Tesla’s biggest issue is Musk.

Tesla held a commanding lead over the other automakers in the self-driving segment a few years ago. Now they’ve all mostly caught up thanks to Musk’s unhinged firings. Tesla lost some of its best talent for no other reason than not wanting to work for an egomaniacal billionaire nut job.

Tesla needs to fire Musk before he runs it into the ground just like he’s done to Twitter.

Genuinely curious, what new features did that updated firmware have that were valuable to you?

“Green Hydrogen” is made by using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. There’re no carbon emissions in that process, but to be truly “green” the electricity must come from a carbon free source like wind, solar, nuclear, or hydroelectric.

The process of electricity to hydrogen to compressed hydrogen to fuel cell to electricity is about half as energy efficient as electricity to li ion battery to electricity. As a form of electricity storage green hydrogen is significantly less efficient than batteries.

Green hydrogen only makes sense as a fuel in situations where batteries are not feasible.

And right now making green hydrogen at all does not make sense because if you build a new low carbon source of electricity it will make a larger impact if you use it to displace fossil fuel based electricity generation rather than using it to create green hydrogen.

Your math checks out.

Charging a 600 mi battery in 9 minutes would require a charging station that can output somewhere north of 1.2 MW.

We need major upgrades to the electrical grid as well as doubling our electricity generation capacity for charging stations and vehicles like that to be common place.

It’s not like the country was massively relying on nuclear energy at any point in time really.

Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors were generating almost 30% of its electricity a decade ago before they started phasing them out. It was their second largest source of electricity after coal.

Despite having built literally 100s of solar and wind farms in the past decade they still had to increase their coal output by 40 TWh to make up for the gap. A nuclear reactor generates a fuck ton of electricity.

And for what? Statically speaking 800x more people are killed in coal mining accidents per TWh generated than are killed by all nuclear power accidents combined. They phased out their largest source of carbonless electricity and the decision likely killed more people than would have died even if there was a nuclear accident.

I remember a time when ads weren’t crazy intrusive. They weren’t being shoved into every os and app and website.

There wasn’t 20 of them on every page, and advertisers weren’t trying to harvest my data to the point where they knew every last detail of my personal life.

And I didn’t mind having them in order to have “free” content. But they got greedy and now I’ll block them in every chance I get.

Maybe forcing ads into everything isn’t the answer.

You’re not wrong.

Wholesale prices do bounce around significantly in a day, occasionally even going negative. And some miners do shutdown for brief periods during high demand due to a high electricity price. Some miners aren’t buying electricity from the grid, and have their own generation sources with different economic inputs. And there’s lots of day to day volatility in mining rates that has nothing to do with economics.

There’s no formula or methodology that could tell you how much energy is being wasted at any given moment. That impossible. There’s no way of knowing how many miners are operating globally at any given point in time. We can’t even reliably tell which country a block was mined in. We can only make reasonable estimates of global averages over the last few weeks.

You can get closer with more detailed modelling, but the equation I gave using global averages for bitcoin and electricity prices in the last few weeks will get you to an accurate estimate.

Yes somewhat… the formula has several factors that are constantly in flux, Bitcoin mining is a random process the value can be off entirely by chance. But it’s designed to self-adjust over the long run towards that formula, individual fluctuations cancel out in the long run.

For electricity price specifically, wholesale prices of electricity tend to be fairly close everywhere bitcoin is mined. Bitcoin mining is more profitable where electricity is the cheapest and is uneconomic in places where the price of electricity is above average. So it only happens where the wholesale price is globally competitive.

The economics of Bitcoin mining at scale force it to find an equilibrium where the cost of mining a Bitcoin is just a bit less than the current market value of a Bitcoin.

Electricity is the only significant variable cost at scale so the amount of electricity needed to mine a bitcoin ends up being a little less than however much a bitcoin can buy.

Thus one can estimate the total amount of electricity very accurately by simply taking the block rate (6/hr) times the block reward (~6.25 BTC) times the current price of a bitcoin divided by the wholesale price of electricity. You’ll get the upper bound for the amount of electricity being consumed.

Which by the way works out to around a TWh costing tens of millions of USD every single day. Which is more electricity than a small country

The only thing that will stop the waste is if the price of bitcoin drops. You can legislate it away, that won’t stop it, it will just move when it’s happening.

The old 8” floppy disks were more expensive but known for being incredibly reliable.

The newer 5.25” and 3.5” floppies used cheaper and mass produced coatings on the magnetic surface, plus the smaller and higher density tracks had less surface area per byte and less material to hold the signal.

The net result was the newer floppies often couldn’t be reliably read after a few years of use.

It’s not at all surprising they stuck with the more reliable system for so long.