24 March 2022. Web3 | Heat (again)
Web3, DAOs, and peace, love, and understanding. Heat pumps may not be an easy climate change solution—especially in the UK.
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1: Web3, DAOs, and peace, love and understanding
In her book Ruling The Waves, the political scientist Debora Spar proposes a model of innovation that she traces from Prince Henry the Navigator to the internet. Innovation, she says, follows a four stage pattern: innovation (“the stage of tinkerers and inventors”); commercialisation (“pioneers, pirates, marshals and outlaws”); creative anarchy (“problems begin to crop up along the frontier”); and finally, rules—and hence the punning title of her book.
It’s a familiar pattern in all significant technologies. I was online early enough to remember the “pioneers and outlaws” phase of the internet, exemplified perfectly by John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which reads today in much the same way as we read the 1225 Charter of The Forest. The history of media takes you to predictions that the invention of videotape would democratise broadcasting.
This long preamble is by way of explaining why I have ignored here so far the increasing noise about the so-called ‘Web3’. I realise that in discounting it I may be an outlier; credible writers such as James Plunkett take a completely different view.
(Image: World Economic Forum)
In short, Web3 is a world where the web is made up of decentralised technologies that makes transactions and exchanges visible and put users in control—think of the distributed ledger systems that make up blockchain, for example. Or as the Web3 Foundation puts it:
Our passion is delivering Web 3.0, a decentralized and fair internet where users control their own data, identity and destiny.
The academic John Naughton turned his attention to all of this excitement in a recent column in the Observer. One of the particular promises of the Web3 age is the DAO, or distributed autonomous organisation, which Naughton described liked this, following Wikipedia:
“an organisation represented by rules encoded as a computer program that is transparent, controlled by the organisation members and not influenced by a central government, in other words they are member-owned communities without centralised leadership”. Or, in plain English, a new way of building enterprises that are democratically governed by a community of users.
One of the reasons for the buzz is that cryptocurrencies are often involved, and that DAOs build on the blockchain, which is, of course, another buzzword:
DAOs rely on blockchains to securely hold the so-called “smart” (ie self-executing) contracts that codify the rules of the organisation – rules that can only be changed through voting mechanisms in which all members of the DAO can participate. So the computer code of the blockchain is the law governing the DAO, and since the code is supposed to be open-source, everyone can inspect it to see that no funny business is going on.
Of course. On his daily newsletter a few days later, Naughton pointed towards an entertaining assessment of the DAO phenomenon by David Birch, who is something of an expert on digital identity and payments systems.
I should remind you that a DAO is a blockchain-based form of organisation that is often governed by a native crypto token. Ownership of these tokens means the ability to vote on the policies of the DAO. DAOs use "smart" "contracts" (ie, apps that can, and often do, go wrong because of software) to manage this process and to-coordinate efforts and resources. I rather like Jonah Erlich's formulation...: a DAO is a " group chat with a bank account".
So we have a set of rules, access to funds, and a set of decision-making processes. Birch goes through some interesting examples of similar autonomous types of organisation, including the non-league fan-owned football team Ebbsfeet United, which it’s worth reading the piece for.
Another example he discusses is the DAO experiment in Wyoming where a group is buying land on a distributed ledger.
One of the people behind the experiments, Max Gravitt (a member of the Kitchen Lands DAO), calls this form of ownership "highly liquid and global". It allows him to transfer tokenised shares of the land easily, although it is some way from a libertarian revolution since the actual physical land that the DAOs own is still restricted by laws and permits and so forth.
Being an expert in digital identity and digital transactions, David Birch is inevitably interested in fraud, and his piece ends up there, via Edward Balleisen’s history, Fraud.
The book magisterially describes the evolution of regulation and institutions to protect consumers and investors from the Gilded Age onwards. Reading this, I couldn't help but see the world of web3 and the proto-metaverse as being similar to America in the age of the railroad barons. Being your own bank and we-don't-need-no-stinkin' badges sounds great, until your grandma clicks on the wrong link in an e-mail suddenly her house belongs to some guy in Minsk who flips it in three nanoseconds.
At the same time, financial intermediaries are a drag on the economy—money ends up being extracted as the transactions go through, rather than being spent usefully—so getting rid of them is an attractive idea. But:
that does not mean no regulation and no institutions: truly decentralised systems just do not survive, they mutate into centralised systems (ie, representation and republic) or an anonymous oligarchy (whales and warlords).
2: Heat pumps may not be an easy climate change solution—especially in the UK.
I wrote about heat pumps earlier this week, which prompted reader Duncan Campbell to send me some thoughts on the challenges of the transition involved in moving away from gas heating to heat pumps, notably in the UK. Duncan s an engineering consultant in the construction sector. In short, it’s harder than it looks, especially given the UK’s aged housing stock.
A guest post by Duncan Campbell
Heat-pumps provide challenges particularly for our UK residential building stock. They work efficiently when the heat they deliver is at a relatively low temperature, compared to typical gas heating systems. By low temperature I mean 30-40C compared to traditional heating systems at 70-80C.
If they need to operate at higher temperatures then their efficiency drops significantly. An efficiently operating heat-pump can generate four units of heat for one unit of electrical input. An inefficient heat-pump will be not much better than one unit of heat to one unit of electrical input.
Replacing an existing gas boiler with a heat-pump is not always possible with typical houses, which tend to be poorly insulated and leaky, and with radiator sizes based on the higher temperatures of a traditional combustion boiler.
(Radiator photo via bestheating.com)
Switching to a heat-pump for these properties can require replacing existing radiators with much larger radiators to achieve the same heat-output, which is both expensive and disruptive. We also expect the hot water from our taps to be ‘properly hot’, to some extent to control bacterial growth— which again reduces heat-pumps efficiency.
The lower cost air-source heat-pumps themselves have an outdoor unit which needs to be located somewhere. The outdoor unit can be noisy (and large). Again, a challenge for retrofitting.
An inappropriately installed heat-pump will not heat a house effectively and won’t use electricity efficiently. This risks pushing people into fuel poverty as the electrical demands from an inefficient heat-pump can be significant.
Finally, the refrigerants used to transfer the heat are themselves generally pretty nasty substances with high global warming potential. Friendlier refrigerants tend to reduce heat-pump efficiencies.
There is also a significant shortage of expertise in the market at the moment. We replaced our gas boiler last year and I couldn’t find anybody locally who could even provide a quote in a reasonable timeframe for a heat-pump replacement for a boiler. In the end we stuck with gas. I’m hoping that in another decade the technology and the sector skills will have caught up.
My advice for those interested in a heat-pump within an existing gas or oil heated property would be to insulate first, find someone trustworthy to assess the suitability of a heat-pump for the property, and to make the change strategically. Don’t wait for the existing boiler to be ‘on-the-blink’ as the it may take a while to find a suitable heat-pump replacement and make the necessary changes to your home.
j2t#286
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