It can still be competitive with things like tar-sand extraction, which takes more energy than you get out of the oil. It's only economically viable because energy in gasoline/oil form is more valuable than the energy content itself, due to it's ease of transfer. Air sequestration might be a viable fuel source in regions where import costs of fuel are high, but energy is cheap.
I am less concerned about economic efficiency and more about environmental efficiency. The process to set up carbon sequestration facilities will itself produce CO2. If you produce a paltry amount of gasoline because all your energy is going towards that conversion, it might take you years or decades to actually reduce atmospheric CO2.
Even more important is the fact that the gas you produce and sell will go right back into the air as CO2, further reducing your net impact. You would basically need to produce gasoline faster than people can use it. Do you think a private company can do this process and outpace the consumption of Asia and Africa? It’s a catch 22: either your process is so inefficient that you pollute more than you clean up, or it’s efficient enough that you just drop the prices of gasoline, putting CO2 right back into the air. Their option is that you produce so much gasoline that you cannot sell it fast enough. Ironically that will tank your profits.
I think doing something other than gasoline is the answer. Make fertilizer: it will help grow the ecosystem while not immediately winding up as CO2.
This echoes the sentiment of Deep Work, which helped me a lot with my own productivity.
If you can do 4 hours of productive work, truly, no distraction, deep productive work, then you're likely way ahead of your peers.
Leave the rest of your time for shallower work, which doesn't require intensity of focus, and make sure to spend some time re-charging, where you focus on not doing work or being connected at all.
A lot of heavy rare earth metals can only be found in very limited concentrations in the earth's crust, with the largest concentrations all being from asteroid impacts. As a consequence, these metals are incredibly valuable. A single high-concentration asteroid, could provide more of these metals than has been mined in the history of the earth, in high concentrations, and may be able to make a host of applications economically viable, which previously weren't.
Yeah, heavy REMs are still expensive but there is really no reason to believe that they'll stay that way. New sites will be found, new extraction techniques will be tried and new processes developed and then the problem will go away. Sure, it could happen in space but it's so much easier to do here on earth that it might never be worth it to go to space for it.
Yes, but if several thousand tons of iridium, platinum, or various rare-earth metals could be captured & towed to Earth orbit, the payoff could be astronomical.
Suddenly there would be so much of a supply that the sale won't be profitable any longer. That's probably the reason why no one is extracting rhodium from nuclear waste, where it is a common fission product.
I've been told that the trucking industry needs every year more platinum than has been mined in all of history. Since there obviously isn't supply they instead use alternative means to achieve their emissions goals.
I'm not an emissions system engineer so I can't evaluate the truth of the statement. If it is true, and supply existed: it would create demand, potentially it could even drive up price as potential users quit using less desirable alternatives.
The demand is mostly in chemical industry and very inelastic. No one is going to put another plant on line because platinum group metals are cheap (but plants may be pulled off line because the economy is in the dumps, as happened in 2008 and 2017). Even small increases in supply will lead to great drops in price. You can only hope that a plentiful supply would encourage new uses.
The amount of transactions is much higher, but the amount of money being moved is much lower. The highest number I could find for yearly transaction amount in mPesa was 3.7 Trillion Kenyan shilling, which is about 36 billion$. Compared to that, bitcoin moved value for over 400 billion$ in 2018.
I agree with you that the mPesa transactions are much more likely to be transactions for goods and services, but I don't think Bitcoin can be counted as an abject failure just yet.
Your valuation number for Bitcoin is driven by a speculative bubble, so it's not a fair comparison. And, "electronic cash" should have a lot of small transactions. That Bitcoin is mainly large transactions is a sign it's a bad cash replacement.
I agree that Bitcoin won't be counted as a failure yet, but I think that's part of the problem. As a hypothesis, Bitcoin apparently isn't falsifiable. Consider the Fred Wilson article linked above, where a Bitcoin advocate admitted that it wasn't a good payment system. But he immediately declares it a store of value. Now that we've had it crash by 80%, it's pretty clear that it's bad for that too. If there isn't a new consensus answer to the question, "what is Bitcoin good for," then its advocates just shift to the possible shining future based on hope and potential. And note how its distributed, peer-to-peer promise has quietly drained away.
Bitcoin can apparently never fail. And I think that's part of what guarantees its failure. Nobody expects an early product to be perfect. But good products evolve and expand to better serve users. As it became clear Bitcoin was not very good for its stated purpose, it could have changed and grown. But speculation was too profitable, so it got stuck in a very deep rut. If some blockchain currency becomes actually useful, I suspect it would be one of the hundreds of competitors. But given that none of them seem to be delivering real-world economic value either, I'm not optimistic.
A digital, decentralized currency. If you want to solve the double-spend problem, you need some kind of economically incentivized block inclusion lottery.
Coded communication is nothing new between criminals, and weakening the security/privacy of Australian software is not going to solve this problem. Weakening encryption of Australian software is not going to work against organized crime; These organizations are quick to adapt to changing law enforcement techniques. It is, however, going to make it much easier to surveil the general populace.
There will always be some criminals who are sophisticated enough to evade surveillance (until they make a mistake) - but that doesn't mean it's useless as many violent and/or organised criminals do get caught. Many get caught even with old-fashioned phone taps.
Also, aren't there ways of implementing targeted surveillance without weakening privacy/security very much, if at all? For example, targeting a specific user/device and making sure all exfiltrated data is encrypted with a public key belonging to the police.
Of course having access to the private key, need to be the most basic way to access funds. It's the only thing that's guaranteed to be uncensorable, while minimizing the requirement of trust. It is a big responsibility though, and should not be taken lightly. The crypto-currency community is partly at fault here, for blaring memes like "If you don't control your private keys, it's not your Bitcoin", without any regard for whether or not people are ready for that responsibility.
That being said, there are number of ways you can store your crypto-currency, with varying degrees of trust-minimization:
- Use a multi-signature smart contract wallet, where a master key has power to move the money. If the master key is lost, the money can be moved by X out of Y keys signing off on the transaction. You can then distribute the Y keys to your trusted associates, preferably without telling them who the other key-holders are.
- Use a dead-hand smart contract wallet, where the money can be retrieved by a trusted associate, if the dead-hand switch hasn't been activated within Z amount of time. Can be combined with the above, in case further trust minimization is needed.
- Store your crypto-currency at a FDIC exchange. Pretty much the same model as the banking world. This really should be the go to way for the average Joe, as it mirrors what you currently can expect from online-banking.
I'm pretty sure the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation doesn't cover crypto. I know what you mean but even with the more reputable players like Coinbase of Kracken I'm a bit wary of the oops we got hacked / shut down / we can't give to you due to AML type stuff.
The first two are way too complicated for retail banking customers. Do you really think you can explain to your parents how dead handed multi pantsed wallets work? I stopped reading half a line in and I’m well within the target customer group here.
The third, an exchange, violates all the core principals of cryptocurrency and is basically no different than what we have today but way harder and less efficient. Exchanges don’t require crypto they just run a MySQL store and attribute fractional ownership as centralized, opaque records not protected by the blockchain. If everyone just did that because it’s the simplest and easiest and most secure way to hold on to your coins, cryptocurrency would just replace bank to bank transfers which by definition don’t require a trustless backing and all the worlds electricity.
Plus to quote your fellow converts “not your keys, not your coins.”
Most of the world's population lives in third and second world countries. You're absolutely right that the centralized fiat gateways are the obvious, censurable bottlenecks of crypto-currency, and there's no good way around that, but crypto-currency itself is still an attractive way for many people, to move their money out of very restrictive regimes. The centralized exchange problem is mainly a problem of creating a black/grey market economy, with crypto-currency as it's main unit of value transfer, which of course is a whole other can of worms.
There's even something like this, that lets you browse via bittorrent: https://github.com/mafintosh/peerwiki