1/n I'm really proud of this report on bitcoin ownership.
Our survey of 3,538 adults in the US found bitcoin ownership:
-covers the full spectrum of political identity
-is skewed young and male
-correlates weakly with a unique profile of moral values
-correlates strongly with knowledge of bitcoin
🧵 2/n We wanted to understand who owns bitcoin and who doesn't, and why. That called for research. Not just surface-level demographics, but a deep look into the roots of our psycho-social identities.

Many frameworks claim to do this, but my research partner, @andrewwperkins chose "moral foundations" and designed a comprehensive series of questions.

We then we employed a professional firm to help us achieve a representative sample.

"In closing, bitcoin appears to provide a number of benefits across an ESG framework."

Terrific new report on bitcoin's ESG impacts by @BrianConsolvo for @KPMG. Share it widely.

advisory.kpmg.us/articles/2023/… @BrianConsolvo @KPMG Some highlights. On the environmental impact side, after clarifying that bitcoin has no scope 1 emissions, like EVS, and comparing bitcoin's energy use to other industries--minor, but not nothing--the report outlines 4 strategies for carbon reduction...

When public officials tell us the banking system is “sound and resilient” or “sound and stable” or “safe and sound,” all while banks are failing, one after another… it’s not just that we dismiss everything they say about banking. We realize that institutions lie to us. That means our behavior is harder to manipulate via lying to us.

So then leaders are stuck with the choice of telling the scary truth and sparking panic or telling an ineffective lie.

They must still choose to lie, but because it’s ineffective, it’s quickly falsified.

No system of carbon accounting can satisfy the following 3 constraints:

1. Compositionality. The sum of carbon footprints of actors in a system must equal the total footprint of the system.

2. Marginality. The footprint of an action must reflect the difference between that… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Let’s illustrate the tension between compositionality and marginality.

Scenario: there are 10 buyers of 1MW each in a grid with 9MW of hydro and 1MW gas production. Gas is the marginal seller.

Let’s say the footprint of hydro is 0, for simplicity, and gas is 1 ton / MWh.

Now… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Educational 🧵on carbon accounting. If you want to learn about attributional vs marginal accounting, start here.

Resources linked after a brief explanation. Attributional accounting takes the total emissions from a system and assigns proportions of it to participants in that system.

Marginal accounting tries to determine how marginal additions to load change the emissions in a system over what it would have been without that load.

Remember that recent MIT Technology Review piece blaming #bitcoin for 225 deaths? I don't blame you if you skipped it, or if you skip this debunking 🧵. At some point you have to just let this nonsense pass. But I can't.
technologyreview.com/2023/01/12/106… I've said on podcasts and in spaces that we are in a moral panic about bitcoin mining, a social contagion spread by "moral entrepreneurs" and media hype.
Emotions like fear, disgust, revulsion are marshaled around an issue or a group that short circuits normal forms of reasoning

Absolutely zero surprise here.
theguardian.com/environment/20… Carbon accounting is all about counterfactuals. How much deforestation would have occurred if you *didn't* protect this little patch of forest? Such questions 1) have no firm answers; 2) since they can't be contested, they'll be answered in a way that benefits the parties asking.

Once they see how mining balances grids...
Once they see how mining incentivizes renewables and nuclear...
Once they see how mining replaces fossil-powered heating...
Once they see how bitcoin substitutes for more carbon-intensive equities... Once they see how bitcoin substitutes for bank deposits, multiples of which are lent for fossil development...
Once they see how bitcoin digitizes environmentally disastrous gold...
Once they see how bitcoin mining is a mere rounding error in the global emissions picture...

Electricity breaks our simple heuristics, rules of thumb like: “don’t consume scarce resources.”

Electricity is both deadly-scarce (looks at those rates in Europe, in Africa!) and at the same time overly-abundant (look at that curtailment, that negatively-priced power!). How can the same thing be scarce and abundant? Electricity is a “good” that decays at the speed of light and cannot be cheaply stored. Nor can it be cheaply transmitted over long distances.

When we think of power, we think of the electromagnetic waves, the electrons themselves.

“I am pretty confident we are the new wealthy elite, gentlemen.”

I remember laughing aloud reading this thread.

6-5-2011. Later in June, flash crash to $0.01. Later that year, crash to $2 from highs of $30.

Not until 2013 did it show signs of life. bitcointalk.org/index.php?topi… I’m only a teenager. Lost 1000+ but incubated 95, so…

Happy if college loans could be paid…

Legacy economists will literally insult the intelligence of the entire developing world rather than admit bitcoin has value. Economists: we don’t tell you what to prefer, only how to collectively maximize getting what you want.

Also economists: don’t prefer bitcoin, that’s irrational.

Canceling my @nytimes subscription.

I like the crosswords, but can't support an org that honors one of the most devastating criminals of his generation.

It's a @nytimes event. Their President and CEO is appearing.

It's a premeditated and deliberate and disgusting choice. Not a fan of our former President, but “the failing New York Times” was a stroke of genius.

“Explain to ME in ways I fully understand, in a tweet, or get lost” is a hell of an approach to inquiry.

Notice this demands always comes from high-status elites in positions of epistemic authority.

https://twitter.com/progressivebtcr/status/1595429614767194114

This is only their response to something new and different that challenges system-wide assumptions. This is not their approach to well-defined, recognized questions. Not their approach to medicine or physics or engineering questions.

Live tweeting the OSTP report so you don't have to read it. Forewarning, I am a slow reader. Framing is FUDish: there’s a climate emergency and we have ambitious targets and at the same time crypto is contributing…

Couldn’t be otherwise given the EO to which this is a response. The question they’re answering is: how bad is this new really bad thing?

🧵developing an extended rug metaphor--I've been advised to use the word "carpet," but "rug" it is!--illustrating the effects of bitcoin's fixed schedule of issuance, ensured by the difficulty adjustment.

1. Bitcoin mining's total budget is like a BUMP in a rug. 2. The bump can be spread around however you like in the rug, but the total volume of the bump (or bumps) will remain unchanged. Block subsidy is about 900 bitcoin per day. That + fees is global mining revenue in BTC. It can't be changed by kings or committees.

The way to ensure bitcoin miners are not “taking power from other socially valuable users” is to find cheap electricity and mine with it.

Increasing difficulty forces out guess who? Miners paying a lot for power, ie, rivalrous miners.

Like emissions, the solution is: MINE MORE Worried that your holding of bitcoin incentivized miners who are squeezing out other precious power users? Don’t ban mining: that will make rivalrous consumption possible by making mining more profitable. Wrong direction!

Bitcoin miners have spent at most 1/1,000 of this amount on fossil fuels… in their entire history. (That’s provable.)

Activists, pols, academics, journals: is your attention and scorn allotted proportionally? Why not?

https://twitter.com/thetrocro/status/1528516450222231553

So-called environmentalists would rather you prop up an inflationary, environmentally ruinous and unjust system of fossil financing than hold bitcoin, and incentivize a tiny amount of mining, most of which is powered by renewables.

Who are they working for, really?

Bitcoin mining's critics think of its power as 100% non-renewable.

How is that possible, given BMC members claim an impressive 65% sustainable energy mix?

🧵 on margins and proportions, explaining this disconnect. As we all know, renewable power plants can't adjust their supply of power. That means variability in demand is met by dialing thermal generation--coal, gas, diesel--up, or down. When you add MARGINAL load to the grid, that margin is met with fossil-fuel-generated power.

Ah, the conceptual attack!

From my teacher, Jerry Fodor, on this kind of attack on an afterlife: ‘Suppose an airplane carrying ten passengers crashes and that seven of the ten die. Then what we would say is that three passengers survived, not that ten passengers survived. QED.’

https://twitter.com/ecb/status/963420036621918210

The second one is on whether people are identical to their bodies. I'm going to quote Jerry at length, because it is too good.

‘Suppose you live with Bob ... who went into a coma on Wednesday ...

anchor.fm/troy-cross0

https://twitter.com/thetrocro/status/1510474532804448256

Nathaniel Harmon discovered bitcoin in 2013 and yammered uncontrollably about it just like we all do. But he failed to orange pill his classmates and faculty members at the University of Hawaii.

Wow, do I have a story for you.

"Mora et. al. was written by children."

Stay tuned, y'all. It gets so much better too.