Let's discuss how little you actually understand about economics and energy.

The first thing to understand is that energy is not globally fungible. Electricity decays as it leaves its point of origin; it’s expensive to transport. There is a huge excess (hydro) in many areas.

In other words, it can also be variable. It's estimated that in Sichuan there is twice as much electricity produced as is needed during the rainy season. Indeed, there is seasonality to how Bitcoin mining works. You can see here: https://t.co/dzPI5LAOln
Bitcoin EXPORTS energy in this scenario. Fun fact, most industrial nations would steer this excess capacity towards refining aluminum by melting bauxite ore, which is very energy intensive.

You wouldn't argue that we are producing *too much* electricity from renewables, right?
"But what about the carbon footprint! ITS HUGE!"

Many previous estimates have quite faulty methods and don't take into account the actual energy sources. Is it fair to put a GHG equivalent on hydro or solar power? That would seem a bit disingenuous, no?
Well that's exactly what some have done.

https://t.co/el1Zzy6g31

https://t.co/JSof31ObNs
Only a wholly uncritical mind would take dubious research like this and double down on a bad take. China's policy has largely veered towards keeping miners out of the 'steady' power grid that runs on coal simply because other productive industries are given preference by the CCP.
Let's consider the other sources of electricity which miners use now and may depend on at greater scale in the future:

Recently the petro industry has experimented with burning CH4 "flare-offs" to power Bitcoin miners, cutting methane emissions and reducing warming potential.
Solar is also free energy for most who are brave enough to commit to the cooling costs and infrastructural requirements. It's been done before and it will absolutely scale as panels become even cheaper.

https://t.co/WaleCRMh51
In fact, even if individuals and companies mining bitcoin do not shift to a renewable-based mining scheme, locales may just force them to do it. In Missoula, MT, miners must "either purchase or build renewable sources of energy that completely offset the electricity they consume"
Furthermore it is estimated that globally between 40-70% of all cryptocurrency mining powered by renewables. Of course this is up for debate and depends on who you ask.

It's fine to be critical of Bitcoin and the negative externalities, but it's worth being well informed.

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Priyamvada Gopal is part of a class of elite academics in the imperial core who teach the ruling class, and use woke radlib rhetoric to justify current Western imperial aggression.

She echoes propaganda against Syria, Iran, and China and is silent about Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc


Anti-anti-imperialist Cambridge University Professor @PriyamvadaGopal smears opponents of the Western neocolonial war on Syria as "Assadists"

Would she ever call liberal imperialist Obama a "blood-soaked cretin"? He has exponentially more blood on


The CIA spent over a billion dollars per year arming and training "rebels" who massacred and ethnically cleansed Syrian civilians, especially religious minorities.

But anti-anti-imperialist @PriyamvadaGopal insists these CIA-backed contras are


This was elite anti-anti-imperialist Cambridge University gatekeeper @PriyamvadaGopal's response right after colonial powers the US, UK, and France bombed Syria in April 2018 on bogus lies that have since been


Of course anti-anti-imperialist Cambridge Professor @PriyamvadaGopal's is also a supporter of the neoliberal imperialist European Union -- one of the key institutions of European necolonialism
Long rant: This @WSJ article bemoaning the decline of price theory is really worth highlighting. The economic theories and so called "laws of economics" that the WSJ consistently and religiously defends, are the source of their authority, power and privilege.


So called economic "theories" like "you get paid exactly what you are worth" and "markets are perfectly efficient" and "when wages rise, jobs fall" and "raising taxes on the rich kills jobs and growth" and "increasing justice decreases economic efficiency" and...

"Government intervention in markets always creates more harm than good" and "any regulation that constrains corporations kills growth and productivity", etc etc are effectively a protection racket for the rich. It is a set of internally consistent and mathematized conjectures...

That are all demonstrably nonsense. But getting people to accept these "theories" as laws of nature and immutable, timeless truths is the most effective way our current economic elites have found to maintain and enhance the status of the powerful and persuade the weak and poor...

to shut the fuck up and accept their lot in life. Now, FINALLY, some economists- are actually beginning to look at the real world evidence to determine whether these propositions actually describe anything real here on planet earth. Let me save you some time. The answer is NO.

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I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.