Slashdot Mirror
Cryptocurrency Wipeout Deepens To $640 Billion As Ether Leads Declines (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The cryptocurrency bear market plumbed a fresh 10-month low on Monday as Bitcoin's biggest rival tumbled and U.S. regulators suspended trading in two securities linked to digital assets. Ether, the second-largest virtual currency, slumped 11 percent from its level at 5 p.m. New York time on Friday, according to Bloomberg composite pricing. Bitcoin declined 2.4 percent, while the market capitalization of digital assets tracked by CoinMarketCap.com shrank to about $197 billion -- down almost $640 billion from its January peak. Cryptocurrencies have declined for five of the past six weeks amid concern that a broader adoption of digital assets will take longer than some had anticipated. That worry was underscored over the weekend after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission temporarily suspended trading in two exchange-traded notes linked to cryptocurrencies and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin told Bloomberg that the days of explosive growth in the blockchain industry have likely come and gone.
The $640 billion loss that is being reported is against the massive gains late last year. The money appeared out of nowhere when everybody thought a crytocoin was worth something and is disappears to nowhere when everybody realised that they were wrong.
Sure, some people bought in when the market was high and have lost their shirts. Most of the losses though are from people who paid $300 for their coin years ago and now it is only worth $9000 instead of $25000.
You bought a security with no inherent value, based on the idea that someone else would, for some reason, pay more for it than you did. It worked out for some people, didn't for others. But why would you think you had more than a 50/50 chance? (Very skillful traders can beat those odds by trading trends in price action and being extremely disciplined.)
Meanwhile, there are lots of assets and securities with real underlying value to trade. You can understand the value and even learn to anticipate changes in that value. Why not trade those instead?
The good news is that my Ethereum wallet has a virtual bobblehead in it. That's got to be worth something, right? I hope it's enough to pay for bus fare back to my parents' basement.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
How much did you lose?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The cost of mining is now a non-trivial percentage of the worlds economy. The miners now have to pay real world money to pay for the electricity and the money they borrowed to buy/build their rigs. This constant selling of crypto currency to finance the mining likely means that we have either seen the last crypto currency rally or maybe there is just one more left.
We have also now seen the limits of what crypto currencies can do and it looks like the existing banking infrastructure does it better...For now. Maybe a highly scalable proof of stake currency will be invented. Maybe one of this existing currencies can already securely do it. It's not going to be bitcoin though.
Hard to eat silver, and it makes a lousy medium to a blacksmith. You're better off with pennies and a book on how to make penicillin, gunpowder, and alcohol.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
If you had of bought/made bitcoin for $1 and next week it went to $2.50.. then the value started sliding back, and you sold for $2: would have you patted yourself on the back for your 100% gain?
It could have been the case that when you sold for $2, it kept going down to zero.
The fact it went to $20k is a once in a generation fluke.
Speculation is a mugs game.
46137
What are the equations governing crypto-gravity?
mv = pq
and
Qd = F(d) + cP
Qs = F(s) + dP
Probably others but those are the main sets.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think you misunderstand "intrinsic value."
Value is whatever someone is willing to pay for something.
Intrinsic value generally means something has inherent use (subjectively).
For example, this is why guns are actually a very popular investment vehicle and prices of them rise well above inflation: Because a gun and some bullets can have huge intrinsic value.
Or take a bottle of water. You crash land in the desert. You're walking 3 days straight, parched throat, how much are you going to pay for a bottle of water? Regardless of what you'd actually pay, it shows water has (huge) intrinsic value. Now how much would you pay for some BitCoin in that desert? You're going to say "Fuck this worthless shit!"
"The U.S. paper dollar is not backed by anything of value"
So you don't think the US government will collect taxes on US dollars or that the US standing army won' t stand for US's interests starting tomorrow?
US dollar is a fiat currency. US dollar is backed by something of value: USA itself.
Now that's what I call a fitting comparison!
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
That's not a very diverse portfolio, you should at least have some Beanie Babies in there...
The U.S. paper dollar is not backed by anything of value.
The US dollar (paper or otherwise) is backed by something of power, the US state and that state's ability to raise taxes. Think of it as a share in a company with the exclusive monopoly to a business method that consists of legally taking a cut from everyone else's profit ... and then tell me it "is not backed by anything of value."
The U.S. dollar can be used to buy goods because it is accepted as a medium of exchange.
The reason it is accepted as a medium of exchange is precisely because it is backed by the power of the US state. That state compels its usage inter alia in the payment of your tax liability. Important also is that you cannot sue for the satisfaction of a debt (between private persons) in anything other than legal tender. The idea that the value of legal tender rests on some tacit, arbitrary agreement among market participants to employ the currency of state (rather than some other random exchange technology) as a medium of exchange is "nonsense walking upon stilts." The state, (if necessary by means of force), insists upon your using it.
you can't go to grocery store and get groceries with bitcoin; but, it's money
Money you can't go to a grocery store and get groceries with isn't very good at being money really, is it? It's more like a token for a limited selection of goods and services.
The problem with crypto-currencies was that is was created by a bunch of geeks who didn't fully understand what 'money' is ... not that anyone necessarily does. The most signal failure however, has been a design that fitted the supply of coin to time rather than to demand (we all know what happens when the money supply falls too far out of alignment with demand! And this was the problem that ultimately killed the gold standard after all). That's why bitcoin and most well known cryptos (I'll reserve judgement as to future developments) are better thought of as 'collectables' rather than 'money' or 'currency' the best intentions notwithstanding.
And NRFB Furbies. They're gonna make a hit return really soon now!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Eternal growth! Say it with me, eternal growth! Fake it 'til you make it if you have to!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Meanwhile, Dogecoin is doing relatively well. It's down since yesterday up 300% form last month!
=Smidge=
Indeed. The thing the cryptocurrency proponent forget (and that those trying to get the scam going conveniently omit) is how and why a fiat currency actually works. There is a large national bank and a national economy tied to it. Of course, it is complicated and market-manipulations in fiat currencies are possible. So are value declines (look at Turkey for a current example) and value increases. But in essence, there is a whole lot of real value tied to it and a whole lot of economic activity depending it being reasonably stable. And that is just what a cryptocurrency lacks: Stability. That is also what makes it unusable as a currency.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Exactly.
In fact, many cryptocurrencies are designed to be anything but stable. Bitcoin is a prime example of this: since the total amount of coins that will be created is capped, and since the creation/mining of new coins gets more complex with time as the math required to do the mining gets more difficult, it means the cost of creating a bitcoin (as well as transaction cost) goes up with time, on its own. Bitcoin is deflationary by design, which is a property you absolutely do not want your currency to have.
This also creates a deathstar level weakness in Bitcoin. People like to talk about it being decentralized, but in reality it's not. The current cost of creating one bitcoin is varies highly based on local prices of electricity and equipment from around 530 dollars in Venezuela (the only country that you can mine it at under a thousand bucks, and that's only because energy is one of the few remaining things one can get cheaply in Venezuela as it's heavily subsidized by the government) to over 10 000 in advanced economies, with South Korea taking the first place at over 26 000 dollars a coin..This means that the actual mining and thus the whole core infrastructure that Bitcoin's continued operation relies on is actually heavily centralized to the hands of (mostly) commercial operators in countries with cheaper operational costs, mainly in Asia/China (china used to control about 70 % of all the mining, I don't have recent data on how much that's changed after the government banned Bitcoin exchanges). In other words: Bitcoin is running because people are making money running it, for now.
The thermal exhaust port of this death star is here: The moment the cost of mining rises above the the price of the coin, mining will be stop. It's safe to say for example that no-one in their right mind is doing Bitcoin mining in South Korea, because at the current prices you're losing about 20 grand per coin mined. If the price of a coin drops below the cheapest possible mining cost (currently the 530 bucks in Venezuela) it will become unprofitable for anyone to be running bitcoin mining, at which point the entire 'decentralized' network will collapse, and the value will plummet to zero, as no means of transacting the coins will exist, and the currency will become useless.
Combining the fact that the design of BC makes the continued rise of the mining costs an unavoidable fact (meaning that the point of failure will keep creeping up in dollar terms) with the market price of a Bitcoin being highly volatile and affected by a whole host of things including regulation of exchanges and other cryptocurrencies and their popularity, the whole BC infrastructure is definitely a game of chairs where you can make money as a miner or an investor up to a point but when the music stops you better hope you're not left with several coins that are now suddenly worth nothing.
So a potentially good investment? Sure. A safe and secure store of value or a functional currency? Absolutely not.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
During Q2 2018, the price of electricity in South Korea was 126.089 South-Korean Won which was equivalent to 0.117 USD at the exchange rate at the time of collecting the data. During the same time, the world average price was 0.115 USD per kWh of electricity used.
From: https://www.globalenergyprices...
So? Mining a coin in South Korea does not cost $20k ... with a little bit of thinking that would have been obvious to you.
if you want to mine cheap, get a solar panel, mine in north africa or in asia or australia, or Nevada if you are in the US, there are certainly more places.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This judgement day for the shitcoins as been both predicted and expected for some time.
The interesting thing to watch is the relative performance of BTC and it's market dominance.
I continue to acquire BTC, and we'll see what the future brings.
..don't panic
Cryptocurrency Wipeout Deepens To $640 Billion As Ether Leads Declines
Imaginary thing without tangible value continues to not be worth shit. Film at 11.
Seriously... shit, the gold standard, if you'll pardon the metaphor, in worthlessness, is ironically, pretty valuable, especially compared to cryptocurrency. I think of this as like someone standing on a street corner with a battered paper bag, inflated and seemingly holding something, then with the top folded over and stapled. He tells passers-by that the bag could maybe contain something that at some unspecified point in the future, could be very valuable, and asks if any of them would you like to buy it from him.
Then someone with FAR more money than sense, somehow, says, "SURE!" and buys the empty bag. When he complains, the seller says, first, he never guaranteed the bag had any specific thing in it, nor what its future value would be. Incidentally, the bag WAS full of air, and damnit, that could be really valuable. Just ask anyone who's choking, for example. Then the poor deluded fool who bought the bag turns around and starts, after publicly complaining that the previous asshole sold him a worthless empty bag full of air, MAYBE, trying to sell someone ELSE the bag. Eventually another dumbass comes along, and the process repeats.
How to do really well in the cryptocurrency marketplace: Don't. Buy. The. Empty. Fucking. Bag.
Ever.
You're welcome.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Wow, I wouldn't think silver (or solder for that matter) would be strong enough for the typical use cases of a bladed mace.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From your very own link:
I was going with the numbers used in the report (here) which they claim to have gotten from governmental sources.
Wiki uses numbers from 2016, so they're outdated now, but back then using more than 1001 kWh a month caused the price to hike up to 24 cents, or as much as 64 cents during peak demand times in the year (summer and midwinter). At those kinds of prices you're talking about more than 20 grand a coin.
It looks like they may have calculated the value by using the peak demand price for the whole of the year, so the entire number maybe off a bit still, but the general point made still stands.
Again, I know there are places where mining is cheaper, I said so out right. It doesn't change the nature of the problem with BC's design as a 'currency'.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
I lost about minus $15K so far. Damn you, crypto-currencies! /shakefist
#DeleteFacebook
Let us assume that you are based in a location where the cost of energy makes mining cryptocurrencies unprofitable. Let us further assume that you have the capital to setup solar power generation. Would it not then be more profitable to sell the power at the going rate in that location, rather than using it to mine cryptocurrency? If I'm producing something worth X per unit, it makes no sense to use it in the production of something else, unless that something else is worth more than X per unit of my input.
MUH TULI^C^C^ BUTTCOINS!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This times million. I made $25,000 just last week using cryotocurrency. Ot is unbeatable amazing investment guaranteed to return big cash to anyone who buys in. Just look at how many stories on slashdot.org there are about it, thats how you knw is safe investment for amazing future full of houses, cars and women.
Alloys. They are often stronger than their components.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
All of the income earned in the United States--all those US Dollars--comes from selling services to consumers buying services. That means the annual GNI is equal to the amount of stuff produced and sold: it's backed by actual productivity.
People have some magical fantasy about a paper currency being backed by a fickle commodity which can explosively inflate or deflate as people corner the market or find a new gold mine. One day, your half-gram of gold is worth what last year's tenth-gram was worth, and your bank account just collapsed; another, the Hunt Brothers start hoarding all the gold, and you have to take a steep pay cut.
With fiat money, we manipulate monetary policy to hold a 2% inflation rate. This works because all the money spent is logistically and mathematically tied to all the stuff sold: the purchasing power of the currency is the purchasing power of the currency, a reflexive mathematical tautology.
That we all agree to use it helps, but doesn't set its buying power.
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What the heck will farmer Joe want with silver ? When you need food and water cash, or precious metals suddenly take a back seat to barter and survival skills. If it is 'just' a financial bubble burst you may very well be right. If the fall is greater into civil disorder then your cash, whether precious metal or a fiat paper currency will likely be very useless. Water, medicine, firearms, kerosene, gasoline, bio diesel will all be much more valuable.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
That's sort of the goal; people generalize too much (yes, this coming from me).
You can't mine more and more oil, gold, or whatever forever. You run out eventually.
Your business can't grow forever. You run out of customers eventually, and become flat relative to consumer base.
Your economy, however...
Productivity is a matter of finding new ways to accomplish the same things by reducing the resources required. Human labor is the final resource: we don't pay iron deposits for their ore; we do pay humans for their time producing the tools, extracting the ore, transporting it, refining it, and so forth. Sometimes we also pay governments or landowners for access rights, but that's a matter of artificial cost and not productivity.
When productivity increases, wealth per person increases. Higher wages for a particular engineer may mean you get a 10% productivity increase but less than a 9% cost decrease (a 10% increase in output, ceteris parabus, is 90.9% cost per output); that's fine: you're concentrating wealth, slowing the growth of the labor force instead of exploding your population. You can still produce and sell more per person, which is why time is the currency.
It turns out you can effectively increase productivity forever, or at least beyond limits we can identify. Productivity increases eventually necessitate the use of fewer expendable resources (less coal, more solar--you need a dyson sphere!), and even causes resource use reduction (GMO wheat grows twice as fast and yields 50% more per plant, so you use 1/3 as much land, labor, water, pesticide, and fertilizer per tonne of wheat). Mechanization front-loads resources: with more energy availability, it's cheap to run machines, and it's already damned-inexpensive to build and maintain them, so you put up human labor with a huge multiplier.
Keynes predicted we'd work 15-hour weeks by now; it's more like 5 or 1. Thing is we kept working 40 hours so we can have the fruits of 40x more labor--or rather, the fruits of the same labor producing 40x as much. I'd like to push for 7-hour work days 4 days per week: as we pick up new productivity, redefine "full time" to force overtime pay and benefits at shorter working hours. We'll be a little less wealthy (we'll be 10% wealthier instead of 15%), and in exchange have more time to enjoy our massive wealth.
Bitcoin is a complex, fancy mechanism that wastes a lot of resources. Instead of producing something consumable, it uses "proof of work": you make a pair of boots, and then we burn those boots because we don't actually need them and just wanted to make sure you're not getting a hand-out. Ethereum seems inefficient as well, although the guy who came up with that did at least put some thought into how to make something productive, whether or not he succeeded. Efficiency of resource utilization matters.
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Water, medicine, firearms, kerosene, gasoline, bio diesel will all be much more valuable.
Gasoline spoils within a year or less (even when stabilized) and produces varnishes which will deposit on fuel system components and cause them to fail. Diesel can successfully be kept for around three years, if a water remover and a biocide are used. Not sure about kerosene... but a quick search suggests it's similar to diesel, though it won't freeze or gel like diesel will.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It turns out you can effectively increase productivity forever, or at least beyond limits we can identify. Productivity increases eventually necessitate the use of fewer expendable resources (less coal, more solar--you need a dyson sphere!),
Stop. Just stop. We not only have no idea how you would build a Dyson sphere, but we have no idea what you would build one out of even if you could magically summon up anything you wanted. Extrapolate those facts backwards and you will see that there are actual practical limits on what can be achieved, and we can reasonably identify them.
Our current sustainable level of productivity is something like 70% of our actual level of productivity. We're fucked.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You hired the wrong kind of smith, get a Silversmith for silver, like Paul Revere,
We not only have no idea how you would build a Dyson sphere, but we have no idea what you would build one out of even if you could magically summon up anything you wanted.
Of course not. When we invented the blast furnace, we could suddenly produce a quantity of iron requiring 84,000 hours of labor in a mere 200 hours; nobody had any earthly idea how to do such a thing until suddenly someone did. If memory serves, the same person invented an iron rolling technique immediately, which made rail travel possible--at the time, the equivalent of traveling from here to Mars Colony as a lower-middle-class family weekend trip.
We do know that a dyson sphere with 32%-efficient collection (the efficiency of concentrating parabolic sterling engine solar collectors) would collect 13,000 trillion times the amount of electricity used on Earth today.
All energy on earth comes from the sun: photosynthesis feeds plants, animals (which eat animals or other plants), and microbes (which photosynthesize or eat other things). The heat, magnetic dynamo (orbiting the sun and its magnetic field causes the Earth's nickel-iron core to turn like a giant dynamo, generating a ton of heat), and so forth all bring energy to the Earth. This is the source of decomposition of arbitrary matter into coal, oil, and flammable gases (today's fossil fuels), as well as the water cycle (hydroelectric power) and wind. Tidal power apparently comes from the moon, which is the odd one out.
That means eventually you are going to expand beyond our exposure to the sun's output if you keep growing. To grow further, you need to collect space fuels (methane from Titan) or more solar energy. Logically, growth eventually demands a dyson sphere.
When you exceed the dyson sphere's capacity, you need one more thing--the most dangerous thing: a black hole generator.
There's an intermediate area between normal space and the event horizon in which the laws of physics are...weird. You can enter and leave this space; you can't leave the event horizon. A black hole is a collapsed spinning star and is itself spinning; dropping more stuff into it makes it spin faster. By throwing something past the black hole, you can enter orbit; and at a close distance, you can drop part of the mass into the black hole to escape. The black hole spins faster, transferring part of its momentum to the mass still in orbit, which exits with more velocity than it entered.
There is one form of self-propagating mass.
If you put a bunch of mirrors around a black hole and shine light past it, part of the light beam peels off and falls into the black hole. The remainder is affected by the gravity and spin, and comes out with more energy than went in: the black hole actually loses a bit of momentum overall, and the photons gain energy. When they reflect, they interact with matter, which means electrons absorb a high-energy photon and emit multiple lower-energy photons.
Put a hole in the mirror array and you get this massively-powerful blast of radiation flooding out; fail to put a hole in it and the mirror vaporizes, but can't move away at the speed of light, and so before it fails to contain the reflecting photons the black hole releases so much energy as to emit the most powerful supernova in recorded history.
Please don't build this until the universe suffers heat death.
It doesn't matter that you don't know how to build it; it's mundane technology. The logistics of assembling it are not mundane. The logistics of needing it at some point in the future are obvious: where else are you going to get more energy than the sun projects onto the earth?
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...as always, is "Is it more a Pyramid or a Ponzi?"
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
We do know that a dyson sphere with 32%-efficient collection (the efficiency of concentrating parabolic sterling engine solar collectors) would collect 13,000 trillion times the amount of electricity used on Earth today.
Yes, but it's like a space elevator in that we don't know of any materials which could actually be used to build one. Our understanding of physics itself does not permit it. If and when that changes, we can start talking about them as something other than fantasy. It's not science fiction without the science, and so far, there is only handwaving. Nothing we understood about physics precluded making a hotter furnace.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's not science fiction without the science, and so far, there is only handwaving. Nothing we understood about physics precluded making a hotter furnace.
You're trying to dispute solar power.
A dyson sphere is a superstructure with solar collectors driving heat engines. We can make metal structures, solar collectors, and the like. Nothing in the laws of physics precludes us from building a dyson sphere in the same way that nothing in the laws of physics precludes you from generating nuclear power in your basement: if you only had a piece of uranium (there's plenty and people are using it to generate nuclear power), you could.
Our understanding of physics itself does not permit it.
Economics doesn't permit it: it would be an enormous resource expenditure. It would pay itself back, but it's hard to start up.
It can be done incrementally, but it's still damned expensive.
it's like a space elevator in that we don't know of any materials which could actually be used to build one.
Steel, PTFE, and some mundane refrigerants.
None of this is even the point.
We know, for a fact, that the currency of resources is energy. Today, we make some cesium and molybdenum by transmuting other elements via nuclear fusion. It's expensive as all hell because it consumes tons of energy; but it works when mining and refining are more expensive than that. Need more uranium? Iron? Hydrogen? Nuclear fission and fusion can do that; we know how; it's just going to take a ton of energy.
Human labor is energy--food. Machine work is energy--fuel.
We know for a fact that expanding our productivity and our production will eventually mean expanding beyond the terrestrial windfall of the sun's energy.
Where do you get more energy?
A dyson sphere. The sun is leaking tons of energy: it's not making it to Earth. Capture it.
That you don't know how to get the material up there is immaterial; you don't know how to get the material up there because you have no clue where you'd find the energy. It's sort of a chicken-and-egg paradox. The physics of building it, operating it, making it work, all easy; the economics are pretty much dead at this moment.
I'm arguing that we will eventually reach the limits of terrestrial energy availability, and then we'll need a Dyson sphere. You're arguing that we can't know that because you can't imagine how to build a dyson sphere. The fact that you can't figure out how doesn't mean you won't need to; and, really, the fact that you can't figure out how is a matter of not understanding that we've actually built things in space that do everything a dyson sphere does--they're just smaller.
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You're trying to dispute solar power.
You just failed reading comprehension. Solar power is not the part I have a problem with, and I made that quite clear.
Our understanding of physics itself does not permit it.
Economics doesn't permit it: it would be an enormous resource expenditure. It would pay itself back, but it's hard to start up.
It can be done incrementally, but it's still damned expensive.
Not only can't it be done incrementally, but it can't be done at all. We have no materials which can withstand the stresses involved.
I'm arguing that we will eventually reach the limits of terrestrial energy availability, and then we'll need a Dyson sphere.
This is so stupid I can't even. There are many lesser things we could do in between here and there, like solar power satellites. That already exceeds the limits of terrestrial energy availability.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Price for a commodity (and bitcoin is one)
I fail to see how bitcoin can be called a commodity at all. Commodities are generally considered things with intrinsic value, useful in the physical world, such as grain, cattle, and other agricultural product, or mined goods like copper and lead.
Wikipedia categorizes commodities as "Hard" (gold, helium, oil are examples), "Soft" (grown such as rice and corn) or "Energy". Bitcoin falls into none of those categories.
Bitcoin, rather, is more of a financial instrument, investment, or value store. It has no value as a useful good. It cannot be eaten, used in manufacturing, nor does it provide heat or power (in fact it consumes power to even exist.
Such ephemeral things cannot and should not be considered commodities.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Does anyone else find it interesting that not one single person has ever lost money on cryptocurrencies? I mean, basic logic will tell you that there is someone out there who bought bitcoin at $16,000 thinking that it was going to $20,000, right? Not long ago, it went UP to $7k before going DOWN to $6k. Somebody's got to be taking a bath in there somewhere.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not only can't it be done incrementally, but it can't be done at all. We have no materials which can withstand the stresses involved.
Then...
There are many lesser things we could do in between here and there, like solar power satellites.
Which could independently encircle the Sun and relay power around its horizon as such.
Which could link together into a ring, although that's problematic: orbits must be eccentric, and a spinning ring becomes unstable. You're going to get a giant ellipse. Material stresses aren't a problem; the matter of keeping a spinning ring or sphere from flying off is.
There's another caveat: all space craft experience solar radiation pressure. That means the Sun's emissions are pushing all satellites outward away from the Sun itself. Satellites might initially require ion engines to stabilize themselves; eventually, as they link, they'll require more stabilization. With sufficient surface, they require less. That expansive tension is shared by all structural tension members, so the stresses are pretty small.
Achieving this, you can then link together a biaxial ring, and then a triaxial ring.
Filling the eight facets by superstructure would produce more outward pressure. Engineers would need to balance as they go over its massive construction based on data from the triaxial ring system's continuous compensation to reduce said compensation and achieve gravitational balance.
What? Did you think they'd just wake up one day and proclaim a 5-year project to build a massive sphere around the Sun? It's going to take a thousand years, or maybe a hundred.
You're still not asking the right questions: if we eventually run out of energy and expand further, won't we eventually use all the energy provided by a dyson sphere?
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How do you make alcohol out of pennies?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The difference is ethanol being added to the gasoline. Ethanol is hygroscopic. That means you're going to end up with water in your gasoline, not good. In some parts of the US you can still get ethanol free gasoline, especially marinas.
Ethanol free gasoline with fuel stabilizer will last just like it did back in the old days.
What is actually going to happen is that the coins become so cheap that nobody cares anymore for the fixed costs of mining. Then the respective coin will be dead.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This is just the Chinese again, using their crypto-coins to buy presents and moon cakes for the big Mid-Autumn Festival in two weeks.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Correct about the Gas, and Diesel. I was more thinking about the knowledge and equipment to produce Kerosene and Biodiesel. Petrol diesel and gas production require a large and intense industry, the other two can be made low tech and in small batches.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
LOL you work the pennies into tools to use to make the still to ferment and distill the alcohol, to trade for food and possibly power a tractor, or disinfect a wound or something :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
"How does the US army standing for the US's interests help me and my dollars stand for my interests?"
Isn't it obvious? By insuring (for their own interests) that US dollar stay "real money". That is, a store of value, a medium of exchange and, because of the previous two, a unit of account.
"Can I use my dollar to compel a single US soldier to serve my interests?"
Paraphrasing Microsoft, what do you want to buy today? Surely you'll want to eat, maybe pay the rent or a ticket for a show... not a single US soldier but its entire army and, in fact, the whole of USA society are *already* working on serving your interests... by serving their shared goals.
I consider capitalism far from being a panacea but the part that works, I know it works when it manages to align individuals' private interests and common ones. That's what makes USA dollar (and other sovereign currencies) work.
"Crypto was developed on the idea that a medium of exchange that was valued and controlled by the people who used it removed the possibility of catastrophic loss on the governments whim. Unfortunately for Bitcoin the whims of the marketplace may turn out to be more catastrophic."
And then, the path to hell is paved with good intentions. As you say, you put currency on the whims of people, and then people use the currency to their whims ("markets" is not a monster in a cave, it is me, and you, and you, and you... it's the people).
I don't know if you are American, but let's pretend you are for the sake of the argument: do not forget that Government *is* the people and instead of having that fixation that Government is good for nothing (which, in the end, is admitting people is good for nothing, so we better let an elite of "wiser ones", the big fortunes, that is, to direct the destiny of the country) work hard for the Government to be what it is meant to be and then, let it take control of the critical aspects of social well-being: education, healthcare, food and shelter at the very least because you can be sure that, otherwise, it will be the big fortunes what will dictate the outcomes and, if you think you have reasons to be worried about "governments' whim" (and you certainly have), then think of the alternative: what makes you think that Bezos, Ellison or Buffet have your own interests in higher regard than Government and, more importantly, what makes you think that you can change in your favour the collective interests of the Bezos, Ellisons and Buffets of this world than your government's?
As far as I know a BTC is worth the amount of power you put into mining it.
After all it is sold for thousand times that money on a BTC exchange.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Wiki [wikipedia.org] uses numbers from 2016, so they're outdated now, but back then using more than 1001 kWh a month caused the price to hike up to 24 cents, or as much as 64 cents during peak demand times in the year (summer and midwinter). At those kinds of prices you're talking about more than 20 grand a coin.
A household where a guy is running a mining rack is not paying peak prices. It has a flat rate price like any other household.
So if you talk about industrial mining, haha, interesting word, that might be different.
Anyway, mining a BTC does not cost more than a few bucks.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Only the government will tolerate their own fiat currency backed by nothing. Gangsters hate competition.