Suggested readings week 26/2022
Bitcoin energy efficency
Bitcoin mining consumes too much energy. Or not?
We demonstrate that Bitcoin consumes 56 times less energy than the classical system, and that even at the single transaction level, a PoW transaction proves to be 1 to 5 times more energy efficient.
This paper describes a measure and compare set of rules based on a conservative approach, with surprising results.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4125499
Autonomous legislation
There's a push for autonomously driving vehicles in public roads, as an evolution of mobility as a service.
Not everyone is happy with the promise for more sustainable use cases of cars and small buses, namely big traditional cars manufacters that would prefer a slow transition to assisted drive first, in order to gain time and resources for full autonomous.
The practical effects are an apparent rising concern for security of vehicles and the publication of several new rules for cars approval, and the difficult path toward a framework of laws for autonomous driving in Europe and United States where specific laws and orders are now in place in several states.
Time to act: the age of awareness
Even if carbon emissions are halted today, the climate will continue to warm, with profound impacts on the Earth system.
The leading magazine Science dedicated the last weekly issue to climate change and how to avoid it, in another disperate move to getting attention from politics and people.
This is time to act for everybody, not too late but already too late. There's no more any doubt about the origin and consequences of fossil fuel emissions and other dangerous processes. This is the time of awareness, and the time of action must follow immediately.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add3698
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add5094
https://www.science.org/content/article/can-farm-and-food-waste-power-tomorrow-s-airplanes