ephbit

> Early miners/adopters were (exponentially!) closer to the money in bitcoin.

True, this initial distribution of Bitcoin isn't desirable longterm.

The important question is: do the fundamental dynamics of the system lead to a less unequal distribution or to even more concentration in the longterm? I'd say the longterm dynamics of a system that's capable of reaching some equilibrium are hugely more important than its initial state.

Every time, some Bitcoin whale buys something with their coins, they're very likely flattening the distribution. Since Bitcoin doesn't earn any interest, whales cannot just spend the earnings and keep a constant balance. Every time (almost) they spend, the distribution becomes more flat.

As long as the Bitcoin price were to rise, the incentive to buy something else with it would also increase. Combined with people having finite lifespan this will probably lead to most whales spending sooner or later.

> > Since they don’t need to expend resources to stake, they can simply increase their overall staking amount as they earn ongoing coins from staking rewards, and exponentially grow their influence on the network over time,

> Every staker increases their stake by the same percentage; each one is just holding on to their share of the pie; there is no exponentially growth.

Aren't you missing here that there's a certain threshold below which holders practically do not stake? All those people with low balances do not get this "same percentage".

Maybe you can compare it to a savings bank account. It is mostly small amounts of money which reside in pockets or wallets or piggy banks. They don't earn interest as the larger amounts in savings accounts do. Most people with little money do not get any interest on the little they have, whereas wealthy people often manage their wealth so that they have gains.

So I claim that there's indeed an exponential effect that will shift the percentages over time. And it should lead to accumulation instead of distribution.

Agree. Heat pumps are likely the most efficient way to heat/cool something we'll ever have.

But that's besides the point. The question was whether mining is becoming more efficient, not whether mining can deliver secondary purposes as efficiently as other technology that's specifically designed for those purposes.

>> That’s what journalists and other people who don’t understand the algorithm often miss: the declining block subsidy. This results in Bitcoin’s inflation rate going down

> The inflation rate would go down as well without a declining block subsidy. The latter just makes it go down faster.

Agree.

The interesting question would be: what would have happened to Bitcoin, if it had been designed to have a fixed emission rate instead of halvings every few years?

Maybe it wouldn't even have attracted interest from enough people to become widespread.

Or maybe it would've attracted even more interest.

I think the notion of "fixed supply" attracted many people who see it as a fundamental feature.

> > some analysts and critics of the network are concerned that Bitcoin won’t use enough energy to remain secure in the future when it relies mostly on transaction fees. I don’t view that as a primary concern either

> Strangely no reason given for this wishful thinking that declining rewards leading to declining security won't be a long term problem.

Why would reliance on mostly transaction fees be a problem? Even with zero block reward, miners still have every incentive as before (with high block rewards) to compete for finding as many blocks as possible, because the creator of a block can choose transactions and gets the resulting fees. The chance to succeed is proportional to hashing power and thus energy usage. Do I get something wrong here?

> I think Bitcoin makes particularly elegant usage of energy, and is getting more energy efficient over time.

She might be hinting at developments where (as an example) mining hardware is being integrated into systems where the waste heat is being used.

Societies' gains as an effect of this specialisation is just one (albeit an important one) aspect of the whole optimisation. Anti-fragility and redundancy typically decrease the number of (costly) disruptions in a system and thus the proposed fallback profession might actually be a net positive for efficiency rather than a loss.

Isn't this autobiographical memory just another capability of the brain that is simply trained by making use of it?

Yes, there are of course medical cases and disorders. But I'd guess a lot of variance just comes from differing individual "training intensity".

There must be quite some variance in the average number of times that individual people are triggered/challenged to recall some memories (and process them) in their everyday lives. Some people don't communicate with others - generally, and also more specifically about what happens/happened in their life - as much as others do.

And some people are more inclined to subconsciously cultivate their own memories, than others. Those for example, who enjoy storytelling. Their mind probably creates stories (which apparently are an essential mental feature) around their memories more easily, which facilitates recalling these memories.

Developments such as passive heating homes that reduce energy consumption to almost zero, might solve these problems. But that'll take another 30 years at least.

I think right now, almost noone can actually grasp how valuable the stability and anti-fragility of the current hydrocarbon-based energy system is to society (with ~ 85 % of all energy still being fossil).

The (necessary/inevitable) shift from that hydrocarbon system towards more and more electricity IMO will introduce more and more fragility.

Strategic oil reserves and natural gas reserves can supply nations for months of heating, car/truck driving and electricity generation.

Now shift all this to electric heating and EVs and the system will have a lot less buffer overall. It'll be weeks (and that's optimistic) instead of months.

Yes, sounds a bit like FUD even to myself, but this is what it looks like to me, when I try to look at the energy system in a more abstract way.

> .. one hydrogen pipeline can move as much renewable energy as 5-10 giant transmission lines, using one 50' right-of-way and no visible infrastructure (vs transmission towers, 500'-2000' of right-of-way and 100'+ tall towers).

This.

Most people don't seem to be aware of how massive the upgrades to a 100 % renewable electric grid would have to be. In order to always be able to transmit 100 % of available peak renewable energy from where it's produced to where it can be used.

Also, an electric grid is a much more fragile infrastructure than gas pipelines, which are in themselves a large buffer.

Running a diesel engine on hydrogen?

Sounds a bit crazy, waste of hydrogen.

If hydrogen were to be produced from solar though, as might be the case in Australia (where this research is done), powering an existing fleet of diesel engines with mostly hydrogen doesn't sound that crazy anymore.

Wasn't it mostly fungi where humans found antibiotics?

Whenever someone states with seemingly absolute certainty that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme and also appears to assume that it will never be anything but a Ponzi scheme I ask myself: am I too optimistic or are they too pessimistic and non-imaginative?

I think Bitcoin does (right now) indeed partially show the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme.

But I also think that it's absolutely possible for it to evolve away from that (Ponzi characteristic) and instead become a reliable store-of-value-over-time asset (more reliable than USD on a bank account as an example) that millions to billions of people use.

Now before you say "store-of-value is bullsh*, Bitcoin just lost x % YoY". Sure, it did. But it always depends on the timeframe you're looking at.

> “We are adapting our plans for domestic production of green hydrogen from five gigawatts to ten gigawatts of electrolyser capacity by 2030,” Scholz noted.

That would be quite some capacity.

And I think the distinction between A dirty and B cluttered is not useful in this context.

Any desired and pleasant state (clean/uncluttered/...) of the surroundings which has to be willfully (and through expenditure of energy/work) defended against inevitable spontaneous deterioration is really a victim of the exact same effect: almost all non-living things constantly deteriorate (atoms moving from where they were purposefully put to make things work to unintended places), with only few exceptions. Such as things that develop patina, but that too is really only a certain state of things on their way towards defect.

> When I boil pasta, I use full heat to get the water boiling, drop in the pasta, then let it come back up to a boil, then drop the temperature as low as possible to keep a slow boil going--about medium-low.

Do you put a lid on the pot?

If not, you're running a reboiler. If you were to do that in a region of the earth and season of the year where you have to heat your place you'd probably be wasting double. Because the additional moisture from evaporation has to be removed from your place later through ventilation.

It always baffles me how many people don't care/know just how much less energy they could use to achieve the exact same result, just by putting a lid on.

> ... you can quickly be left holding the bag. This corrects eventually, but not usually within the span of days or even months. It can often take years to see things correct.

You're aware that especially bakeries have been raising prices very promptly all over the world.

True, price raises do have delays in some cases (rents) but generally for most common services and products that people buy in everyday life, if there's no cartel messing with prices, they will very consistently and without years of delays increase when inputs become more expensive.

> You still can't have inflation if the people don't have money.

This might be true for the more dispensible items in the basket but I'd say for real necessities it's mostly wrong. People who have little money will first shift their expenses from less necessary things to essentials. Even if people don't have more money, they will have to spend more on the things they continue buying. This is exactly what's happening right now, almost everywhere.

> A business can't magically charge more than someone is willing and able to pay.

Unless there are subsidies by the state that try to keep the businesses afloat. These are very pervasive.

> Your drag area figure for Tesla Semi is absurdly high.

Don't think so. But I made a different error. See further down.

Drag equation [1]:

> FD = 1/2 * rho * u² * cD * A

> The reference area A is typically defined as the area of the orthographic projection of the object on a plane perpendicular to the direction of motion.

So A in the case of a truck carrying a standard container cannot be smaller than the section of the container. And because the container cannot hover millimetres above the ground but must rather be carried at a height of at least half a metre you'll have A > greater than the cross section of the container.

Which is what I calculated above.

I did make an error though by multiplying the drag area of the Model S by the drag coefficient, since the 0.562 m² already takes the coefficient into account.

So you're right, the factor Semi/Model S is ~ 4.68 based on the numbers I assumed.

It does look more feasible indeed based on this number.

Yet I'm still sceptic a battery 5 times larger will suffice because of higher friction and because I doubt regenerative braking will recover the same proportional amount of energy for the Semi as for the Model S.

Let's see. Decelerating the 20,000 kg Semi going at 100 kph at mild 0.10 g requires a force of 0.1 * 9.81 m/s² * 20,000 kg = 19,620 N.

At a velocity of 100 kph that equals (not taking drag and other friction into account) an initial (lossless) braking power of 545 kW that could be regained by regenerative braking. Okay, could be feasible as well, if charging can be ramped up to this rate within the fraction of a second.

If you brake at 0.5 g though, you'd have to suddenly feed in the ball park of 2 MW into the battery. Not sure that's possible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_equation

> But if you printed money endlessly and gave it all to Jeff Bezos, there would be no competitive pressure to see prices rise in the general economy. He might try to buy up all the real estate or stocks, driving asset inflation, but there is little reason for him to buy up all the bread to see it appear in CPI where we measure general inflation.

The connection isn't all that obvious, but there is indeed a connection between fresh money being invested in financial asset XY and price for bread rising. Even though the investor did not buy up piles of bread, they created pressure on some scarce resources in the value chain on the way to bread. Those are energy, base materials, labour force, ...

Whenever an institution (central bank, commercial bank, ..) creates fresh money and this money gets invested in something, a portion of total global resource allocation (towards different end products) gets shifted. Shifted means that some end products see an increase of costs in their value chain, which leads to higher prices.

Example: commercial banks in some country xy are allowed to lend more due to some changes in the rules for fractional reserve banking. The banks currently have some kind of skew in their allocation of lending, meaning they don't just lend exactly proportional to current total allocation of credit. Let's say they lend more (in respect to current allocation) to real estate development businesses than to bakeries. This means that the real estate sector now has more bidding power for all the scarce resources (energy, raw materials, ...) than the bread sector. So there's new demand for energy from the real estate sector which makes energy prices rise. Voilà, bakeries spend more on energy, bread prices rise as well.

And all that without "someone buying up all the bread".

Injecting fresh money in the financial sector will lead to real world resource reallocation, which will put pressure on sectors that don't even seem to be involved.

> As an example, we've often been told to eat more fibers to increase "flow", the flow increase is because the fibers are digested by bacteria and the mild toxicity of the process forces the digestive system to flush everything.

Very interesting.

Can you maybe refer to some text(s) about this phenomenon of mild toxicity from digestion of fibers?

Electric grid capacity will be an interesting field to watch over the next 2 decades.

It's not like power lines all over the world have massive capacity reserves left. And with heat pumps becoming highly relevant right now for heating homes, there's going to be a lot of additional load on the grid.

Yes, EVs and heat pumps do also offer very useful application as flexible load to consume when supply is high and be switched off when electricity supply is low. But all this combined will make electric grids even more essential for keeping everyday life running.

H2 on the other hand with its inherent buffering effects would take some of these pressures off the electrical grid.

For hydrogen tanks in cars the weight is not really an issue. Volume is much more so.

Comparison to an airplane - where weight is basically everything - is pretty useless here.

Now what happens as soon as there _is indeed_ sufficient H2 refuelling infrastructure for trucks? (Assuming that it will happen for long haul trucks because BEV trucks will not replace diesel powered ones in the long term)

Doesn't that make FCEV cars look a lot more convenient than BEV cars?

Model 3 Cd: ~ 0.23 [1]

Tesla Semi Cd: ~ 0.36 [2]

A shipping container measures w x h: 2.438 x 2.591 m The total height of the truck will be > 3 m so we're talking about 2.438 m x 3 m projected area. That's ~ 7.3 m2

A Tesla S apparently has 0.562 m2 drag area so let's assume 0.6 m2 for the Model 3. [1]

This amounts to a factor of Semi to Model 3 of:

7.3 m2 * 0.36 / (0.6 m2 * 0.23) = 19

So at the same speed the aerodynamic drag of a truck will be almost 20 times that of a Model 3. Yes, a truck typically drives slower and speed goes into calculation of engine power at a power of 3. But the truck would have to go slower than the Model 3 by a factor of 19^(1/3) ~ 2.7 to have roughly the same drag.

If the Model 3 drives at 150 kph and the Semi at 100 kph, the Semi still has more than 5 times the aerodynamic drag.

And you'll have to add friction to that and losses for accelerating the greater mass. (I doubt regenerative braking will scale well with increased vehicle mass)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_drag_coefficient

[2] https://insideevs.com/news/345710/tesla-semi-details-on-truc...

> A truck should consume about 5x than what a Model 3 LR does.

Do you have any hints as to why "5x" should be roughly correct?

> I think about 2 ton battery is closer to truth for a truck that has about 400-500 mile range.

A Tesla Model 3 has a ~ 500 kg battery and weighs ~ 2 tons. With the drag coefficient of a truck being significantly greater and its gross weight amounting to ~ 15-20 times that of the Model 3, I'd say your 2 tons are way off. Sure, the truck will go slower than the Model 3, but still.

Also electric motors do weigh a few kg's as well, so I'd guess the less heavy drive train of the electric vehicle isn't going to save all that much weight.

> Charging at the starting point while loading, at (mandatory) breaks and at the destination should be enough; a BEV truck done right shouldn't require extra waiting time.

I think this needs to be compared to the procedure with a diesel truck. The diesel truck needs a few minutes at the gas station to refill and get some Ad Blue or what. Then it's all flexible to go anywhere for a few hundred miles. Compared to that, your BEV truck is going to need careful planning ahead of charging and any small deviation from the plan is going to be a lot more of a hassle than for the diesel truck.

Point being. Nope, there aren't many H2 gas stations either as of now. But once there are, the refuelling of a FCEV will be much more similar to that of a diesel/gasoline vehicle than that of a BEV, aka more convenient/resilient.

I'd guess the one important application of fuel cell tech that people often appear to forget is going to be long haul trucks where it'll replace the diesel power train.

It's a big chunk of overall land transport that IMO in the long-term won't have other technologically/economically viable options besides the fuel cell.

Rail doesn't serve the last few miles to the destination.

Electric trucks are viable for short distances. Trucking dozens of tons of cargo over distances > 500 miles isn't going to roll well with carrying another 3-5 tons of battery. And having to recharge that at 2 MW every now and then would require a very reliable/available and ubiquitous high power charging infrastructure.

You can also run Recoll on it .. awesome full text searchable personal history and knowledge base.

grep is nice, but Recoll gives you stemming and such.

Let's say you have a facility where chips/semiconductors/electronic components are produced. Supplying this facility with green electricity only is pretty easy. Sign contract with energy company, done.

All the raw material inputs needed to produce the components, that's where it gets interesting. I kind of doubt you'll find a copper (or whatever) mine where green electricity powered dump trucks drive around (which .. in turn would need to have been produced sustainably, otherwise they add CO2 to the BOM).

And good luck trying to first build the factories for the production of components from exclusively decarbonized materials. Steel? Concrete? Plastics?