To state the result in very short terms, wind is struggling even with the very high tariffs in place, and solar is headed for the “rocket start” former Prime Minister Noda called for last October.

The Japanese figures come in two flavors. One set is for installations that have started producing electricity, and the other one is for installations that have received approval from the Ministry. The latter one is the higher one, it includes capacity that will come online shortly, but is not yet commissioned.

Using those latter figures, solar recorded 12.2 GW until February. That’s not bad, considering that Japan had only about 5.3 GW of solar installed at the end of 2011. Adjusting for the larger population of Japan this is comparable to the German records of the last couple of years. Not bad at all.

On the other hand, the rocket for wind energy is still firmly planted on the ground. The Ministry reports a measly anemic 0.6 GW of approved capacity. The problem with wind is, you need much more time from starting a project to getting it to the approval stage. Anyway, it will take some time for wind to get up to speed  in Japan. The numbers are still very disappointing.

The new solar capacity is spread rather evenly all over the country. The interesting thing is that the biggest chunk is located in Hokkaido, the most northern island. It certainly does not have the best solar resources. But I assume it is easier to find the land for megasolar projects there. Hokkaido has about 1.13 GW, with 0.97 of that coming from projects with over 1 MW capacity.

Dwolla operates an online payment service that is open only to residents of the United States. See their Terms of Service, which state:

Dwolla may only be used in connection with United States Financial Institutions: User funds must originate at a United States Financial Institution, and Dwolla will only instruct Veridian to transfer funds to a United States Financial Institution associated with the appropriate Dwolla User.

Mutum Sigillum is an American company owned by Mark Karpeles, who also owns the World’s largest Bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox, located in Japan right next door to my university.

The warrant is accompanied by an affidavit (a sworn statement of facts) by a Special Agent of “Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement”. This Affidavit is not only a statement of fact, but it also explains some legal theories behind the application for the Seizure Warrant.

The Affidavit establishes that a “Confidential Informant (CI-1)” residing and banking in Maryland was able to send some funds to himself, with Mutum Sigillum and Mt.Gox involved in the process.

In detail: CI-1 opens accounts at Dwolla and at Mt.Gox. CI-1 funds his Mt.Gox over Dwolla. CI-1 buys some Bitcoins at Mt.Gox. CI-1 sells Bitcoins on Mt.Gox, getting back to dollars at his Mt.Gox account. CI-1 directs Mt.Gox to send these dollars to his Dwolla account, where they are right now.

So, the Affidavit has shown that CI-1 was able to send these dollars to himself over this elaborate process.

But, unless I am missing something here, that is not what one could reasonable describe as “transmitting money”. You would need some other party that actually receives funds for that.

This is similar to sex. You are supposed to do it with someone else involved.

The relevant American statute, 18 USC § 1960, helpfully provides a definition of “money transmitting”.

(2) the term “money transmitting” includes transferring funds on behalf of the public by any and all means including but not limited to transfers within this country or to locations abroad by wire, check, draft, facsimile, or courier;

“Transfer funds” means getting them to someone else. The only one doing that in this case is Dwolla. Both CI-1 and Mutum Sigillum are just normal users of the money transmitting service Dwolla provides.

The recent FinCen Guidance of March 2013 makes in principle the same point:

The term “money transmission services” means “the acceptance of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency from one person and the transmission of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency to another location or person by any means.” (Emphasis added).

CI-1 transferred the funds to himself. No other person involved. And he transferred them from Maryland to Maryland. No other location involved.

The above analysis is just common sense. Mt.Gox is a user of money transfer services, not a provider. If they were still dealing in “Magic the Gathering” cards that would be even more evident. But the fact that they are operating an exchange in Bitcoin doesn’t change that fact.

The March FinCen “Guidance” has some more specific language on Bitcoin, which is rather confusing. Here it is:

A person that creates units of this convertible virtual currency and uses it to purchase real or virtual goods and services is a user of the convertible virtual currency and not subject to regulation as a money transmitter. By contrast, a person that creates units of convertible virtual currency and sells those units to another person for real currency or its equivalent is engaged in transmission to another location and is a money transmitter. In addition, a person is an exchanger and a money transmitter if the person accepts such de-centralized convertible virtual currency from one person and transmits it to another person as part of the acceptance and transfer of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency.

One could indeed read this as meaning that in the opinion of FinCen, operating an exchange (like Mt.Gox) does, means that they are also in the business of transmitting money.

If so, such an opinion is entirely without merit.

Sure, if CI-1 buys a Bitcoin from some other third party (TP), then Mt.Gox transfers that Bitcoin from TP to CI-1, and the dollars in CI-1′s account to TP.

But that is an exchange of things of equal value, at the market price when that exchange happens. It transfers exactly zero funds from CI-1 to TP, and exactly zero funds from TP to CI-1.

Even if it was possible to somehow get away with this overly broad construction of 18 USC § 1960 the Application for the Seizure Warrant seems to assume, there is the added question why a Japanese company operating in Shibuya, Tokyo, would be obliged to follow this American law. Didn’t the American occupation of Japan end in 1952?

Over the weekend, Deutsche Welle published a report that went almost unnoticed – the Desertec project “has been shelved.” Yet, when the project was announced, there was a lot of attention.

Of course, the Deutsche Welle article cited by Morris does not say “Desertec has been shelved”. He really should consider removing this misleading statement from his article. The article at Deutsche Welle, while trying hard to make Desertec look bad, actually reports that construction at Ourzazate has started. All the author of that piece says is that probably most of the electricity from that project will be consumed in Morocco, instead of being sold to the European Union.

If some day this kind of misleading statement was actually true, one would need to source it from Desertec or from the Desertec industrial initiative. I just checked their websites. It is a complete fabrication to assert that they have shelved the project.

Looking at the DII website, one notices that, quite on the contrary, the latest news is that the project at Ourzazate just launched construction.

Update: After some discussion on Twitter, I get the impression that Morris did not want to say “Desertec has been shelved”. He wanted to say something like “some projects in Morocco won’t deliver electricity from desert sites to Europe, but use the electricity themselves instead”. He also wrote that he actually likes power from the desert, as long as it is used for the people living there.

Still “Desertec is shelved” is rather different than “there will be no electricity transmissions from Morocco”.

As to this latter point, that will be just a question of market forces once the connections are there (there is already a small connection between Spain and Morocco, but there will be more of the same in the future). Having a larger area of the network will help stability of supply and be in the economic interest of everybody involved. There is no reason to artificially restrict access to the EU electricity market for African states.

It is much too early to say anything about how that will play out. We need to build some massive desert capacity first before we can see where it will be used.

Having written a book opposing software patents ten years ago, I am pleased with this development. It’s about time software patents got abolished completely in Germany. Nothing good has ever come from them. As the draft resolution rightly states, having software patents removes the commercial value of copyright protection for computer programs, since every copyright holder always needs to be afraid of some extortionist patent troll coming out of the woods and stopping him from marketing his program.

Now there has been an expert hearing at the Bundestag, and this short article at the Bundestag site reports on it. All the experts hate software patents, as well they should. There was only one exception. One guy representing Siemens thought they have some merit. That makes sense, since software patents help large companies like Siemens restrict the competition from more effective smaller companies. Good for Siemens, but bad for the economy and society at large.

How come this got to be a best seller? There is nothing at all happening in the whole goddam book. The plot is boring as hell. I was always waiting that the goddam story would actually BEGIN some time. But it didn’t. It really never started. There was nothing worth writing about in the whole book. I suspect the author was deliberately screwing his readers over and trying to get over the distance without having any plot.

I hate it when these famous authors write such lousy books. I really do. They always write about their little brother’s baseball mitt or something. Boy, does that depress me. It really does. I must admit it.

Again, how could this ever find an audience?

My theory is that it became half way interesting at the time because it was a big deal if someone wrote “goddam” or “fuck”, or mentioned that there may be sex happening ever once in a while.

That said, it is actually written rather well. It needs to be. Without a plot to keep readers awake, there is nothing left except the voice of the main character and all the detail in which he is developed. Here are a couple of techniques I would like to learn as an author of fiction.

For one, I learned that you can always address the reader directly. Salinger does it all the time. He tells the reader what he isn’t going to write. He tells the reader how his main character feels. He tells the reader that the story is over (you wouldn’t know otherwise, because there is nothing happening anyway). That’s interesting, and even I can easily do that.

Another thing is the extreme detail in which the lead character is developed. After reading the goddam book people know more about Holden Caulfield than about themselves. Or their spouse. Or their children. That makes the lead sympathetic. So people care for what happens to him, even if there is nothing really happening.

One other thing.

Salinger published this in 1951, at age 32. That one hit was enough for him to live happily ever after from the royalties. He never needed to publish another book.

So he didn’t.

Clearly he was overcompensated for this effort. They paid him so much that he stopped being a writer, and became a person who wrote earlier, instead.

That is one of the inherent flaws in copyright law. There is nothing to stop famous authors from making so much goddam dough from one smash hit that they never need to write another word. That obviously will not help motivating them to write more.

And one last note. I actually found a typo in this book, after all these years. That’s of course not counting all the places where something is spelled wrong or the grammar doesn’t add up deliberately, so as to mimic how a teenager at the time would speak.

Here it is.

Salinger wrote: “I quick jumped up and ran over”. He really did. That must of course be “quickly”.

1KfLenzmpCEjNhdNs2Y6txuaJAFLUNzfjZ

And here is a QR code for this:

I used the great service at “Bitcoin Vanity” for finding this particular address. They charged me only 0.004 Bitcoin, which is around 50 cents now. Ordering the address and calculating the resulting private key was a very smooth process. I would also like to mention that with their setup they never get the private key for this address themselves. At least that’s what they say, and I don’t have any reason not to believe that.

This is called a “vanity” address. But I think there are very good reasons besides wanting to see your name more often for having such an address. It has a number of advantages over a random address.

For one, it is easier to remember. I can just remember the “1KfLenz” part. Then I can head over to blockchain.info and search with that, which gives me a page containing the full address as well as the transaction history of that address.

That of course means I can write down just “1KfLenz” and be done when I want to communicate that address to somebody else. This is basically the same advantage as a URL shortener gives me. I am running my own URL shortener for most pages I reference in my writings or in classroom scripts. For example, my second global warming science fiction novel “Tasneem” (FREE PDF file available!) gets “k-lenz.de/7″ as an URL, which is slightly shorter than “k.lenz.name/LB/?p=9141″, and more convenient.

Another way to think of this is as a parallel to domain names. Those are easier for people to remember, compared to IP numbers. That’s why we have them.

And there is another big advantage. Not for me, but for people using Bitcoin for larger payments.

Assume that buyer A (based in Germany) paid EUR35,000 to the Bitcoin address of seller B (based in Japan). Then, all of a sudden, B complains that the funds have not reached him. A would need to prove that he has paid in any later lawsuit. With a traditional bank transfer he would of course have the bank records to prove his payment. Under current international regulations all wire transfers come with names of both parties attached, so as to prevent money laundering.

The latest international standard requiring this is recommendation 16 in the February 2012 recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force against money laundering. As an aside, let’s just note that these don’t mention Bitcoin yet. It was able to fly under the radar at the time. Under that standard, information on the beneficiary needs to be kept with all wire transfers.

The EU is not yet requiring keeping records on payees. Right now Regulation (EC) No 1781/2006 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 November 2006 on information on the payer accompanying transfer of funds requires records only on the identity of the payer. But this is supposed to change, the Commission has proposed changing the rules to require also records on the payee.

Anyway, with a bank wire transfer, usually A will be able to just point to the bank transaction records. He doesn’t need to insist on a receipt, which may be difficult to get with B sitting at the other side of the World.

But with a Bitcoin address? How exactly does A prove that the address he sent his Bitcoins to actually belongs to B?

That becomes much easier if the address in question identifies B as the payee in its first characters, and B has published it in different ways he can’t change later. For example, if you tweet some address, you can’t edit that later. For example, if B has registered that address with some third party which does not change anything later on request, that would do the trick as well.

One may also note that this adds some security, especially if the address in question is longer.

Anyone can find another address with “1KfLenz” as the first seven digits. But searching for “1KfLenzmPC” (only three digits more) would already cost over 700 Bitcoin, or over $70,000 at the excellent service provider “BitcoinVanity” I bought my address from. Searching for “1KfLenzmpCE” (four digits more) is too difficult for them to even quote a price. The difficulty goes up very fast with only a couple of added digits.

So if some large company you may have heard of gets “1CocaCoLa777″ (11 digits) for its address, anybody trying to direct a payment to another address starting the same way would need to invest substantial funds to find it. That would deter most people from even trying.

As Gleick explains, 400 ppM means an ice-free Arctic, average temperatures up between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius, and over 10 degrees at the poles, sea levels between 5 and 40 meters higher.

So why do I think this is irrelevant?

The answer is easy.

Anyone paying attention knew a long time ago that we will reach 400 and blow right past it. The fine people at 350.org want humanity to keep CO2 levels under 350. That is not likely to happen any time soon.

To explain this with a little comparison to Bitcoin, it didn’t matter much if the price was at $2 or at $5 some time in 2011. It was always sure to go way up anyway (it is around $110  now).

The one thing that matters most is if humanity somehow will be able to avoid the positive feedback spiral leading to Venus syndrome. This question has only two possible answers.

In contrast, assuming stabilizing at some level or other of global warming, that is a question of degree. While much would change, there would still be at least some life left on the planet, possibly even human life.

For all of that, blasting through 400 ppM is not ever so important. The real fight will come in the next couple of decades.

Now she has posted a Youtube video on a final party, with some interviews of people involved in Bitcoin:

Actually, in the process of publishing this series, she got around 10 Bitcoin in tips from readers. That is more than $1000. I asked how often other blog articles she wrote netted her over $1000 from readers in a couple of days. The answer was “0″, not unexpectedly.

She decided to give these Bitcoins right back to the community by paying dinner for a Bitcoin meetup.

The most interesting thing I learned from her interviews was that Bitcoin is superior to cash for merchants. If you take cash, you need to count it, move it, and secure it. All that comes with costs. With Bitcoin, the counting and moving goes away, and the security issues can be handled easier than with cash. You could run a whole restaurant with no one on site knowing the private key of the Bitcoin address used for payments, so that anybody trying to get that information from staff by threatening them with a gun will be unable to do so.

I was aware of the fact that Bitcoin beats credit cards in cost and convenience. It also seems to beat cash.

I neglected to mention Al-Daini’s newer article on the question, which was published with the title “Climate Change: Governments Must Act To Reduce CO2 Emissions” at Huffington Post on May 6.

There he addresses two potential problems with this idea.

For one, people might object because this causes inflation. Al-Daini counters that the risk of inflation is minor compared to the risk of global warming. He says that inflation may not happen, since the GDP will be boosted as well as the money supply. And he says that without printing money, he expects that nothing will happen.

The other objection would be that this kind of government action is undesirable. Things should be left for the markets to figure out.

I partly agree with that objection. The Phaseout Profit Theory I am preaching all the time on this blog says that the global warming problem will be solved easily and quickly once the fossil fuel companies (and the climate activists) understand that reducing the supply of fossil fuel increases fossil fuel companies’ profits. High prices for fossil fuel would solve the problem.

But on the other hand, there is no such thing as a free market for energy. Most of it is decided by regulation. And subsidies. The idea that energy policy is decided mainly  by free markets is not based in reality.

Anyway, I don’t agree with these objections. And here are a couple of other thoughts to support the original proposal (print money to pay for renewable energy).

For one, Central Banks can print money. They can’t print Arctic ice, once it is gone.

Anyone understanding the scale of the damage expected from global warming should agree that we need to do whatever is possible. If this is one simple way to find a couple of trillion dollars a year for speeding up the transition to renewable energy, anyone objecting is making climate change worse. There is no need to make it worse. It will be a disaster anyway.

Another point: In the long run, transition to renewable energy faster will always be cheaper. Printing the money now and getting rid of fossil fuel a couple of decades earlier will save a fortune in fuel costs down the road. And it will of course reduce the damages from global warming.

Now Adnan Al-Daini proposes a different way to finance renewable energy. In this article published at Huffington Post in February he calls for printing money and investing it in renewable energy. The number he mentions is GBP 375 billion, which is what the Bank of England has spent on “quantitative easing” (buying government bonds on the secondary market with newly printed money).

GBP 375 billion government spending for renewable energy would be a considerable sum. It would be more than half of last year’s United Kingdom budget, which had expenditure of GBP 682 billion.

I am all for it. As long as there are feed-in tariffs as well, there is nothing wrong with the government investing massively in renewable energy. That is especially true for military spending.

I recall that in the United States the Pentagon is a large investor in renewable energy. They spent around $680 billion in 2011 (the whole budget, not the spending on renewable, which is only projected to reach a measly $10 billion by 2030). The main purpose of that spending is to feed the large military contractor industry. The secondary purpose of that spending is to provide security.

Since global warming is the most serious threat to the security of any country, a large part of military budgets should be spent for renewable energy, on top of current (largely useless) spending for weapons. Sell some “renewable bonds” to get the money. And then have your central bank print money and buy those bonds.

Once the military contractors understand that they can get the Pentagon budget to a trillion dollars a year this way, I expect them to support this kind of idea in their lobbying efforts.