Matt's avatar
Matt
codinginlondon@iris.to
npub16nd6...ftma
Former finance C++ C# dev writing about the merge of mining into the energy grid 🔋
Beautiful drone view of a new Gridless operation in Kenya. Water is diverted out of the river from a small dam and goes through a buried canal towards 3 turbines a few hundred meters downstream. This is how they extract 150kw out of a small river and provide electricity to the communities nearby. And this is partly financed by busy little ASICs hidden inside green sheds.
There is a lot in @gladstein latest article: The most salient: 1. Details about a Gridless hydro operation in Bondo, Malawi. Capex vs opex funding. 2. Opportunities of geothermal mining in Malawi. 3. the recent situation in Malawi: 2023 devaluation of the local currency. Still reading it... Will add to my collection of references: https://099244.wixsite.com/mysite
Gresham’s law: people tend to spend weaker money and hoard the harder money. ➡️ Therefore the harder money is not much used as a means of payment. However it is used for savings. Thiers’ law: at one point, weaker money is losing its purchasing power so fast that merchants stop accepting it and prefer being paid with harder money. ➡️ Harder money then replaces weaker money as a means of payment.
A quote that struck me while listening to Audible last night: "People have historically been willing to deal with weak money if it’s faster than gold, but if weak money doesn’t even have a speed advantage relative to harder money alternatives, then in a world of widely accepted bitcoin it would likely become harder for governments to convince their people to accept fiat currencies for payment and hold large amounts of value in them. Gresham’s law dominates until the weaker money is basically useless. At that point, Thiers’ law takes over, which observes that good money drives out bad money. A payee generally wants to pay for goods with weaker money, and a merchant generally wants to sell their goods for stronger money. If a weaker money gets bad enough that merchants won’t even accept it, that is when Gresham’s law gives over to Thiers’ law. ” Broken Money Lyn Alden
Tobacco was introduced to China by the Portuguese during the 16th century. It was actually considered as a medicine (!). People would sniff it out of small bottles. Emperors would collect those bottles and it became cool in China to carry around a snuff bottle. (they do look cute) image
Bitcoin is used by criminals who are bored with the safety of physical cash and prefer taking the risk of leaving permanent tracks on a public blockchain, giving plenty of hints to help investigators find them sooner or later.
Lyn Alden: "fees aren't expensive because there are frogs on the timechain; fees are still cheap because relatively few people are using bitcoin to send and store money compared to the total addressable market that could be doing so."