You can buy it here: https://www.homepowersolutions.de/en/picea-plus/
Hydrogen can indeed be stored in standard steel gas cylinders.
206 karma · joined March 5, 2021
Hydrogen can indeed be stored in standard steel gas cylinders.
You did not specifically write it, but the way you plainly state ".. but it can't." makes it appear as if it were an evident fact that can be derived from simple reasoning available to everyone who spends some time thinking.
I'd say it is absolutely possible that "crypto" (or as I would narrow it down: Bitcoin) can improve society.
One can think of it this way: society/humanity can be seen as a very complicated board game (that's played simultaneously by all humans) with certain elements (cards, rules, ..). The rules somehow evolve during the game, some are stable some change, new elements get added from time to time.
The set of elements in the game at some certain point in time might strongly favour a very narrow set of participants which might already be in a very strong position (which could be seen as unfair). A new rule or other element in the game might counter/dampen the effects of the existing rules, so that after adding the new element there's now less tendency for concentration of success than before.
Technologies in the real world are like such new elements/rules in the game. New real world technologies (such as Bitcoin) may very well change the dynamic of the real world in a way that dampens various unfavourable outcomes.
No, one cannot easily prove whether Bitcoin does ineed have this effect.
But likewise, one cannot prove that Bitcoin certainly has only negative effects on humanity/society either.
As I understand it, the people developing GNU Taler, are trying to solve this problem and have come up with a promising system.
Interesting implication.
A system such as GPT learning from its own output is almost obviously absurd. A computer model getting fed its own output as training data feels like some kind of short circuit, or maybe just a circuit with a capacitor and resistor that simply slowly dissipates energy, until nothing happens/changes anymore.
Yet, isn't what humans do mostly the same, just more sophisticated?
Humans pick up experiences and references and information and, inspired from these, create "new" things. I'd argue that the "new" things humans create are really just new combinations/iterations of things that they picked up earlier in life.
The difference between GPT and humans is mostly: the human recombination system is vastly more complicated/sophisticated than its GPT counterpart and produces more chaotic output.
In the end, the _essential_ part of the, let's call it, cultural evolution, that's happening with humanity, maybe isn't so much the creation/recombination aspect (which produces this vast stream of new things, almost randomness), but rather the selection process. Lots of random things are being created all the time, most are being discarded, except for those that somehow appear valuable or get selected for other reasons.
The selection of things from the vast random stream might matter more than the process that creates the vast random stream.
I keep its folder synchronized to my computer with syncthing, to be able to write there as well.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.billthefarmer.diary
This one lets you track simple things about your day, like whether you did something or not. It doesn't get any simpler. Just one tap/tick. Makes nice plots of the data.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.smasi.tickmate/
This one is similar but can do a bit more. It can record time spans of activities and more. Also does plots.
As people collect more and more personal data about themselves, which they do unconsciously already, the only thing that's missing is an offline system (software) on the local computer/device that enables processing and making sense of all this data, ideally _without_ companies also obtaining the data.
Such software appears to be possible in the near future with all these neural network, NLP, image processing, .. systems.
I think developers of open-source apps ought to agree on some standard data format so that data from different apps/sources can easily be aggregated without additional processing.
The problem is: commercial apps/platforms don't have any incentive to enable private personal data collection and companies will always have a head start over the individual in different ways: amount of data, processing power, brain power, ..
And people don't appear to realize that companies are constantly optimising against the individual and therefor the individual needs better tools to gain a better position.
In order to deliver enough electricity most of the time, without needing huge amounts of storage (which are tiny right now), renewables will have to be massively over built. I assume there'll be times when there's 5x or more the electricity available compared to actual consumption.
Let the sun shine and the wind blow in summer and there'll be huge amounts of electricity which cannot be stored or consumed by BEV or some other grid connected battery because they're not enough. Industrial processes won't easily consume sudden surges in available electricity either.
Take the UK grid with its average of ~ 31 GW. Let's say they triple their wind power capacity which is currently at ~ 18 GW and double their pv capacity which is currently at ~ 3 GW. That'd be 60 GW so roughly twice the electricity that's consumed on average.
We're in summer, heat pumps don't consume .. so 30 GW excess electricity over say 3 windy days adds up to ~ 2 TWh. That's the capacity of 26.7 million Tesla Model 3 (long range) with a 75 kWh battery each. And they'd all need to be charged from 0 to 100 %.
Batteries won't suffice, I think.
So what'll be done? Electrolysis, I think -> H2, ammonia, methane, ..
So there'll be significant amounts of these being produced and stored.
Ammonia might well become the energy carrier of the future, being shipped around the world with large tankers to transport energy from where it's produced to places where it's used.
If that were to become true, wouldn't the fuel cell be the fitting technology for heavy duty and/or long range vehicles?
And once there'd be infrastructure for trucks and heavy vehicles, roughly the same ifrastructure could be used for FCEV cars.
Indeed, if you view the whole chart, the development during the 90s directly supports my claim I'd say.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
But still, I guess I phrased my actual point rather poorly. True, wind and solar produced almost 1/3 of the UK's total electricity over the last 12 months, but what kept the grid stable was mostly natural gas.
In this role natural gas replaced coal.
> Now, in terms of capacity for instantaneous power, the Combined Cycle Gas Turbine plants probably do add up to similar capacity to older coal plants which were phased out, at least very close, but it's pretty rare for all that generation to actually be needed - this chart doesn't really show that.
Yes, pretty rare. But this is exactly what grid stability is about. Making sure the lights stay on even though it's cold and there's no wind. As for example end of November 2022 till middle of December:
https://www.electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?period=1-mont...
True. By electricity produced natural gas and biomass have not replaced all TWh that formerly came from coal. (Even though you can see how natural gas directly replaced coal during the 90s here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by... )
The point I intended to make is: there's two kinds of electricity production capacity. There's Flexible/dispatchable capacity such as gas, coal and others. And there's intermittent capacity such as solar and wind.
Without electrical storage (almost non existent), solar and wind cannot replace dispatchable capacity in the context of grid stability.
The increase in electricity produced from natural gas and biomass is what directly contributed to the grid remaining stable, _despite_ the increased production from wind and solar.
> Natural gas is still the largest single contributor to the UK's grid supply, but it's in decline, and will be overtaken by renewables in the coming years. Wind capacity will triple in the UK by 2030!
Yes. But it won't be the wind, that'll be keeping the grid stable, that's for sure.
Do you see BEV becoming the dominant truck technology?
If FCEV trucks were to take off as a technology and get to a share of say 30 % of all trucks in some region, then I'd speculate that the FCEV tech in itself would ultimately displace BEV not only in the truck but also partially in the car sector.
See this plot:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
Agree, the speed of transition has been quite fast. As you can see in the following plot the UK started out at a rather low level of renewables. At this relatively low level the transition is probably easier than at higher levels.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-electricity-prod...
I'd guess the real challenge with grid stability will become more visible when grids all over the world reach some 2/3..3/4 of renewables.
> On the flip side, what benefits does crypto actually offer?
> For most of the benefits I hear of crypto (like what you've mentioned) my response is "No one cares about any of that". On the contrary ...
Right now admittedly, the benefits of Bitcoin are relatively hypothetical.
I think the chance that in a few decades (say 20-30 years) Bitcoin will have turned out to have been a system/technology that will have assisted the world's financial system with converging to principles that'll have brought with them significantly more stability in this financial system and following from this more stability of society .. this chance is greater than zero.
I'd argue that one key problem of the world's current financial system is its (in my opinion) inherent dependency on economic growth. As most people will agree, economic growth has been a good thing for centuries, but humanity has reached a level of (ab)use of natural resources that far outstrips the capacity of ecosystems to recover. Many people would be content with less material goods but for the sake of economic "stability" (and also because voters like presents) governments decide to hop from one growth stimulus package to the next, subsidizing consumption and thus nudging people to buy new stuff instead of maintaining/repairing existing stuff and incentivizing companies to churn out one new variant of an existing product that's often only minimally better and sometimes even worse than the previous one after the other.
Jobs/unemployment is _the_ justification for the never ending growth/stimulus policy that almost no voter will argue against, which is why politics isn't really able to solve this.
From this follows the key solution: for the sake of our ecosphere, the (IMO) inherent dependency on economic growth has to be done away with. Fiat currencies (through the expansive monetary policies they enable) are the basis for the growth dynamic and Bitcoin is a system that enables opting out of it.
You might say: now that's one vague kind of benefit.
Agree, it's vague. But the possibility that Bitcoin can help solve one of humanity's fundamental and existential problems _because_ unlike politicians it cannot easily be corrupted by big money is IMO enough hypothetical benefit to justify its adoption and use.
I'm on a 4 GB system, so RAM fills up quickly. Since I'm also still using a HDD, it's pretty important for me to prevent RAM from filling, since swapping makes the whole desktop environment lag.
When I see the RAM indicator column get close to 75 % I'm warned and do things like close applications I currently don't need or press the above mentioned button, since Firefox is open pretty much the whole time.
https://www.mediamarktsaturn.com/en/top-stories/even-more-bi...
...
> In the study, the WSU researchers found comparable energy costs for the fossil-fuel based technology, SOE, and water-based electrolysis ranging from $153 to $197 per ton of ammonia.
> The bitcoin price needs to be high enough so the big boys’ loans don’t get liquidated, but low enough so bagholders don’t attempt to cash out and crash the price. It’s a tightrope.
Can someone explain, please?
Who is meant by "big boys" and "bagholders" here?
Bagholders are holders of (smalls amounts of) Bitcoin, trivial.
Big boys are the folks running the shady exchanges that basically borrowed money ("loans") and bought bitcoin with that, is that right?
Or maybe you stick three hydrogen atoms to one nitrogen atom and have ammonia.
It's pretty obvious that the single most important reason why the vast majority of machines/engines runs on hydro _carbons_ instead of hydro nitrogens, is that hydrocarbons have been humanity's most important energy source for centuries.
So it makes sense, everything is geared towards them.
But for the future, ammonia appears to be a much better choice, because nitrogen is readily available and the only thing that's missing is matured tech that runs on ammonia. Fuel cells, engines, ...
IIRC there are already container ships being built that run on ammonia.
> If a big enough “bad actor” joins here, and we are on the brink of this with major platforms having announced upcoming ActivityPub interop, whatever they do will happen regardless of the consent given by folks who think they can federate content but restrict where it goes. I’m not suggesting this as a justification to just make away with people’s data, but realistically this is going to happen eventually and I’d rather Mastodon has tooling and conventions available to deal with this rather than “we always hoped this would never happen” ...
" .. we are on the brink of this with major platforms having announced upcoming ActivityPub interop .. "
Anyone know which major platforms have announced ActivityPub interoperability?
Agree, hydrogen storage is not something you do as easily as say piling up some fire wood.
On the other hand, it's totally possible to do at home and it is being done. Hydrogen can be stored in regular gas cylinders. See the realized projects from Home Power Solutions [1].
If these cylinders are located outside, explosions should be rather unlikely due to ventilation.
There's also a recent HN topic [2] about it, but without any comments yet.
My biggest hope is around MNT reform putting a RISC-V module in their laptop sometime in the next 5 years.
Or maybe some other project builds a laptop around a successor of the HiFive Unleashed. https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed
The demand appears to be there.
Maybe the folks from SiFive just need to get a few more request for a small module that can be integrated into a laptop to actually crowd fund such a thing.
Except for ".. will be supported by mobile network providers.", doesn't Jabber/XMPP already fulfill all of that?
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by support by mobile network providers.
I wouldn't be so sure about this. I'd assume FOMO is rather induced by people observing steep price surges which show them that they could have earned X % in a short time, had they bought a little earlier, than the mere supply function over time.
Had the price remained mostly flat in the way it did until September 2020, there'd have been little FOMO.
I read your text. While I agree that in the long term the difference in inflation rate is almost negligible (after 200 years Grin would have 0.5 % inflation whereas Bitcoin's inflation would be practically zero) it appears pretty obvious to me that in the early years, the difference is huge.
A huge difference in the beginning is crucial for systems that are subjected to the network effect. If early on a system doesn't gain enough traction and users, there's a big probability it will just fade away. So any p2p digital currency system should attract enough users in the beginning or it will be too slow to catch on and be outrun by its competitors.
Sure, Grin would work as store of value practically the same way as Bitcoin would in 200 years. But people don't live that long, so their time horizon for a system to work as store of value will rather be like 30-40 years. If you look at Grin's inflation over the first 30-40 years, it is no store of value, it looses value quicker than regular currencies did in the last couple of decades.
Grin vs Bitcoin Inflation, had they both started in 2009:
2013 - 25.0 % - 12.5 %
2017 - 12.5 % - 4.2 %
2021 - 8.3 % - 1.8 %
2025 - 6.3 % - 0.8 %
Sure, many people became interested in Bitcoin (second wave) because of price spikes. But I still assume the early adopters were only early adopters because of rapidly decreasing and eventually fixed supply.
Unlike a top down governmental currency which is just issued and everybody uses it, a bottom up currency (that has to grow via the network effect) needs a sufficient level of early adopter reward, or it will never become wide spread.
Also, the pure blockchain doesn't really appear to scale well enough to enable everyday payments for billions of people, which might indicate that its purpose might be more in the store of value (as foundation of currency systems) domain rather than in being used for day to day payments.
So you think that flattening of the distribution of Bitcoin is (almost) impossible?
As I wrote, I do think the distribution will flatten.
Or do you mean the flattening is possible but it is just too slow? So slow that it might become a cause for Bitcoin to fail?