What do Tesla, Musk the Vajra and Bitcoin have in Common?

Back in November 2022, Elon Musk posted a picture of his bedside table. It had some cans of coke, a couple of guns and a vajra on it.

What is a Vajra you ask? The vajra is a Buddhist ritual object. It is said to cleave through ignorance. In sanskrit “vajra” means “thunderbolt” or “diamond”. Bitcoiner and AI expert Brian Roemmele had this take on Elon’s post:

So what does this have to do with the late Serbian innovator Nikola Tesla?

Nikola Tesla dreamed of “limitless energy” harnessed from the atmosphere, and dedicated years of his life to achieving this dream, sponsored by J.P. Morgan. Tesla built the now infamous Wardenclyffe Tower in an attempt to the realise this dream, but the project was later abandoned and the tower fell into disrepair, eventually being sold for scrap.

Christopher Dunn, author of “The Giza Power Plant” believes that the pyramids were used to harness, store and transmit energy.

The claim may seem outlandish, but in 2017 “a team at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst published a paper declaring they had successfully generated a small but continuous electric current from humidity in the air.”
Source: The Guardian

Was Elon warning the powers that be, that if something were to happen to him, their big little energy secret would be out in the open?

What about Bitcoin?

What if energy was, in fact, limitless and free? What would happen to the security of the Bitcoin network?

The Impact of Free and Limitless Energy:

• Increased Mining Competition:

  • Free energy would dramatically reduce operational costs for Bitcoin miners, leading to an influx of participants trying to secure block rewards. This would escalate competition in the network.

• Hash Rate Surge:

  • As mining became cheaper, the total network hash rate would likely increase exponentially as more miners deploy equipment, leading to shorter block intervals initially.

• Network Adjustments:

  • Block production would initially speed up until the difficulty adjustment recalibrated the computational effort required to find blocks.

Bitcoin’s Difficulty Adjustment

Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment algorithm, which recalibrates approximately every two weeks (or 2016 blocks), is designed to restore equilibrium in block production. If the hash rate surges for any reason (in our hypothetical case, this would be due to free energy), here is what would happen:

The difficulty adjustment works by evaluating how long it took to mine the previous 2016 blocks compared to the target time of 14 days (or 1,209,600 seconds). Bitcoin aims to maintain an average block production time of 10 minutes. If blocks are being mined faster than this target due to an increase in hash rate, the protocol adjusts the difficulty upward, making it harder to solve the cryptographic puzzles required to add a new block to the blockchain. Conversely, if blocks are being mined more slowly, the difficulty is adjusted downward to make mining easier.

This adjustment process ensures that Bitcoin remains predictable and secure, maintaining its decentralised nature.

“But what about Quantum Computing” you ask? We’ll cover that another day 😉