M tons in total, not sure what the annualized basis would be.
That's a tiny amount, relatively. But is that "just a little more" or is it "just a little more, but in a really inconvenient and difficult to reach altitude"?
What kind of infrastructure would be required to put it where it needs to go?
You would need a few pipes the width of garden hoses constantly flowing, suspended by helium balloons, near the Arctic where the stratosphere is 1km closer.
I think putting any amount of tons of matter into stratospheric altitude is a hard challenge.
Especially if we consider the fact that you would be putting upwards of 200t[0] of CO2 into roughly the same altitude Only to deliver maybe 5 tons of sulfur.
> To achieve a 2 °C result, the plan would inject 6.7 teragrams (6.7 billion kg/14.8 billion lb) of sulfur dioxide per year into each pole, calling for an eye-watering total of 13.4 teragrams (29.5 billion lb) of material annually.
>The study goes on to look at logistics, finding that existing aircraft can't carry enough payload to a sufficient height to get the job done... To hit the cooling target, this project would need 125 purpose-built SAIL-43Ks, flying a total of 1,458 missions per day during the four-month injection period at each pole. These planes would take off, climb for 30 minutes, vent their entire load of sulfur dioxide within two minutes, then come back down over the following 30 minutes, and spend the next hour loading up again and refueling for the next mission.
> All sulfur oxides are nasty to breathe in, harming the lungs and causing asthma and bronchitis if inhaled regularly... It notes that the effects of teragrams of sulfur dioxide and the associated acid rain deposits are risky both to humans and to the wider ecosystem, requiring lots more research. And it expects some stratospheric heating as well.
So yeah, we could. It would be expensive (but not $trillions), and the environmental effects would be horrific.
And yet its still being proposed, because that's how desperate we are.
Delivering the SO2 directly to the stratosphere needs some new tech to be developed.
Assuming that's done, the environmental side effects should be negligible, as I understand it. The stratosphere is pretty isolated from the atmosphere we live in, and the SO2 breaks down there over 1-2 years.
> sulfur dioxide tends to rise high into the stratosphere, where it combines with water molecules to create sulfuric acid particles, and remains for up to three years
> the way that sulfuric acid eventually leaves the atmosphere is by combining into larger and larger droplets that eventually become heavy enough to fall down to earth as acid rain
Probably make more sense to launch from ground. No reason to lift entire plane into the air. The launch stations can be placed in relatively remote locationst to minimize human or natural habitat impact. Possibly place launch locaitons close to So2 mining location to limit transport Co2.
> For the sort of globally effective SAI deployment in the tropics and sub-tropics envisioned in (Smith and Wagner 2018) and (Smith 2020), a deployment altitude of 20 km is commonly assumed in order to remain well above the tropopause, which can often appear as high as 17 km in the tropics. Injection of large masses of aerosols at 20 km is not judged to be feasible with existing aircraft, requiring the development of new lofting platforms designed for this mission as envisioned
Ground deployment is not extensively discussed, but perhaps the referenced papers discuss the necessity of high altitude more.
What does a "launch" location for SO2 look like from the ground? Is there any guarantee it would get as high as we'd like, especially given that SO2 is heavier than air?
Kinda feels like entirely too large a percentage of humanity already gave up entirely too long ago, and now it's rather too late for many of 'em to change their minds. Isn't that why we'd rather let our "leaders" geoengineer some more screw-ups upon our environment rather than actively work toward the changes we know will actually improve the situation? (eg; "fast track" our societal transitions globally toward more "planet-friendly" everything that we can? Just all-around "cleaner" modes of living? Better for the planet, and for humanity.)
Yes, this has been studied quite a bit (but not "extensively"). I am (guardedly) a fan of managing the earth's albedo, but not on a global scale and especially not with a toxic compound like SO2. Some of the most important issues:
* It's not just SO2, but soot and other particulates that reflect sunlight, in particular IR.
* SO2 (and soot etc, for that matter) have other side effects; its not that they were eliminated for no reason. And the point of any ecological activity (not just climate intervention) is to make the environment more supportive to human life and ativity. Stratospheric SO2 advocates tend to dismiss these issues.
* solar radiation adjustment has other consequences (on agriculture, for example).
In the case of SO2 the frequencies reflected by SO2 are not all ones we want to do without -- we need some UV to get through.
* Stratospheric SO2 injection (AKA "SAI") is hard to switch off, so if we are unhappy with the results (widespread reduction in agriculture, if that's what happens) we would be waiting years, possibly decades, to get things back on track.
Solar radiation can also be managed at a more local level in the troposphere through marine cloud brightening for example, and can be done with more benign chemicals than SO2 (e.g. water), and can be switched on and off quite rapidly (days). It will use more energy and activity, but also provide greater control (in some locations on the water you may not want increased shade because of microscopic marine life).
Note I am working on removal of ambient greenhouse gas (CH4) and so am quite sensitive to the safety and consequences of intervention.
I wonder if there's a way to keep the SO2 localized to a geographic area? The best bang for the buck should be over the arctic to help with the ice loss and less reflectivity due to that.
I talked about localized marine cloud brightening, but why would you choose something toxic like SO2? There’s a reason why the first emissions trading market was one that controlled SO2 emissions: acid rain.
In the case of the arctic there are non-atmospheric (i.e. surface) interventions being investigated as well to change the local albedo. In fact the best way to brighten the arctic (and glaciers) is to reduce particulate emissions — and it’s happening!
> Has anyone looked into the theory that SO2 is an "anti-greenhouse" gas
Yes.. there is an entire section in the IPCC report dedicated to this. This is also the reason they believe there is a "missing volcanic eruption," as it would explain data anomalies in their back projections. Make of that what you will.
Yes, James Hansen. His page [1] has links to his newsletter posts, but here's a recent example that looks into the shipping emissions reductions and the role they may be playing:
FWIW, I found this book to be an extremely disappointing introduction to Neal Stephenson and an extremely disappointing exploration of Sulfur-based geoengineering. The actual geoengineering is just a vehicle for a semi-political thriller IMO.
It's not a great book, but the fact that a single billionaire could decide to change the climate with a relatively small amount of SO2 was news to me until I read this!
I felt exactly the same way. It seemed like he thought "If Elon Musk tried to stop global warming, what would happen?" and then just sorta fleshed it out an released it during his spare pandemic time.
Contrarian opinion, but given the models have been poor at predicting the catastrophes that they typically claim, I’m hesitant to support atmospheric engineering to try and cool the planet.
Let’s not kid ourselves, global cooling is FAR worse than global warming. Ice ages are no joke.
The risk/reward bet here is that we put jussst enough SO2 to drop by X degrees. I’m just not confident enough in our computational capacity to account for all the variables that could produce unintended consequences.
Tangential, but we can’t even figure out proper programs/legislation to improve education or reduce inner city poverty.
As a person from a cold country I'm not so sure about that. It's much easier to dress up on a cold day than to cool down on a hot day. It's cheaper to warm up a house than to cool it down. There are way less diseases/viruses/insects in cold climates. Granted, the food is much harder to come by, though, unless it's maritime (cold waters are much more abundant with life than warm oceans).
And in case of global warning, if it ever gets too cold, we know what to do.
As someone who went to school for this, no. Mammals evolved to survive colder conditions. Going hotter and with higher CO2 is not going to be awesome for our biology.
Sulphur dioxide. That's the thing that caused all the acid rain that was going to be the end of all life as we know it back in the 1980s when were still concerned about global cooling, right? The same thing that made it possible to practice the moon landings just downwind of Sudbury, Ontario because all vegetation was stripped by the fallout from the big stacks at the nickle smelters?
Yeah. Pump that shit into our atmosphere. What could possibly go wrong?
"Retro Game Mechanics Explained" is exactly what you're looking for for retro games. They talk about things like memory layout, how unintended bugs work, the cpu instruction set, how things happen on the hardware level, etc etc. Highly recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/@RGMechEx
Do they deliberately underrate the operational lifetimes of the nasa stuff for publicity reasons? Eg Spirit and Opportunity rovers survived 25x and 60x of their mission lifetime of 90 sols. And now this Ingenuity does 52 flights vs the 1 to 5 flight estimate.
Do they take like the 5th percentile of estimated life or something? Wonder if there is kind of a theory on how overbuilt you want to make things that you can't ever maintain and because of that, things usually end up lasting way longer than expected.
When you're building machines that need to work in alien environments, you run into a lot of "what-ifs", without clear answers. So you "over"engineer your solution, because it'll probably be cheaper than re-doing the whole mission.
Meanwhile, there's a academic research politics side going on, where a lot of people want their experiment to be done by your probe, the negotiations for which happen oftentimes before the probe has a solid design. You want to be able to tell some subset of people "as long as we don't screw up terribly, you should be safe betting on this", and tell the others "you'll be in the "nice-to-have" category, don't get your hopes up". So a mission lifetime gets decided, pretty much independently of engineering considerations.
They could, in theory, update their lifetime estimates after the project is finished, but there is little to gain at that point: The researchers with experiments in the "nice-to-have" set have already hedged their bets, the engineers would rather have a 50x success than have announced an over-estimate, and nobody really complains when the Opportunity is still truckin' around the Martian surface years later.
A follow on question to this that I've wondered is if they reduced the reliability of some of their probes, would they be able to build more of them? Could they send probes/rovers to additional bodies more quickly?
Obviously the flip side is that some probes will fail.
I expect they are not operating at the most efficient use of capital (if measured in probe lifetime/$). But since they are funded by the government, the politics mean that failure, even within expectations, would result in reduced funding.
So maybe this overbuilding is a symptom of government inefficiency?
I get the impression its something like you only get funding for a couple of weeks mission runtime. Then its a game of chicken with directors, who wants to sign off cancelling and abandoning perfectly functioning $xxxmil instrument?
This recently happened to the trust wallet browser extension due to using mersenne twister to generate their private keys. Issue is that this PRNG is not cryptographically secure. I think trust wallet is more popular than coinbase wallet as well.
I use a chrome extension called Imagus that will load any linked image on mouseover (either instantly or after a configurable delay). The image can be shown as large as your current browser window and it will even load links to albums in such a way where scrolling while mouse-overed or pressing left and right on the keyboard will advance between images.
