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I will restate that the incentives of making a geothermal cryptocurrency may be the highest positive impact we can have on the planet in our lifetimes. How do

I will restate that the incentives of making a geothermal cryptocurrency may be the highest positive impact we can have on the planet in our lifetimes. How do you exhaust a renewable? By driving up its price, which creates higher rewards on innovation that brings it down. So you don't exhaust it. Carbon taxes were a farce invented and promoted by academic managerialists with no understanding of human desire, as a way to sell their managerialism, and by politicians too meek to stand on their own and so they deferred to con artist experts. The only reason miners are using coal and nuclear is because it is available, subsidized, and it scales. It's a legacy tech of the past. Geothermal technology isn't available as widely yet, and it requires demand to scale. Miners are that demand. I wonder what The Boring Company is doing these days, as I think I might have a project.

acdha 5y ago
> How do you exhaust a renewable? By driving up its price, which creates higher rewards on innovation that brings it down. This is a naive position: geothermal, like hydropower, have only a few locations where they can be feasibly tapped. If that power is used by cryptocurrency miners, that will drive up the price until it's no longer cheaper than the alternatives and that region will not be attractive to relocating industrial operations. That could be excusable if cryptocurrency was useful but since over a decade and billions of dollars have yet to find a productive application, there's no way it's worth taking capacity away from useful activities. There's no shortage of demand, so anyone who makes a cheap non-carbon electricity source will have customers even without being subsidized by proof-of-waste speculators.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  Thank you for indulging this because the opposition refines the idea. The objection I'm interpreting is that this will make the price of electricity in the region too high for anything else because of that demand. I'd say that in exchange for locating there, it provides a certain percentage of power at a loss rate, and this electricity supplied to the region is in effect a tax. Regional energy needs above a certain level would have to pay competitive prices for it. If I have a hydroelectric dam or geothermal plant in a little remote mining town, and I put the output of whole thing towards miners for proof of work/waste/sacrificial block processing, that means the processors are taking something that is local there (hydro power) and refining it into value (blocks that facilitate economic transactions), and exports the value instantly via satellite uplink to the global economy (completed blocks, proofs, etc). This means we don't have to transmit electricity hundreds of miles/km and lose it. We just refine electricity into compute processing, and export its service value as processed transactions right there. Since most of the renewable electricity is being used and isn't being transmitted, it doesn't effect broader energy market prices, and creates further incentives to innovate to optimize power use in the region. I get the sense that most of the objections to cryptocurrencies are because the low bar to entry and decentralized nature makes them the wrong kind of Keynesianism, where instead of government printing money to pay hole diggers and hole fillers, we're using the same proof-of-waste algorithm, but on machines instead of people. Speculators as a bugbear aren't a thing when you are building something either, so I'm not sure that's a material argument.

acdha 5y ago

> How do you exhaust a renewable? By driving up its price, which creates higher rewards on innovation that brings it down. This is a naive position: geothermal, like hydropower, have only a few locations where they can be feasibly tapped. If that power is used by cryptocurrency miners, that will drive up the price until it's no longer cheaper than the alternatives and that region will not be attractive to relocating industrial operations. That could be excusable if cryptocurrency was useful but since over a decade and billions of dollars have yet to find a productive application, there's no way it's worth taking capacity away from useful activities. There's no shortage of demand, so anyone who makes a cheap non-carbon electricity source will have customers even without being subsidized by proof-of-waste speculators.

motohagiography 5y ago
Thank you for indulging this because the opposition refines the idea. The objection I'm interpreting is that this will make the price of electricity in the region too high for anything else because of that demand. I'd say that in exchange for locating there, it provides a certain percentage of power at a loss rate, and this electricity supplied to the region is in effect a tax. Regional energy needs above a certain level would have to pay competitive prices for it. If I have a hydroelectric dam or geothermal plant in a little remote mining town, and I put the output of whole thing towards miners for proof of work/waste/sacrificial block processing, that means the processors are taking something that is local there (hydro power) and refining it into value (blocks that facilitate economic transactions), and exports the value instantly via satellite uplink to the global economy (completed blocks, proofs, etc). This means we don't have to transmit electricity hundreds of miles/km and lose it. We just refine electricity into compute processing, and export its service value as processed transactions right there. Since most of the renewable electricity is being used and isn't being transmitted, it doesn't effect broader energy market prices, and creates further incentives to innovate to optimize power use in the region. I get the sense that most of the objections to cryptocurrencies are because the low bar to entry and decentralized nature makes them the wrong kind of Keynesianism, where instead of government printing money to pay hole diggers and hole fillers, we're using the same proof-of-waste algorithm, but on machines instead of people. Speculators as a bugbear aren't a thing when you are building something either, so I'm not sure that's a material argument.