Minting money

This morning an amusing little report circulated that one can buy a cypto-currency mining system that doubles as a space heater. Clever--take a feature that tends to be a nuisance, especially in consumer-grade computers--the high power requirements of the GPU(*)s used in the calculations that go into "crypto-currency mining," and spin it as a feature--the waste heat can heat your room! With 8 GPUs packed into that small a volume the water heat transfer system had better work well or you can set things on fire. That happened with some collaborators of ours in Maryland.

The whole crypto-currency business reminds me of the gold-rush folks. They looked to get rich by increasing the quantity of symbols of value--but not creating anything particularly valuable themselves. Thought experiment: suppose your country found boatloads of silver and gold (we won't go into details about how they collected it), and brought it back. Now you have the wherewithal to import more stuff, and you need to import--because, funny thing, having twice as many doubloons doesn't automatically double the size of your local industry. In fact it's simply apt to double the prices. Lots more gold, but not necessarily more stuff.

In Dawn Treader Lewis never bothered to explain why a lake that turned things to gold would be bad--except that people got greedy. Too bad, it would have been a one-liner.