You could use mining to incentivize the build out of remote energy generation before transmission infrastructure is ready.
For example, drop some solar panels and miners in the middle of the desert and immediately start generating profit. Use the profit to deploy more solar panels and build out transmission lines. You can do this piecemeal at low initial investment to feel out an energy source without committing billions of dollars to build out.
I'm not aware of anyone who's done major operations like this, but with the profitability of mining so absurdly high right now plus scrutiny on using dirty energy sources, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts. Access to mining ASICs is likely the key bottleneck.
This is the story used to explain part of the reason so much mining is in China. They built out a ton of hydroelectric dams over the decades that have been underutilized due to lack of infrastructure. Miners came in for the unused electricity and brought in a ton of money to the area.
This is actually a pro for bitcoin. It's not useful as anything other than a store of value.
If we collectively decide to switch to bitcoin as our store of value network, and retire gold and silver from that use case, then we free up all the gold stored in vaults collecting dust as a value store to do more useful work that it's uniquely capable of, like being used in electronics or dental work.
A lot of these use cases now aren't economically viable because the market value of gold is inflated due to being overloaded with the store of value use case.
Yeah, I was referring to the hyperloop and the boring company as separate things.
I feel like the Boring company is what he settled on once it was made clear to him how monumentally stupid hundreds or thousands of miles of near vacuum tube would be in practice. Even if you could actually build a working prototype, it's hyper fragile and will just never be economically viable compared to other solutions.
Even still on Earth, we're mining ~2% more gold annually. More gold in absolute terms is being mined than any other time in human history.
You just answered the quantum question yourself. We can upgrade the bitcoin protocol with quantum resistant cryptography. I very much doubt it would be a contentious fork. No need to bootstrap an entirely new value network.
It's perfectly scarce and rapidly trending toward 0 inflation. This is one of the key arguments for why it's ultimately a better store of value than gold, which is abundant in the context of the solar system.
I'm curious about what you mean by a possible better store of value. To me, that sounds like saying we can go colder than 0 kelvin.
If you pay out a dividend, you force your shareholders to pay income tax rates.
But, if you can use company profits in a way that pumps the stock valuation, your shareholders can effectively take the same profits with long term cap gains tax. My understanding is that a stock buyback is basically this strategy, and MicroStrategy's CEO has said that he also considered that.
MSTR is up ~100% since they first bought bitcoin.
This is at least, my amateur understanding that could be wrong.
A caveat to this is, what happens when we actually solve aging and involuntary death? Will the world eventually be owned by a single, Bezos like individual simply by the weight of time and compounding interest crowding out everyone else? Would we be ok with a situation where the racist slave owners of 200 years ago are still alive and control the vast majority of the world's wealth and power?
This is the kind of concern that isn't a problem right now, but will be one day. And it will happen in the blink of an eye.
Honestly. It really seems like the Tesla hype bubble has melted people's brains. Now every new company that comes out of nowhere with nothing more than a prototype is hailed as the next leap of innovation.
The reasoned panic over Covid-19 was never really about the individual severity of the disease or even the number of people it would kill.
It's about the rapid spike in deaths and hospitalizations happening all at the same time because of how extremely fast it spreads.
The flu spreads slow enough that our medical infrastructure can usually handle the seasonal surge of cases. Too many cases all at once overwhelms the system, leads to more deaths than necessary, and potentially has even more catastrophic effects on our economy and supply chains than we've had if too many people call in sick at the same time.
To put it physics terms, the scary thing about Covid-19 is the impact, not the absolute force. A million people dying isn't too concerning compared to other causes of death. But if they all die in a single month, that's a huge systemic problem.
I don't think it's reasonable on an individual level to panic about catching Covid-19 compared to other health risks. It's akin to thinking death by terrorism is something to be more concerned about than dying in a car crash.
BUT, this is a hair on fire emergency. We are fully and truly fucked and until enough people wake up to this reality, we'll continue with the glacial pace we've had addressing the problem for the past several decades and wake up one day realizing there really is nothing we can do fast enough to matter.
It's entirely possible we've already passed this threshold and we're already dead.
Getting to space is absolutely NOT a solution to climate change. We have to solve climate change SO THAT we can continue on our path to become space faring. If we can't manage to survive on an Earth decimated by climate change, then we obviously have no chance in space or any other planet in this solar system.
We 100% will go extinct eventually if we don't expand beyond Earth. And my point is that if climate change destroys our civilization now and we get flung back into a new dark age, I don't think it's likely that we'll ever manage to spread beyond Earth.
Climate change is an existential threat to our species because it threatens our ability to become space faring.
Exactly this. Before the oil age, we were already rapidly decimating forests for fuel. In a way, the discover of fossil fuels averted that ecological disaster and there are more trees now (in America at least) than 100 years ago [1].
Solar and wind energy generation are great, but don't have a high ERoEI in early development. Oil that's gushing out of the ground has an insanely high ERoEI and we used that to advance our technology very quickly.
Also remember that we probably have only a few hundred million years left before the sun expands and heats the planet to the point were complex life can't exist. There will be no liquid water in 1 billion years.
This is all conjecture. It certainly could be possible that future civilizations can become space faring by a different path than we took, but that's a terrible gamble to make if you think intelligence in the universe is worth preserving and expanding.
> My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456