gxon

You could use mining to incentivize the build out of remote energy generation before transmission infrastructure is ready.

For example, drop some solar panels and miners in the middle of the desert and immediately start generating profit. Use the profit to deploy more solar panels and build out transmission lines. You can do this piecemeal at low initial investment to feel out an energy source without committing billions of dollars to build out.

I'm not aware of anyone who's done major operations like this, but with the profitability of mining so absurdly high right now plus scrutiny on using dirty energy sources, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts. Access to mining ASICs is likely the key bottleneck.

This is the story used to explain part of the reason so much mining is in China. They built out a ton of hydroelectric dams over the decades that have been underutilized due to lack of infrastructure. Miners came in for the unused electricity and brought in a ton of money to the area.

This is actually a pro for bitcoin. It's not useful as anything other than a store of value.

If we collectively decide to switch to bitcoin as our store of value network, and retire gold and silver from that use case, then we free up all the gold stored in vaults collecting dust as a value store to do more useful work that it's uniquely capable of, like being used in electronics or dental work.

A lot of these use cases now aren't economically viable because the market value of gold is inflated due to being overloaded with the store of value use case.

Yeah, I was referring to the hyperloop and the boring company as separate things.

I feel like the Boring company is what he settled on once it was made clear to him how monumentally stupid hundreds or thousands of miles of near vacuum tube would be in practice. Even if you could actually build a working prototype, it's hyper fragile and will just never be economically viable compared to other solutions.

Even still on Earth, we're mining ~2% more gold annually. More gold in absolute terms is being mined than any other time in human history.

You just answered the quantum question yourself. We can upgrade the bitcoin protocol with quantum resistant cryptography. I very much doubt it would be a contentious fork. No need to bootstrap an entirely new value network.

Luckily, it seems like he's mostly abandoned the spectacularly stupid hyperloop idea.

More tunnels would be cool, but I find it hard to believe there's really that much room for improvement over established companies.

It's perfectly scarce and rapidly trending toward 0 inflation. This is one of the key arguments for why it's ultimately a better store of value than gold, which is abundant in the context of the solar system.

I'm curious about what you mean by a possible better store of value. To me, that sounds like saying we can go colder than 0 kelvin.

Tax advantage?

If you pay out a dividend, you force your shareholders to pay income tax rates.

But, if you can use company profits in a way that pumps the stock valuation, your shareholders can effectively take the same profits with long term cap gains tax. My understanding is that a stock buyback is basically this strategy, and MicroStrategy's CEO has said that he also considered that.

MSTR is up ~100% since they first bought bitcoin.

This is at least, my amateur understanding that could be wrong.

Can you describe the breathing exercises? Is it literally just sitting and taking deep breaths?

A caveat to this is, what happens when we actually solve aging and involuntary death? Will the world eventually be owned by a single, Bezos like individual simply by the weight of time and compounding interest crowding out everyone else? Would we be ok with a situation where the racist slave owners of 200 years ago are still alive and control the vast majority of the world's wealth and power?

This is the kind of concern that isn't a problem right now, but will be one day. And it will happen in the blink of an eye.

Honestly. It really seems like the Tesla hype bubble has melted people's brains. Now every new company that comes out of nowhere with nothing more than a prototype is hailed as the next leap of innovation.

“Shoot for the stars but if you happen to miss shoot for the moon instead.”

There's something to be said about the value of setting wildly unachievable goals. It takes you further than you might have thought possible.

Exactly. Scalable solutions to deal with the waste don't exist.