Aaron Parecki

The blockchain folks have a strange marketing advantage because the scale of energy use and pollution is literally unbelievably huge. It seems like it can't possibly be as bad as all that. We want to believe that someone, somewhere would have put a stop to it if it was that bad.

Thank you to all the hardworking utility and maintenance workers getting Portland back in power today 🤗👏🏽👍🏼

this is a really good article about how bitcoin is a terrible tool for the problem it claims to solve, its enormous environmental costs are still being understated, and some fun anecdotes about the scale of the fraud it engenders (pirate HV transformers!) https://www.ofnumbers.com/2021/02/14/bitcoin-and-other-pow-coins-are-an-esg-nightmare/

consensus is achieved by seeing which version of history had the most money thrown at it, and if it gets too easy to throw money at it, more money is required

it's hilarious

as a result of this, basically every implementation now which is designed to use it for Currency Things has to do the actual Currency Things "off-chain" through some other distributed protocol, and then only occasionally commit the results to the actual blockchain

that's it, that's the tweet

it's seriously infuriating any time people talk about bitcoin while glossing over the fact that it's intentionally designed to take approximately constant wall-clock time to do the same amount of work, no matter how many computers are on the network

bitcoin is the final form of an inefficient system: it is literally impossible to scale it up, because it is carefully designed to be immune to being scaled up

Open source alternative to Clubhouse 👏

Great for audio-centric events and group people...

https://jam.systems

Ping @EnrolYourself @danielyep @LornaPrescott_ @unevendistrib @solarpunk_girl

The storm has caused numerous power outages in the area. Some quick numbers.

From PGE:
Transmission lines out: 15
Miles of transmission lines to be repaired: 206
Substations out: 7
Feeders out: 106
Number of wires down: 4,408
No. of people working to restore power: ~2,500

1/2

The Bitcoin apologists have turned my mentions into a trashfire, so I gotta turn off any further notifications.

the one good blockchain is the one that blocks these people for you

I woke up to hundreds of mentions calling me poor this morning, so I’m glad this website is free

And now for our annual Valentine:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Singular they is older
Than singular you.