Climate Change

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

The Wilkes Land crater may be of interest in that regard.

BTW, I modified the URL in the quoted portion to make it work...

Thanks!
EDIT: from the Wilkes artcile-

Plate reconstructions for the Permian–Triassic boundary place the putative crater directly antipodal to the Siberian Traps, and Frese et al. (2009) use the controversial theory that impacts can trigger massive volcanism at their antipodes to bolster their impact crater theory.[7]

[kladner]

From the Mantle Plume article I wandered into:

The impact hypothesis
In addition to these processes, impact events such as ones that created the Addams crater on Venus and the Sudbury Igneous Complex in Canada are known to have caused melting and volcanism. In the impact hypothesis, it is proposed that some regions of hotspot volcanism can be triggered by certain large-body oceanic impacts which are able to penetrate the thinner oceanic lithosphere, and flood basalt volcanism can be triggered by converging seismic energy focused at the antipodal point opposite major impact sites.[38] Impact-induced volcanism has not been adequately studied and comprises a separate causal category of terrestrial volcanism with implications for the study of hotspots and plate tectonics.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

The Wilkes Land crater may be of interest in that regard.

BTW, I modified the URL in the quoted portion to make it work...

Ha - I too-hastily used the URL of my local copy-on-disk of the Wikipedia page. Glad to hear the Antipodean hypothesis is not completely dead, even if inoperative within the particular context of the K-T impact.

[ewmayer]

Bitcoin Could Cost Us Our Clean-Energy Future | naked capitalism

I suppose the one silver lining to the above is that the BTC tulip-mania will be self-curing - and if major global commodities exchanges rushing to make markets in BTC-futures is any indicator, said cure will not be long in coming - because when the inevitable** price crash comes, there's likely gonna be an unprecedented worldwide sale on compute hardware.

** Said inevitability follows from simple arithmetic ... the crazy run-up of the past year, and especially the past month or so, is a direct result of a flood of late buy-at-any-price money into the market. Thus, as with the late great housing bubble (specifically the v1.0 one, to distinguish from the current global all-risk-assets bubble blown by the world's central banks flooding the globe with cheap money for the purpose of 'recovering' from the crash of the previous bubble via blowing another, even bigger, one), you have a relatively tiny % of a given speculative vehicle being bought at a crazy price by True Believers in the laws-of-economics-don't-apply-to-this-thing-ness of said vehicle, thus conferring the latest-trade-price to the entire asset base. The problem? The resulting total-asset market valuation is far less than the total amount of money invested in the Ponzi scheme by the punters. Thus, the only thing keeping the mania going is the punters' confidence that there is only one direction for the price to go, and that is up, exponentially up in the case of recent action in BTC. The result is a huge imbalance in buying versus selling pressure. As soon as enough traders try to realize their miraculous paper trading gains, the huge-dance-hall-with-a-very-tiny-door-and-someone-just-yelled-fire panic-selling dynamic kicks in. The wilder the run-up in price, the greater the ratio of dance-hall/exit-door size becomes. But is certainly is morbidly fascinating to watch ... a modern tulipmania amplified by the reach of the internet and the utterly vaporous nature of the underlying 'commodity'. The wasted energy production, alas, is all too real.

[Dubslow]

I mean back at $8K per BTC I thought "this is obviously a bubble that's gonna crash", yet here we are. I haven't changed my underlying opinion, but still, the sheer (relative) size of this particular bubble (13x growth in <8 months) is astonishing even compared to other recent bubbles in the financial markets (meaning within the last decade).

[rogue]

With respect to BTC, will some government decide to bail out the owners of the bitcoins if that market crashes?

[kladner]

Originally Posted by rogue

With respect to BTC, will some government decide to bail out the owners of the bitcoins if that market crashes?

That always depends on who, and how big the owners are.

[Xyzzy]

Is it possible the BC bubble is being sustained by people who are laundering money, and that they are okay with "losing" some money?

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by rogue

With respect to BTC, will some government decide to bail out the owners of the bitcoins if that market crashes?

According to this Daily Mail article,

The combined value of all the world's bitcoins last night was estimated to be about $270billion (£200billion).

That's a lot of bailing -- probably enough to narrow the field of potential candidates.

[VictordeHolland]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

Is it possible the BC bubble is being sustained by people who are laundering money, and that they are okay with "losing" some money?

I personally believe the current BTC bubble is sustained by the uninformed people that are attracted by the mainstream media reporting record after record high of the BTC price. But I wouldn't bet against it reaching even higher. Anybody looking at the (past years) graph will come to the same conclusion.....

I think this quote (Keynes) summarizes the current tulip mania:
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

[ewmayer]

A 94-Million-Year-Old Warning About the Ocean’s Future - The Atlantic