2nd Edition — Updated with Latest Information.
2nd Edition 15/05/2021
Above is an illustration of our journey as it might have appeared to Kardashev, if he had still been around now.
He is known for his characterisation of stages of civilisation.
Currently, we are somewhere between Kardashev 0.5, and Kardashev 1.0, in the age of Bitcoin creation.
Bitcoin appears to fit into this scenario of transition in a very surprising way.
Background
When first introduced, Bitcoin was produced entirely from conventional secondhand power.
By that is meant power produced by energy extracted from Earth, which was put there in the first place by the sun, thus is secondhand…
2020 was a big year. But was it just the tip of an iceberg of change, to happen in 2021?
So 2020 was a big year.
The biggest in thousands of years, I would argue.
It wasn’t the best of experiences for most of us.
I saw many of my own “achievements” and ambitions dashed, by a chain of events no-one could have predicted.
And I know the same applies to the majority of people.
But do I feel bad?
No, I feel great.
Not because I had a minor unexpected upturn at the end of 2020, but because it looks to me like we are on the cusp of a real brave new world, one that really will put…
No more beating about the bush
We’ve seen the power of the sun beginning to be unleashed.
We were warned about it, long ago, but chose not to recognise those warnings, choosing instead to throw them to the wind, the waves, oil, gold, money, in fact anything but solar power, all things scarce.
Hoping the heat domes and all their side effects like localised flooding will go away with the seasons whilst carrying on ignoring the warnings makes no sense at all.
We need to stop messing around, and switch to solar immediately.
That means doing everything necessary to the economy, to make the change, right…
A lesson learned
We see misinformation of all kinds, all around.
That is the very least thing we see.
Behind every narrative is a motive.
We might see that too.
Yet, we don’t really have the choice to choose what we believe.
That, is the conclusion we come to when we reach the end of story.
The story of humanity, choosing to believe whatever it wishes to believe.
Everything except the truth.
Opinion
I love the Truman show.
My daughter loves it too.
Such thought provoking stuff.
What if humanity itself is the real Truman?
What if we really are under surveillance as a species, for the digest, or even entertainment of a higher order “Society” out there?
The Truman show itself could have been a tantalising clue.
“It’s all about you, humans!”
Would we even realise the grand conspiracy before destroying our home, our planet?
Seems unlikely, as long as we manage to deny all possibilities of any kind of higher intelligence than humans, I think.
Yet we were built to worship…
Were we asked?
What else is worth saying?
We were not consulted.
That ain’t right.
Satire
It worked, we created a brand new business from creating and selling vaccines, and we made a killing.
Now, covid appears to be on the way out, at least in the countries who could pay top dollar for protection, profit is starting to wane.
What next, how long will we need to wait for another virus gravy train to come along?
Did someone say they can make these things in a lab?
What are we waiting for?
Therapeutic Thoughts
Ever noticed how much more we know individually now than we used to?
The academic concrete mindset model of how people think, that I remember reading about somewhere as a teenager, and which I swore I would never conform to, seems to me to have been blown wide open.
It might have been mostly true back in those days, but it certainly isn’t now, and that is a very good thing.
In essence it claims we each go through an evolution of learning, until at some age our thoughts become effectively cemented in concrete, and we become incapable of learning…
Why does this sound so much like a google ai or something, scanning conversations for keywords like Bitcoin, understanding nothing about the actual conversation, but interjecting with a sales pitch?
A message to Bitcoiners, on why you should not only be honest about, but proud of the massive power consumption of Bitcoin.
The problem with trying to argue down the power consumption of Bitcoin, compared with other things, is that sooner or later it has to dwarf all other things.
Just look at the algorithm to dispel any doubts. The amount of power needed to mint the final coins is huge, by anyone’s definition.
It might still be arguable now that the world banking system, or some other industry consumes more power than Bitcoin. But as time goes on, and Bitcoin becomes ever bigger, the power consumption of it keeps racing up, the argument will get more and more impossible.
Already it…
Frederick Bott
Solarpunk
