Currencies are in some ways just as artificial as cryptocurrencies. In fact, most everything humans chase after is spun up as whole cloth, from countries, to gods, to money to belief in comrades in arms and so forth. Most everything humanity does is ultimately fake. Money is stuff we just "make up." Even the value of gold is something we "make up." We might be better off if we stopped making this crap up.
However, with currencies at least in a representative system the average person has some impact. The crypto-currency trend has been the culmination of Milton Friedman's strange dream of privatizing almost everything. In that setting the average person only has as much power in the system as what they hold. An Elon Musk or Bezos etc has vastly more and so they not only have more power, they have more power to get more. A world of complete private forms of currencies is one that will lead to a sort of monetary feudalism. There will at some point be a few people, financial institutions and banks that own it all. They would come to be the overlords of the world.
The collapse of the cryptocurrencies and bitcoin is something of some relief to me. The next dark age may be forestalled a few years at least.
LC
> Currencies are in some ways just as artificial as cryptocurrencies. In fact, most everything humans chase after is spun up as whole cloth, from countries, to gods, to money to belief in comrades in arms and so forth. Most everything humanity does is ultimately fake. Money is stuff we just "make up." Even the value of gold is something we "make up." We might be better off if we stopped making this crap up.
> The aha on your energy observation seemingly would be resolved by huge electricity making. I will list the electricity makings that are likely to be ginormous if perfected?
On Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 8:33 PM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:> The aha on your energy observation seemingly would be resolved by huge electricity making. I will list the electricity makings that are likely to be ginormous if perfected?That won't help because the energy cost involved in making a bitcoin is also increasing and it's increasing exponentially; there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins in the world because if there are 21 million of them the energy needed to make another one is infinite. Bitcoin is inherently energy inefficient and its inefficiency can only increase.
Other than it's inventor Satoshi Nakamoto the very first person to ever mint a bitcoin was Hal Finney in 2009, back then a typical home computer could make a bitcoin in just a few minutes, I remember he said on the Extropian mailing list I was on at the time that on a whim he once left his computer on overnight minting bitcoins. He claims that after that he forgot all about it but soon after he was faced with huge medical bills because he was diagnosed with ALS, the same disease Stephen Hawkings had, and about the same time he started reading about the huge increase in the price of Bitcoins. Finney no longer used that old obsolete computer but he still had it at the back of his closet, and the Bitcoins were still on the hard drive, they were more than enough to pay for his medical expenses.Finney died in 2014 and to this day some people think he actually was Satoshi Nakamoto. It may be a coincidence that Nakamoto stopped posting and disappeared about the same time Finney got sick, or it may not be, but it would explain why although he owns billions of dollars worth of bitcoins not a single one has ever been spent by somebody who controls the Bitcoin account of "Satoshi Nakamoto". Even after this recent price collapse Nakamoto is still one of the richest men in the world, and yet he doesn't seem to have ever spent a single nickel of his vast fortune. It's weird.John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis3ch
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> Running the bitcoin network isn't inherently energy intensive. The entire network can be run on a single laptop.
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On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 8:19 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:> Running the bitcoin network isn't inherently energy intensive. The entire network can be run on a single laptop.I don't see how that could be possible, the entire idea behind Bitcoin is to be decentralized and have multiple miners competing to be the first to verify the Blockchain and get a reward in the form of Bitcoins, so you can't have just one computer doing it all.
And every time there is a Bitcoin transaction 707 kilowatt hours of energy is expended,
and the more bitcoin is used the longer the Blockchain will be and the more energy it will take to verify it.
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> In theory all existing miners but one could power down and it bitcoin would keep on going fine.
On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 1:47 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:> In theory all existing miners but one could power down and it bitcoin would keep on going fine.If one miner was in charge of verifying the Blockchain for all bitcoin transactions, or even just 51% of them, he could double spend bitcoins whenever he wanted to. And that would be the end of bitcoin.
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> a single honest one can run the network.
> But my point is the energy requirements are not part of any inherent part of the protocol nor is there any inherent computational difficulty in validation the chain or transactions. The only high cost is the one the protocol adds for the explicit purpose of throttling new blocks to 1 every 10 minutes. If there are fewer miners, this cost is reduced by the protocol. If there were only 100 miners running on lower power laptops, this cost would be no more than the cost of powering these 100 laptops.
On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 2:20 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:> a single honest one can run the network.So bitcoin can avoid problems if they can just find somebody that everybody agrees is a saint. But you could say the same thing about the US dollar if everybody agreed that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is a saint.
> But my point is the energy requirements are not part of any inherent part of the protocol nor is there any inherent computational difficulty in validation the chain or transactions. The only high cost is the one the protocol adds for the explicit purpose of throttling new blocks to 1 every 10 minutes. If there are fewer miners, this cost is reduced by the protocol. If there were only 100 miners running on lower power laptops, this cost would be no more than the cost of powering these 100 laptops.If there were only 100 laptops mining for Bitcoins and I joined as the 101st then I could make a lot of Bitcoins on my laptop, and if I spent a few thousand dollars more to get a computer a few times more powerful than a typical laptop I could make even more.
There will never be more than 21,000,000 Bitcoins so if the world switched over entirely to Bitcoin then each one would be worth a little more than 1/21 millionth of the world's economy, and because of technological improvements the world's economy will increase, so the amount of stuff you can buy with one Bitcoin will increase, so the incentive to mine Bitcoins and waste huge amounts of energy will also increase.
kqx
e
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>> So bitcoin can avoid problems if they can just find somebody that everybody agrees is a saint. But you could say the same thing about the US dollar if everybody agreed that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is a saint.> You don't need a saint. That's the genius of the protocol design, a trusted system without any trusted individuals. You just need no majority of the nodes to be working against the system.
> Bitcoin allows one to freeze something of economic value (in this case energy) and convert it to money, after which it can facilitate an unlimited number of transactions basically for free and indefinitely, until it is lost/or destroyed.
> Note that this same process underlies the creation of money in existing monetary systems: E.g., invest energy in mining gold. The amount people will spend to mine new gold is related to the price of gold.
On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 4:12 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:>> So bitcoin can avoid problems if they can just find somebody that everybody agrees is a saint. But you could say the same thing about the US dollar if everybody agreed that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is a saint.> You don't need a saint. That's the genius of the protocol design, a trusted system without any trusted individuals. You just need no majority of the nodes to be working against the system.Bitcoin is between a rock and a hard place. If the number of miners is reduced the energy efficiency increases but the security declines because it allows the elite to spend one of their Bitcoins and keep it too. If the number of miners is increased the security gets better but the energy required to complete an economic transaction increases. If you use Bitcoin or anything like it and you want honesty then you're going to have to expend a ridiculous amount of energy every time you buy a candy bar.
>> Bitcoin is between a rock and a hard place. If the number of miners is reduced the energy efficiency increases but the security declines because it allows the elite to spend one of their Bitcoins and keep it too. If the number of miners is increased the security gets better but the energy required to complete an economic transaction increases. If you use Bitcoin or anything like it and you want honesty then you're going to have to expend a ridiculous amount of energy every time you buy a candy bar.> This is not how it works. Each mining attempt also tries to fulfill the outstanding transactions in the network -- or at least the ones that pay what the miner considers to be an acceptable fee. Each block contains many transactions.
On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 4:12 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:>> So bitcoin can avoid problems if they can just find somebody that everybody agrees is a saint. But you could say the same thing about the US dollar if everybody agreed that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is a saint.> You don't need a saint. That's the genius of the protocol design, a trusted system without any trusted individuals. You just need no majority of the nodes to be working against the system.Bitcoin is between a rock and a hard place. If the number of miners is reduced the energy efficiency increases but the security declines because it allows the elite to spend one of their Bitcoins and keep it too.
If the number of miners is increased the security gets better but the energy required to complete an economic transaction increases.
If you use Bitcoin or anything like it and you want honesty then you're going to have to expend a ridiculous amount of energy every time you buy a candy bar.
> Bitcoin allows one to freeze something of economic value (in this case energy) and convert it to money, after which it can facilitate an unlimited number of transactions basically for free and indefinitely, until it is lost/or destroyed.As the number of bitcoins approaches 21 million the amount of energy required to mint a new one will increase exponentially and will approach infinity asymptotically.
That's just not going to work. When Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin I doubt if he gave energy a single thought, but then I don't imagine he ever figured it would get as big as it has.> Note that this same process underlies the creation of money in existing monetary systems: E.g., invest energy in mining gold. The amount people will spend to mine new gold is related to the price of gold.Energy cost is one factor that determines the price of gold but not the only one nor the most important one. And gold is irrelevant, it hasn't been an important factor in the world economy in over a century, but paper money has. And unlike Bitcoin it doesn't take an exponentially increasing amount of energy to run a printing press.
vhe
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On Mon, Aug 1, 2022 at 10:24 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:>> Bitcoin is between a rock and a hard place. If the number of miners is reduced the energy efficiency increases but the security declines because it allows the elite to spend one of their Bitcoins and keep it too. If the number of miners is increased the security gets better but the energy required to complete an economic transaction increases. If you use Bitcoin or anything like it and you want honesty then you're going to have to expend a ridiculous amount of energy every time you buy a candy bar.> This is not how it works. Each mining attempt also tries to fulfill the outstanding transactions in the network -- or at least the ones that pay what the miner considers to be an acceptable fee. Each block contains many transactions.If verifying a block takes an exponentially increasing amount of energy that asymptotically approaches infinity,
>> As the number of bitcoins approaches 21 million the amount of energy required to mint a new one will increase exponentially and will approach infinity asymptotically.> Not necessarily, because as I explained the block reward decreases too. So the economic incentive also decreases.
> Your theory of what will happen with bitcoin would conclude a gold miner will put in exponentially more and eventually infinite energy into mining a gold mine that is drying up.
>>Energy cost is one factor that determines the price of gold but not the only one nor the most important one. And gold is irrelevant, it hasn't been an important factor in the world economy in over a century, but paper money has. And unlike Bitcoin it doesn't take an exponentially increasing amount of energy to run a printing press.> You conveniently (for you) cut out my paragraph showing the printing press does require vast expenditures of energy. Since printed money is based on debt, and debts are typically secured against assets of value which required great expenditures of energy to produce (in line with the value of the asset, and therefore in line with the amount of money created).
On Mon, Aug 1, 2022 at 10:58 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:>> As the number of bitcoins approaches 21 million the amount of energy required to mint a new one will increase exponentially and will approach infinity asymptotically.> Not necessarily, because as I explained the block reward decreases too. So the economic incentive also decreases.The number of bitcoins you get as a reward may decrease but that's not important, what's important is the amount of stuff you can buy with that reward, and as the economy increases in size, as it will as technology improves, then that reward will get bigger because each Bitcoin will be worth 1/21 millionth of the world's economy.
> Your theory of what will happen with bitcoin would conclude a gold miner will put in exponentially more and eventually infinite energy into mining a gold mine that is drying up.And that is exactly what a rational gold miner would do if gold kept exponentially increasing in price and was asymptotically approaching infinite valuation.
>>Energy cost is one factor that determines the price of gold but not the only one nor the most important one. And gold is irrelevant, it hasn't been an important factor in the world economy in over a century, but paper money has. And unlike Bitcoin it doesn't take an exponentially increasing amount of energy to run a printing press.> You conveniently (for you) cut out my paragraph showing the printing press does require vast expenditures of energy. Since printed money is based on debt, and debts are typically secured against assets of value which required great expenditures of energy to produce (in line with the value of the asset, and therefore in line with the amount of money created).That does not compute. It doesn't matter if you're using Bitcoins, dollars, or monopoly money, the entire purpose of an economy is not to create money but to create assets of value, money is just a bookkeeping device and Bitcoin is an enormously inefficient bookkeeping device.
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That's the worst case scenario in terms of energy use incentives (bitcoin replacing all other currencies). But it's still finite, and not exponential to infinity. (Unless you are counting the economy as exponential to infinity).
>> And that is exactly what a rational gold miner would do if gold kept exponentially increasing in price and was asymptotically approaching infinite valuation.> Why do you have think bitcoin value is going to infinity?
>> That does not compute. It doesn't matter if you're using Bitcoins, dollars, or monopoly money, the entire purpose of an economy is not to create money but to create assets of value, money is just a bookkeeping device and Bitcoin is an enormously inefficient bookkeeping device.> You may be confusing money creation with the bookkeeping process. For gold, dollars, bitcoin, the bookkeeping is trivial and easily done by computers and spreadsheets.
> You could argue that one difference with debt based money is we get a house or a car out of it, while for bitcoin, gold, collecting seashells, we get only waste-heat and a medium of exchange.
> What's this? Talk of no star travel whilst we are very near to producing the mighty Bussard Ramjet to cleveth the night sky with a mighty roar! Actually, I think all the fusion power stuff may be uneconomic (unaffordable) till our AI is fast enough to cut through the maths in diverse areas of science to make it cheap enough. BUT, it will be peachy keen for interplanetary travel. For Dyson Sphere's yeah, we do the solar system (descendants) and then red dwarf stars which are said to last some 2-10 trillion years. I visualize these as some sort of very long holiday, for some reason?
awt
>>> What's this? Talk of no star travel whilst we are very near to producing the mighty Bussard Ramjet to cleveth the night sky with a mighty roar! Actually, I think all the fusion power stuff may be uneconomic (unaffordable) till our AI is fast enough to cut through the maths in diverse areas of science to make it cheap enough. BUT, it will be peachy keen for interplanetary travel. For Dyson Sphere's yeah, we do the solar system (descendants) and then red dwarf stars which are said to last some 2-10 trillion years. I visualize these as some sort of very long holiday, for some reason?>> That is a very ambitious plan but I see no scientific or technological reason that would make it impossible, however there might be other things that could prevent it from happening, Nancy Pelosi's trip to Taiwan could be one of them. That's why I hope she doesn't go. Nobody knows for sure what will happen if she does decide to but the possible risk doesn't seem worth the possible reward. You might say that China's threat is just a bluff and maybe that's true, but are you willing to bet your life on it? And the timing is particularly bad, China's economy is stalling and this fall the 20th Communist Party Congress is supposed to give Xi an indefinite extension of his role as leader, so Xi needs something to make him look strong and get the people's mind off pocketbook issues, ramping up hostilities against Taiwan could do that. We already have one hotspot in Ukraine that could lead to nuclear war, we don't need another one in Taiwan.
> Taiwan is becoming the "Berlin" of the second cold war.
> We, even under Donaldo, didn't build in hypersonic missiles of previous discussions (which is faster).
> The democrats love ad hominem attacks
> Pelosi should be able to talk with whomever she wants.
> One pundit viewed the Germans and the EU simply wishing to be a large Switzerland (neutral) and purchase Russian gas,
> Another matter is, I still view fusion technology as easier to do in space or maybe even nuke subs, over commercial power,
One pundit viewed the Germans and the EU simply wishing to be a large Switzerland (neutral) and purchase Russian gas, while selling their Mercedes to the Chinese.
> Trumpo liked to hit back
> which is why he was elected by us
> Also, lets not forget that Jefferson had been nailing Sally Hemmings since she was quite young.
> Funny. You are referring to the Steele-Danchenko allegations (Fusion-GPS) which has proven wrong.
> I had seen Ayman al Zawahiri post on Twitter that he had evidence that he would present that would get Hillary Clinton arrested. Was that what triggered the drone strike??
> I am not broken hearted if the Don did partake in female attentions.
> My point the golden shower tape never existed,
> wish Don or Joe was chummy with VLAD!
> If Putin had something on Trump, oh well.
> For me, it's all policy and the results.
> The intelligence community has not been so wonderful to Americans at large for the last several decades,
> so if Trumpo wanted to keep the door of communication open, that was ok with me.
> The world respects a strong man,
> I do mean man and Joe-Joe's a whimp! Joey also ignored warning from the DIA not to withdraw from Afghanistan back in July 21,
> The Afghanistan Withdrawal Fiasco is plain for all to see
> Its like when Obama needed a boost, CIA was there to show him as a patriot when Bin Laden was whacked. This works big with dem voters
> For Afghanistan, first, there were no anti-war protests of any memory in the US which would validate the progressive-soviet mindset of the democrats. Nothing. No Vietnam War. Zip. Nada.
> My opinion of Joey has always been, nice guy,
> old style democrat. But he kind of sold his soul to the Stalinsts
> Billionaires that now possess the DNC.
> For Obama, I would state that I try not to vote for people who see me as the great enemy.
> Dems always focus on personality
> I never said the world and human affairs are not Darwinian.
> if K. Eric Drexler's nano-manufacture ever was successfully produced, (fantasy) one could blather on about socialism, capitalism, but the machinery would produce goodies in such abundance and low cost that as Engels & Marx
c
> We weren't the losing side till Joey pulled out.
Currencies are in some ways just as artificial as cryptocurrencies. In fact, most everything humans chase after is spun up as whole cloth, from countries, to gods, to money to belief in comrades in arms and so forth. Most everything humanity does is ultimately fake. Money is stuff we just "make up." Even the value of gold is something we "make up." We might be better off if we stopped making this crap up.
However, with currencies at least in a representative system the average person has some impact. The crypto-currency trend has been the culmination of Milton Friedman's strange dream of privatizing almost everything. In that setting the average person only has as much power in the system as what they hold. An Elon Musk or Bezos etc has vastly more and so they not only have more power, they have more power to get more. A world of complete private forms of currencies is one that will lead to a sort of monetary feudalism. There will at some point be a few people, financial institutions and banks that own it all. They would come to be the overlords of the world.
The collapse of the cryptocurrencies and bitcoin is something of some relief to me. The next dark age may be forestalled a few years at least.
LC
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> I am a nationalist but not an ideologist,
> unlike the democrats and their cash link to Wall Street globalists.
John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
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> JC is an ideologue who holds that whatever his party does is absolutely justifiable.
> John,
For libertarians that identify as rationalists
> there is a very clear way they can address your concerns. could list all of the public goods currently provided by governments and then explain in which cases and over what timeframe they plan to turn them over to free markets. Additionally, if they are free market maximalists they could explain how they plan to move into enclaves where they have no dependencies on public goods provided by governments.
> Here the overall story arc as promoted by Balaji and others is effectively that mega-corporations powered by crypto will soon be in a position to provide all state services and can effectively de-couple from traditional forms of governance. You could call this a "revolution."
> governments could be defined simply as "an institution which depends on tax revenue (i.e. a form of coercion) to institute its own version of good which may or may not intersect with that of its citizens"
And Nick Hanauer, a member of the top 0.01%, also thinks the hyper rich should pay more and wrote a letter about it to his rich peers. I found this passage to be particularly illuminating:"I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now? I see pitchforks."
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