Yet another worry: Bitcoin mining consumes energy big time
We all have a lot to worry about, what with neoliberals and neocons running rampant all over the world and inside our country. We already know about Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies - a Libertarian wet dream of tax avoidance, contraband selling, and protection from government asset seizure. Of course, with government increasingly dismantled by the neo-libs/cons, BTC is a "vote Trump" middle finger to TPTB for many. For the past few months, BTC has become full-blown Tulipmania with every Ralph Kramden on the planet buying into this Ponzi scheme.
NOTE: For the rest of this OP, I'm going to assume you understand how BTC works. If you don't the Internet is your friend.
The purpose of the OP is to highlight the fact that BTC is devouring energy at an exponentially increasing rate to perform USELESS to the real economy "calculations" as "proof of work".
There is a lowtech article on this topic today at Naked Capitalism. (Ignore the idiot comment claiming BTC uses 29 TWhrs today - the whole world only consumes 18.)
According to an IEA estimate, we humans produced and used 5.67 × 1020 joules of energy in 2013, equivalent to about 18.0 terawatts.
https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate/how-much-renewable-energy/
Just in case you think that NC is nothing but leftwing scaremongering, IEEE Spectrum, a magazine put out by the mainstream, super-hightech Institute For Electrical and Electronics Engineers devoted two articles in a recent issue to the problem of energy for BTC. They give a more realistic estimate (and, they admit that no one knows for sure):
Bitcoin’s mining-based ledger-writing process is aptly known as “proof of work"...No entity tracks how much power it takes to sustain that level of computation. But estimates by independent researchers suggest it’s around 500 megawatts—enough to supply roughly 325,000 homes [PDF] —with the activity concentrated in China and a few other countries with cheap energy and, in some cases, loose regulations on emissions.
Because of all that calculation, the energy cost of Bitcoin is high in comparison with that of conventional financial transactions. For example, according to one estimate, processing a bitcoin transaction consumes more than 5,000 times as much energy as using a Visa credit card...
Another Dutch researcher, Sebastiaan Deetman, says an “enormous increase in hash rate” over the last year or so has likely pushed Bitcoin’s global draw closer to 700 MW.
And if the hash computations accelerate further? In that case, Deetman, who is a doctoral candidate in industrial ecology at Leiden University, sees Bitcoin power demand ballooning 20-fold—to 14 gigawatts—by 2020. If that happens, Bitcoin will be using as much electricity as Denmark.
In certain places, Bitcoin’s power drain may already be straining grids...Earlier this year, Venezuelan authorities shut down a mining operation whose 11,000 computers were allegedly running on power that was being siphoned illegally. The drain apparently caused a backlash amid the country’s severe electricity shortages.
The IEEE issue also had a unique and exclusive visit to Bitmain, one of the largest BTC mining operations in the world. (Its in Inner f-ing Mongolia!) Notice the smokestack of the coal-fired power plant that supplies the operation in the background of the exterior shot.
Here's an exterior shot of the 8 warehouses that house the operation:
And here is a shot of the barebones interior:
Why the Biggest Bitcoin Mines Are in China
Yeah, that Spartan operation (tin roofs, concrete floors, nothing but computer racks inside) represents a plurality of BTC mining on the planet. Exactly the kind of minimalist, environmentally destructive operation you would expect from the money mad.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the hightech food chain, BTC mining has become so lucrative that major hitech players like Intel are desiging custom chips for mining and for routing mining calculations.
To me, spending all this money and all this energy on a currency alternative is insanity. Of course, if you are an insider in the e-currency game, or could easily enter the game (Goldman, Sachs, various national governments) you are all for the ultimate privatization of government (private money) and for the elimination of all financial regulations.
Yeah, that will help the little guy, sure. And taxes? What taxes? If money goes private, government dies. To these loons, that's a feature, not a bug.
I have no solution to this. I only hope this Ponzi scheme crashes before it is able to tap into the real money world and loot it blind. (Right now, very few legimate places accept BTC.)
Bottom line: you can't do much about this nightmare. Its probably best to ignore the problem.
Comments
The insanity deepens: miners stealing from Tesla
Its like some meth-addict who will do anything to score a little more. I mean, if you already own a Tesla, you most likely paid over $50k for the car. And your trying to score $10 of free electricity? Pathetic.
Looks like Bitcoin becomes
more mainstream every day. As I suspected. If it ain't dead by now it ain't gonna be. And, sure, it will skyrocket upward then crash and burn, skyrocket... crash and burn... But eventually it stabilizes, fluctuates plus or minus 15% like our good ol' USD.
Bitcoin, however, should think about building their own electric generating stations (solar, nuke and wind) to avoid negative press and feedback from the anti- crowd. Figure roughly $2.5 Billion per 500 megawatt grid, and can expand as needed at the same rate. 500 Mwatts will power 1.6 million desktop computers, to give an idea of scale. Or about $80 /computer /year over the 20 year life of the grid (not including run-time and mtce costs), or about 22¢ /day /computer. Maybe a $1 /day including all costs. Add that $1 /day to "transaction costs" - or maybe 5¢ /transaction - and that's competitive with credit cards.
The crypto currency is viable. Whether it's actually useable as an alt currency remains to be seen, is up to the users. I like it only becuz it brings competition to The Fed - something The Fed needs.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
BTC is not your friend.
What you said:
is quite consistent with what I said:
But, IMHO, BTC is not a step in the right direction. You are simply trading one opaque, non-government-controlled monetary system (The Fed, owned and operated by the Banks) for another opaque, non-government-controlled, monetary system (as BTC consolidates, the transaction managers ((BTC mining corporations)) will shake out to about the same number as the number of Fed Reserve banks.)
e-currency has been a Libertarian utopia since it was invented. It means privatizing the money supply, which means putting it in the hands of a few large corporate entities. (There are many news stories about how one crooked Wall St. bank or another is going to start issuing its own e-currency.) IOW, its a return to the bad old days of the 1800-1860 era of the US, in which local banks issued their own money and went bankrupt on a regular basis.
That's a very large assumption, based on what exactly? The greater fool theory? The idea that all banks are risky? For 90 years, the FDIC reliably policed banks and kept the 99% from getting robbed. And we should just forget that stability and security for the average Joe because technology?
I do not see any upside to BTC. It is private and is in the process of being consolidated into a handful of mining corporations which will change the algorithms to suit their purposes and maximize their profits. How can they do that? Well, BTC has some kind of "board" which decides how fast to change the "difficulty" of mining to match the deployed computing power. Changing difficulty means changing the value of the coins. (And the coins are what they get paid with.) That is, the "board" can control inflation and deflation in BTC. So, as with any technical endeavor, the board will be taken over by the people in the industry with the most money and power.
I grant that the average US citizen currently has no control over the governments monetary or fiscal policy, because elections and democracy are a joke these days, and courts are stacked full of Federalist Society ideologues. But, at least formally, the citizenry is supposed to be in control of the Treasury. To formally give away control of the money supply to e-currency would be the fast route to completely destroying the government by massive defunding. How do you collect taxes when everyone's money is in e-currency that cannot be confiscated (except by hacker crooks, as in the Mt. Gox looting.)?
I think MMT people are correct. The only reason a currency has value is that it is the sole legal instrument for paying taxes. Take away that monopoly of payment, and the value of the government currency will collapse. A lot of people who aren't following this will wake up one day in the e-currency era and find the dollar isn't worth a Confederate nickel. It will look like Greece on steroids.
Now, if the government issued an e-currency, that might be different. If the "board" were visible to the public, if the voters could veto decisions of the board, then this whole idea would be less dangerous. Russia has already made a move in that direction.
Bottom line: encouraging private e-currency is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
A side point about gold futures
One of the arguments for BTC is that it is "better than gold" because gold prices of late have been manipulated by massive dumping of futures contracts in the commodity markets. That is, the paper value of futures in the market is at least ten times the value of the acutal gold metal that is available for sale. So, one can manipulate the price of gold by selling futures when the market price goes up.
The argument goes that there is no futures market in BTC, so BTC can't be manipulated. First, I already mentioned in the earlier post that the value of BTC can be manipulated by changing the "difficulty" of mining. But, second, what stops anyone from settin up a futures market in BTC? I mean the price swings violently. Some arbitrager will step in, and BTC will become as manipulable as gold.
Bottom line: Gold is not a panacea, and neither is BTC.
Indeed, gold has some of the same basic
difficulties as bitcoin. It requires enormous environmental degradation to extract gold, whereupon it is immediately and pointlessly sequestered where it can be of no fundamental use to anyone. (Once upon a time, most of it was sequestered in expensive knickknacks and jewellery, which at least had some human function ... and then when the government needed it, the knickknacks were taxed away and melted back down -- or possibly exchanged in their worked state.) Its scarcity is largely arbitrary and inevitably deflationary (generally held to be a not good thing).
The built-in deflationary character of bitcoins dictates that there is a continual "debasing" of the currency itself. If this seems counterintuitive, understand that bitcoins are not the currency, they are the stuff of which the currency is made. More precisely, the currency itself remains, nominally, dollars or whatever else. As the price of a bitcoin rises, each Dollar "contains" less and less bitcoin, just as in a gold-standard economy, the government will debase the currency by adding silver to each Dollar, so that each Dollar contains less and less gold. When this happens in the real world, "bad money drives out good" -- people hoard the coins with the higher gold content, creating a deflationary spiral. In the world of crypto-ecurrency, a bitcoin is a bitcoin is a bitcoin (i think), but people will always prefer to trade directly in the nominal currency (dollars) rather than spend their ever-more-valuable bitcoins.
You are unlikely to ever see an era in which prices are stated in bitcoin, for the simple reason that they would need to be falling almost continuously.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
What you said makes BTC sound like goldsmith receipts.
The minute people start hoarding the "store of value", you are into fractional reserve banking. That is, someone will find a way to use the BTC as collateral against a dollar loan. Then someone else will create a market for loans backed by BTC, thereby setting the fractional reserve rate. And then you are right back to the over-leveraged, elite-controlled mess we are in today.
@arendt All currency is
All currency is like goldsmith receipts, when it's functioning correctly, unless I misunderstood David Graeber and Ellen Brown.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Hmm. Missed that. Need to read Graeber again.
What I got from "Debt" was the distinction between credit money and physical money, and the fact that credit preceded physical. Also, he completely demolished the myth of the economy as having evolved from barter.
If it is true that there is no way to conduct a monetary system without some kind of fractional reserve banking, then several known problems must be dealt with.
First, compound interest must be caged. It has been known since Babylonia that compound interest produces debt slavery in short order. So, there must be jubilees (debt forgiveness) or caps (e.g., no more than X times the value of the item should be paid in interest charges, where X is something like 1 or 2).
Second, there must be caps on leverage. Banks should not be allowed to make loans for highly leveraged "investments" that are, in reality, nothing more than speculation with OPM. A decent economist, named ?Geaneopolis? showed that economic systems will blow up if more than 5:1 leverage is allowed. (If you want the reference, I can dig.)
@arendt Hey, I meant
Hey, I meant it when I said I might have misread Debt. It's one of the hardest books I've ever read [not counting philosophy: Gunnar Olsson's Abysmal was harder (but I didn't get through it), everything Kant ever wrote is harder (Kant led me, in grad school, to echo the medieval monk who wrote in the margins of a translation he was doing Dear God, when will Brother Michael get back from confession?)]
In the fictional world Finnegan's Wake is harder, (obviously I didn't get through it, almost nobody does, though I enjoyed the time I spent there).
But Debt is hard. I really should have had a notebook and pen by me while I read it.
Not having done that, I could honestly be misremembering.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
@arendt I love what
I love what Graeber did to the origin myth of capitalism. Analyzed it as a story, which it is. Obvious and yet bloody brilliant, because it was an obvious thing that couldn't be seen for the culture's mental furniture. We have a cultural couch sitting in front of the fact that that explanation of capitalism's origins is a story.
Such great work.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
@arendt If it is true
If it is true that there is no way to conduct a monetary system without some kind of fractional reserve banking,
I don't even know if that's true. It sounds likely. But I'd first have to look around and imagine what the world, and its money systems, would look like without fractional reserve banking--preferably with some experts in currency and finance in my company. Well, experts in those fields who are operating in good faith, which probably makes them as rare as hen's teeth.
Before I decide that something couldn't possibly work, I want to imagine what the world would be like if it could work. That process lights up several different cultural objects: anything that is being protected by the current system AND places where there are functional lacks that make doing a thing impossible. Imagine what it would be if it were possible, and the contrast lights up. Then I can judge from the contrast whether or not it's worth attempting.
I haven't been doing much imagining like that since I decided none of us had power to accomplish anything on that level, but perhaps that's a mistake.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
@arendt Yes, compound
Yes, compound interest must be caged. One of the smartest things in Debt is Graeber's illumination of the connection between debt and slavery--though it was right there in the Bible, if we'd looked at it. If sin is debt, then that's why we were slaves but we are free in Christ, who paid off the debt, so we no longer have to be enslaved. I don't mean that I necessarily agree with that religious position, but that was what Paul was on about. It's only because slavery here in the States was less about debt and more about racism--connecting slavery ineradicably to certain bloodlines, how diabolical--that I didn't get it before.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
@arendt I would prefer a public
I would prefer a public, but non-governmental, alternative currency, or many of them. In other words, either a local/regional currency or a national currency which is to the dollar as vernacular patios was to the Roman Empire's Latin. The people need to be able to do business with themselves without the intervention of the banks--or to create their own banks. This would obviously not work for taxes or health insurance or mortgages. It could work for food, basic medical needs, repairs, even clothing if we could find enough people who still had the skills to make clothes. It could work for travel if you were dealing directly with the owner of a property you were staying at (and if you still had enough disposable income to take such vacations). You could use it for your hairdresser or barber. It wouldn't cover nearly everything. It would be supplemental. But it would represent taking part of our economic activity back under our control.
I'd be fine with the government managing this if they could be trusted, but they don't work for the people, they work for Wall St, and at this point are only distinguishable from it because they also work for big energy and big guns. Actually, if the government were ethically capable of managing this, we wouldn't need an alternative currency other than greenbacks.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
I don't see how you do "public" without some kind of...
government oversight.
The BTC example is gong to be par for the course. All unregulated economic schemes wind up with some lucky winner (early positive fluctuation) outpacing all other competitors and getting most of the money. The concept behind that is that in a "perfect" market, all competitors are equal and all rates of returns on investments are identical. So, a tiny early fluctuation determines who wins.
Therefore, there must be some kind of regulation in order for a public currency to remain public. Case in point, the US currency is now completely corrupt. The Central Bank hands out money at zero or near-zero interest to banks, who give low interest loans to their cronies while shafting everyone else (7% non-dischargable student loans). By the time the money hits your paycheck, the banking system has already taken a bite.
I think you recognize this:
Insurance and mortgages are completely financial "products" that involve resources far beyond that of average people. The large financial institutions that deliver these products are de facto too big and distant to be trusted. The Ninja loan scam of the 2000s shows banks must be tightly regulated (and the regulators must not be captured, which is a different issue).
As long as there are big corporations, there must be big government to police it. IMHO, the word regulation is too weak. These corporations have proven to be felons many times over. They are crooks and we need the police to keep an eye on them. White collar crime is the worst kind of crime.
@arendt I want a lower,
I want a lower, informal people's currency that is used to buy and sell simple things. Surely such trade currencies must have existed many times in history, and been totally or semi-independent of the official empire currencies. Is it really impossible to create one?
The problem I see is not regulation, but the fact that you need to create a sizable chunk of an economy to make it work. A larger percentage of small businesses, entrepreneurs, family farmers, and artisans would have to be willing to deal in the new currency. But the world I'm envisioning would have them dealing in both. They would be trying to make their taxes and the cost of their health insurance (if any) in dollars, so they would need to be able to make that much profit in dollars. But for buying most other things, they could deal in People's Dollars, or greenbacks, or whatever you want to call them. In other words, once they had made the amount of their taxes and health insurance in dollars, they would be able to make the rest of their profit in greenbacks. You could even have a seasonal shift, announced like a sale, in which the business throws a "Hooray we've made our taxes for the year--now we're going to deal in People's Dollars till year's end" event. It would create, essentially, two business seasons.
There are many problems with this, but I think it's worth thinking through rather than just dismissing.
The three main problems I see:
1)Concentrated land ownership. A HUUUUGE problem, to quote a phrase, and probably shoots the whole thing in the head from the beginning. If the 1% own the land, then they will charge rent in dollars, and hike it through the stratosphere to drive everyone else out of business. They already are. This is the biggest problem for small business right now.
2)The corporate takeover of most economic production. Obviously. If I want my local gaming store to stay open, then Callie, the business owner, needs to order games from corporations, sometimes multinational ones, and miniatures from the same, and the 1% ain't gonna take People's Dollars (they take people's dollars, but that's different. Heh.). Now, there are also gaming companies that are independent small businesses, sometimes done as a labor of love (I don't think Goodman Games makes much money). I suppose theoretically it's possible that in this fictional world (call it CantStopWorld), during the second business season of the year, Callie would focus on buying and selling indie rather than corporate games. All those entrepreneurs would also have to be willing to deal in People's Dollars, though.
3)I guess regulation comes in when the question of how much currency to have about comes in. This question inevitably brings up the Weimar Republic, which neoliberals quote at me like I quote them about the Powell memo. But couldn't there be more than one way to handle this problem? I am not an expert, and this is the point at which I really need some experts willing to imagine other ways of doing things. I mean, does the absence of a central bank HAVE to mean wild overproduction of and devaluing of a currency? Can't we have some kind of decentralized, populist currency system?
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
The US bankers caused the Weimar hyperinflation
Here's some ammunition when Weimar comes up.
Counterpunch does have some authors I trust. One of them is Michael Hudson:
There is also some MMT writing that I simply can't give a cite for. But, they are defending MMT against the charge that an MMT government will simply print money and cause hyperinflation. Their defense consists of pointing out that hyperinflation only happens when productive capacity and money supply are completely out of balance. One of their examples is Weimar. In Weimar, German factories were literally taken for reparations. Production collapsed.
Saying that a lack of austerity was the cause of hyperinflation is to blame the victim.
@arendt Thank you very
Thank you very much for this.
I have a different view of Keynes, but I need to look into it more.
I didn't know we created that problem (to some extent). My god, Wilson was a horrible bastard.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
need to get straight W versus W-hours
Power, measured in watts, is a rate of energy consumption (1 watt = 1 joule/sec). A watt-hour -- the energy "consumed" over the course of an hour by a 1 watt draw -- is (1 joule/sec) x (1 hour) x (60 minutes/hour) x (60 sec/min) = 3600 joules. The world consumes energy at a rate of 18 TW (or 18 quadrillion joules/second), which is, per your citation, 5.67x10^20 joules per year, or (365 x 24 x 18) = 157,000 TW-hours per year, or 157 Petawatt-hours per year.
Bitcoin is consuming (low-end estimate) energy at a rate of 500 Megawatts, or 0.5 gigawatts, or 0.0005 TW. At that rate, it is burning (365 x 24 x 0.0005) = 4.34 TW-hours per year. At the higher estimate of 0.7 gigawatts, it's about 5.2 TW-hours per year, or about 1/30,000 of global energy consumption. At the 20-fold projected increase, it would be 100 TW-hours per year, or 1/1500 of current global energy consumption. At current energy prices, that'll run ya 10 to 20 billion dollars per year.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Right. I caught that after I posted, and...
gave up, because I didn't know what units were actually being quoted by the various articles. Apples to oranges and all that.
One of the sites I quoted is claiming only 18 TW per year:
The IEEE article says:
So, 21k boxes times 1.4 kw/box = 29.4 Megawatts for the site, which is 4% of the world mining. So 25 times 29.4 MW = 735 Megawatts world BTC total today.
Taking that up to one full year, we must multiply Megawatts by:
3600 sec/hr * 24 hr/day * 365 days/year = factor of 31.536 M.
Energy per year = 7.35 x 10^8 * 31.536 x 10^6 = 231.7896 x 10^14 = 2.31 x 10^16
Fraction of total power = 2.31 x 10^16 / 5.67 × 10^20 joules of energy in 2013
BTC fraction of total earth power = 0.4088 x 10^ -4
= 4.088 x 10^ -5
That is 4 parts in 100,000. Pretty insignificant.
Of course, I would have to check the site to see if the 5 x 10^20 joules is electricity only or if it includes fossil fuels too. That would change the number.
the problem is the way the one site phrased it.
They said " 5.67 × 1020 joules of energy in 2013, equivalent to about 18.0 terawatts ", but joules can't be equivalent to terawatts, because joules measure energy and terawatts measure a rate of energy transfer (specifically, trillions of joules per second), so they completely confused the issue. what they should have said was something like "5.67 x 10^20 joules of energy in 2013, representing an average power draw of 18.0 terawatts".
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
One electric generating
station can crank out 735 megs. Granted, most are in the 450-650 range, but I worked at a plant the ran 3 generators for a total of nearly 1200 megs, so... not impossible. And, if they built their own grid, could power 1.6 million computers (at $500 electricity cost /year) = about 9¢ to 15¢ per bitcoin transaction (depending, natch, on # of transactions).
Just saying the cost of electricity not that big a deal, low on the list of priorities. This whole thing falling into the hands of a few billionaires IS a huuuge deal though., high on that priorities list! Bitcoin started as a P-2-P currency. The lure being there was no Big Corp involved, that one traded online among others like themselves. I LOVE that becuz the internet needs its own currency, and what better way than P-2-P ? Sadly... another good idea gone south becuz billionaires gotta be billionaires.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
Without integrity, the mechanism is just camoflauge for looting
I agree completely.
However, I think any monetary system (even one based on feudal land) that is not regulated will inevitably be hijacked by the richest people. One of my favorite quotes is from Durant, talking about the Roman empire:
Here's more Durant. This time from the 10th century Byzantine empire:
BTC is no panacea. If left unregulated, it will wind up like Rome or Byzantium. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Thanks For the Scholarly Info... Much Like It Is Portrayed, But
in simple, explanatory text.
It is somewhat inspiring to know that this situation is not entirely new or fresh, historically speaking. But there is a piece of it that is truly new and extremely relevant.
Information disparity and organization.
The Romans were known for their organizational and administrative skills, right? They certainly had more information than the slaves and conquered citizenry. I'm sure it was a great advantage.
But today... my lord, the near omniscience by moneyed interests and oligarchs is dizzying. Daily they add data and metadata streams about all of our lives, at least anyone who is attached to the internet or Western society.
This information disparity, arguably not unheard of historically, is one thing, but the omniscience, granularity, and intrusive nature of this information disparity completely is something new.
Godlike omniscience is terrifying, and They™ got it and are gaining more.
Again, thanks for bringing us back to the historical refrain, and hopefully we got some kind of cat in the bag to survive the coming fall.
Peace~
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
I'm in favor of one, or more, alternative currencies.
But not like this.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
The mechanism matters less than the integrity of...
the people running the mechanism.
This country is run by extractors, thieves, and gangsters. They are in it for short term profits. They are looting what it took centuries to create, and trashing the good name of public investment and honest regulation.
If the government was honest, there wouldn't be a lot of support for e-currency, as opposed to credit cards. If credit card companies were not loan sharks, people would not be looking for an electronic alternative.
However awful they were, at least the Robber Barons built things and paid for public infrastructure, which they understood was to their benefit.
Today's crooks are nothing more than barbarians - melting down statues for the gold, burning beatiful works of art because they can't be rendered into commodities.
The debate should be about morality. We will get money right when we get morality right.
@arendt The problem is power.
The problem is power. Commerce has been colonized. It was one of the first human activities to be colonized. In order to colonize that, they had to colonize (and re-invent) finance and how currency actually worked in the world, in order to take control of it and ultimately weaponize it.
That's why a currency run by the government can't actually make the difference we want it to, because the government is a tool of the people who have made this discussion necessary in the first place. It's a bit like the problem of milk. I'd love to buy lots of dairy products from the members of the American Dairy Council, but since they're producing a product that I can't eat much of without having an allergic reaction (probably because of homogenization), I'm forced to look elsewhere. I'd gladly use the currency being loaned to the U.S. government by the Wall St banks, and backed with the credibility of those institutions, if the Wall St banks and the U.S. government weren't being run by sociopathic, possibly psychopathic, human wrecking balls.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Unless you think anarchy is viable, what is the alternative...
to government?
I'm too lazy to go get my copy of John Ralston Saul's "The Unconcious Civilization"; but he says there are only three kinds of governments: blood-line aristocracies, tyrannies, and democracies. Since I don't like the first two, I want to preserve (however unlikely that is at this point) the democracy I was born into.
We agree that there are some things, which require large, coordinated human endeavor and resources, that cannot be produced by individuals. Hence, control of those things (monopolies) become potential levers for despotism. Public ownership in democracies was an attempt to prevent the potential monopolies.
It took corporations about 100 years to escape from the prison the original Constitution put it in. And they did it by having some corporate hack on the SCOTUS right in an after-the-ruling summary that corporations were people under the ON EDIT: 1
5th14th ammendment, which was designed to help freed slaves.Ever since then they have been trying to privatize everything, except for a momentary setback under FDR.
We don't seem to be able to legislate limited liability corporations out of business (although they are busy trying to legislate governments out of existence with their stinking trade treaties), so we need government to police the corps.
Now, you may be limiting your comment to money; but money is a key monopoly. Money generates tax revenue and keeps public government alive. If private companies can generate money, they will let government fail, and then institute their own taxes either via direct "fees" on all the transactions they now control without oversight or via playing games with the e-currency.
I think public money and government are joined at the hip. Inseparable.
c@arendt I'm thinking of
c I'm thinking of something much more informal than anything you're thinking about. I'm not thinking about a private business issuing greenbacks for profit. Hopefully, nobody would get paid for issuing it. If anybody did, somebody else should (and probably would) immediately provide a supply of the same chits for free, thus cutting the legs out from under the person trying to make money off currency production--something that I think is inherently toxic.
I'm willing to be talked out of that position, but it would take some doing. In other words, it's not a casual position, but I recognize I'm not an expert, and if somebody wants to explain to me why it's so goddamned absolutely necessary that people and institutions make profit out of the production of currency, I'll listen with an open mind. But I will take some convincing.
As for letting government fall, why on earth would the corporate part of the private sector do that? Government is much too useful to them to let it fall. Government might as well be on their payroll. I imagine whatever government is up there will continue to crank on, regardless. You'll notice that, in my CantStopWorld, people are still paying taxes--and health insurance, and mortgages--in dollars. And, of course, paying off their credit cards in dollars. The dollar is the currency of the Man. It's the currency of Wall St bankers, corporate goons, and the political system that works for them--and I see little daylight now between any of those players. In the CantStopWorld, the Wall St currency business, and the Washington, D.C. role in that, would continue apace--it just wouldn't be an absolute monopoly.
What I'm talking about is removing some portion of our economic activity from their grasp. Obviously, the parts of our economic activity that have directly to do with the FIRE sector will not be reclaimed. But it is in our interest to draw whatever portions of our economic activity that we can out of their sphere of influence.
If ten million of us decided that bottle caps were going to be our People's Currency, and that we would use those, rather than the dollar, among ourselves where we could, we would create the kind of economic activity I'm thinking about. What we're using for this right now is a system of informal barter (which can also persist, I've got no problem with it). People are using barter because, in the dollar economy, they can't survive, at least not in any kind of decent conditions. So they're exchanging goods, and even more frequently, skills, in order to get outside the dollar economy, which exists to drive people like them into poverty and destroy their self-determination. I might not have said anything so radical as late as 2010, but by now it's undeniable, or seems so to me.
I have no illusions that People's Dollars, or bottlecaps, or whatever, will bring down the dollar. It will simply give us a space where we are not absolutely subject to the dollar, and thus will give us some room to economically maneuver, and some room to make our lives better. I bet more small businesses would survive in CantStopWorld than in this one. Extracting family farms from the corporate and banking behemoth is more difficult, but it might be possible to use the farm-to-table and co-op models to reclaim even some of our food production. Of course, I also believe we need lots of small, decentralized food production everywhere, including in our cities, but that's another story.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Two currency systems were common in the past
But it was a negative feature. In early modern Europe (~1500-1700) there was a shortage of specie (gold, silver) for coinage (and paper money hadn't been accepted yet). So a lot of copper and bronze coinage was minted. The denominations of those non-specie coins was appropriate for the kind of person-to-person market transactions that took place. Thus, there were two sets of coins: gold/silver for the rich, and copper/bronze for the poor. Of course, even the copper coinage was subject to "clipping" and other scams. Like today, money works differently for the rich than for the poor.
One must also remember that, in that time period, the economy was still not fully monetized. There was still much in the way of feudal duties, labor corvees, etc.
There are lots of "time dollar" schemes floating around today. In the desperate economic situation most people find themselves, this kind of informal local currency can work as long as there is community solidarity.
But, if its not possible to dislodge the crooked bankers who control not only the money, but also the two-faced tax policies, then we are reduced to skulking in the woods, gathering acorns. And, I do not deny that that is the likely outcome of the trajectory we are on.
When the dust settles, we will have totally open economic records on every poor citizen who will be taxed and fee-ed to the limit of their financial endurance. Meanwhile the rich will have their assets anonymized behind walls of hedge fund-like anonymity. In that situation, it would be best to behave like rich Russian serfs.
That is, some serfs became rich running companies for their masters; but they were still serfs. They needed to save up money to buy their freedom. But, if people found out they were rich, their assets might be confiscated before they could execute the buyout. So they resorted to all kinds of subtrefuges, bank accounts in other cities, in other names, etc. to hide the fact they were rich.
We are reaching the point where honest citzens who do not want to be outright robbed by TPTB will need to deal more in the "informal economy" and keep assets in unlikely places.
@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
Or perhaps because of the milk of garbage-fed factory farm cattle lacking the enzyme that helps with the digestion of milk and/or chemicals/antibiotics/hormones?
https://www.organicconsumers.org/essays/how-boycott-milk-factory-farms
Hope this doesn't dupe, on my umpteenth try here...
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
@Ellen North Pasteurization, in
Pasteurization, in the context of dairy production, is a horrible thing. Everybody should read The Story of Milk, in which the history of the dairy industry is laid out. It makes it clear that pasteurization was adopted so that milk wouldn't be subject to inspection for quality, both of the dairy products themselves, and the treatment of the cows. There was a war between those who wanted an inspection model, and those who wanted a pasteurization model. Pasteurization won, so that companies could produce a terrible quality product out of abominably-treated animals without creating an epidemic.
Except the epidemic of allergic reactions they finally created after decades of bad business practices.
But homogenization plays a role, too. They push the milk through, essentially, a kind of sieve that breaks the milk up into molecules small enough that the body no longer recognizes them as food. In fact, the body has trouble processing these new molecules.
Like I said, I'd love to buy their product, but they've driven me away by creating what is almost a health hazard for me, and definitely is for my partner.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Wonder What GS Frontrunning Energy Footprint Looks Like...
This is the first I've heard about excessive energy usage by bitcoin.
I wonder how it compares to the top shelf financial institutions footprint. They run some BIG data.
If I had to guess, I'd say it pales in comparison, but that's just a guess.
And I'm not sure about the comparison to "regular" credit cards. There's a lot of background computing going on in our financial system...
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
Excellent comment. That is a number I am going to look for. n/t
Re: credit cards
Yes, there is an immense amount of processing being layered on top of simple accounting.
They look for patterns that indicate fraudulent use - that alone must be an immense computational load. Then, they build user profiles, so that they can sell the data for a profit. Who knows what other data mining spyware they are running.
Then, you have to add in the "vampire" power of all those credit card readers in every store just sitting idle most of the time.
The whole idea of how much energy all these financial products (stocks, credit cards, e-currency) consume is ignored. Maybe it is, as I calculated 4 parts in 100,000. But if it turns out to be 1% of all energy use, then we need to know that.
But, You Know, That Shit Is Just a Fact, Right?
I mean best of all possible worlds and whatnot...
That bitcoin though, that's a completely different story... How dare they steal our energy like that!
The complacent stupid... It boggles the mind sometimes.
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
Discussion has gone way beyond BTC
and that's a good thing.
The issue of stealing energy is very minor at this point. The issue of overall consumption of non-renewable energy for this ill-engineered Ponzi scheme was my original issue. But you and others have added on credit card and HFT energy.
I think its been a useful discussion. Thanks. I wish more people cared about how energy gets wasted big time.
It's the Bullshit That I'm Pissed Off About.
They can't have the honest argument that "private currencies are dangerous" because Private EVERYTHING and Corporate Freedom are the goals.
So they have to make up some specious argument,"Bitcoin uses too much energy," while ignoring the Surveillance State and High Finance. I'm so tired of the reductionist or manipulative framing dominating our national discourse. It's maddening. And all the people who seem to be completely incapable of stepping outside of the approved, corporate media frames, drive me bonkers.
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
The "too much energy" argument was started by techies
I agree with you that its the privatization and concentration that are the issue.
Just to flesh out the tech argument:
Techies love bitcoin, since so many of them are Libertarians. They focus solely on the technology of e-currency while ignoring the societal impact. Sorta like concentration camp guards focusing on the throughput of the gas chambers while ignoring the murder.
To them, e-currency is a good idea; and they, being good engineers, they just want to improve the efficiency of the tech before said efficiency becomes an issue.
The fact that some bloggers have picked up on this technical discussion to use as a point against e-currency is mere happenstance. The bloggers are just throwing anything at the wall to see if it will stick.