6 Comments
User's avatar
Arne's avatar

David, "any productive activity that can easily turn itself on or off based on whether or not excess electricity is available should work":

Have you heard of https://seti.berkeley.edu/participate/? I'll guess you have.

It's a search for extraterrestrial life project that asks people to donate their idle computer processing power to run a program called SETI@home to look for signs of intelligent life out there in the universe.

Expand full comment
David Shane's avatar

I used to run Seti@Home. It wouldn't really help the utilities in this case because there is no financial return to them... unless Seti would pay for all the electricity used, of course.

Expand full comment
Stephanie's avatar

Ok, I still really don’t get it.

Expand full comment
David Shane's avatar

Aw man, I tried.

You know I teach at a classical school. There seems to be a similar problem in answering the question, "what is classical education?". I literally had about three seconds to answer that question once (a bus driver was literally stopping to put me off), and I think I said, "they read old books and they learn Latin". Well, when you only have three seconds, I guess that'll do.

Expand full comment
Arne's avatar

I believe the transactions aspect of bitcoin is similar to other payment processing systems, except its records are public and unalterable (at least that's the goal).

Bitcoin carries its accounts ledger with it.

Expand full comment
Stephanie's avatar

I did get the first part about a big spread sheet in the cloud. What can I say I went to public school! 😀

Expand full comment