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I read the other day that China is booting out its Bitcoin miners because they are using too much dirty energy. Where are they going? Apparently, to Texas, where wind and solar energy are cheap and the government doesn’t give a shit about anything that matters. (I have to believe some are moving to Oklahoma!, where the wind come sweepin’ down the plain.)
The average cost of something depends on volume, so there’s a chicken-and-egg dynamic for many new technologies: they are too expensive only because not enough people want them, yet. Green energy is cheaper in Texas than elsewhere in the US, but it is nowhere near as cheap as it could be if everyone were using it. What we need are more users.
Pornography has long been a lever that pries open the door to new communication technologies. I’ve already forgotten the name of the decoders one used (I hear) in the 1980’s to send bawdy pictures as ASCII text over 1200 baud lines. Considering how much bandwidth Porn uses, one has to believe that the market for smut played a serious part in bringing broadband to the masses. I don’t want to put down pornography as a useful good, but I think we can agree that it is not universally appreciated in the way that, say, a cure for cancer would be. Yet, that picture-decoder thing was not…