Philosophers At Work
I liked reading books by philosophers. However, I just now realized I never saw one at work. Most of the time, the work was done long before I read it or read about the situation that gave rise to the work. With Bitcoin, this is different as we are experiencing its introduction to the world, history in the making.
We have read and heard people talk about Bitcoin's electricity use and associated CO2 emissions. Some work was led by emotions and arrived at untenable conclusions. For instance, Mora et al.'s 2018 paper entitled "Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C)".
Then, there is the much more accurate work of knowledgeable authors. However, if they appear to defend a preformed conclusion rather than arriving at one after neutral deliberation, their work is more challenging to read for the critiques.
And then there is the book Resistance Money, subtitled A Philosophical Case for Bitcoin by
@Andrew M. Bailey ,
@Bradley Rettler and
@Craig Warmke. I much enjoyed their scientific work on Bitcoin's energy consumption from a neutral ground and with a global humanitarian goal. Rather than arguing for what is good for them, the stance many people willingly or unwillingly take, they tried to approach the question assuming that tomorrow, they could wake up as any one of the eight billion people.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Bitcoin's energy consumption. If you are already a Bitcoiner and short on time, you might skip to chapters 9 and 10 directly.
It became apparent to me why we need philosophers.
The main button (front) got partially stuck on my Blockstream Jade, making it hard to enter the correct PIN or approve/reject transactions. Loosening the two screws on the back a tiny bit fixed the problem 😃
#bitcoinknots 🥇