Tag: war

Bitcoin and the Power Grid

BPowerGrid“Bitcoin is evil” articles exist in profusion, and these days I pretty much ignore them. But one of the recent types – raising awareness of Bitcoin’s environmental unsustainability – has engaged me. As it turns out, I have an unusual background to bring to this topic, and I think I should contribute.

So, here we go:

Another Apocalypse?

Let’s be honest and admit that most of the “environmental movement” sells fear of an apocalypse. And as we should all realize by now, humans have an innate weakness for fear.

More or less every apocalyptic environmental prediction has failed. (I’m talking about those that could actually be measured, obviously.) That won’t stop the fear-sellers of course, and now Bitcoin has come into their sights.

The fear is that because crypto mining uses so much power, it will bring down the grid or cause various environmental disasters. The advocates of this fear throw around scary sounding numbers (measured in terawatts) and assorted scientific terminology. (“They understand it and you don’t… don’t expose yourself to ridicule.”)

But it’s mostly just fear. Sure, proof-of-work sucks up power, but that’s nothing new. How much power do you suppose all those millions of air conditioners suck up every summer? I haven’t dug up the figures, but I’m ready to take bets that it’s several times more than crypto mining. Shall we now fear the air conditioner?

Further Factors

I worked for decades in the electrical industry, and so I’d like to give you some facts from that perspective:

  • Power use has been going up since the beginning. These days most houses get 200 amperes of electrical service. But there are still thousands of houses that are wired with only 60 amperes. That was plenty 60 years ago. New loads (devices using power) come along all the time. In just my time, we’ve added air conditioning, microwaves, and lots of computers.
  • Mining is a nice, steady load. The kind power companies thrive on. What makes their lives crazy are seasonal loads like air conditioning, which occur only a few months per year.
  • Power failures happen every year, especially in summer due to the aforementioned air conditioning load. It’s a good bet that several fear-sellers have press releases ready to go for this summer.
  • The utilities are making money on this. More power use means more income.
  • If people use too much power, the providers will raise their prices. Econ 101.

And the Big One

Cryptocurrencies don’t finance war.

The public hasn’t actually paid for a war since WW2. Since then the whole game’s been run on credit. (The same goes, more or less, for everything Big Guv does to save us poor, helpless sheep.)

With Bitcoin you can’t do such things. If you want to throw a war in a Bitcoin-based economy, you’ll have to convince people to pay for it. Good luck.

**

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

More Revolutionaries Are Coming

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
– Princess Leia, Star Wars



Assange, Ulbricht, Manning, Snowden… we’ve seen a slow stream of revolutionaries over the past decade or so, a few of whom became well-known. More will be coming.

RevolutionariesThe more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

– Princess Leia, Star Wars

Assange, Ulbricht, Manning, Snowden… we’ve seen a slow stream of revolutionaries over the past decade or so, a few of whom became well-known. More will be coming.

The reason I’m sure of this is that the two forces driving it are increasing:

  • On one hand, humanity is becoming better. You’ll never believe that if you watch “the news,” but out here in the real world humans are slowly improving. I’m tempted to say that I’d like the progress to be a bit more rapid, but the truth is that recent progress has sometimes been faster than I expected.
  • On the other hand, elite control, empowered by the internet’s parasitic “free stuff” model, has bypassed all known limits and is riding the numbness and compliance of the past few generations into new territory.

And so the best and brightest are increasingly caught between hammer and anvil. And when struck, they’re tending to see the entire system as retrograde and absurd. Which of course it is.

What happens when the young and healthy see themselves cast in the role of “the permanently abused,” then, is quite predictable, all the more so because they’re expected to thank their abusers: They rebel. As they should.

The Path Around Violence

You’ll notice that the four revolutionaries mentioned above have been fully non-violent. That of course is a very good thing and can be attributed to a mix of intelligence, information, and general goodness. What truly healthy person, after all, prefers violence as a tactic?

This, however, is bad news for elite power addicts. They need rebels to lash out violently. Their propaganda systems are designed to scare the rest of the sheep with images of violence and to use the whole drama to their advantage. That’s “their thing,” as John Lennon noted decades ago:

When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.

This is why, as you may also have noticed, all four of these revolutionaries have relied upon cryptography: because cryptography transcends violence.

You can bomb a car or a building, but you cannot bomb a math problem… and cryptogrphy is simply math.

The Crypto Platform

In the end, it is cryptographers who are preventing violent revolution, while the elites are provoking it.

And so, whether or not you think new tools like cryptocurrencies are flawed (and why would we expect perfection of anything?), it remains very much in your interest to support them in one way or another. We do not want violence, and the current system is pushing the young generation into it. Instead, we want abused young people to find peaceful, productive outlets, and crypto is pretty much it these days. (Though others would certainly be welcome.)

It really boils down to a type of equation:

Pressure A + Pressure B = Expulsion Energy C

Whatever values we plug in for these variables, we know that A and B are increasing. Humans really are improving and the elites have become degenerate control addicts; they can’t even see anything else.

Expulsion Energy C, therefore, will increase. We’ll be having more and more revolutionaries, whether or not they show up on authorized vid feeds.

It is very important that these young people find productive avenues. If they do, a benevolent future can form.

**

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com