Peak Oil, Resource Depletion, deminishing EROEI and the long term implications for the continued development of China...

quantumlight

Junior Member
Registered Member
I would like to start a thread to discuss in earnest the bigger picture of energy/resource dynamic and how it will affect China's continued growth and development going forward in the next decades to come... As you all know, recently Xi committed China to be carbon neutral by 2060, and the implication is that by then China will also be energy independent... maybe we will have solved fusion and fast nuclear breeders AND have scaled them up by them to avert the oil crash... or maybe not... but there is a real possibility that unlike the Thucydides Trap or the Great Filter, this is one hurdle that China will not be able to overcome, for simply said everything, including Chinese civilization, exists within the laws of physics and abide by this grander force rather than the other way around... human ingenuity cannot out-think the energy problem of which it exists within...

Shell just declared 'Peak Oil'... a NVIDIA graphics card such as the RTX3080 that MSRPs for $799 USD is now on ebay/Craigslist with the current market value of $2500 USD+, and in some cases nearly quadruple the retail price... Where I live, the Harbor Freight inverter generators such as the Chinese brand Predator 3500 series that used to go for as low as $600 just last December are now at or above $1200 on Amazon and elsewhere... the popular Thrustmaster joysticks are still not available (zero inventory) unless you are willing to shell out nearly 3x the cost to get one for $400 bucks on ebay for the Airbus edition when it should have been not more than $120... You getting the picture now?!

Sure some of this is Trumps trade war tariff and some of it is due to the COVID shutdowns and the impact to the supply chain and JIT systems of globalization... (and that large EverGreen ship that got stuck in the canal didn't help matters but I digress) but I posit that these are all one and the same, in that the trade war as well as the tech/semiconductor battle and even to some degree COVID and other bio threats and/or climate catastrophes are all manifestations of a overcrowded world in which we humans have overshoot the population in a blink of an eye (when compared to normal evolutionary timescales) and indeed have all but consumed nearly all of the high EROEI fossil fuel deposits that took nature billions of years to slowly accumulate over time yet we wiped it all out within 150+ years since the industrial revolution and really most of it was at the tail end in the last 20 years...

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I try my best to remain optimistic and see things glass half fool, but even the most rosy plans and projections do not take into account the physics and the thermodynamic truth of the bigger picture in terms of quantity and quality of energy resources and the fact that we as human species have already front-loaded everything by exploiting the low hanging fruits of easy to extract energy/mineral resources head first...


The inhabitants of Easter Island built a lot of gigantic stone monuments before they all seemingly and suddenly disappeared... We know in hindsight they grew too quickly, depleted their resources, but the limited scale and size of the island provided them with no means to "grow out of the problem" long enough to reach the economics of scale to bootstrap themselves up the technology ladder by exploiting other forms of energy resources (coal, gas, fission, etc)... Likewise, our planet earth, the third rock from the sun, the pale blue dot, as it were, is like an 3D island onto itself... and our current geopolitical, macroeconomic and global civilization structures make it increasingly unlikely that we will be able to bridge the gap of "The Great Filter" and successfully transition from a largely fossil fuel and hydrocarbon/petroleum based society to that of one of fusion and other more exotic energy technologies at scale and in mass... Just like there are fundamental limits to the universe and physical reality (for example the speed of light being the ultimate speed limit which dictates the viability of forms of long term space travel) it is apparent that the laws of physics are such in this universe that it is not conducive for the evolution nor sustained survival of lifeforms reaching Type I on the Kardashev scale...


Infinite growth in a finite environment is a mathematical impossibility. Human population growth tracks precisely that of bacteria growth in a petridish right before it encounters rapid dieoff as it hits its resource constraints...

The problem is that our modern civilization is built upon both the expectation and the requirement of perpetual infinite growth in order to be sustained, and its tenet is one of always borrowing from the expectation of future growth to use as collateral to pay for the the present/current debts and expenses... essentially it is the most massive high level Ponzi Pyramid scheme of the ultimate form of kicking the can down the road that humanity has ever conjured up or invented...

There is the problem of the Energy Cliff, in that modern civilization is highly dependent upon high thresholds of EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) in order to sustain the sort of globalized Just-In-Time structures needed for modern society and trade, and to prop up the sort of high standards of living and at the enormously high levels of carrying capacity (almost 8 billion humans) that we've all come and grown to be accustomed to in the so-called modern world for the past hundred years or so...


Fusion is perpetually 30 year away, even solving the fast breeder nuclear fission issue will take another 2 to 3 decades to ramp up and that is precious time the world just doesn't have left anymore. None of the renewables are energy dense enough (high threshold of EROEI) to power modern society and certainly not the kind of globalized world we have become accustomed to... for example solar has a energy payback of 2 to 3 years currently... that means for the first three years of a solar project you have net sunk energy into it and don't make an energy profit until after that period. Whereas oil as an energy payback period of zero days, you can use it immediately to provide net positive energy and it is both a means of energy and storage of energy. The problem with solar is that it needs energy storage, and there are not enough lithium nor rare earth in the world to be able to build enough batteries to store enough energy to scale to the entire world's current energy consumption levels even if we could achieve 100% renewable sources... (solar, wind, hydro, etc)

The human body is 70% water. You don't have to lose the very last drop of water in your body to die. Once you lose 10% of water weight you are severely dehydrated and at the edge of death, by the time your body lost 20% of its weight in water you are already died. Likewise, modern civilization doesn't have to run out of oil before it dies... We are already margined to the hilt and basically the entire system is like Gamestop gambling on margin and we need continously growth in order just to sustain the fabric of globalized society, any slow down means the entire house of cards come toppling down! In terms of conventional oil the world has already peaked back in 2008 and now we are relying on unconventional shale, fracking, etc etc to make up for the energy deficits but like turning the knob faster and faster towards the Hot side of a shower as the hot water starts running out, we are only delaying the inevitable and making the collapse cliff that much more steeper when it finally implodes upon itself... Back in the golden age of oil for one barrel of oil energy expended we could drill, extract, process and make usable about 100 additional barrels of oil, that was a EROEI ratio of 100 to 1. Now we are barely at EROEI ratio of 10 to 1. All the sweet crude is gone, there are no more low hanging fruits, its just the dirty, sulfuric, hard to extract/drill and energy intensive to process/refine tar stuff left now... so even the quality and density and usable energy we are getting from the remaining hydrocarbons under the ground have reached terminal point of diminishing returns... when you have reached "peak" oil and have approximately half of the reserves left underground, from an energy perspective you really only have 10% left in the gas tank even though the meter says its still half full...

 
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quantumlight

Junior Member
Registered Member
And herein lies the real problem... our entire financial system is predicated upon the default and defacto assumption of perpetual infinite exponential growth. Modern money is just a placeholder or tally for energy and its ability to do work on our behalf... without (cheap and abundant) energy our money becomes utterly useless and meaningless! None of the renewable sources are actually renewable, they are currently being created by a predominantly oil heavy society (over 85% of all energy globally still from hydrocarbons) which gives it the misleading 2 to 3 year energy payback.. because its being subsidized by the denser higher EROEI nonrenewable sources, once the world tries to go predominantly "renewable" it will incur the physics energy tax and that makes each and every transaction that much more "expensive" in terms of energy expended... solar panels don't last forever, they need to be replaced every 10 to 20 years... even if we could make energy solar panels and wind turbines to power the entire world, we wouldn't have enough rare earths left to replace them a decade or two later... and when fossil fuels are gone and we have to rely on using renewable energy to further scale out new renewable sources then suddenly the energy payback of solar and wind goes from 2 or 3 years to 5 years and more... which means assuming the infrastructure can last 10 to 20 years, even if we had infinite supply of lithium and infinite rare earth supply (which is not possible) we would still incur a permanent and perpetual 25% to 50% "energy tax" (paid to the God of 2nd law of thermodynamics) in everything that we do, and this is before the government economic taxation! This will utterly collapse the globalized society that we have come to know and love...

Worse, there is no going back to the way things were.. all the fresh water is gone, all the top soil is gone, climate catastrophe has destroyed earth's nature safe harbors, and it took billions of years for fossil fuels to form under the ground and we've spent it all in the 150 years since the industrial revolution and really most of it was spent in just the last 50 years... all the easy to extract elements and minerals and resources that society relied upon to bootstrap itself into a higher technology ladder/tree the first time around are all gone and will never exists again... there won't be a second chance for another species to evolve intelligence and have another go at it if humanity fails...

The earth's natural carrying capacity is roughly 500 million humans... it cannot sustain 8 billion mouths without relying on the high EROEI of oil.... most of the food on this planet today is grown using oil, -- for one calorie of food we consume, 9 additional calories of oil went into making that one calorie of food!-- and as all the fertilizers and pesticides and the planting, harvesting, transportion of food and all the support supply chain infrastructures are run on oil... we are basically converting oil to fertilizers to force food to grow and then using this oil subsidized food source to feed the unsustainable population of 8 billion... once oil is gone so are the vast majority of the 8 billion...


The writing is on the wall folks... four years ago a top of the line Nvidia Graphics card was $599 at Frys... nowadays the top GPU is stated at MSRP of $1499 but there is zero inventory and you can only get the RTX3090 on ebay from scalpers at inflated price of $3300 and rising... and Fry's went belly up.... In four years I really don't think people's incomes rose by 600%... the RTX3090 is also much larger and bulkier, using up all three PCI slots and producing twice the heat waste and consuming twice the power... so its incremental "performance" gains comes at the expense of more energy consumption as Moores Law is dead and we hit the wall of Dennard Scaling... the global semiconductor shortage has even caused GM to stop producing its trucks... and affecting everything from Tesla to not being able to find spare parts to even build a new PC.

In the entire history of the USA, nearly 20% of all dollars were printed in the last year.... this is crazy... insane...

You don't have to be a rocket scientists to figure out where this is headed... it would be a mistake for those on this forum to believe that China is somehow immune and will be left unscathed by the reality of diminishing EROEI... (and the absolute dreadful implications it has for the continued existence of civilization, any human civilization be it Chinese or otherwise)
 
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sequ

Captain
Registered Member
Yes the outcome is very pessimistic, but not unrealistic. I'm afraid we are going to hit the wall very hard and starting from this decade, things will spiral out of control completely. Brace yourselves!
 

2handedswordsman

Junior Member
Registered Member
Things are not as complicated as they seem. We talk about change, waking up etc but these word become empty when we fail to answer simple questions as : What really matters, profit or benefit. We deeply know that eating pizzas everyday is great in taste but do bad things in our body but once the heart attack strikes, we seem to be sorry and regret a little bit late. This is hypocrisy.

It is hypocrisy when we pretend we own the earth, but we deeply know that earth owns us
It is hypocrisy when we cry about the prices of GPU but we gamble in SHITCOINS that are massive waste of resourses and energy. ( or to just think that this is the future---an algorithm that wastes energy and resources for nothing ). Note this is not a personal attack, the cryptos make me furious anyway
It is hypocrisy pretending that antagonism is the best drive to excell than teamwork
It is hypocrisy when we cry about inequality but we love the privileges of capitalism
It is hypocrisy that we pretend we are not racists and we are ok with companies exploit even children in other continents to deliver the goods that we proudly wear and use.
It is hypocrisy when a surgeon saves a life after a 12hours operation and we say "Thank God"
It is hypocrisy when we cry that planet resources decline but refuse to give up building armies capable of destroying our planet 500 times.
Same when we store gold and other great materials in vaults or jewelries or in army applications when we can build machines to serve us virtually unbreakable
Same when we refuse to change our diet even knowing it's unhealthy and non viable

IT IS HYPOCRISY WHEN SHELL DECLARES PEAK OIL WHEN VENEZUELA'S AND IRAN'S OIL IS OUT OF THE MARKET
 

sndef888

Senior Member
Registered Member
Honestly, I think every problem in the world can be solved by energy. Water shortage can be solved by desalination, climate change can be solved by carbon capture, food shortage can be solved by high tech farming All you need is the energy to power all of them

IF we manage to invent fusion reactors, all our problems will go away
 

quantumlight

Junior Member
Registered Member
Yes the outcome is very pessimistic, but not unrealistic. I'm afraid we are going to hit the wall very hard and starting from this decade, things will spiral out of control completely. Brace yourselves!
Let's explore the dynamic between energy and money.

Money is just a human construct, a symbolic proxy representation of energy and resources accumulated and available for our use and consumption. In basic terms money is merely a tally or way of counting and accounting for the resources, goods, services in existence and it facilitates trade (vs the more crude barter system of trade) as well as it can be used as allocation of resources (through budget constraints etc)

For the longest time gold was the gold standard but due to expensive wars that the US engaged in after WWII such as the Vietnam and Korean wars the gold bars went missing in the Fort Knox which turned up empty and Nixon was forced to take the US off the gold standard... before this moment in the 1970's the US dollar was backed by gold, in fact the paper dollar /cash was really just a "IOU" note that you could trade it for its equivalent amount in real gold. In essence, paper money was just a certified deposit of gold that you can trade in to the bank to get it back in gold as paper money was more convenient to carry around vs actual gold bullion or gold bars etc...

Nowadays the USD and many other currencies are entirely fiat and not backed by anything real other than faith of the government and the military might aka OPEC "protection" racket...

But if we take a step back and look at earth as an isolated system, a 3D island in the vastness of infinite space... we see that in this closed system we can take a snapshot of a moment in time and measure and account for all the energy and resources and products and services in existence worldwide on the entire globe at any point in time... this is the total net worth of our globalized world economy...

And then if we take into account all the different money, all the different currencies including government backed and even the new bitcoin/blockchain digital cryptocurrencies and put all of these different forms of money into one total sum aggregate then we come to all the total money that exists in the world that is in circulation etc...

If we divide the sum total of all the real energy and resources and products and services in existence worldwide by the sum total aggregate of all money that exists in the world at any moment in time then we get a good estimate and rough idea of the purchasing power of money, even if different baskets and different currencies vary in terms of the energy and resources they will actually fetch... but the big picture is more or less ascertainable... in the absence of discover, extraction, production of additional wealth and resources if all we are doing is printing more money, then all that serves is to dilute the purchasing power of existing money already in circulation... this is exactly the case of bitcoin and the invention of all other new forms of cryptocurrency in which we use up real energy to "mine" for digital coins that have absolutely no intrinsic value and cannot be used to power society

Currently the US Federal minimum wage is still at $7.25 per hour, while the US national average of gasoline is at $2.873 per gallon. A gallon of gas contains about 131.9 million joules of energy, or the equivalent of nearly two weeks of manual human muscle power and labor, given that 131.9 mega joules is about 31,491 calories and the typical human male consumes 2,600 calories per day. The minimum wage being a metric of the lower bound of what an hour of work is worth – even if it is merely putting groceries into a plastic sack at the checkout counter – and the average price per gallon of gasoline being a standard measure of the price, cost or value of one of modern societies main energy commodities, the implications are indeed far-fetching. This means that even at the most basic levels of compensation, compared to our stone-age brethren, we now enjoy at a minimum at least a 244 times energy multiple factor equivalent. To illustrate one example, the average U.S. mpg is around 24.9, and so an hour’s worth of work at minimum wage equates to approximately 2.52 gallons of gas, which is enough to move an average motor vehicle 62.8 miles. Since the average car can reach max-continuous speeds of 63 mph or faster, this means an hour’s worth of work from even the lowest paid members of our society will transport and propel him or her at 63 miles per hour for one entire hour for a total of 63 miles traversed. It would take days if not weeks for a person to naturally walk 63 miles, and it would take weeks if not months for that same person to push a car the same distance of 63 miles.

In essence even a worker in US society even at the bottom rungs of the ladder have the equivalent of 244 (an small army) of "energy slaves" that are powering them and making their lives more productive and their standards of living more wealthy... without this energy multiplier factor (current at least x244+) and we had to go back to pre-augmentation days of living without the supplement of high EROEI hydrocarbons then commuting across town for a job would no longer be possible, most people wouldn't be able to propel themselves up the dozens of flights of stairs to their office without the use of elevators, and entire metroplexes wouldn't exists nor would live in them continue to be viable at scale without the use of energy dense sources to afford centralized Air conditioning during the hot summers or gas heating during the frigid winters, to mention nothing of the fact that without the high EROEI powering society there would not be running water, safe drinking water/filtered, and the necessities of modern life would immediately collapse....

The basic crux of the matter is that without the existence of cheap and abundant high density energy (Higher EROEI hydrocarbons) we as a society lose the energy multiplier factor that we have come to enjoy and expect, and thus with this our "money" will also commensurately lose the vast majority of its value and purchasing power (basically the ability to do "work" (physics) which money is merely a token/tally accounting of that)... without oil and other high density energy sources the high schooler working part time sacking bags at the Kroger won't be able to trade one hour of his time/labor for nearly two weeks of muscle power to enjoy a 244 times energy multiple factor equivalent. He will no longer be able to work for a summer and save up enough money to take an overseas vacation since there will be no oil to power the jet engines that used to take three months to reach by wind and sail...

When cheap energy is gone, or when we reach the point of inflection of point of diminishing returns as we fall down the EROEI energy cliff, then likewise all of our money will lose the vast majority of its purchasing money as hyperinflation invariably takes over... the more central government tries to print out of this the faster the collapse will occur since this is nothing more than shuffling chairs on the deck of the sinking Titanic or akin also to opening the refrigerator door to try to cool down the rest of the home... (Which thermodynamically only serves to make the matter that much worse)
 

quantumlight

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This morning I saw an article on RT talking about how all the digital cryptocurrencies in existence today if added up amount to about 2 trillion dollars market cap.

While blockchain is indeed a novel technology, bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies are all at their core nothing more than distributed peer to peer digital general ledgers. They are nothing more than merely glorified bookkeeping entries in the digital age, where the verification of transactions is distributed and stored amongst nodes (multiple independent CPU/process/computers) and the communication/transfer of that money is done by leveraging the Internet for transport of information.

The invention of bitcoin and all other digital cryptocurrencies does absolutely nothing to increase the energy/resources on earth, and the digital "mining" of more of these new cryptocurrency coins does not produce nor unlock any additional energy/resources for our use. Unlike mining for coal or mining for uranium in which we expend real energy in order to get a positive return on that energy (when we use coal to power electricity plants or uranium/etc to power nuclear plants etc) the mining of bitcoin also expends real energy (worldwide more than the energy consumed by some small nations in fact) but whilst producing absolutely ZERO energy in return!

In fact bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are pure net energy sinks in that they consume lots of real energy (in fact the hash difficulty increases exponentially!) without producing any useable energy in return! Even the ethanol scam of basically converting oil to corn and then reconverting that corn back to fuel produces some energy in return although it is a net energy sink, but bitcoin is a pure scam in the sense that it uses up lots of real energy and produces absolutely zero energy /resources in return!

In fact all bitcoin serves to do is dilute the supply of all the already existing total monies already in circulation and thus thereby devaluing the purchasing power of all other currencies...

In this regard bitcoin is exactly like the Tulip mania of the 1600's in which at the peak a single tulip (or rather even a tulip future/contract) could fetch an entire house! Obviously the tulip didn't make society wealthier, it was just a speculation/hype instrument used in the pyramid scheme and that is what we are doing right now with bitcoin... Bitcoin will never make society wealthier and all it ever does is a reallocation/transfer of wealth from future suckers aka bag holders to those who got in earlier than them, a classic multilevel pyramid scheme...

But bitcoin also serves to mask the symptoms of the infinite printing of fiat currency and it is meant to forestall the impeding implosion of the US dollar... as more and more suckers become digital millionaires or even cryptobillionaries via the rise of bitcoin and other alt coins, like all pyramid schemes it encourages the latecomers, the average everyday joe six packs to forego spending their dollars and "invest" them into bitcoin, having the net effect in society of discouraging real consumption and encouraging holding phantom wealth that will disappear once the elites have converted all their dollars into other real assets like gold, silver, land, buying up other real commodities and real assets while the average joe is "HOLDDING" a bunch of worthless digital coins that can be bubble popped at moment’s notice by something as simple as NSA releasing a long held zero-day or secret vulnerability in the blockchain security cipher...

Gold was created in the belly of a dying star during its supernova.... we cannot create gold. (we can in very tiny amounts using particle accelerators but that’s like saying sending trash into space is a way to solve the landfill problem here on earth) however those that say bitcoin is capped at 21 million total bitcoins and thus this is what defines its "value" do not realize that bitcoin has NO intrinsic value whatsoever as a digital distributed bookkeeping entry and that in fact right now its speculative value is only propped up by the "social networking effect" and in reality there is no limit to the infinite number of other alt coins that can be created based on the same underlining blockchain protocol....

Bitcoin is just the newest kid on the block and I believe its purpose is to be a absorber of excess USD and to create a culture of "investing" into this intrinsically worthless scheme in order to mask the USD QE infinity problem of hyperinflation and to suck up the excess dollars whereby creating the sort of lock-in effect of artificially encouraging the common everyday sheeple to voluntarily and unwittingly forego purchasing/consumption of real goods/products and thus hiding the peak oil / supply chain problems by via global "demand destruction" as the bitcoin ponzi grows ever more exponentially larger...

Rich people "invest" most of their money and only consume a tiny fraction of their income as the 99.99% of it is disposable money they will never spend/convert to actual resources... the problem is but as we slide down the slope of Olduvia Gorge and fall off the EROEI energy cliff it will also require and also take the masses to also reduce their real consumption in order to adjust to this new world order of scarcity for all... and what better way to have vaccine passports and COVID shutdown as the reset/circuit breakers in a post-PeakOil world, after all when push comes to shove would you rather use oil to grow food or use oil for overseas trips and cruise vacations? The elites of the world cannot just openly admit to this new reality so they have to take advantage of the 'crisis' in order to reshape the postPeakOil world and I believe bitcoin is another fabrication for the purpose of cleverly getting the masses/sheeple to willingly defer consumption and to "invest" in this new scheme thereby masking (for now) the collapse in real standards of living and the reduction in worldwide CONsumption...
 
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sequ

Captain
Registered Member
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

This morning I saw an article on RT talking about how all the digital cryptocurrencies in existence today if added up amount to about 2 trillion dollars market cap.

While blockchain is indeed a novel technology, bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies are all at their core nothing more than distributed peer to peer digital general ledgers. They are nothing more than merely glorified bookkeeping entries in the digital age, where the verification of transactions is distributed and stored amongst nodes (multiple independent CPU/process/computers) and the communication/transfer of that money is done by leveraging the Internet for transport of information.

The invention of bitcoin and all other digital cryptocurrencies does absolutely nothing to increase the energy/resources on earth, and the digital "mining" of more of these new cryptocurrency coins does not produce nor unlock any additional energy/resources for our use. Unlike mining for coal or mining for uranium in which we expend real energy in order to get a positive return on that energy (when we use coal to power electricity plants or uranium/etc to power nuclear plants etc) the mining of bitcoin also expends real energy (worldwide more than the energy consumed by some small nations in fact) but whilst producing absolutely ZERO energy in return!

In fact bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are pure net energy sinks in that they consume lots of real energy (in fact the hash difficulty increases exponentially!) without producing any useable energy in return! Even the ethanol scam of basically converting oil to corn and then reconverting that corn back to fuel produces some energy in return although it is a net energy sink, but bitcoin is a pure scam in the sense that it uses up lots of real energy and produces absolutely zero energy /resources in return!

In fact all bitcoin serves to do is dilute the supply of all the already existing total monies already in circulation and thus thereby devaluing the purchasing power of all other currencies...

In this regard bitcoin is exactly like the Tulip mania of the 1600's in which at the peak a single tulip (or rather even a tulip future/contract) could fetch an entire house! Obviously the tulip didn't make society wealthier, it was just a speculation/hype instrument used in the pyramid scheme and that is what we are doing right now with bitcoin... Bitcoin will never make society wealthier and all it ever does is a reallocation/transfer of wealth from future suckers aka bag holders to those who got in earlier than them, a classic multilevel pyramid scheme...

But bitcoin also serves to mask the symptoms of the infinite printing of fiat currency and it is meant to forestall the impeding implosion of the US dollar... as more and more suckers become digital millionaires or even cryptobillionaries via the rise of bitcoin and other alt coins, like all pyramid schemes it encourages the latecomers, the average everyday joe six packs to forego spending their dollars and "invest" them into bitcoin, having the net effect in society of discouraging real consumption and encouraging holding phantom wealth that will disappear once the elites have converted all their dollars into other real assets like gold, silver, land, buying up other real commodities and real assets while the average joe is "HOLDDING" a bunch of worthless digital coins that can be bubble popped at moment’s notice by something as simple as NSA releasing a long held zero-day or secret vulnerability in the blockchain security cipher...

Gold was created in the belly of a dying star during its supernova.... we cannot create gold. (we can in very tiny amounts using particle accelerators but that’s like saying sending trash into space is a way to solve the landfill problem here on earth) however those that say bitcoin is capped at 21 million total bitcoins and thus this is what defines its "value" do not realize that bitcoin has NO intrinsic value whatsoever as a digital distributed bookkeeping entry and that in fact right now its speculative value is only propped up by the "social networking effect" and in reality there is no limit to the infinite number of other alt coins that can be created based on the same underlining blockchain protocol....

Bitcoin is just the newest kid on the block and I believe its purpose is to be a absorber of excess USD and to create a culture of "investing" into this intrinsically worthless scheme in order to mask the USD QE infinity problem of hyperinflation and to suck up the excess dollars whereby creating the sort of lock-in effect of artificially encouraging the common everyday sheeple to voluntarily and unwittingly forego purchasing/consumption of real goods/products and thus hiding the peak oil / supply chain problems by via global "demand destruction" as the bitcoin ponzi grows ever more exponentially larger...

Rich people "invest" most of their money and only consume a tiny fraction of their income as the 99.99% of it is disposable money they will never spend/convert to actual resources... the problem is but as we slide down the slope of Olduvia Gorge and fall off the EROEI energy cliff it will also require and also take the masses to also reduce their real consumption in order to adjust to this new world order of scarcity for all... and what better way to have vaccine passports and COVID shutdown as the reset/circuit breakers in a post-PeakOil world, after all when push comes to shove would you rather use oil to grow food or use oil for overseas trips and cruise vacations? The elites of the world cannot just openly admit to this new reality so they have to take advantage of the 'crisis' in order to reshape the postPeakOil world and I believe bitcoin is another fabrication for the purpose of cleverly getting the masses/sheeple to willingly defer consumption and to "invest" in this new scheme thereby masking (for now) the collapse in real standards of living and the reduction in worldwide CONsumption...
You should save your posts in this thread for future posting or turning it into a nice comprehensive article. The comparisons you make here makes the whole EROEI very understandable for a beginner and especially your take on crypto is very refreshing and aligns with my own conclusions about it. It really does suck 'money' away from the late comers and brings it to the oldies, while being a huge net energy sink! But for how long this crypto-pyramid scheme will last is anyone's guess. I sure don't have a clue when it is going to collapse.

And lol to the 'perpetual 30 years in the future' fusion enthusiasts. If energy comes almost unlimited to us through these exotic and advanced technologies, do they really think that suddenly the whole world is going to come together around the bonfire and sing kumbaya or are they going to take out the full advantage out of this huge surplus energy to further their geopolitical ambitions with all the bad and nasty consequences? It reminds me of the post Hiroshima and Nagasaki era where the world would never be the same again.
 
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