This is awesome. I just wish more governments would wake up to the fact that crypto does nothing beyond suck resources and warm the planet. If you want to bet on things that go up & down, there is the stock market where things go up and down 20%+ every single day.
Bitcoin has provided the non-boomer generations an investment vehicle and inflation harbor that has no competition. I know so many younger people who now have some semblance of retirement savings due to crypto. Fiscal policy and wealth inequality have made crypto the only option for savings in 2021.
You cannot move "underground" when you are sucking that much power.
The government did what they should have done, and what all governments should have done a long time ago and shut this nonsense down. It's sucking up resources and only adding to wealth inequality.
Bitcoin rewarded a small group of very smart people very very very well. It then rewarded morons... hordes and hordes of morons very very well too. We will be living with the consequence of this for decades to come.
You can move underground. Put a PC in regular homes with a few GPU's, kick back some money for the people letting you do it, and the energy is dissipated across dozens of regular homes. Sure, it would be a lot of work. But it's certainly worth it given the very cheap energy.
Don't take the Saudi money. Don't take any money.
Just build it, and ship it. Work a regular job and work on your startup at night.
Create a product and charge very little for it. Wipe out the competition with a better / cheaper product.
Once you think you are having an effect, short your competitor. Continue to ship your as good or better product for 1/3 the cost.
Take down the world powers.
Just an idea.
A key to changing this is to invest in public research universities that release research papers publicly & emphasize reducing the cost of manufacturing & distribution.
Another key is to fund nonprofit foundations that act as custodians of science & engineering tech released under open source licenses.
Software startups are possible because manufacturing costs have been minimized to near zero & key tech is effectively public domain. Hardware is about 20 years behind the curve, but open hardware licenses are appearing & patents expire quicker than copyrights.
Luckily we already have a working fusion reactor. It's 92M miles away, but it's a big one. All that is required are some solar panels and wind turbines to harness its power.
So Bill Gates doesn't think we can do this with a majority solar, wind, and storage. He invented the backslash and has a lot of money, so he is getting a lot of attention.
But has a good computer simulation been made? Just collect annual sunlight data from a million points across the US, along with wind, throw in 200M electric vehicles (can use satellite data and image recognition data to guess how often they are parked for V2G), and see how far we can get towards a 100% green grid.
I haven't seen a computer simulation and yet here is Bill saying it's impossible. Is it? Or is this just another "computers will never need more than 640k" moment?
