It’’s fundamentally different from the stock market. The stock market is about ownership of a productive asset, a company. Bitcoin produces nothing. It’s a nominal store of value, like gold, but completely intangible. It’s worth exactly the faith that people have in it, no more or less. There is no liquidation value as there is for a stock. You are not left with something in your hand, as you are with gold.

In short, it’s bullshit. It’s always been bullshit. I’ll never be convinced otherwise.

Starlink delivers low-latency broadband internet to virtually any point on Earth without requiring local ground infrastructure, the build out of which is high capex. That’s a unique competitive edge and the economics of AI and solar are completely different.

Some of this is fair, and some of it is a little bit silly. For example, what water? Neither solar nor BESS use water for cooling or steam processes etc. Operationally, they use practically none. Just the occasional bit of cleaning. And as for lawsuits, despite all the fuss and some prominent examples, lawsuits are not an inevitable part of building ground-based solar farms even in the US, where most are built without any such issues.

Elon has a long history of suggesting obvious technobullshit to credulous audiences. This is clearly one of those.

Trump is a moron, but I’m sorry to say he isn’t actually suffering from dementia. Or at least, he has no shown no meaningful clinical signs of it. How do I know? Well, I have a dear friend who is one of the UK’s most senior dementia specialists, and is far to the left, and I asked him about this. He said: “ Trump doesn’t have dementia and even if he does it’s not a helpful analytical frame”. It’s just wish fulfilment. Trump is showing some signs of age-related cognitive decline, but it’s not significant. Don’t believe me? Ask an AI for a brutal frank assessment. Ask several. You’ll be told the same. Ask a local dementia specialist and after a lecture about the impossibility of a professional diagnosis based purely on public observations, they’ll also say the same.

He’s an absolute idiot, very stupid (but also cunning), proudly ignorant, proudly bigoted, and completely vile. But not suffering from dementia.

The first EV with a sodium battery, whose range is basically impervious to the effects of coal, has just launched. Many more will follow

Well, the first sodium battery has just launched, and it has essentially no loss of winter range. The range isn’t yet enough for Canadian long journeys, but give it five years and it will be.

I just did a bit of digging. Ground-based solar panels cost about 20 to 50 cents per W. Space-based solar panels cost about 100 to 500 *dollars* per W.

Bonkers to think it would be cheaper to do this in space.

This is a completely different scale from Starlink -- orders of magnitude more compute and complexity. And the powergen is competing against ground-based solar.

What this really boils down to is that a space-based array only saves you money for a single component, the solar panels -- you need fewer of them for the same amount of power output. Everything else is more expensive. And guess what? Solar panels are cheap! They're so cheap that African families are buying their own and sticking them on their roofs so they can get reliable power. You're saving money on one of the cheapest components in a complex system. The most optimistic projection is that you can get away with one panel in space for every 40 on the ground. If a panel cost a million bucks, that would be very worthwhile. But a panel for a US solar farm is about 600W, and you can buy one for about 100 bucks! And none of this accounts for the fact that a ground-based solar panel will be much cheaper to engineer than a space-based panel -- about one or two *orders of magnitude* cheaper, because the operating environment is so much more extreme -- vacuum, radiation, crazy temperature swings, no engineer visits, etc. That immediately eats away the entire cost-based advantage of space-based AI compute.

This is a complete boondoggle of an idea.

Also, you ignored the cost and additional launches for sending the complete AI compute up into space, including the very massy chips, the radiators for cooling, and the structural trusses for linking it to the solar arrays. Because all of that power is going to become heat which must be radiated away. Plus there’s the chip hardening costs and indeed system hardening (micrometeroids). At least 100 further Starship launches, I reckon.

Meantime, a solar farm in the southern US that can deliver 1GW would cost about $1bn, and the battery bank another $1bn

Buttons are better, but dials or levers are better yet. Hitting a stupid toggle button that’s indistinguishable from the rest of the row of toggle buttons multiple times to change the temperature is just a stupid idea. I’m looking at you, Mercedes.

Of course. I'm just saying that trenching will still be the biggest component of costs, followed by site prep (eg upgrading electricity rooms) and hardware.

Smart for them, shit for consumers. Are you saying they shouldn't rely on Visa, Mastercard and Amex too? And why does this apply only to payment processing? Surely they shouldn't be dependent on third parties for any of their critical business functions, then? No use of third party logistics, heat and light and electricity and water and property assets and refrigeration and of course all the actual stuff they sell.

Wait it out, I guess. Supply will ramp up in response to heightened demand, some of the AI players will fall away, but we’re a long way off consumers deciding they don’t want a new phone every so often. It may end up with overcapacity in the supply chain meaning Apple gets to squeeze suppliers harder a few years down the line. I’m sure all the participants are busy running a ton of sensitivity analyses on different scenarios as they try to play this out.

I meant the biggest expense that will fall to the charger operators, rather than to the system as a whole.

I just don’t buy the argument that the cables supplying store power etc will be conveniently located to enable charger deployment just by drilling a few holes. You have to run the charger cables from the site’s electrical room or transformer, and that’s going to be a distance of dozens to hundreds of metres. I wish it weren’t the case, but it really is.