Jim Adams has posted another Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Friday Faithfuls prompt and Paula Light, at Light Motifs II, has posted another TGIF prompt. It’s rather late in the day, so I thought I’d combine the two prompts into a single post.
Friday Faithfuls
Jim would like to know our thoughts on cryptocurrency and Bitcoins. He asked, “Did you invest money in this, have you ever used it to purchase anything, or have you ever been asked by a hacker to send this to them? Do you think that cryptocurrency is the future of financial transactions, or do you feel it is just a way for criminals to hide money?”
Well, I actually know very little about cryptocurrency. In fact, I learned more about cryptocurrency from Jim’s post than I ever knew. That said, I have never invested in Bitcoin or any other crypto coin. About four or five years ago my son invested a sum of money in Bitcoins. He didn’t tell me how much, but he did try to persuade me to invest in it as well. I don’t invest in schemes I don’t understand, so I declined. I recently asked my son if he still has Bitcoins and he said he did, but when I asked him if he got a decent return on his investment, but he didn’t want to talk about it, which made me think it didn’t work out that well.
As to Jim’s other questions, I haven’t been asked by a hacker to send Bitcoins. And I would not attempt to predict if cryptocurrency is the future of financial transactions. Hell, I’m still trying to figure out Venmo.
TGIF
For Paula’s prompt, she wants to know if we had a good week, not so good, books, movies, counting steps…? Spill it and link back to my TGIF post, she says.
Actually, I had a very nice week. The weather was clear, dry, and with highs in the mid-sixties, it couldn’t have been more perfect. My wife and I got our annual flu shots with no adverse reactions. We also took a nice, invigorating ride on our ebikes. The stock market had another up week, which has helped replenish my retirement nest egg a bit.
It was also nice to have the house by ourselves and to get back to our routine again after our houseguests left on Sunday. And, because the nights have been so clear, when I walked our dog at around 9 pm, I could clearly see both Jupiter and Mars visible in the night sky with the naked eye. And Mars is definitely the red planet.
So all in all, it’s been a very good week. Thanks for asking, Paula.
And on that note, happy TGIF, everyone.
This, That, and the Other 
A happy weekend to you Fandango
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Thanks, Sadje. Right back at you!
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Thanks
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Son lost a lot of money on BitCoin, he was still investing when he was asking to borrow money. 🙄
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🙄
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This November, Mars and Jupiter are the 2 bright planets in the evening sky.
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glad your week was good Fandango!
I’d never invest in bitcoin! Its all a scam I think!
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The first I ever heard of cryptocurrency was when my second son was a teen and mined bitcoin through playing video games. So, it made sense to me as a way to buy things within games online. I was surprised when I started hearing of people trying to, at first, and then actually buying real world things like real estate with digital coins. My son still has some virtual money somewhere, but he couldn’t find it when he thought about it back when it was way up.
The very best thing I’ve heard of being connected to this kind of virtual asset is a company that harvests natural gas at abandoned places where said fossil fuel just spews into the air. When I heard of these invisible polluting sites, I could hardly believe it. Yet they are very real; I saw the topic covered in news before I heard of the people who subsequently decided to do something about it. Somehow, they convert gathering of the gas and capping into Bitcoin.
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These aren’t the people to which I was referring (although they are somewhat similar). I will try and find them as well. But this will give some background as to how oil drilling spews natural gas.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/12/23-year-old-texans-made-4-million-mining-bitcoin-off-flared-natural-gas.html
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Enter the oil and gas business, which often features sites in remote parts of Texas, far from major population centers.
More often than not, if a gas well isn’t already stationed near a pipeline, it won’t be big enough to warrant the time and expense of building an entirely new line. And if a driller can’t immediately find a way to sell the stash of natural gas, most dispose of it on site.
One method is to vent it, which releases methane directly into the air – a poor choice for the environment, as its greenhouse effects are shown to be much stronger than carbon dioxide. A more environmentally friendly option is to flare it, which means actually lighting the gas on fire.
But flares are only 75 to 90% efficient, explained Adam Ortolf, who heads up business development in the U.S. for Upstream Data. “Even with a flare, some of the methane is being vented without being combusted,” he said.
This is when on-site bitcoin mining can prove to be especially impactful.
When the methane is run into an engine or generator, 100% of the methane is combusted and none of it leaks or vents into the air, according to Ortolf.
“But nobody will run it through a generator unless they can make money, because generators cost money to acquire and maintain,” he said. “So unless it’s economically sustainable, producers won’t internally combust the gas.”
Bitcoin makes it economically sustainable for oil and gas companies to combust their methane, rather than externally combust it with a flare [or even more wastefully and pollutingly simply vent it instead], rendering stranded gas a thing of the past.
But Ortolf has taken years to convince people that parking a trailer full of ASICs on an oil and gas field is a smart and financially sound idea.
“In 2018, I got laughed out of the room when I talked about mining bitcoin on flared gas,” said Ortolf. “The concept of bringing hydrocarbons to market without a counterparty was laughable.”
Fast forward four years, and business at Upstream is booming. It now works with 140 bitcoin mines across North America.
“This is the best gift the oil and gas industry could’ve gotten,” said Ortolf. “They were leaving a lot of hydrocarbons on the table, but now, they’re no longer limited by geography to sell energy.”
Meanwhile, bitcoin miners get what they want most: cheap electricity.
{And it goes on for quite a while, with the very next paragraph sounding quite like bullshit if you take a minute to think about it.}
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The company I was thinking of has been acquired by another. Besides the possibility of oil drillers accessing Bitcoin miners during the active oil drilling, there have been, as I said, abandoned sites where natural gas just traveled invisibly into the air on an ongoing basis after oil drilling was done; I don’t know whether or not the abandoned places have all, at this point, been harvested and capped (I doubt it).
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221012005190/en/Crusoe-Energy-Systems-Acquires-Great-American-Mining
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“We value the relationships established by Great American Mining with oil and gas producers in the Bakken oil fields, and look forward to developing these relationships to enhance and expand DFM operations wherever flaring may be a challenge,” said Crusoe’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Chase Lochmiller. “Given Crusoe’s industry leading operational efficiency, scale and technology, we believe we can materially improve the overall performance of GAM’s existing asset base to create value and deliver even better results for clients.”
The acquisition of GAM’s assets will add approximately 9% to Crusoe’s capacity.
Following the acquisition, Crusoe will have:
Approximately 125 flare gas-powered modular data centers deployed and operating in the field
Run rate capacity to reduce flaring by approximately 20 million cubic feet per day
A total of approximately 300 employees across 6 states
Deployed capacity to reduce an estimated 800,000 metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions per year primarily through elimination of uncombusted methane from open flares, comparable to removing approximately 170,000 cars from the road
“Our belief at Great American Mining is that bitcoin mining is an important solution to stranded gas and flaring problems – problems that have frustrated the oil & gas industry’s efforts to improve environmental performance and efficient use of Earth’s natural resources for decades,” said Todd Garland, Founder and CEO of Great American Mining. “Crusoe is a trailblazing company that successfully pioneered and scaled large-format Digital Flare Mitigation technology and operations. They are the clear leader in the space and I believe Crusoe is best positioned to take our combined business to the next level.”
~
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https://www.crusoeenergy.com
Crusoe – g a m
Crusoe’s Digital Flare Mitigation® offers oil and gas companies a fast, low-cost, and simple solution to eliminate natural gas flaring. This helps energy producers clean up the least efficient parts of their operations to meet rising environmental standards around flaring and emissions.
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Interesting timing, here, and a bit of a curiosity reading between all of the lines (from all of the articles). Meanwhile, the good part was and may be the eliminating of some warming gas pollutants from the environment (only in that the co2 isn’t as bad as methane). But I’m kinda suspicious of the financialization aspects (and appearance, in my opinion, of some kind of shenanigans where oil companies may get credits or write-offs for participating… which might only be a piece of the funny business). Plus, I don’t “believe in” unregulated ethereal “money” despite the fact people will be using it (at whatever imagined valuations) until it is outlawed or somehow absorbed into the regulated system. Anyway, I learned enough today (from one of the earlier articles I shared) to demystify what the “mining” pods are about; computers in portable spaces that use the energy aspect of the incidental natural gas release in oil drilling and extraction — the computers are used, as computers would be anywhere even not at oil fields, to solve puzzles/riddles/games. Gnarly.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cathedra-bitcoin-great-american-mining-110000602.html
TORONTO, May 03, 2022–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Cathedra Bitcoin Inc. (TSX-V: CBIT; OTCQX: CBTTF) (“Cathedra”)… and Great American Mining (“GAM”) (together, the “Companies”)… today announce the Companies have amended their original partnership agreement to provide for the conclusion of the business relationship by September 15, 2022 (the “Conclusion Date”).
In 2021, the Companies entered into a business relationship (the “Original Relationship”) …..
Due to severe winter weather conditions that resulted in up to four feet of snow accumulation in multiple storms, the Cathedra and GAM bitcoin mining operation saw its performance impaired throughout the month of April, operating at an average of 45% of expected hash rate during the month. Current hash rate levels and operating conditions have now returned to normal.
Additionally, the Companies were recently notified by their generator provider that the generator lease rate would be increasing by over 50%. In light of this higher cost and the adverse effect it will have on mining economics at the Site, the Companies have mutually agreed to work toward a conclusion of the business relationship and have entered into an amended agreement that governs the terms of the wind-up (the “Amendment”).
Under the Amendment….
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Scam Economy #41 (with guest Domingo Flores) |
The Myth of Blockchain Security : So many hacks!
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https://news.bitcoin.com/while-elon-musk-plans-to-purge-1-5-billion-inactive-twitter-names-bitcoiners-beg-him-to-preserve-hal-finneys-account/
Finney not only tweeted about “running bitcoin” on Jan. 10, but it’s also very likely he mined his first BTC block the very next day as well. Block 78 is affiliated with Finney’s set of transactions and the bitcoins he mined that year, and it’s highly probable that he mined block 78 on Jan. 11, 2009. Block 78 is not only associated with Finney’s set of 2009 transactions and all the coinbase rewards he collected, but it is also linked to the first BTC transaction of 10 BTC on Jan. 12, 2009 03:30 a.m. (ET), bitcoins that originally derived from Bitcoin block 9.
Moreover, Finney’s “running bitcoin” tweet is not the only post he wrote about the decentralized cryptocurrency network. “Looking at ways to add more anonymity to bitcoin,” Finney said on Jan. 21, 2009. “Thinking about how to reduce CO2 emissions from a widespread Bitcoin implementation,” Finney wrote on Jan. 27, 2009.
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One of my sons, not the one who I mentioned earlier, completed his first bitcoin transaction today—because a friend of his is invested in quite a lot of cryptocurrency, and the friend wanted to pay for something that he and my son will be doing together some months into the future.
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Hey! Can you post some crypto related content given by me on your page for ORM purpose.
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I have no idea what you just asked me.
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Hey!! I noticed you write about cryptocurrency and I read your few articles and loved the way you write and looks like the public is also appreciating your efforts. And I would like you to post some articles for me on your website. If you’re interested please connect with me.
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I really don’t write much about cryptocurrency other than to admit that I don’t know much about and have never bought any, so I don’t think my blog would be a good place for me to post article about that topic. Sorry.
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Coinbase✅ v Binance❎
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Okay thank anyway
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