I guarantee nobody will have heard this before or thought about it this way so I'm really excited, but it is important he tells it himself rather than me telling it for him.
the only problem is he is on a submarine and I don't know where it is or when it's coming back.
2/3
and in fact, nobody does. best guess is september or october ish, but there's really no way to know.
so when @MartyBent says "imminent", that's still true if your time preference is super low.
which it should be anyway so stop complaining.
I'M SO PUMPED! 🤪😃🥳
3/3
p.s. no, this is not a joke. I am 110% telling the truth. see you all in september or october or whenever it turns out my friend's submarine resurfaces 👍
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probably no group in human history has done more damage to the environment than "environmentalists".
the ultimate source of the climate being a political issue is that nuclear power is politically impossible.
we are in the early innings of the exact same thing with #bitcoin 🧵
the greenest future you can hope for with any shred of realism is predominantly nuclear and hydro, with pockets of wind, solar, and natural gas, all enormously aided by bitcoin mining reducing their cost of capital.
all else is virtue signaling bullshit, power-grabbing, or both.
and even in this greenest of greeny green greeneroo outcomes - assuming you want this, Mr Environmentalist - oil is sticking around for a long, long time to support the transition.
if you disagree, you hate humanity, are playing politics, or both:
not that I speak for everybody or anything (except following thinkboi decimation EGMs) but my humble suggestion would be that the memes need to get more serious and more aggressive.
don't defend #bitcoin; make *them* defend literally anything else.
even aside from the marginal benefits to intermittent renewables, methane flaring, etc, the truly remarkable thing is that so many allegedly serious people have been conditioned to think that energy consumption is bad.
energy consumption is synonymous with human flourishing.
increased energy consumption per capita per year is correlated with (and obviously causally linked to) improvements in extreme poverty, child mortality, undernourishment, sanitation, education, and life expectancy.
i.e. not "GDP Growth" or other meaningless number-go-up, "let's measure the flow rather than the flow-over-the-stock because we don't know what a return is or how capital works" metrics ...
... that is, every conceivable non-economic measure of the avoidance of human suffering.
I'm gonna break it down for y'all coz I'm feeling charitable this beautiful morning and also coz I stumbled upon the perfect explanatory concept:
the use case this refers to does not need to be "economical" or "competitive" in terms of what you think those words mean.
1/4
it's a form of insurance. more specifically, it is buying a put option on excess generation for which there is no grid demand.
from your point of view, you are hedging against the price going to zero by buying upfront the ability to still sell and shorting the differential.
2/4
congressman guy 2: I really liked John Adams on HBO and Google seems like a monopoly to me.
@sundarpichai: we have many, many lines of business. we do searches for cats, we do searches for dogs. we sell phones. we have lost a lot of money on pointless investments too.
Zuck: please, please, please shut down TikTok. we have tried everything and they are destroying us. also, Snapchat is still a thing.
I want to do a thread while it's still reasonably fresh on trying to steelman Ben's "Wall Street swallows Bitcoin" thesis, as I have a newfound appreciation for it after our chat.
okay, so first of all here's a strawman, which I will admit is more or less what I thought going into the chat:
"investment banks comes to control so much of the circulating supply they can do all kind of annoying forky statist shit and it will become unusable for the good guys"
that's NOT what he means!
what he means I think is much subtler and more sophisticated. I'll say upfront I don't agree with it (assuming I've even captured it properly) but I do think it is amongst the best articulated threats worth being aware of.