"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed." ā€”Neuromancer, by William Gibson
The first transatlantic underwater cable was completed in 1858. That's a few years before the Battle of Bull Runā€”the maiden battle of the Civil War. The cable allowed for telegraph transmission, connecting the UK and Americas, and cut communication time from 2 weeks to 2 minutes. Check out the commemorative stamp with Neptune and a mermaid:
But the cable permanently failed shortly after it went live. The next one snapped halfway into the laying process across the Atlantic. The technology was called a scam by protectionist politicians, businessmen, and people following them. The media and newspapers (which international telegraph transmission certainly benefited) were called into question, accused of dishonest and excited headlines on the viability of the nascent technology. The reliability of boats was betterā€”so went the status quo thinkingā€”and steam power designs were making them faster. The transatlantic cable concept was very nearly abandoned, ultimately hinging on government subsidy from both the UK and US governments to complete in permanence. The subsidy was fought hard, especially in America, lobbied against by the steamship route operators of transatlantic mail. In America that subsidy passed by a single vote in the Senate. Cable technology exploded shortly after, scaled globally, was refined with Telegrapher's equations, materials science, bandwidth increases, lead to many discoveries about electrical transmission, batteries, etc.
Now holding our thumb down on the fast-forward button>>
Interconnectors:
Viking Link is an enormous achievement for HVDC (High Voltage Direct Current) power lines. It was completed a few weeks ago. She runs 475 miles underwater, connecting the British national grid's lips to Denmark, and at peak, can lactate 1400 megawatts of milk from renewable glands, enough to power 1.4M United Kingdom cradles.
This is the global dairy pattern that answers half the energy intermittence problem. The other teat is where energy storage solutions come in. First:
As the world switches from century-old AC power lines to High-Voltage Direct Current lines, larger distances get covered, less energy is lost in transmission, and these interconnectors as they're called, connect the energy grids of different countries, acting as super-highways to ferry renewable energy where it's needed most, where demand is highest, where prices are most favorable. This isn't theory, it's happening.
Eventually, much of the world will have interconnected grid(s). The concept is powerful, nothing new as some of you know, because with interconnectors, you can leverage time zones and overproduction to distribute renewable energy intermittence.
"We can generate round the clock electricity from the sun as it sets in one part of the world but rises in another part. Look at me dearā€”the sun never sets for the entire earth.ā€ ā€”A quote from Christ as he looked down the loose shirt of a weeping Mary Magdalene at the base of the cross.
It's not just sunlight, but wind schedules, overabundances of geothermal, and hydroelectric milk. And then, combining this system with milk bottles (energy storage solutions), like say chemical batteries, gravity batteries, hydrogen via ammonia, etceteraā€”as these technologies develop and matureā€”then suddenly Buckminster Fuller's vision at the World Game simulation in the 1970s becomes reality, where the highest priority on the dymaxian map is an intercontinental grid ferrying renewable energy. We should also consider the increasing number of people who will opt-out from the grid with their own independent infrastructure using solar, wind, batteries, and geothermal cooling/heating. They can even pump their excess renewable energy into the grid like we see a lot in California et al. We should consider micro-grids too which use the same concept.
The United Kingdom and Morocco are in the final planning stages for the Xlinks infrastructure, a $25B project of "national importance", where several HVDC cables travel 2400 miles (šŸ˜³) underwater, and connect Morroco's immense wind and sunlight resources in the Guelmim Oued Noun region to the United Kingdom's grid. 11GW....that's almost 4 nuclear power plants worth of energy, for less than the construction cost of a single nuclear plant, with the same build timeframe. FYI, a modern full-sized nuclear plant produces about 3GW, costs about $28B, and takes around 6 years to complete. That's not to say nuclear plays no role, because it does, just not in the *horn-gored way Twitter would have us believe.
*horn gore: violently bullish, as in charts tracing the the inner parabolic shape of a bull's horn
One of the limiting factors of underwater HVDC lines are the cables themselvesā€”there's not enough production capacity yetā€”which is why I'm heavily researching opportunities in this space. Kind of a FOMO thing for me right now.
We're all used to visible overland cable towers, utility poles, etc, but I'm seeing a bunch of new designs for overland cables that are buried underground. In some cases they're a cheaper solution, bypass fixed legalese, and reduce liabilities (forest fires, injuries, aesthetics, etc). The company SOO Green has a cool model using the space adjacent to train tracks to bury cables and run them to various power stations, bypassing the expensive and timely legal issues to secure land, as train routes are already logistically optimized and legally settled. TransWest, the HVDC overland project that will ferry Wyoming wind power 735-miles to Las Vegas ran into the above ground problem, fighting 18-years worth of court cases; the project broke ground earlier this year. The HVDC project called the CHPE (Champlain Hudson Power Express) will be complete in 2026. This $6B masterpiece runs 1250MW of renewable energy through HVDC lines connecting Quebec and New York. The cables will be buried, and run along the bottom of lake Champlain and Hudson River, again bypassing many legal issues. Anyway, as I've suggested in a previous post, it feels like a referendum on the current mining game for large public miners. Public miners have talking points that are a bit iffy directionally. These companies (not all of course) could see their unique grid positioning challenged, because energy storage occupies the same space, and demand response gets interesting when international and intercontinental grids scale. I wish there was more about this kind of stuff from public miners, about how they'll fuse with energy storage, ratio between what's most profitable in any given hour along with HPC, what work they've done on micro-grid research, how they're deploying debt to achieve this, what inroads they've made with the IEA, what universities they've contracted with, what cool renewable companies they've invested in. But why would they? They've nested their HTML and lobbyists with the GOP while hitching their wagons to the fossil fuel industry. And rehashing a few other miner complaints I have from a previous post:
  • Public miner bitcoin treasuries have never grown consistently over the longterm. And with the distribution schedule getting halved soon, and hash power growing, it's hard to believe they will in any significant way w/out a Saylor-esque play. No thx
  • They're bad stewards of debt, all seemingly developing the going concern disease when volatility heats red. How the CORZ bankruptcy went down was a doozy
  • They dilute the shit out of shareholders interminably when debt is cheap. They have to.
  • They put interminable sell pressure on BTC
  • They have no clue how far the optics of paying a dividend in bitcoin would go, even if it's just a few irrelevant sats
  • None of them are profitable, which is fine, but they lose more money consistently than I'm comfortable turning my cheek to
  • They virtue signal the Lightning Network
  • They're fiat companies dressed in orange
  • Their stock promotion on certain social media sites is bothersome (they've cooled-off doing this though)
I have no clue what I'm investing in there. Network security? Transaction finality? Rare Ordinals? I'm not "investing" in gated versions of that. I'll trade them sure, otherwise I'll run my own node, and mine myself, directing hashpower to pools other than Foundry (which I couldn't do anyway because Foundry is by invite only, requiring hashpower minimums, contracts, and hardware purchase agreements). I couldn't care less if many of these miners in their current iteration get themselves specially taxed, or go bust. They heretofore have embraced the short-term benefits of friction. They seem to be following and not leading. Funny, because just a couple years ago I might've suggested the opposite. I'm not going to mince words, and appreciate any rebuttals, but I think the entire industry is on-par with KYC crypto exchanges, mostly bullshit, full of charlatans, and they've made big strides for hearts and minds amongst the bitcoin res publica. Again, I have no clue what they do deserving of an investment, or what their plan is as storage and grid marriage scale. Maybe virtue signaling. They do put out great press for this during grid strain events, and it's usually the same grid.
The industry will eventually consolidate and a bunch of these current companies will get supplanted. As it stands, many American miners have zombied towards the Texas ERCOT grid, which is a unique grid, in that Texas is the only state with an independent grid. This keeps it from most federal oversight. And because ERCOT is adding immense amounts of wind and solar capacity annually, miners can suck it up with favorable contracts, which is good for the time being. I'll posit here (I could be wrong) that the reason hashpower has pushed to multiple ATHs, even with bitcoin's USD price more than halved from its own ATH, is a response to the rapid expansion of cheap renewable energy globally; it's not just the fastest expanding type of energy, but the cheapest, by far per kWh.
Intermittence of renewable energy is the elephant in the room, but assume over the x-axis (time) intermittence gets solved, and conspires to give us advantage, regardless of what fevered noise to the contrary the expedient Twitter personalities cascade. Follow the money, the culture, the snake mating ball of innovation, and data. Natural gas has another term to serve, oil and oil economies on the other hand, are climbing a wall of worry. In some telling so is the petrodollar system. The oil industry and its political cantillionaires straight lied to us. I was watching energy markets as they opened Monday morning after Hamas broke down the gates of the open-air Gaza prison and engaged in pyrrhic war crimes against German tourists, Thai workers, American students, curiously dressed ravers, Israeli civilians, IDF soldiers, children, holocaust survivors, and random motorists. Horrible stuff. So we now have two wars, high inflation, massive reshoring of US jobs, and sanctions grinding three major oil producing nations.

Yet oil trades at $85 per barrel...

Houston we have a [demand] problem. $85 is lower than oil traded before the war began March of 2022, when homo sovieticus thought a two week timeframe was sufficient for his special military operation. Perhaps Rasputin visited him in a dream and he woke up with sand in his eyes. It's quite possible the United States already reached peak oil demand in 2018, when we averaged 20.5M bpd of consumption. We haven't surpassed that amount in the 5 years since, even with the massive reshoring of manufacturing that we're experiencing. If we're talking about gasoline consumption specifically, then that's fallen off a cliff and I'll bet on a new low in the next 10 years:
We have a bunch of oil refiners who don't want to refine oil for gas and instead prefer transitioning exclusively to petrochemical production. Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are rapidly spending down their sovereign wealth funds to prepare their economies for oil's declining demand. Micro-transportation is revolutionizing urban mobility. Electric cars are growing. I go back to January 2016 when oil contracts fell to $26 bbl, and again in June 2020 when they went literally negative. It'll happen again. Bigger volatility swings. Deeper. High oil prices incentive renewable energy. And people can modify their behavior so fast nowadays (there's a crush of options) in response to high energy prices, that any death spike in oil (and there are sure to be a couple) will be short-lived games amongst marginal buyers. Homo sovieticus learned this lesson the hard way in failing to hold Europe's economy hostage via energy. Interconnectors, innovation, renewables, and perpendicular thinking all got fast-tracked; in other words, the fallout from the invasion is that it hastened the global transition to cleaner forms of energy. Now Russia and their soon to implode currency are trapped fighting against a hyper-efficient war design, where the US defense budget has not only been falling for years, but for a drop in the bucket of that budget, America is dramatically weakening an enemy (Russia), selling energy to allies (EU) for more money than the enemy did, while putting a resource rich country (Ukraine) in debt, and losing no men in the process. It's like an advanced Ai model output an instruction manual for the input: How do we politically embarrass, operationally dominate, and tactically outfight an enemy without ever fighting him?
Ukraine bonds remain one of the hottest investments in the world:
Peak demand for oil globally will happen this decade. The IEA agrees, the integrated oil majors agree, car manufacturers agree, a crush of unbiased studies agree, I agree. OPEC doesn't agree, but that's what happens when you have a 13-country cartel run by 12 dictators. Big chunk of their power is set to expire. I'm done with their well-funded education campaigns. What awaits them on the other side is a bit too distributed for 20th century playbooks. Dictators have been involved in every war, refugee crisis, and hyperinflation event of the last 100 years. They'll all be gone in the next couple decades. Just having to account for them costs too many resources.
I think free/cheap forms of decentralized energy, intercontinental grids, energy storage, and photonics-based silicon will revolutionize bitcoin mining.
I read through Softwar a few months back, the book by Major Jason P. Lowery that caused a stir. I think he took far too much SPITEFUL criticism, it felt like bullying, and you absolutely want young people like that adding to collective intelligence (think wisdom of crowds theory) even if you don't agree. It gets averaged out. I'm guilty of saying a whole bunch of stupid shit on this site and others. But I'm learning. We have to get it all out there. The fact Lowery caused so much outrage was reason enough for me to read it. Besides some of the technical criticisms raised by learned devs, I think power grid marriage is something under-accounted for in his thesis. Some of the other stuff was interesting.
Conclusion: Interconnectors add new layers of cooperation for nation states, incentive alignment, we might see emergent behavior that bitcoin fits right into. The renewable industry is a rabbit hole full of scams, specious ideas, amazing innovation, world-altering projects, political expedience, and opportunities. Take a flashlight down it, the future of energy and mining looks different.
Thanks for reading this abusively long post. Lots of sats for replies as always. You know the rules.
Kudos on the write-up, the formatting, the personality & expertise you showcase. Really refreshing and educational šŸ‘
I had no idea that the U.K actually had long-term strategic thinking behind that clown show they call parliament. Nice to know some intelligent people & engineering masters clearly remain that understand that..

ā€¦the future requires exponentially more energy not less of it.

Also I should say Iā€™ve been doing some research into our future internet too and this post will get me over the finish line. Really top job, and inspiring for readers & contributors of SN.
Curious thoughā€¦as will many other plebs. Do you work in the energy industry yourself? Clearly seems to be an area of expertise.
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Listen to what people say...
"The future REQUIRES"
REQUIRES?!?
WHO "REQUIRES" IT.
Only deranged statist top-down central planning big government authoritarian cucks phrase things like this. This is the language of collectivists, of people who talk about "our society, and what "we" need.
In the future, there WILL be vastly more energy production because that is simply the nature of things, and the nature of things is something OP has a very weak grasp of.
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Youā€™re literally saying the same thing.
There are more important things to disagree on than language and semantics
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Was in the energy industry for a while surveying. Probably was around 2015 when renewable costs starting falling so fast that a durable energy transition started taking shape. Now it's getting beyond ideology to where renewable options (especially geothermal heating/cooling) just make economic sense. And the efficient product designs are moving almost too fast to keep up with. It's not going to stop. I really can't imagine what it'll look like when solid-state batteries go commercial. I bet the average single family home will produce 150% of what they use by 2035.
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150%? so ur saying this is how mining hashpower distributes and decentralizes further?
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Well that's a subject to ponder, but if energy inputs are free, then theoretically all hardware is profitable. We'll have to see where photonic silicon takes us, and in what ways hashpower gets commoditized. All the same, mining has consistently become more distributed over time.
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He is retarded. He was probably a sales rep and ate up all the fiat solar propaganda. He has zero trchnical background.
@k00b everything ks way too tiny on here. I accidentally zapped guy below and can't undo it.
If I think buttons are too small, 95% of people over the age of 50 cannot use this website at all
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You really are quite something dear Delta. It's like your brain is tethered to 2018 or prior so far as photovoltaics go. "Solar" is a very broad word, kind of like "crypto". Some folks can navigate the nuance. Others like to conflate. Where do you get your data from? Genuinely curious.
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"Where do I get my data from"
Dude, you are talking about how you have FOMO about the costs of cable manufacturing because you don't know how things are made or what drives cost of incredibly simple things.
I'm done being nice and friendly in my comments -- you are a worthless piece of shit, and you have no curiosity. You are leftist, statist scum, and you're "oh, look at me I'm so jovial why are you mean" tactics don't work outside of your leftist echo chamber. This is beyond stupid. Now you are just being a trash person making the world a vastly worse place. You are far worse than a nocoiner who makes an honest living.
There are plenty of nocoiners who are not like you. You are disgustingly arrogant. Your sort of arrogance is literally the root of every evil thing that has every happened throughout human history. Not understanding bitcoin is something I can accept in certain people for it is an emotional challenge, but there is no excuse for your behavior. I hope you lose most of your bitcoin, for it will make the rest of the world have more electricity.
You are not much less evil than 15th century style rapist, pillaging terrorists. You are not worth having a conversation with on the actual subject and you have already shown that is not something you are interested in anyway.
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My dear Delta. I'm not losing my BTC and have been consistently stacking since the last Obama Administration. I'm no leftist, rightist, or statist. Just a decentralized advocate. That means energy, money, transportation, food, and the internet. For energy, you really need to ask what that means and how it's achieved. I want you to tell me how I opt-out of the grid without renewable energy and storage, and how countries opt-out of dictatorships and inputs traded on centralized and manipulated commodities marketplaces. Fiat literally has a direct connection to fossil fuels via the petrodollar. You will eventually come around to the distributed and decentralized way of thinking about this like all bitcoiners. Bitcoin's mining economy of scale demands it. Still love you.
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@mallardshead I would like to respectfully disagree with your assessment that by 2035 PV owners will be generating 150% of their energy needs. This really is simple Physics and truthful market dynamics. I live in Uganda and full-scale rooftop solar energy is something acquired only by the rich who can afford to pay for 24/7 national electricity. The poor can only afford tiny PV systems for lighting. These do not boil water and certainly cannot cook food.
OP has written a very good and fun-to-read article on HVDC, but the way he fumbled the data on solar electricity supply economics is off-putting. Simply understand this, if solar WAS REALLY cheaper that fossil fuels, then the poorest parts of the world would be the most PV covered areas on Earth. Places like Morocco that literally enjoy desert level amounts of sunshine almost 12 hours each day, might afford to greatly subsidize solar PV farms enough to profit from that entire investment. In Uganda, with our equatorial climate, lots of water bodies and forested places, it hardly ever shines non-stop for 8 hours on the sunniest of days during the dry season. So PV farms here will always run secondary (big time secondary) to national grid hydroelectricity.
If neither you nor the OP hasn't heard of Alex Epstein I really recommend you go check him out. He has facts backed by graphs, references, and rebuttals to quoted exaggerations by all the big pro-renewable experts (including Leonardo Di Caprio's guy).
Thank you for your time.
"decentralize everything"
= LARPer maxi šŸ¤”šŸ¤”šŸ¤”
You can go and live in the Alaskan wilderness today and even the IRS will not bother you.
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I will reply more later, but I want to say how cool it is to use SN for this kind of long-form content creation. Love the idea, would love to see 10x more of this.
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Yes, @mallardshead is one of the better follows on this site.
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Thanks for the write-up, and don't worry about the length (the longer the better). This is long-form content I'd love to see more of on SN (I should be the change I want to see and write stuff myself).
With the other Starlink Direct to Cell post on SN today I feel a little bit uncomfortable that all of this foundational infrastructure (physical AND digital interconnectors) are so centralised. As you mentioned, individuals can run their own energy infrastructure, but I haven't really heard of people running their own internet (waiting for @davidw's post on the future internet).
My two cents on your writing (meant as constructive criticism). You hooked me with the history of the transatlantic cable, and gave a great overview of interconnectors, but then lost me with (what seemed to me) a confusing detour into public miners and oil prices. Interesting detours, to be sure -- but as someone with no prior experience, i would appreciate some signboarding to explain how those things are relevant to your central thesis (which you laid out nicely in your conclusion). Cheers
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Thanks for posting that link to Starlink. I had already uncovered this was likely to be announced this quarter. They had those agreements (as back-up coverage) with networks for over a year in some cases. But now they have an official offering.
SpaceX really are on track to grow Starlink exponentially. It can either be a huge level-up or get even more centralised & monopolised. As you say, this is the danger. Thatā€™s what I hope to uncover & let the reader form their opinion on, once finished.
Next spin-off to follow may well be digging deeper into mesh networking, if any readers have useful resources on that topic.
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I don't have any resources to offer, but casting my vote for some SN content wrt mesh. I was super excited to hear about goTenna back when, but then they dropped out of the news.
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Will be interesting to see how fast Amazon's Starlink competitor Kuiper can gain network effects. Mesh nets are awesome tho. Time to challenge ISPs. Probably a decade out, but we keep getting nuggets here and there.
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Good criticism, was definitely a rant by me regarding miners and oil. I think I still harbor a bunch of unresolved anger after certain revelations and blowups last year lol. Good Starlink link.
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The transatlantic cable concept was very nearly abandoned, ultimately hinging on government subsidy from both the UK and US governments to complete in permanence. The subsidy was fought hard, especially in America, lobbied against by the steamship route operators of transatlantic mail.
It's interesting that in the Libertarian / ancap circles that dominate btc, the idea of a subsidy would presumably be considered a Great Market-Distorting Sin. Yet according to this account, much productive development came from it. The usual critique of subsidies and govt meddling of all kinds is that when there's a real market need, a market solution will arise.
Is there an obvious place where this governmental interference perverted this undersea cabling ecosystem in some way? What does the alternate past without subsidies look like?
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Technically, the economic distortion from subsidies is known as a "Dead Weight Cost". The idea isn't that what is produced via subsidy is worthless. Rather, those resources would have been expected to generate more value on the open market.
As with much economic analysis, it's about the seen vs the unseen. Only uncritical observers make their judgements solely based on the observed outcome.
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Yeah, fair. I think the real insight is that everything's tradeoffs. You put dead weight loss on one side, and coordination failures + externalities on the other, and try to behave sensibly given those tradeoffs. Pretending that either one doesn't exist (which is the usual partisan arguing) is dumb.
But the seen vs unseen is important to keep in mind, I think any reasonable person would agree on that.
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There's a very interesting conversation to be had about whether it's actually possible for non-market actions to be efficient: i.e. whether it's possible to correct for market failures at a lower cost than the cost of the failure. This gets skipped in basically every discussion about externalities justifying state interventions.
The theoretical framework for doing it requires accurately knowing exactly how much value each person attaches to the externality and then charging/compensating them for it with money from whoever created the externality (or paying the creator of positive externalities).
Since the requisite knowledge is impossible to attain, the entire endeavor is quite suspect.
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I can see that point.
Another interesting conversation to be had is over the fact that market mechanisms can only function over domains for which there is a pricing signal; and even then, markets can only be efficient insofar as the price accurately encodes the values that it purports to encode at all [1]. Both of those assumptions are violated in practice; the question is: by how much?
So then those are the imperfect strategies you set against each other. And the approaches are not equally palpable to people, e.g., it's easy for someone to look at how the groundwater has been fucked and to say: "Something needs to be done!" and for that to seem reasonable, vs a more theoretical market-efficiency argument.
[1] A better way of putting it: they are efficient, but efficient with regard to what?
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Now you understand the incompleteness of subjective value theory. It is just that value is subjective at a local scope, and human life is perceived largely from the local scope. But just like we can do math and understand galaxies beyond the human scale, there is a global objectivity in value, which is nothing more than maximizing negative entropy (dubbed exotropy by some). This is what is done most efficiently with freedom and ALL government interference/subsidies is MATHEMATICALLY GUARANTEED to make efficiency drop, and poverty to increase, which is measured in energy.
Bitcoin is what gives you a measure NOW, but total energy is how you measure real world wealth. I explained it all here: https://heaviside.substack.com/p/bitcoin-mining-wastes-energy-but
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Is there a relationship between minimized local entropy and Pareto Efficiency?
I've thought about economic order in entropy terms as an analogy, but I've never looked into how literal that relationship is.
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Well, yes, in the sense that all economic decision makers operate to move toward the Pareto frontier, and that movement proceeds at maximum speed when you have free markets, which only are really free when you have sound money.
markets can only be efficient insofar as the price accurately encodes the values that it purports to encode
The thing is, market mechanisms are such that "insofar as" becomes greater over time, whereas I'm not aware of any evidence that non-market forces have similar self-correcting mechanisms.
The "Something needs to be done" people may not realize it, but what they're usually advocating is that their preferences override the preferences of others by force. However, in your example, the real issue is a tragedy of the commons, which is an expected trait in non-market environments.
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The thing is, market mechanisms are such that "insofar as" becomes greater over time.
Provocative statement. What are you basing that claim on?
whereas I'm not aware of any evidence that non-market forces have similar self-correcting mechanisms.
I don't think asymptoting to "correct" can be demonstrated at all except in a toy domain, since defining what "correct" is is the heart of the issue.
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What are you basing that claim on?
Price theory, in particular, and microeconomics theory, in general. Basically, markets approach an equilibrium over time and market equalibria have certain properties, like Pareto Efficiency.
I don't think asymptoting to "correct" can be demonstrated at all except in a toy domain
Since that's the only type of domain where we know what "correct" is, I also don't think it can be demonstrated in other domains. Of course, that criticism would apply to any economic system. The point is that the mechanisms are at least self-correcting in theory and that can't be said of other systems.
efficient with regard to what?
I like this question. It is often taken for granted in these discussions. Markets are efficient at meeting the various preferences of the populace with the resources available. Specifically, they lead to a state (non-unique) where there is no way to make anyone better off without making someone else worse off (Pareto Efficiency). In a way this is obvious, since all markets do is allow voluntary exchanges, which are win-win (ex-ante). Once all available voluntary exchanges occur, there could be no more win-win exchanges.
Correct, not is it only suspect, it is thermodynamically provable as less efficient via Landauer's principle because the bitcoin a person holds is literally the only prove of information that anyone can provide with skin in the game. This is the crux of everything, and it is absolute. There is no "small" exception.
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Probably financial markets and the businesses there would have no option but to finance it. The advantage for them was probably greater than any other. Overland (domestically) it was the railroad and logistics industry that needed it most, for scheduling-dispatching-safety, and for weather.
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An interesting thought experiment is to think whether the telegraph would have been successfully deployed in that time period without government subsidy. I'm guessing the steamboat lobby would have protected the status quo for longer, but eventually superior technology would be embraced?
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At some point in all this is the idea that subsidies get around otherwise-insurmountable coordination costs, where the other actors lack the resources to take action that would be to all their benefit. Back in the day, this might have been the case for these giant projects, e.g., could private industry have managed the telegraph, or undersea, without subsidy?
At this point, with many companies that are effectively as rich and powerful as nation-states of old, perhaps what were sensible arguments in the past are no longer relevant. Presumably this has been explored in depth someplace, but I don't know where.
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You are absolutely spot on. Microsoft and Amazon are two such behemoth examples, with massive cash in hand and huge infrastructure required for their operations.
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I think so, because financial markets realized the advantage was too great to ignore.
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I think he took far too much SPITEFUL criticism, it felt like bullying, and you absolutely want young people like that adding to collective intelligence (think wisdom of crowds theory) even if you don't agree.
My take is that whatever bullying he took was a reaction to the btc podcast irrumatio when people who should know better swooned over him. He blathers so confidently through his evolutionary biology fast-talk that you think he's maybe saying something really smart.
Nope.
He deserves way worse than he got, as far as I'm concerned. In fact, I'd suggest you should be more annoyed than you are, because now any smart person, young or otherwise, who could make a novel contribution to the field will be a) dissuaded and b) come across as noise to a group that was already cripplingly over-reactive to anything that isn't orthodoxy.
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šŸ˜‚ Yeah the evo biology stuff went on for like half the book. It was for the worst. The transaction censorship resistance stuff for nation states was something I'd been thinking about prior. His podcast arrogance I haven't experienced (don't think I ever heard him talk). His lack of information regarding energy economies is where I believe he ran into trouble. Kept thinking he would confront that in the book but he didn't.
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He ran into trouble because he is an arrogant moron who doesn't understand the basics of bitcoin, but talks and writes about them anyway as if he had anything of value to say, like you with energy
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Lowery understands the "basics" of bitcoin dear Delta. You often speak in hyperbole to drive points. This is unnecessary. Are you and Sudonaka friends by chance?
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Wrong. Thinking mining is of strategic value to a nation, that owning mining allows "securing other things/data" or whatever gibberish he said, among the many other things others can point out all are "basics". Hyperbole? You handwaived over the foundational costs inherent in raw materials and didn't bother to run the numbers, but pointed out a fantastical vision for a grid. YOU DID NOT EVEN DO THE NAPKIN MATH THAT MATTERS FOR YOUR OWN PET THEORY. Hyperbole is all yours.
Don't know him.
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tl;dr delusional solar maxi spouting nonsense and trying to fit bitcoin into the narrative while saying "look, I'm on your side" to get morons to agree with him.
Tech illiterate moron who doesn't understanding chemical/industrial engineering, the notion of embodied energy (materials science 101) and operates primarily on feelings.
A dude wrote this, but he should really get his T levels checked, as all solar cucks should.
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Here are the numbers for the non-retards. CRUX OF THE RETARDATION: THICC cables are not something you can magically produce more of "cheaply". Cables are basically raw materials that have a cost tied directly to their energy. Look at his reply below to the term "embodied" energy.
If you want to live in a better world, people like OP need to be vociferously and derisively SHAMED for their nonsense.
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Interesting. And how long do these modern cables last for? What are the upkeep costs? Insurance? And how much value do they add? Of course these bits get left out and of course your data would come from a twitter bro lol. Glad I left that burning valley at my back. If you read my original post, you'd know there was a reason I started off by mentioning the first transatlantic cableā€”which was completed nearly 170 years ago. Cable laying ships, routes, and cables themselves have advanced quite a bit, nearly perfected. Imagine an idiot telling you in 1858 that telegraph cables were a scam, or in 1992 that internet cables would never get laid across oceans because trust me bro, they're too costly. How has that worked out? Now we're supposed to believe grid interconnectors are a scam because trust me bro, they don't work. Please see the numerous examples and links from my post of either completed projects, projects being built, or projects in planning. I left out at least a dozen more. There seems to be a difference between what I hear on twitter, and what I see in the real world. Going to trust my eyes, the data, and follow the money on this one.
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A fixed ceramic insulator used with 14kVdc even at very low amps needs to be replaced every 10 years. So I suspect peak fiat incentives are at play here.
Would be better to spend on research on how to send power though the ionosphere.
HIGH VOLTAGE CREATES CHAOS! The magnetic field changes the crystal structure of the insulator over time. These cable experiments will be good for mining it will probably create lots of randomly stranded energy.
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Ceramic insulators are quite cheap to replace, but they've been slowly getting phased-out by polyethylene insulators since 2007 or so. And the new design pattern of cables and powerlines isn't overland but underground and underwater. The most expensive part of overland powerlines are the legal fights to build them. And in recent times the liability of forest fires and injury as well.
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Are you saying they are using plastic on overhead high voltage powerlines now? If this is true you are breaking my world view?šŸ¤Ŗ Seems like fiat regression in engineering..for me, high voltage = oxidation... oxidation + plastic = yes, break down
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fuck off, scammer
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Embodied energy and chemical engineering...I'm uncertain where you're trying to hide there dear Delta. Do we need to break down the entire backend of fossil fuel exploration, extraction, logistics, refining, accidents, and geopolitics? Embrace decentralized forms of renewable energy (that sun, the wind, and geothermal are all around us) and welcome their collapsing hardware costs. Embrace the design patterns to get people off the grid, and the design patterns to form renewable intermittence into glorious global distributions. Stop towing dictator lines about one-trick economies, where energy produced by a nationalized or private entity that never saw anti-trust accumulated all its power into their hands. We're undergoing a full-blown energy transition, with an emphasis on decentralized inputs. Sorry you thought a bitcoin standard was coming without an equally radical energy transition. And please, no more arguing with conceptions, we have data now. I provided a bunch of that in the post no? Besides the flagrant misquotes of course.
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Embodied energy is a technical term. Computing things precisely is one thing and disputing the method and exact number is one thing, but you are denying the mathematical foundations of how things actually work. How things actually work is the basis of chemical engineering.
You go on to spout a bunch of word salad based on your FEELINGS because that is the only domain you know how to operate in. This was always confusing to me, but I have come to accept there are humans who are neurally wired in a way they are incapable of separating logical, numerical thoughts from their feelings.
People like you are extremely harmful and dangerous on a fiat standard when arrogant lunatics are able to violently impose their deranged feelings upon other. The incredible thing about Bitcoin is it renders lunatics like you harmless. After the transition, you will only be able to hurt yourself by making yourself poorer.
I suspect you will be unable to humble yourself. Alas, people like you becoming poorer means we may have capital misallocation persist a few decades after fiat dies in which all of you fools become broke (or humble later).
Fundamentally, you are a grifter and probably have a fake job that has conditioned you to believe your feelings and words are relevant or productive in the real world, and your employer's money printer access has allowed them to do this and subsidize your delusions.
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Someone is a happy soul
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I am glad you are able to remain blissfully unaware of things even as a bitcoiner. Truly incredible.
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This made me laugh. YOUR FEELINGS ARE KILLING ME! Dam straight fools do the math!
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That's not to say nuclear plays no role, because it does, just not in the *horn-gored way Twitter would have us believe.
Glad you fixed on this in your post -- so many people i see just screaming "nuclear" as just a blanket solution for everything. You added some actual good (enlightening too!) context.
Now Russia and their soon to implode currency are trapped fighting against a hyper-efficient war design, where the US defense budget has not only been falling for years, but for a drop in the bucket of that budget, America is dramatically weakening an enemy (Russia), selling energy to allies (EU) for more money than the enemy did, while putting a resource rich country (Ukraine) in debt, and losing no men in the process. It's like an advanced Ai model output an instruction manual for the input: How do we politically embarrass, operationally dominate, and tactically outfight an enemy without ever fighting him?
damn man...true chess being played. they like to abuse that skill on us though too unfortunately.
I enjoyed being abused by this post. Incredible read!
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Thx! ā¤ļø
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I hope you lose 50% of your net worth after hyperbitcoinization foolishly operating based on your feelings that draw you to "moderate" positions while ignoring engineers who actually know they're shit. You are no better than a fiat person.
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can you read ser? Did you fall over ser? Hit in the noggin?
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Can you do arithmetic?
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Trying to stay abreast of this post, but you lost me at: "can lactate 1400 megawatts of milk from renewable glands".
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Learned more in this post of yours than I did from anything else today. Thank you sir!
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The growth of HVDC interconnectors revolutionizes global energy distribution by efficiently transferring renewable energy across borders, impacting energy dependency and environmental sustainability.
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TLDR man. It's all about the Intercontinental Championship my guy.
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I saw this man drop a People's Elbow in Chatanooooga once. Still gives me chills.
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That era w/ Nation of Domination, when The Rock was being such a goofy smartass, was my favorite in all of wrestling. The high point was when he gave all Nation members Rolox watches as gifts, except the main guy (Farooq?), to whom he gave a giant painting of himself.
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Stop it. šŸ¤£
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If ya smeeeeeelllllllll
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Interesting concept but hope it doesnā€™t become too relied on. NordStream2 comes to mind.
How do you protect these things from sabotage?
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Underwater cables are quite easy to repair and are designed with splicing and easy repair in mind. Cables generally are laid in littoral or shallower water routes, have simple replaceable parts, are immune to elevation changes and the weather, they can flex and move quite a bit, and require very little maintenance. When the remote Faroe Islands for example saw their underwater internet cable cut in two different places, it was fixed in about 3 days.
Underwater pipelines are quite difficult and expensive to repair, they require pumps, compressors, an enormous amount of maintenance, expensive specialized parts, mounting brackets, can't move, and can only be laid in really specific routes with perfect conditions. In Nordstream's case, after 3 of its pipes got blown up, they depressurized and were filled with saltwater destroying many kilometers of all 3 pipes.
We've had transoceanic telegraph cables, phone cables, and internet cables for a long time. The biggest saboteurs of these cables so far have been ship anchors getting stuck on them, or fish nets in littoral waters. Modern cables are buried deep enough in the floor to avoid both. Geopolitical risks are always there, and these are mostly an issue with fossil fuels because of where they come from. The majority of gas/oil produced comes from dictatorships. Their gas/oil giants never underwent anti-trust like much of the west did, in our case Standard Oil, which eventually became all these companies:
So for the countries never undergoing anti-trust of their energy (really an economic base layer), all that power and wealth never distributed and centralized in the hands of single families, or got nationalized, accumulating in the hands of a single dictatorship or despot.
You can't turn off the sun, wind, or earth's core though, and thankfully, bitcoin uses electricity.
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Thanks for the insights. I can definitely see how pipe vs wires is a tradeoff you'd want. Even personally, I'd prefer a wire issue at the house over a plumbing issue.
You can't turn off the sun, wind, or earth's core though, and thankfully, bitcoin uses electricity.
I do want to play devil's advocate here. You also can't turn on sun or wind (earth's core is always on) so how does reliability factor into this? the current grids have to maintain a steady level of supply/demand. It is my understanding that renewables are not consistent enough to meet these demands if peak demand happens outside of peak generation time. What's the solution to renewables not being consitent? (I would think nuclear is the solution but happy to hear your take on the matter)
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That's what the original post was about. TL;DR:
The world is switching from century-old AC powerlines to HVDC powerlines. With HVDC interconnectors, we can connect grids and leverage time zones, wind schedules, stranded energy, etc. I gave several examples of completed and in-process projects. That's half the renewable consistency (intermittency) problem. The other half is energy storage solutions as they mature (chemical batteries, gravity batteries, green hydrogen via ammonia, etc). So together, interconnectors and energy storage solve the intermittence problem.
Nuclear has a future, just not the hyper-bullish one people paint. A typical nuclear plant puts out 3GW and costs $28B with a 6 year build timeframe. And the costs are only rising. The xlinks morocco renewable project can put out 3x that amount of energy for $9B less, a shorter build timeframe, with none of the longterm security costs/concerns. Renewable designs are getting more efficient, and the cost is falling. I'm all about following that trend to find its bottom.
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