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The cryptocurrency Bitcoin is becoming increasingly popular in California, and it’s not hard to see why. Just like solar energy, Bitcoin is a decentralized, renewable resource that can be used to power the economy.
Bitcoin is a digital currency that is created and held electronically. It is not controlled by any government or central bank, and it is not backed by any physical commodity. Instead, it is powered by a distributed network of computers that are connected to the internet. This network is known as the blockchain, and it is responsible for verifying and recording all Bitcoin transactions.
Like solar energy, Bitcoin is a renewable resource. It is created through a process called “mining”, which involves computers solving complex mathematical problems. This process requires a lot of energy, but it is renewable and does not produce any emissions.
Bitcoin is becoming increasingly popular in California because it is a secure and reliable way to store and transfer money. It is also becoming more widely accepted as a form of payment, with many businesses now accepting it as a form of payment.
The popularity of Bitcoin in California is also due to its potential to revolutionize the way we do business. By using the blockchain, businesses can securely and quickly transfer money and goods without the need for a third-party intermediary. This could lead to lower transaction costs and faster transactions, which could benefit both businesses and consumers.
Just like solar energy, Bitcoin is becoming an increasingly popular resource in California. It is a secure, reliable, and renewable way to store and transfer money, and it has the potential to revolutionize the way we do business. As more businesses begin to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment, it is likely that its popularity will continue to grow.
The thing is there is a middle man with the solar power, with bitcoin there is no need for a middle man.
With Bitcoin, everybody follows the exact same rules.
Anybody who “bends” any rule in any way gets rejected/ignored by the rest of the Bitcoiners and their software.
What Bitcoin IS (6 min):
https://youtu.be/HzxKs-Jd0H4
Intro: The Trust Machine (22 min):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKwqNgG-Sv4
1) First they ignore you,
2) then they laugh at you,
3) then they fight you,
4) then they join you.
I’ve always assumed that the transitions between each phase will only be motivated by extreme self interest and that few people will be honest about their motivations. I expect the transition between the fight you and join you phases will be marked by people in power publicly bashing bitcoin or making on ramps near impossible for the average person, while they secretly stack using money/methods that aren’t accessible to their constituents. A LOT of people will gladly throw women and children into the ocean so that they themselves have a spot on the lifeboat.
So yeah, I expect you’re right. Hard to say if it would choke Bitcoin in a damaging way or just slow its adoption by a few years while other countries take dominance by buying earlier. I don’t know yet what political rule bending will be put in place but I do know that the more sats I stack now, the fewer anyone else can have or keep me from buying in the future. ⚡️
To be fair:
What the utilities asked for in NEM 3.0 was far far worse: They essentially wanted to outlaw local consumption so that you’d be forced to sell all the power you generate to the utility (for pennies per KWH) and then buy your own power back at retail rates. They didn’t get that.
The NEM 2.0 rules seem obviously not economically viable in the long run: The utility was forced to pay close to full retail for power they had little to no use for, because it was being provided during peak production conditions when the utility had no need of more power (e.g. because their own solar production was kicking ass), yet the utilities cost were increasingly dominated by the need to maintain idle generation capacity for night time and/or when the clouds come out.
In any case, under 3.0 you’re still compensated back at quasi-wholesale rates. But unfortunately they’re lowball wholesale rates and not e.g. a realtime rate where solar producers are promised to not get paid significantly less than the utility is paying others for power. Helpfully customers with NEM 2.0 are also grandfathered in.
Even the economics of NEM 3.0 are not *obviously* viable: As storage becomes affordable people will begin producing enough for their daily usage, feeding nothing back to the grid (maybe bitcoin mining the excess since it pays better than the lowball wholesale rates)… and then when there is sustained bad weather, where it wouldn’t be economical to have enough storage to span it, they’ll all start loading the grid like crazy when its least able to provide because its own solar is not producing. If I’m a utility and I know that my customers are going to be all idle and then draw like crazy all at once, the rates I’ll have to charge to make my business viable would be MUCH higher. (The fix for this are demand charges and realtime rates– so people will recharge during times of better supply–, but that makes it much more complicated to use power… but thats just the reality of a grid getting 2/3rds or more of its power from solar).
This is made all the worse by electric cars that give residences sustained bursty loads at a level that previously was only the norm for commercial/industrial users. Though arguably it may only be the introduction of electric cars that keep the existence of a grid in sururbia economically viable at all: As storage comes down in price it’ll be increasingly reasonable to just produce all the power you use yourself absent an EV.
But importantly, NEM 3.0 didn’t do anything adverse to people’s ability to opt out of the system entirely. And if that’s the model for bitcoin where they dick around with the boundary between bitcoin and legacy finance in ways that are unfair but not fatal– well I think that’s a starting point that Bitcoiners can work from.
This is the same shit we see everywhere with utilities, namely they take your excess solar, and give you little. But Bitcoin can fix this, instead of giving those idiots your solar for nothing, hook up a Bitcoin miner to your solar system, you need some extra tech to make this happen automatically, but essentially you turn on your miner when you have excess power, this way you pay yourself in Bitcoin when the sun is shining, if everyone did this, pretty soon the electricity companies will come a begging, they will have to compete with Bitcoin for your excess power!