I have argued for Throne and Altar before: Throne because a stationary bandit is better than a mobile bandit; Altar because we have to shut down open entry into the state religion: Harvard needs an Archbishop and a Grand Inquisitor to stop America’s officially unofficial state religion from holiness spiraling out of control into ever greater holiness. But throne and altar has been tried, and has failed. How did it fail? The answer is, failed because of loss of freehold. …
Category: economics
How to do cryptocurrency right
Proof of work tends to be inherently slow, has inherently high transaction costs, and the miner’s interests are not identical with those holding currency as a store of value and those using currency as a medium of exchange. Proof of stake is nontrival to get right. It is a form of the infamously difficult to understand (and infamously difficult to program correctly) Paxos protocol. The Paxos protocol has the great advantage over the proof of work in that after an …
A bad time to invest in Bitcoin
Back in 2013 I urged people to invest in Bitcoin. Yesterday someone asked my cleaning lady to invest in Bitcoin. Now if someone had asked her to accept payment in Bitcoin, or send payment in Bitcoin, then this would be compelling evidence that one should invest in Bitcoin. But when cleaning ladies are asked to invest in Bitcoin, not a good investment. When Bitcoin began, everyone was a miner, and everyone was a peer, everyone stored the entire blockchain. Which …
Cryptocurrency
Our financial system is corrupt and oppressive. Cryptocurrencies represent an opportunity to route around that system, and make lots of money doing so. Cryptocurrency is real, and presents the opportunity to make enormous amounts of money. Also, cryptocurrency scams are real, and present the opportunity to lose enormous amounts of money. Like the dot-com bubble in the 90s, you can add the concept of blockchain to just about anything and have a ‘business’ worth millions, no matter how idiotic the …
Holiness and corporate performance.
Notoriously, corporations that are Social Justice converged behave in ways that are not only evil, but self destructive, leading to loss of shareholder value. It is difficult to objectively assess social justice convergence, but we can expect it to have a pretty good correlation with the company’s business model – a green energy company is going to be full of social justice warriors, and receive lots of investment from fund managers who are trying to earn brownie points from the …
No enemies to the right
No enemies to the left has been working great for the left, and no enemies to the right has been working great for us. If you declare someone to your right your enemy, you wind up dancing to a tune called by leftists. Supreme Dark Lord Vox Day recently criticized Spencer and the Nazis as fake right – criticized them not for being too far right, but for being too far left, for being socialist. He did not criticize from …
Peak Oil
If you discover more than ten years of reserves, politicians are apt to take it away from you. So for the last hundred years or so, the world has only had ten years worth of proven oil reserves left and has been about to run out in ten years or so. In fact the world has only had about ten years of anything left for the past hundred years or so. King Hubbert created a composite, mega-decline curve that predicted …
Not a dog barked
Remember all those mighty and entirely spontaneous protests demanding that the Obama regime do what it quite obviously wanted to do and was quite obviously looking for justifications for doing, protests demanding that the government block every form of energy production in every white country, which obstructions have made the US into an energy importer for sixty years or so. And, of course, with deep reluctance the Obama regime would invariably yield to the justified and entirely spontaneous and genuine …
The bitcoin crisis
There can only be one. There can only be one money, at the root of all others. Money is a measure of value, a store of value, and a medium of exchange, and you want to uses the same medium of exchange and measure of value as everyone else. At the very beginning, I said the trouble with bitcoin, as originally designed, is that it does not scale. Everyone, to be a peer, to be an equal participant, has to …
The true cost of renewable energy
Because the cost of renewables is falsified, installation of renewables causes power crises. Renewables are installed. The cost of renewables is hidden in some other part of the system, renewables continue to be installed, that part of the system does not get increased funding, collapses, blackouts and brownouts ensue. Fixing the blackouts and brownouts costs money, the cost of electricity then rises to reflect the actual cost of renewables that no one will admit. The cost of renewables is assessed …