Cryptocurrency Wipeout Deepens To $640 Billion As Ether Leads Declines (bloomberg.com) 174
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The cryptocurrency bear market plumbed a fresh 10-month low on Monday as Bitcoin's biggest rival tumbled and U.S. regulators suspended trading in two securities linked to digital assets. Ether, the second-largest virtual currency, slumped 11 percent from its level at 5 p.m. New York time on Friday, according to Bloomberg composite pricing. Bitcoin declined 2.4 percent, while the market capitalization of digital assets tracked by CoinMarketCap.com shrank to about $197 billion -- down almost $640 billion from its January peak. Cryptocurrencies have declined for five of the past six weeks amid concern that a broader adoption of digital assets will take longer than some had anticipated. That worry was underscored over the weekend after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission temporarily suspended trading in two exchange-traded notes linked to cryptocurrencies and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin told Bloomberg that the days of explosive growth in the blockchain industry have likely come and gone.
Re:I have a much better store of value (Score:5, Insightful)
Hard to eat silver, and it makes a lousy medium to a blacksmith. You're better off with pennies and a book on how to make penicillin, gunpowder, and alcohol.
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You hired the wrong kind of smith, get a Silversmith for silver, like Paul Revere,
Re: I have a much better store of value (Score:2)
How do you make alcohol out of pennies?
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LOL you work the pennies into tools to use to make the still to ferment and distill the alcohol, to trade for food and possibly power a tractor, or disinfect a wound or something :)
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Alloys. They are often stronger than their components.
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What the heck will farmer Joe want with silver ? When you need food and water cash, or precious metals suddenly take a back seat to barter and survival skills. If it is 'just' a financial bubble burst you may very well be right. If the fall is greater into civil disorder then your cash, whether precious metal or a fiat paper currency will likely be very useless. Water, medicine, firearms, kerosene, gasoline, bio diesel will all be much more valuable.
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Water, medicine, firearms, kerosene, gasoline, bio diesel will all be much more valuable.
Gasoline spoils within a year or less (even when stabilized) and produces varnishes which will deposit on fuel system components and cause them to fail. Diesel can successfully be kept for around three years, if a water remover and a biocide are used. Not sure about kerosene... but a quick search suggests it's similar to diesel, though it won't freeze or gel like diesel will.
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Correct about the Gas, and Diesel. I was more thinking about the knowledge and equipment to produce Kerosene and Biodiesel. Petrol diesel and gas production require a large and intense industry, the other two can be made low tech and in small batches.
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The difference is ethanol being added to the gasoline. Ethanol is hygroscopic. That means you're going to end up with water in your gasoline, not good. In some parts of the US you can still get ethanol free gasoline, especially marinas.
Ethanol free gasoline with fuel stabilizer will last just like it did back in the old days.
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That's not a very diverse portfolio, you should at least have some Beanie Babies in there...
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And NRFB Furbies. They're gonna make a hit return really soon now!
"Loss" (Score:3, Informative)
The $640 billion loss that is being reported is against the massive gains late last year. The money appeared out of nowhere when everybody thought a crytocoin was worth something and is disappears to nowhere when everybody realised that they were wrong.
Sure, some people bought in when the market was high and have lost their shirts. Most of the losses though are from people who paid $300 for their coin years ago and now it is only worth $9000 instead of $25000.
Re:"Loss" (Score:5, Insightful)
CItation needed. Especially since literally everyone would sell you their coin for $9000 at this point.
Re:"Loss" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. It'll come back up. Just like Cabbage Patch dolls and Beanie Babies did!
Wanna buy half a bitcoin for $4500?
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Bitcoin is STILL up from where it was last year this time. ie $6300 vs $2000. Give me a break. As someone who has been accepting Bitcoin since 2011 I can say it's basically gone up and the dips don't hurt provided you aren't a total dumb ass. I continue spend my crypto like nothing has happened because in the long run I can't lose. Even in the short run I can lose and regularly buy the stuff even as it goes down. You can say 33% at saveatpurse.com on anything with near anything that has prime shipping on Am
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Found the person who mortgaged his house to buy BCs.
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No you didn't. You found a person who has been using crypto for years, makes six figures, has had multiple successful businesses, and even closed one for no other reason than to migrate to a state over his desire to see to it there is a last bastion of hope for those who would rather not be a mere slave of the majority, but rather a free man. A Free State Project participant, Shire Society, early mover, and radio co-host of the largest libertarian radio show in the world (syndicated on 200 stations, satelli
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No you didn't. You found a person who has been using crypto for years, makes six figures, has had multiple successful businesses, and
- yet remains an anonymous coward with zero credibility.
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Sure. I'm the Pope, by the way.
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No, I'm a Discordian Pope. All hail Eris.
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You're an idiot if you think the way to making money is just buying bitcoins and letting them sit. Once you are invested you basically day trade like normal stocks. I'm honestly amazed that the neck beards here are so anti crypto currency. You'd think the ones wearing foil under their fedoras would be all over an anonymous currency system (which Bitcoin is NOT).
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You'd think the ones wearing foil under their fedoras would be all over an anonymous currency system (which Bitcoin is NOT).
That's the problem. We know.
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Studies in stocks have revealed that Day Trading does not yield better results than the "buy an index stock & hold it" approach..... except that you wasted a lot of time on trades, whereas the "hold it" person spent almost not time to earn the same amount of money.
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Applying hippopotamus sex behavior on ants doesn't quite work.
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CItation needed. Especially since literally everyone would sell you their coin for $9000 at this point.
Was looking at the price in AUD not USD. Same ratio applies though.
Re:"Loss" (Score:5, Insightful)
It's disingenuous to suggest there hasn't be a lot of actual loss.
I'd say the loss of planetary health due to the waste of energy, some portion of which was provided by fossil fuels, is significant.
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The real question... (Score:2)
...as always, is "Is it more a Pyramid or a Ponzi?"
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Price for a commodity (and bitcoin is one)
I fail to see how bitcoin can be called a commodity at all. Commodities are generally considered things with intrinsic value, useful in the physical world, such as grain, cattle, and other agricultural product, or mined goods like copper and lead.
Wikipedia categorizes commodities as "Hard" (gold, helium, oil are examples), "Soft" (grown such as rice and corn) or "Energy". Bitcoin falls into none of those categories.
Bitcoin, rather, is more of a financial instrument, investment, or value store. It has no va
Greater fool theory (Score:5, Insightful)
You bought a security with no inherent value, based on the idea that someone else would, for some reason, pay more for it than you did. It worked out for some people, didn't for others. But why would you think you had more than a 50/50 chance? (Very skillful traders can beat those odds by trading trends in price action and being extremely disciplined.)
Meanwhile, there are lots of assets and securities with real underlying value to trade. You can understand the value and even learn to anticipate changes in that value. Why not trade those instead?
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So ... I can spend Ethereum to mine Ethereum?
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Sure, but the server time has intinsic value, so the value of Ethereum won't drop below the market-value of the server time it's equivalent to. If it does, then anyone needing the server time benefits from buying Ethereum. So there's a natural pricing floor for Ethereum in a way that Bitcoin doesn't offer.
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You are aware that you're looking at a price floor in a market where that floor drops faster than the elevator in a 200 levels skyscraper, yes? And that processing time is curiously on par with the processing time required to mine more of the stuff.
In other words, funny as it may sound, that means that with this kind of inflation, you're better off holding Turkish Lira.
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You forget that it has this value only for transactions in Ether. If there are no such transactions, it has no value, and the server-time cannot be recovered. Hence even that aspect does not provide any real value, even if it may seems to at a first glance. That "natural pricing floor" is zero.
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But, but ... this cryptocurrency is new and magic!
Well, at least that is what I understand its proponents claim. Have yet to find any evidence for that.
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It's all greater fool. When GM went bankrupt, I couldn't trade my stock for a drill press or robot - only bondholders get to do that
Because GM value had gone down below zero and the bond holders had a contract. Other companies have positive values, so their stock has positive inherent value.
You seem to have developed an understanding based on one unusual thing that happened one time, disregarding everything else that happens every other time. That's a useful understanding for a specific set of extreme outlier events, but not for any other time. If you only want to be right once every 20 years, then I congratulate you on achieving tha
Re:Greater fool theory (Score:5, Insightful)
You bought a security with no inherent value, based on the idea that someone else would, for some reason, pay more for it than you did.
People can't stop thinking about cryptocurrency in terms of get-rich-quick, or even get-rich-period. Cryptocurrency is NOT ABOUT INVESTING, no more than Euros are about investing. Cryptocurrency is a transaction facilitator, the novel thing about it being that said transactions are beyond the control of the banking industry. Ah well; in the same way that lotteries are taxes on people who are bad at math, crypto has the apparent side effect of being a tax on people who are bad at finance. Having been harassed for being a nerd in middle school, I'm feeling a certain sanguinity about it all.
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It's a very risky transaction facilitator because the value is too volatile.
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* A huge % of the world is unbanked, and not allowed to participate in the stock market. Same goes for GICs, savings bonds. If Banks don't like you, for whatever reason you're cut out of having a stable place to put your money.
* I've been trying to buy a house on/off since 2013 - so far I haven't got a single serious offer for anyone to sell me one in a place I co
Somebody Load Me A Dime (Score:2)
The good news is that my Ethereum wallet has a virtual bobblehead in it. That's got to be worth something, right? I hope it's enough to pay for bus fare back to my parents' basement.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
Mining costs are the difference (Score:5, Interesting)
We have also now seen the limits of what crypto currencies can do and it looks like the existing banking infrastructure does it better...For now. Maybe a highly scalable proof of stake currency will be invented. Maybe one of this existing currencies can already securely do it. It's not going to be bitcoin though.
Speculation a Fools Errand (Score:3)
If you had of bought/made bitcoin for $1 and next week it went to $2.50.. then the value started sliding back, and you sold for $2: would have you patted yourself on the back for your 100% gain?
It could have been the case that when you sold for $2, it kept going down to zero.
The fact it went to $20k is a once in a generation fluke.
Speculation is a mugs game.
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The fact it went to $20k is a once in a generation fluke.
lol no, there's a sucker born every minute.
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The fact it went to (high number) is a once in a generation fluke
This has happened 3 times in Bitcoin's 10 year history. Not so much of a one time fluke now is it? People said this exact same sentence during the last two bubbles.
Re: Cheap per fundamentals (Score:1)
I think you misunderstand "intrinsic value."
Value is whatever someone is willing to pay for something.
Intrinsic value generally means something has inherent use (subjectively).
For example, this is why guns are actually a very popular investment vehicle and prices of them rise well above inflation: Because a gun and some bullets can have huge intrinsic value.
Or take a bottle of water. You crash land in the desert. You're walking 3 days straight, parched throat, how much are you going to pay for a bottle of w
To the mooooooon! (Score:2)
Meanwhile, Dogecoin is doing relatively well. It's down since yesterday up 300% form last month!
=Smidge=
There can be only one. (or two) (Score:2)
This judgement day for the shitcoins as been both predicted and expected for some time.
The interesting thing to watch is the relative performance of BTC and it's market dominance.
I continue to acquire BTC, and we'll see what the future brings.
Comment removed (Score:4)
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How to do really well in the cryptocurrency marketplace: Don't. Buy. The. Empty. Fucking. Bag.
I agree with what I interpret your advice to mean, which is "do not invest in cryptocurrency". I think it's sound advice.
I'll also make the point that despite that advice being sound, cryptocurrency is here to stay... not because there will be an endless stream of "investors" in it (there won't, at least not of significant volume), but because it will continue to enable decentralized transactions, an aspect which makes it both very useful and disruptive. Prediction: the only way cryptocurrency will ever
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I've been doing "decentralized transactions" all my life for decades, before cryptocurrency
it's a very bad solution (illiquid, volatile) looking for a problem
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While I expect cryptocurrencies to not disappear, what kills them is when the bounties earned are less than other uses for that kind of computing power. Thus an individual cryptocurrency could very easily effectively disappear as performance lags and volatility adds implicit costs, eaten by other cryptocurrencies and more valuable uses for the GPU cycles.
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U.S. dollar and stocks and bonds are also "imaginary thing without tangible value"
only works as long as everyone agrees to play the game; they are game tokens
that said, crytocurrencies are terrible as money: illiquid and hugely volatile. bad solution.
OH NOES!!!! (Score:2)
MUH TULI^C^C^ BUTTCOINS!
Chinese again (Score:2)
Remember folks.... (Score:1)
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How much did you lose?
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I lost about minus $15K so far. Damn you, crypto-currencies! /shakefist
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Does anyone else find it interesting that not one single person has ever lost money on cryptocurrencies? I mean, basic logic will tell you that there is someone out there who bought bitcoin at $16,000 thinking that it was going to $20,000, right? Not long ago, it went UP to $7k before going DOWN to $6k. Somebody's got to be taking a bath in there somewhere.
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What are the equations governing crypto-gravity?
mv = pq
and
Qd = F(d) + cP
Qs = F(s) + dP
Probably others but those are the main sets.
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that's what I call a fitting comparison!
Re: Well, duh (Score:1)
This times million. I made $25,000 just last week using cryotocurrency. Ot is unbeatable amazing investment guaranteed to return big cash to anyone who buys in. Just look at how many stories on slashdot.org there are about it, thats how you knw is safe investment for amazing future full of houses, cars and women.
Re:I think a lot of people have forgotten... (Score:4, Informative)
"The U.S. paper dollar is not backed by anything of value"
So you don't think the US government will collect taxes on US dollars or that the US standing army won' t stand for US's interests starting tomorrow?
US dollar is a fiat currency. US dollar is backed by something of value: USA itself.
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Indeed. The thing the cryptocurrency proponent forget (and that those trying to get the scam going conveniently omit) is how and why a fiat currency actually works. There is a large national bank and a national economy tied to it. Of course, it is complicated and market-manipulations in fiat currencies are possible. So are value declines (look at Turkey for a current example) and value increases. But in essence, there is a whole lot of real value tied to it and a whole lot of economic activity depending it
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Exactly.
In fact, many cryptocurrencies are designed to be anything but stable. Bitcoin is a prime example of this: since the total amount of coins that will be created is capped, and since the creation/mining of new coins gets more complex with time as the math required to do the mining gets more difficult, it means the cost of creating a bitcoin (as well as transaction cost) goes up with time, on its
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During Q2 2018, the price of electricity in South Korea was 126.089 South-Korean Won which was equivalent to 0.117 USD at the exchange rate at the time of collecting the data. During the same time, the world average price was 0.115 USD per kWh of electricity used.
From: https://www.globalenergyprices... [globalenergyprices.com]
So? Mining a coin in South Korea does not cost $20k ... with a little bit of thinking that would have been obvious to you.
if you want to mine cheap, get a solar panel, mine in north africa or in asia or au
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From your very own link:
I was going with the numbers used in the report (here [elitefixtures.com]) which they cl
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Wiki [wikipedia.org] uses numbers from 2016, so they're outdated now, but back then using more than 1001 kWh a month caused the price to hike up to 24 cents, or as much as 64 cents during peak demand times in the year (summer and midwinter). At those kinds of prices you're talking about more than 20 grand a coin.
A household where a guy is running a mining rack is not paying peak prices. It has a flat rate price like any other household.
So if you talk about industrial mining, haha, interesting word, that mig
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As far as I know a BTC is worth the amount of power you put into mining it.
After all it is sold for thousand times that money on a BTC exchange.
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What is actually going to happen is that the coins become so cheap that nobody cares anymore for the fixed costs of mining. Then the respective coin will be dead.
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All of the income earned in the United States--all those US Dollars--comes from selling services to consumers buying services. That means the annual GNI is equal to the amount of stuff produced and sold: it's backed by actual productivity.
People have some magical fantasy about a paper currency being backed by a fickle commodity which can explosively inflate or deflate as people corner the market or find a new gold mine. One day, your half-gram of gold is worth what last year's tenth-gram was worth, and
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"How does the US army standing for the US's interests help me and my dollars stand for my interests?"
Isn't it obvious? By insuring (for their own interests) that US dollar stay "real money". That is, a store of value, a medium of exchange and, because of the previous two, a unit of account.
"Can I use my dollar to compel a single US soldier to serve my interests?"
Paraphrasing Microsoft, what do you want to buy today? Surely you'll want to eat, maybe pay the rent or a ticket for a show... not a single US so
Death and Taxes (Score:1)
The U.S. paper dollar is not backed by anything of value.
The US dollar (paper or otherwise) is backed by something of power, the US state and that state's ability to raise taxes. Think of it as a share in a company with the exclusive monopoly to a business method that consists of legally taking a cut from everyone else's profit ... and then tell me it "is not backed by anything of value."
The U.S. dollar can be used to buy goods because it is accepted as a medium of exchange.
The reason it is accepted as
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Eternal growth! Say it with me, eternal growth! Fake it 'til you make it if you have to!
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That's sort of the goal; people generalize too much (yes, this coming from me).
You can't mine more and more oil, gold, or whatever forever. You run out eventually.
Your business can't grow forever. You run out of customers eventually, and become flat relative to consumer base.
Your economy, however...
Productivity is a matter of finding new ways to accomplish the same things by reducing the resources required. Human labor is the final resource: we don't pay iron deposits for their ore; we do pay human
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It turns out you can effectively increase productivity forever, or at least beyond limits we can identify. Productivity increases eventually necessitate the use of fewer expendable resources (less coal, more solar--you need a dyson sphere!),
Stop. Just stop. We not only have no idea how you would build a Dyson sphere, but we have no idea what you would build one out of even if you could magically summon up anything you wanted. Extrapolate those facts backwards and you will see that there are actual practical limits on what can be achieved, and we can reasonably identify them.
Our current sustainable level of productivity is something like 70% of our actual level of productivity. We're fucked.
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We not only have no idea how you would build a Dyson sphere, but we have no idea what you would build one out of even if you could magically summon up anything you wanted.
Of course not. When we invented the blast furnace, we could suddenly produce a quantity of iron requiring 84,000 hours of labor in a mere 200 hours; nobody had any earthly idea how to do such a thing until suddenly someone did. If memory serves, the same person invented an iron rolling technique immediately, which made rail travel possible--at the time, the equivalent of traveling from here to Mars Colony as a lower-middle-class family weekend trip.
We do know that a dyson sphere with 32%-efficient coll
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We do know that a dyson sphere with 32%-efficient collection (the efficiency of concentrating parabolic sterling engine solar collectors) would collect 13,000 trillion times the amount of electricity used on Earth today.
Yes, but it's like a space elevator in that we don't know of any materials which could actually be used to build one. Our understanding of physics itself does not permit it. If and when that changes, we can start talking about them as something other than fantasy. It's not science fiction without the science, and so far, there is only handwaving. Nothing we understood about physics precluded making a hotter furnace.
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It's not science fiction without the science, and so far, there is only handwaving. Nothing we understood about physics precluded making a hotter furnace.
You're trying to dispute solar power.
A dyson sphere is a superstructure with solar collectors driving heat engines. We can make metal structures, solar collectors, and the like. Nothing in the laws of physics precludes us from building a dyson sphere in the same way that nothing in the laws of physics precludes you from generating nuclear power in your basement: if you only had a piece of uranium (there's plenty and people are using it to generate nuclear power), you could.
Our understanding of physics itself does not permit it.
Economics doesn't permit it
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You're trying to dispute solar power.
You just failed reading comprehension. Solar power is not the part I have a problem with, and I made that quite clear.
Our understanding of physics itself does not permit it.
Economics doesn't permit it: it would be an enormous resource expenditure. It would pay itself back, but it's hard to start up.
It can be done incrementally, but it's still damned expensive.
Not only can't it be done incrementally, but it can't be done at all. We have no materials which can withstand the stresses involved.
I'm arguing that we will eventually reach the limits of terrestrial energy availability, and then we'll need a Dyson sphere.
This is so stupid I can't even. There are many lesser things we could do in between here and there, like solar power satellites. That already exceeds the limits of terrestrial energy availability.
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Not only can't it be done incrementally, but it can't be done at all. We have no materials which can withstand the stresses involved.
Then...
There are many lesser things we could do in between here and there, like solar power satellites.
Which could independently encircle the Sun and relay power around its horizon as such.
Which could link together into a ring, although that's problematic: orbits must be eccentric, and a spinning ring becomes unstable. You're going to get a giant ellipse. Material stresses aren't a problem; the matter of keeping a spinning ring or sphere from flying