In progress: a three-board bench of Antminer S21 chips, and the power meter I built for it
My simulation of miners and capacitors needs to know how fast a mining chip can change its power. Nobody has published that measurement, so I am making it on three Bitaxe Supra boards. The power meter has three sensors. Two of them are wired in and checked against a multimeter. The third connection and the chip tests come next.
In September I rented an NVIDIA H100 GPU, sent it requests timed and sized like real chat and coding traffic, and logged its power. In 1 of every 100 tenth-of-a-second intervals, its power changed by at least 36% of its peak. I wrote seven predictions before the run, and four of them were wrong.
Today I gave a talk at TABConf 8 in Atlanta about running AI computers and Bitcoin miners on one grid connection. Several people asked me to write about the work as it happens. This is the first post in that series. It explains why I started the project, and it links to the slides.
Dear readers, I’ve been very busy working on my research on Bitcoin mining. I’m trying really hard to get my PhD done by the end of next year. But, I’m still spending my spare time reading and thinking about how we can exit this system and how to frame Bitcoin from a perspective that does not rely only on pro-capitalist dogma and Austrian economics.
This week’s issue reviews a new paper called, “How to pay for saving the world: Modern Monetary Theory for a degrowth transition”. Is MMT a superior choice to bitcoin? I promise to get back to Peet’s book soon.
This week’s issue is an tourist’s review of the book Cryptocommunism. Did your head explode immediately after reading the word, “cryptocommunism”? I will return to my review of “Energy and Ecological Economics” next week.
I finished Part 1 of John Peet’s Energy and the Ecological Economics of Sustainability and what follows are my thoughts on this introductory section of the book. Thank you to everyone who supported my conference fundraiser, I reached my goal and I’m all set for the trip!
I wrote this paper in 2019 as part of requirements for my PhD. Given the gobal droughts we are seeing now, it’s evermore clear that climage change is not just a climate crisis, it is a water crisis. My hope is that the layreader will be able to make some fundamental connections using the High Plains Aquifer as an example.
Bitcoin’s energy consumption is what really gets a lot of bitcoin skeptics’ blood boiling. Thanks to ridiculous claims that bitcoin would use all of the world’s energy by 2020 or that bitcoin will push warming above 2 degrees Celsius all on its own, many people have an unrealistic impression about bitcoin mining.
I’m mostly back from a very needed vacation. Before getting into this issue’s topic, I want to share my recent appearance on the Progressive Bitcoiner, with Mark Stephany. This is my favorite podcast appearance so far. We spent a lot of time on degrowth, so I highly recommend it.
This issue’s topic: The IPCC’s Shared Socio-Economic Pathways
This issue’s topic: The economics of never-ending growth
This issue’s topic: How to implement demurrage using bitcoin and thoughts on bitcoin and freedom
This issue’s topic: How fiat demurrage leads naturally to a CBDC.
This issue’s topic: I’m still in the demurrage rabbit hole, sorry, not sorry.
This issue’s topic: The price of money is interest and so what?
A recent report found that indirect carbon emissions from the amount of cash and investments a company has in the United States banking industry greatly diminish their efforts to decarbonize their operations. When comparing the bank industry to bitcoin, which turns out to be better for the planet?
This issue’s topic: Green Keynesianism is still consumption-based growth.
This issue’s topic: The time I realized that bitcoin and degrowth could be the same…
This issue’s topic: what’s degrowth?
In a recent op-ed[1], Yanis Varoufakis argued that to escape the zero-sum game in which we have socialism for the very few and austerity for the rest of us, “it is necessary, though insufficient, to end bankers’ dual monopoly of the payment system and the money tree. But how?”
The end goal here is not to push a libertarian or Austrian economic wet dream of a Bitcoin reserve currency future, but to disrupt the financial system through Bitcoin in order to create a window of opportunity to transform the financial system to meet the needs of a climate change world. Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that is in a position to be this threat.
I have alluded to some issues related to the digital currency, but the most important one for the climate change community is that of its environmental impact. There are issues with mining companies and underlying energy sources that drive the high-computation costs.
The goal here isn’t to focus on all the details of the shifting economic landscape but to argue why Bitcoin is the kind of disruption that we need to stop the global climate from warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius. However, the reader must understand the dire situation we are in before such an argument can be made.
We need a major system disruption in order to make the transformative societal change that is necessary to stop the planet from warming humans into extinction. Bitcoin, the decentralized digital currency, may be the very disruption that we need. Bitcoin is transferred over a peer-to-peer network and its’ transactions are verified using network nodes that must solve cryptographic puzzles.
Artificial intelligence (AI for short) is hot thanks to recent advancements in game playing algorithms. Google's Alpha Go's success sent the media into a tizzy, leading to debates on the future of AI and the role it will play in the lives of humans as it becomes more ubiquitous. A lot of these debates revolve around the dangers of AI, how it could go Hal 9000 on us, committing crimes against humanity like the robot in I, Robot. Or worse, it could become Skynet and lead to the destruction of human civilization. These fears are literally (and literarily) based in fiction. The reality is equally troubling, not because machines could become sentient and harm us, but because machines are still just so darn stupid.
These days, there’s a lot of talk about what robots will do to the workforce. Most people are convinced that a robot will eventually takeover their job. It’s only a matter of time before you exclaim to your friend as your sip your sad, warm beer, “That robot stole my job!” Well, I have bad news and good news. This could happen sooner than you think, but it doesn’t have to mean doom and gloom for humans.