- Mines
- Pyramids
- Egyptian
- Aztecs
- Incan
- China
- Cryptocurrency
- https://youtu.be/p0ftZgCEZos
- The most valuable cryptocurrency is that which is most decentralized, censorship resistant, unconfiscatable, etc.
- Undeniably, Bitcoin has been, is, and will continue to be the largest, longest, strongest, most valuable cryptocurrency.
- Energy and Work
- Bitcoin mining: a global review of energy and power demand (Küfeoğlu 2019)
- between 1.3 and 14.8 GW – Dec 2017
- during June 2018, between 15.47 and 50.24 TWh per year
- The carbon footprint of Bitcoin: (Stoll 2019)
- energy price estimate: USD 0.05/kWh
- 45.8TWh total used in 2018
- Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
- Electricity consumption of Bitcoin: a market-based and technical analysis
- Bitcoin Energy-Value Equivalence
- Bitcoin mining: a global review of energy and power demand (Küfeoğlu 2019)
Historically, the cheapest form of energy was slave labor, hence most ancient titanic proofs of work were built using human slaves. Today the cheapest form of labor is rapidly shifting towards autonomous machine work-forces. Once built, most modern machines primarily require electricity to operate. Although, today retrofitting factories with robot laborers is still fairly costly despite offering significant savings over the long term. In the future, the cost of operating machine work-forces should continue to decline towards the base cost of available electricity pricing.
Today, we’re already at the point where electricity from renewable sources is becoming the cheapest to produce, i.e. wind, hydro, and solar.
Currently, the economics of bitcoin mining also reflects this trend towards a baseline cost of electricity, while the upfront cost of mining hardware becomes secondary.