What happens if the lights go out? Bitcoin requires a huge amount of energy. I see that as an unrealized environmental impact that cannot be accounted for in the value of the coin, much like air quality has no inherent monetary value. The net result is an incomplete picture of risk/value. And once the environmental costs of providing the computational lifeblood exceed the value of the objects the system crashes, right?
How much energy would Bitcoin need to consume to get even close to the amount that the DoD uses to push it as the reserve currency? The current global banking and attached militaries and governance systems use around half of all the energy.
"For the purpose of this article, we tether our axiom to the supposition of technological progress. Simply, in the absence of serious technological reversion, cryptocurrency (most likely buoyed by Bitcoin) will become the world's dominant form of money."
I have been reading your work increasingly the last several weeks. I don't even remember how I found your Substack page. You have challenged my cognitive skills like few do. I was totally down with almost everything you have written. And then I came to this passage.
That is assuming a lot. In fact, according to various theories about the rise and fall of civilizations, technological regress is baked into the proverbial cake. There is nothing about the consciousness of this civilization that suggests in any way to me that we are capable of immortality as a civilization. Technology is not an elixir of eternal life.
"In fact, according to various theories about the rise and fall of civilizations, technological regress is baked into the proverbial cake."
But is it?
The Chilean miracle demonstrated something interesting: even when an economy takes a hiatus, when it powers back on, it rises to the point it would have been on in the exact same exponential curve.
We don't have a good way to measure world economic output back to the Roman Empire or others that "collapsed", but I strongly suspect that we'll find out that there was an intellectual diaspora that rekindled the flourishing not long afterward.
What happens if the lights go out? Bitcoin requires a huge amount of energy. I see that as an unrealized environmental impact that cannot be accounted for in the value of the coin, much like air quality has no inherent monetary value. The net result is an incomplete picture of risk/value. And once the environmental costs of providing the computational lifeblood exceed the value of the objects the system crashes, right?
How much energy would Bitcoin need to consume to get even close to the amount that the DoD uses to push it as the reserve currency? The current global banking and attached militaries and governance systems use around half of all the energy.
An interesting project on reputation systems is at New founding.com
Also, is anyone tracking the carbon footprint of war?
"For the purpose of this article, we tether our axiom to the supposition of technological progress. Simply, in the absence of serious technological reversion, cryptocurrency (most likely buoyed by Bitcoin) will become the world's dominant form of money."
I have been reading your work increasingly the last several weeks. I don't even remember how I found your Substack page. You have challenged my cognitive skills like few do. I was totally down with almost everything you have written. And then I came to this passage.
That is assuming a lot. In fact, according to various theories about the rise and fall of civilizations, technological regress is baked into the proverbial cake. There is nothing about the consciousness of this civilization that suggests in any way to me that we are capable of immortality as a civilization. Technology is not an elixir of eternal life.
"In fact, according to various theories about the rise and fall of civilizations, technological regress is baked into the proverbial cake."
But is it?
The Chilean miracle demonstrated something interesting: even when an economy takes a hiatus, when it powers back on, it rises to the point it would have been on in the exact same exponential curve.
We don't have a good way to measure world economic output back to the Roman Empire or others that "collapsed", but I strongly suspect that we'll find out that there was an intellectual diaspora that rekindled the flourishing not long afterward.
https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/rjb21/nass/site/WhatIsFoodPartII.html
Or instead of sending people luggage, we could end the dollar that stifles the economic development of emerging markets.