# Hannes Alfven's fairy tale becomes reality (2024)

Vladimir Aksayskiy

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It looks like Hannes Alfven's fairy tale about a big computer is turning into reality.

Moreover, rapidly and on a large scale, eclipsing all the international problems of humanity.


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A recent analysis by the International Energy Agency found that electricity consumption by data centers, cryptocurrencies and AI could double over the next two years.

https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/6b2fd954-2017-408e-bf08-952fdd62118a/Electricity2024-Analysisandforecastto2026.pdf

The sector accounted for about 2% of global electricity demand in 2022, according to the IEA. The IEA forecast that electricity demand in this sector will grow exponentially, increasing at least 10 times between 2023 and 2026.

Here are the latest estimates of the growth of AI power needs.

Apr 17, 2024 - By 2030, the world's data centers will consume more electricity than India, according to Rene Haas, Arm CEO.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-computing-pace-consume-more-150000328.html

Apr 20, 2024 - The data centers that developers use to train large artificial intelligence language models consume enormous amounts of energy, and could consume up to a quarter of all US electricity by 2030.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/early-winner-race-feed-ai-182923589.html

It is possible that Selena will soon be populated by data centers.

Now, - in accordance with Hannes Alfvens fairy tale, - planetary society is experiencing the next stage of digitalization of the entire solar system. In particular, there is a de-dollarization of the world monetary system - the replacement of the dollar with cryptocurrency.

The figure illustrates the dynamics of replacement using the history of Bitcoin, the first-born cryptocurrency, as an example.

https://www.blockchain.com/ru/explorer/charts/difficulty

The black line is the dynamics of the market price of Bitcoin, the blue line is the dynamics of network complexity.

Difficulty is a measure of how difficult it is to mine a block of Bitcoin.

It can be seen that the lag phase has already ended and the exponential phase began in mid-2017.

The generation time for it is approximately 3 years.

It seems that the dollar has no more than 6 years left to live as a world currency.


Figure. History of Bitcoin.