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> And if the economic effort that had been spent trying to corrupt terrestrial nodes is instead directed to ever-more-cost-efficient planet-leaving tech - that'

> And if the economic effort that had been spent trying to corrupt terrestrial nodes is instead directed to ever-more-cost-efficient planet-leaving tech - that's a win, too! By that same argument, wouldn’t Bitcoin currently be directing economic effort towards producing electricity and computer hardware as fast and cheaply as possible?

rebuilder 5y ago
Isn’t Bitcoin doing just that? Of course the hardware is pretty specialized. Unfortunately ”cheap” is not the same as ”ecological”.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  True, but the same goes for “planet-leaving tech.” Some of us might not be able to afford leaving the planet, or might want the planet’s environment to remain somewhat hospitable to life even after the CEOs leave in their spaceships!
  - acqq 5y ago
    Of course, "billionaires won’t "escape" to space while the world burns" -- "when you understand the science, it becomes clear that the "billionaire space race" is just that—nothing more than a pissing contest between egotistical robber barons." https://www.salon.com/2021/07/07/no-billionaires-wont-escape-to-space-while-the-world-burns/ https://www.salon.com/2021/07/07/no-billionaires-wont-escape...
    - gojomo 5y ago
      I'd not trust Salon to know what billionaires, or science/technology, will be able to do. Modern Salon is even more ideology-addled than the historic NYTimes, which editorialized human flight was a million years away in 1903, when it was… 2 months away. Still, billionaries are likely happy that creative-writers, like the author of the linked piece, keep Salon-readers smugly overconfident about what billionaires can't do.
CRConrad 5y ago
Sure -- but only in order to use it all up for mining Bitcoin. It hasn't exactly led to a glut of GPUs, has it? Here, a single computer + transmitter would be a tiny fraction of the cost or a space probe that you're sending up anyway.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  In that case it wouldn’t likely lead to affordable/scalable space travel.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    No, and AFAICS that was never part of the proposal. Stross is talking about a dozen or two unmanned research probes, like Voyager or Viking, which is the sort of spacefaring we've had since the glory days of the Apollo project ended; he never claimed it would make Star Wars true, IIRC. Just get one extra use case out of the tiny bit of space activity we do have. Or did I miss something; do I have to re-read it?

rebuilder 5y ago

Isn’t Bitcoin doing just that? Of course the hardware is pretty specialized. Unfortunately ”cheap” is not the same as ”ecological”.

tshaddox 5y ago
True, but the same goes for “planet-leaving tech.” Some of us might not be able to afford leaving the planet, or might want the planet’s environment to remain somewhat hospitable to life even after the CEOs leave in their spaceships!
- acqq 5y ago
  Of course, "billionaires won’t "escape" to space while the world burns" -- "when you understand the science, it becomes clear that the "billionaire space race" is just that—nothing more than a pissing contest between egotistical robber barons." https://www.salon.com/2021/07/07/no-billionaires-wont-escape-to-space-while-the-world-burns/ https://www.salon.com/2021/07/07/no-billionaires-wont-escape...
  - gojomo 5y ago
    I'd not trust Salon to know what billionaires, or science/technology, will be able to do. Modern Salon is even more ideology-addled than the historic NYTimes, which editorialized human flight was a million years away in 1903, when it was… 2 months away. Still, billionaries are likely happy that creative-writers, like the author of the linked piece, keep Salon-readers smugly overconfident about what billionaires can't do.

CRConrad 5y ago

Sure -- but only in order to use it all up for mining Bitcoin. It hasn't exactly led to a glut of GPUs, has it? Here, a single computer + transmitter would be a tiny fraction of the cost or a space probe that you're sending up anyway.

tshaddox 5y ago
In that case it wouldn’t likely lead to affordable/scalable space travel.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  No, and AFAICS that was never part of the proposal. Stross is talking about a dozen or two unmanned research probes, like Voyager or Viking, which is the sort of spacefaring we've had since the glory days of the Apollo project ended; he never claimed it would make Star Wars true, IIRC. Just get one extra use case out of the tiny bit of space activity we do have. Or did I miss something; do I have to re-read it?