4 Bitcoin Bull Markets: Big Lessons to Learn

John Baker September 7, 2018

Great article Juan….thanks

John Mahler September 7, 2018

I am trying to find an exchange on which I can purchase EOS. Bittrex has a coin NEOS but I am not sure if that is the same as EOS. Any data on this? John Mahler

Roger GARRAMORE September 8, 2018

Juan,
Great insight, thank you.

Bill Oliver September 8, 2018

Great article. We need more.

Bob Schubring September 11, 2018

Lyndon Johnson and Charles DeGaulle had a fundamental dispute over how to fight the Cold War, that led to a currency crisis once. At issue was an invention by two US Air Force materials scientists, who had devised a high-temperature ceramic with the same thermal expansion behavior as a particular high-temperature metal alloy. Metals have good tensile strength but ceramics, when pulled in tension, tend to shatter…so a ceramic-coated metal, if the ceramic and metal expanded and contracted with temperature and the ceramic didn’t tend to break off the metal, would be useful in making jet engine turbine blades, because they could be put directly in contact with flames. The USAF scientists wanted to build turbine engines that, by exposing the turbines to the high temperatures found inside flames, would attain higher efficiencies than previous turbine engines did. Improved fuel efficiency would enable aircraft to operate over longer distances without refueling.

The C in C-Level dispute arose, over what to do with this tactical advantage.

LBJ favored applying it to a supersonic bomber design, the B-70. Conceived in the early 1950s as soon as Bell’s X-1 rocket plane proved that supersonic flight was feasible, the B-70 was meant to have supersonic capabilities for use in eluding Soviet fighter aircraft and delivering a precision payload of highly-toxic VX nerve gas bombs to the deep underground bunkers in which Soviet commanders would be commanding the ballistic missile war going on overhead. The goal of the design was to keep war off the Soviet list of desirable options.

Charles DeGaulle, who had actually seen an economic war waged during the buildup to Nazi occupation of France, and during the occupation itself, saw the USAF scientists’ invention entirely differently. If there was a technology that made turbine engines more fuel-efficient, putting that technology to work in the civilian economy to boost productivity, would make the Cold War survivable over the long term. DeGaulle saw the strategic threat as a Soviet siege of the Free World, that would slowly starve us of capital until we surrendered, whilst LBJ thought in terms of blitzkrieg. France had lost the Fascist economic siege in the 1930s. France had the funds to build the Maginot Line of concrete forts and tank traps that kept their German border secure, but lacked the money to extend it over their entire land border with other countries. In May of 1940, the Maginot Line performed as intended, deterring German attack. The trouble was that Belgium hadn’t taken the Nazi threat seriously and found itself invaded one morning, by German troops who marched across Belgian territory into France, circling around the Maginot Line. (French general Henri Petain, who was then President, ordered his troops to withdraw from the Maginot Line and march south, where an Italian army was also invading France, apparently as part of a secret Hitler-Mussolini pact that would divide France between German and Italian occupiers. Petain defeated the Italians, but an outnumbered British force that remained in the north, had to be evacuated at Dunkirk. France preserved a shell of a government by agreeing to let occupying Germans occupy the north, while maintaining a disarmed French state in the south that governed the country from Vichy, but allowed the Germans to make all the important policy decisions for France. A minority still think Petain was a hero. DeGaulle publicly denounced Petain as a traitor. And the real lesson DeGaulle came away with, was that the Maginot Line would have worked, if France had only been able to fund it’s construction to protect their entire border, not just the border with Germany. Hence his focus on prevailing in an economic war with the Soviets.)

The problem Charles DeGaulle had, was to make his protests known in Washington. He used the only peaceable means at his disposal: He attacked the US dollar, by redeeming dollars for gold. After demonstrating that he was serious, DeGaulle found allies at the Atomic Energy Commission, where there grew to be efforts to promote a High Temperature Gas-Cooled Nuclear Reactor (HTGR), that would have higher thermal efficiency than today’s steam-powered nuclear plants. The trouble with the HTGR idea, is that it introduced a new materials challenge, of making the turbine blades radiation-resistant. The hope, initially, was that the French/AEC science effort would independently find, and publish about, some other metal/ceramic combination almost as good as the one developed by the USAF scientists, and someone would then proclaim, “We can use this new material in combustion engines, without waiting for nuclear technology to evolve further!”. LBJ’s secret B-70 program would stay secret.

Keeping anything with that many moving parts running, is difficult. France repeatedly needed to attack the dollar, to show their seriousness about getting advanced gas turbine technology into civilian hands. The B-70 prototypes never actually flew with engines sufficiently powerful to run them properly, for lack of development funding. One prototype was destroyed in a crash.

Eventually Georges Pompidou replaced Charles DeGaulle and worked out a deal with Dick Nixon. NASA, who tried to rescue the USAF B-70 program with a proposed civilian supersonic transport plane, cancelled funding for the transport plane on orders from the White House. For good measure, Nixon’s new EPA devised a scheme of shock-wave prevention, on a crackpot theory that sonic booms crack bird eggshells, and outlawed supersonic flight over most of US airspace. Further French attacks on the currency were stopped, by closing the Gold Window to everyone except the King of Saudi Arabia. And a secrecy agreement was worked out, under which USAF contractor GE would build parts of a working turbofan jet engine (namely the special flame-resistant parts) and a French company would build the more-conventional parts, resulting in a high-efficiency turbofan engine for slower-moving airliners. The French company grew into Airbus. Boeing adopted the engine design for it’s popular 737 jetliner.

Now that the high-efficiency combustion engine technology exists, it’s making inroads on our power grid, as well as in our skies. Most new power plants built in the US over the past decade, use high-efficiency gas turbines and fire natural gas, which is rather cheap. Commonly they achieve 51% efficiency. The best efficiency possible with older steam plants was 45%. China, where natural gas is scarce and costly, has begun building coal gasification plants, adapting high-efficiency gas turbines to burn a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that’s made from coal, gaining more electrical energy per ton of coal and keeping the turbine exhaust free of soot. (A problem in China is that it’s difficult to throttle a gasifier down, during low-power demand periods. So the new clean power plants run constantly to cover the base electric load, and older steam plants that generate a lot of airborne soot and ash, throttle up to produce additional power to cover peak electric demand. This results in dirty air in Beijing and elsewhere.)

A lot of that dirty air is being made to keep Bitcoin mining machines operating.

Sensibly there ought to be some sort of arbitrage possible, that pays China’s Bitcoin miners to power off some of their equipment during peak electric-load periods, enabling the dirty power plants not to operate.

Gerda Groemig September 18, 2018

The fact that the technology of other cryptocurrencies are – as you say – more advanced then
Bitcoin, why are still thinking that Bitcoin will be the leading cryptocurrency among the top
20 – and being within banking in some sort why is Ripple so very low in it’s price – looks nearly like a ‘penny’ stock amongst the crytos and should be a good start for a very small investor –
with patience – or could it be wiped out totally and one would loose everyting – never mind the
low price now – knowing that penny stock’s can go bust instantly ?