Episode 6.09 Granular Levels of Tomato Tracking
Blockchain, the necessity of regulation, and the regulatory challenges posed by truly global technologies.
Show Notes
Blockchain and the associated currencies and techniques derived from it have been in the news a lot for the last few years. And it’s an incredibly interesting technology, which basically only has benefits for individual users – but has some profoundly distortive effects at scale, on everything from economics to energy consumption. So what do we do about it?
Links
current regulatory approaches
Blockchain and triple-entry accounting
Bitcoin will use 0.5% of the world’s electricity by the end of 2018
Terrorists have (unsurprisingly) already been using cryptocurrencies
On the basically-asymptotic difficulty of “mining”:
“Is the asymptotic performance of bitcoin O(n) relative to the block chain length?”
“How many bitcoins will there eventually be?”
Every block introduces 50 new coins in the system. This quantity (50) halves every 210,000 blocks. So, getting the limit of coins it is possible to generate is quite easy: it’s the sum of a geometric series.
The total number of bitcoins that can ever be created is 21,000,000.
We also discussed the importance of regulation in some detail in a couple episodes in season 5:
- 5.09: Regulate All the Things - on regulations and the open internet
- 5.11: Fences, Neighbors, Etc. – on vaccinations and the application of force
Music
- “Heavy Eyes” by Palm Ghosts. Used by permission.
- “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.
Sponsors
Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:
- Andrew Fallows
- Kurt Klassen
- Jake Grant
- Jeremy W. Sherman
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