Written or printed out at 3 digits per centimeter, 202 trillion digits would make a string about 670 million kilometers long -- or about the distance between Earth and Jupiter.
Solar-powered railgun accelerating rocks to lunar escape velocity in directions chosen to make the desired delta-v. Speed the moon up or slow it down or change whatever other orbital elements you please.
This would work better to change the orbit of a small asteroid. For the moon it would take (a lot) longer.
Both manufacturing corporations and mutual investment funds are ways to aggregate smaller amounts of capital into big enough sums that large factories or investments are possible. I don't think it's necessary to rely on multi-billionaires for investment in wild ideas.
Just before the section on Moore's Law, it says this about silicon purity:
> Electronic grade silicon (EG-Si): 99.9999999 pure ('nine nines pure') Thats one impurity atom in every 10.000.000 silicon atoms.
I believe that should be 1.000.000.000 (10^9 atoms) to correspond to nine nines pure. Just as one impurity atom in every 100 (10^2) atoms would be 99% (two nines) pure.
That involved massive movement of people, weapons, and vehicles, let alone factories and resources.
Chip making is expensive, but what do you do with 7T? Buy out every engineer on the planet with half of it, and have them work on problems? Does Altman think he’s Oppenheimer?!
A Visa fact sheet [0] claims 276 billion transactions in a 12-month period, which would be less than 9,000 per second, but still an impressive figure.
Fedwire, the settlement system operated by the Federal Reserve, processed 196 million settlements in 2022, each about $5.4 million, for a total of over $1,000 trillion. [1] That would be about 16 settlements per second. Visa handles many more smaller, individual transactions; aggregates and nets them; and uses Fedwire to settle them between member banks.
Bitcoin could be used in a similar manner, handling a relatively small number of larger settlements; leaving other systems to handle smaller, individual transactions.
> Bitcoin could be used in a similar manner, handling a relatively small number of larger settlements; leaving other systems to handle smaller, individual transactions.
That’s what Lightning does but it also removes most of the sales pitch for the system since you’re giving up the global ledger. Once you’re relying on a bank in all but name for your transactions, it’s unclear what you’re getting for the extra cost and lower usability.
