The Bitcoin Saga

Ok 42 terawatt hours is about the consumption of 2 million New Yorkers (or the ~5 million New Zealanders in the article).

How is that even possible? I mean, where is that power coming from?

A brand new AP 1000 nuclear reactor puts out 1.2 gigawatts. So, over a week, it’d put out around 200 gigawatts. So, 5 of them would put out a terrawatt in a week.

So you’re saying they are using the equivalent output of… 210 AP 1000 reactors?

That doesn’t seem likely to me… I feel like I’m making some obvious math error that I’m just not seeing.

I just looked it up, and NYC is only using around 11 Gigawatt hours of power every day… so 77 GW/h per week… this claim of 42 TERRAwatt hours makes no sense.

Here is the article’s source if you want to analyze their methodology.

I’ll leave it to you, though. I don’t do terawatts.

Ah… it’s 42 per YEAR… not per week. The Vox Article fucked that up.

Saw a video of some guy in China throwing himself off a roof this morning (puportedly) because of the Bitconnect scam. I won’t link that for obvious reasons, but here’s a video of a poor guy giving his story on Youtube about losing his life savings to Bitconnect yesterday.

Get rich quick becomes get poor quick. What are the chances?

A part of me feels bad for these sheep who put everything into a fake thing, but another part of me wants to shake the shit out of them for putting everything in anything.

And useful in Donkey Kong.

BananaCoinDKCR

There’s always money in the banana stand.

There’s only one rule at the Casa del Todd:

You gotta hammock up.

If there was any real way to tie the currency to the price of bananas it would be a serious thing, indeed. Not just because it would be the first cryptocurrency with some value basis beyond dollar-sign-eyes, but because over the next ten years the price of bananas is going way up as the cavendish monoculture dies off due to the fusarium plague…

Seems like tying it to the price of bananas doesn’t work though, since that would assume that someone is going to guarantee you can always buy X bananas for one of those imaginary coins.

I feel like quoting from Cryptonomicon, one of my favorite novels, now. Reminder: this was published in 1999.

"We are going to launch our own currency.” By saying this, Randy is divulging proprietary information to someone not authorized to hear it. But he does it anyway, because opening himself up to Amy in this way, making himself vulnerable to her, gives him a hard-on.

“How do you go about that? Don’t you have to be a government?”

“No. You have to be a bank. Why do you think they’re called banknotes?" Randy is fully aware of the insanity of divulging secret business information to a woman solely for purposes of sexual self-titillation but it is in the nature of things, right now, that he doesn’t especially care.

“Okay but still, usually it’s done by government banks, right?”

Only because people tend to respect the government banks. But government banks in Southeast Asia have a huge image problem right now. That image problem translates directly into crashing exchange rates.”

“So how do you do it?”

Get a big pile of gold. Issue certificates saying ‘this certificate can be redeemed for such-and-such an amount of gold.’ That’s all there is to it.”

“What’s wrong with dollars and yen and stuff?”

“The certificates—the banknotes—are printed on paper?. We’re going to issue electronic banknotes.”

“No paper at all?”

“No paper at all.”

“So you can spend it on the Net.”

“Correct.”

“What if you want to buy a sack of bananas?”

“Find a banana merchant on the Net.”

  • from Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson, published in 1999 by Avon books.

It wouldn’t. There are plenty of cryptocurrencies that purport to have some underpinning value. Tether is the most prominent one, and purports to be backed by US dollars, though there are reasons to believe it isn’t.

This sounds closer to something like OilCoin, which purports to automatically track the value of oil using a mechanism which is kinda sorta like an ETF, but with none of the transparency and no oversight as to how the the arbitraging is performed. Venezuela’s attempt at a cryptocurrency is also supposed to be oil backed.

That’s my point, that none of them are really backed by anything. There’s no way to demand fungible payment in conventional currency or commodity from some official central bank or funding entity based on possession of the cryptocoin, at least not that I believe is legitimate.

I think we should have a cryptocurrency based on my blood pressure. The longer Trump’s in office, the higher it will go!

But the bubble bursting will not be good for you.

SEC Commissioner signals crackdown on ICOs and those arranging them

Also on those bullshit pivot-to-blockchain companies;