The problem bitcoin/blockchain solves is how can two people who don't trust each other transfer money without a mutually acceptable 3'd party acting as some kind of broker or facilitator?
This is only a problem between a criminal and the victim.
What do you mean by "full fuel cycle"?
breeder reactors
Solar is the largest and most scalable energy source available.
Then why is growth in the solar power market so slow? I guess there's more than one way to interpret "scalable". There's scaling up the industry, and there's scaling the application from pocket calculators to gigawatt power stations. Sure, we can scale down solar just fine for calculators and wristwatches but if we don't solve some fundamental problems the solar power industry isn't going to be growing all that quickly.
Solar PV has a supply problem with silicon, rare earth elements, and other materials. Solar thermal can borrow skilled labor from other industries but given the poor energy return on investment the people in those industries will be more attracted to the higher returns on wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear fission.
Scalable, as in time and total available.
Storing energy collected from renewables in hydrocarbon fuels is a much better idea.
Ramping fuel synthesis up and down as electrical demands vary is not likely to happen. Hydrocarbon fuels will be very price sensitive and so the plants used to produce the fuels will want to operate full steam ahead to keep costs low. There may be some grid storage as part of the process with the hydrogen used as storage as well as raw material for fuel synthesis. Perhaps in extreme cases synthesized methane would be burned for electricity. I see thermal energy storage and pumped hydro dominating grid storage. Synthesized hydrocarbons generally will be too valuable to burn for electricity, instead it would be used for transportation fuels, and non-energy uses like lubricants.
The solar power industry has been subsidized heavily for decades and it is still a rounding error in the total energy produced worldwide. People taking energy issues seriously are not going to bother with the low EROEI, high resource requirements, intermittency, and dilute nature of solar power. They will look at hydro, onshore wind, geothermal, and nuclear fission. Those we can scale up quickly and get high returns on investment.
I have no problem with nuclear fission, as long as we are building full fuel cycle reactors. The main point I was trying to make, is that electricity is really only useful at the time it is produced or collected. I think we should be building plants that can pull CO2 out the air and store it in a hydrocarbon, I don't care where you get the electricity/energy from.
We are not a clone.
