Thank you for your nuanced take!

It’s easier than trying to get the money from the esteemed billionaire class.

Apparently the (United States of) America is a threat for even Canada, Central America and South America.
That is a way to say: I concur.

The gist of you comment is valid and points out a major flaw:
miners need to operate at a gain.
With shrinking amounts of BTC being created by the network for producing blocks (that reward getting halved each 210,000 blocks), that gain is at risk, because it can be doubted whether transaction fees can cover the gap.
With that gain being at risk, the network security is going to be at risk.

Ethereum did the right thing and aligned ETH holders and block producers by switching from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.
That also reduced the ecological footprint to a tiny fraction of what it was before.

Loved playin’ it on C64!

[…]problem is that difficulty adjustment is not automatic and its done only once every few months so […]

Last time I checked it was automatic and done each 2.016 blocks, which should ideally take 14 days time (10 minutes per block at average).
When the difficulty gets adjusted, it gets automatically set to a level, which would take exactly 14 days to mine the next 2.016 blocks.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

I’m no friend of PoW in general and even less so of the way Bitcoin implemented it (resource hungry arms race for specialized hardware compared to PoW done only by general computing devices cough Monero), but insinuating there’d be some manual adjustment is disingenuous.

Isn’t it the other way round?
Difficulty drops because miners are losing money while mining and shut down miners, which by protocol makes the Bitcoin network adjust to the resulting difficulty (happens each 2.016 blocks afair).

Let more and more miners shut down and you get an idling amount of mining power capable of attacking the network. Why would they do that you may wonder. Well, shorting BTC, attacking the network and cashing in could be a way to recoup their losses. Mining equipment isn’t cheap and letting it idle makes no money.
I’m not saying this will happen soon or at all. I’m just saying it can happen. It’s one of the flaws of proof of work (PoW).

One can dream, but the full suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement would at least put some economical and political pressure on Israel.
I’m optimistic that the missing signatures can be gathered and the thresholds per country can be reached.

edit: I just realized that not all, but only 7 countries need to reach their threshold.
This has already been done.
Less than 118.000 signatures are missing. This initiative will succeed.

I wish, the USA did consider bombing Israel, until they start behaving.
Isn’t it strange how Trump always does the wrong kind of crazy things?

I have a Kobo Clara 2E and like it very much.

Maybe more than 100 billions of dollars even, depending on whether you “only” consider the 1,148,800 BTC that have never been spent or the 1,814,400 BTC that have been awarded to Satoshi in total.

More details here:
https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

I wholeheartedly agree!
I installed Bazzite because I wanted an easy solution for my laptop with Nvidia GPU - now it’s my daily driver and gaming is only a fraction of its job.

Wouldn’t an AMD RX 9060 XT with 16 GB RAM be nice as well if you’re hunting for good speed/cost options?

One could argue that fossil fuels are a kind of chemical battery that store solar energy from aeons ago.
But in a strict sense you’re right and that’s why I’m keen on having more batteries in the wild, because there are (more and more) times, in which wind turbines and solar farms need to be throttled or shut down, because their continued operation endangers the grid by providing too much electric energy.
So more batteries -> more renewable energy can be captured and stored/buffered!

Yeah, like let’s complain about lithium having a limited supply (which can be recycled until the cows come home) while burning fossil fuels all the while - which are also limited but gone after having been burned. The cherry on top is burning them pollutes the air and causes climate change.
Aside from new mining techniques and new battery technology there’s still the option to improve the situation by moving people and goods onto rails and operating the trains directly by electricity and not through batteries - a technology already available. It just needs to be implemented at more places.
I’m aware that this is no solution that fits all situations, but I’m damn sure a lot of situations would be improved by having more rails/trains.

The real world begs to differ: https://www.livescience.com/technology/electric-vehicles/china-puts-a-sodium-ion-battery-into-an-ev-for-the-first-time-it-can-drive-248-miles-on-a-single-charge

In the end it’s a matter of price, reliability, usability, etc.
And while sodium based batteries have a worse energy density (space and weight wise) than lithium based batteries, they seem to have advantages in other areas (eg. no. of charge cycles, price per kWh, no thermal runaway, basically unlimited amounts of cheap sodium available).

Spot-on!
Alas, I’ve written my last comment before I read yours.

Do you think it’s easier to

1. cob lithium from rocks, dug from the earth or
2. extract lithium from a lithium battery
   ?
   Where do you think will be the higher concentration of lithium?

First you make batteries economically viable alternatives to fossil based energy sources.
Then the competition for even more economically viable battery technologies brings the tech to the next level.
Besides, lithium and the used rare earth elements can be recycled. It’s not like they’d evaporate when being used.

Strange to see something good coming off a war.