miscellany

Bitcoin was the reason that blockchain was invented, and Bitcoin remains the biggest blockchain, with the largest market capitalisation. Bitcoin has 62% of the market and the remaining 38% is divided between the other 2,600 or so blockchain-based currencies. Then, allegedly, there are also non-currency applications of blockchain.

So that is why I focused on Bitcoin. Being the biggest, Bitcoin also is the most harmful to the environment, and that is my main gripe against it. I'm retired now and hopefully the climate crisis will not damage the world too spectacularly in my lifetime. But I have a child and five grandchildren and many young friends and relatives who will suffer under the climate disaster that Bitcoin is hastening. And I do spare a thought for the billions of young people I do not know.

In my talk I looked at all the claims of the advantages of blockchain and I was unable to be convinced by any of them. Gary Nuttall[*] says that the “real advantages of Bitcoin [are] censorship resistant and peer-to-peer transactions.” This puzzles me. What does "censorship" mean in terms of financial transactions? The only thing I can think is that it is the prevention of transactions that are fraudulent or illegal in some other way. If that's it then "censorship" sounds like a good thing to me – I want illegal transactions to be prevented. And peer-to-peer transactions seem to me to be non-existent with Bitcoin. Every transaction goes through a miner. The miners can decide which transaction is processed and which is not. If my bank refused my transaction I could challenge it; if a miner refused my transaction I would not be able to find someone to hassle.

The conventional financial organisations are far from perfect. They do billions of successful transactions and when they fail they can cause a lot of grief. I would like them to be more strongly regulated and for any perpetrators of financial crime to be punished much more harshly than they have been so far. Blockchain was supposed to make such financial crimes impossible, but instead it facilitates speculation and massive actual crime. It is not worth making each transaction cost 600,000 times as much, just to get another flawed system.

As for non-mining currencies, that takes away my biggest complaint, but what is the point of them? For currency and non-currency applications, I have not seen one that could not be implemented in other technologies with the same or more functionality and massively less cost.

… the truth can be bluntly stated as follows: our current problems aren’t like the fall of Rome because they’re far, far worse. Would it only be that we faced the collapse of the U.S. government, or authoritarianism, or even civil war, because the rising average temperature per year, the pH of the oceans, and the biodome’s decreasing diversity are things unheard of on the Earth since the Permian-Triassic extinction of more than 250 million years ago, when 70 percent of life on land perished and almost 95 percent in the seas did.*

Tonight, Barbados becomes a republic. Like Ireland. Unlike Canada, Australia and New Zealand. https://t.co/L7FDITYBgb

— Alan Sharp (@chggenerations) November 29, 2021

… First drafts are slow and develop clumsily, because every sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow. The first draft of a long piece on California geology took two gloomy years; the second, third, and fourth drafts took about six months altogether. That four-to-one ratio in writing time—first draft versus the other drafts combined—has for me been consistent in projects of any length, even if the first draft takes only a few days or weeks. There are psychological differences from phase to phase, and the first is the phase of the pit and the pendulum. After that, it seems as if a different person is taking over. Dread largely disappears. Problems become less threatening, more interesting. Experience is more helpful, as if an amateur is being replaced by a professional. Days go by quickly, and not a few could be called pleasant, I’ll admit.

…

The difference between a common writer and an improviser on a stage (or any performing artist) is that writing can be revised. Actually, the essence of the process is revision. The adulating portrait of the perfect writer who never blots a line comes express mail from fairyland.*

As South Africa’s rooibos tea trade heats up, debate brews over how to give Indigenous experts a fair share https://t.co/QunW8XChjz

— The Globe and Mail (@globeandmail) January 8, 2022

We have two choices: to strive for power with one another or power over one another.
—Robert Koehler*

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The value of a prediction is in the act of making it, not the prediction itself. Contemplating what may happen encourages us to take responsibility for decisions we make in the present.*