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LHC is funded by governments - can't remember who. It makes no money. Technically its a government sanctioned shitcoin (facility).
What about LHC? (Large Hadron Collider)
Not market viable is such a massive understatement though. The energy required to convert lead nuclei into enough gold to form a single solid 1kg bar exceeds the energy required to move an asteroid from somewhere in the belt to low Earth orbit, mine it, send it to the surface and smelt it by many orders of magnitude. In fact as long as there is gold anywhere on the solar system at all, including deep in unforgiving gravity wells, it would be cheaper to mine it than convert it this way. And while it would be a massive undertaking, it doesn't really require a whole lot of improvements in engineering. At such time when we have easy access to enough power to convert lead to gold at scale there will be much, much more efficient ways to do it than literally smashing lead nuclei together and somehow catching the low percentage of them that become gold. In fact, it would be much simpler to create gold through nuclear fusion the natural way. In case that's unclear - it's easier to build an artificial star to make gold at scale than it is to do it in the LHC. And finally, even if you could create gold this way with zero cost on your energy input. I'm waving a magic wand and you have infinite energy for free. It would take 100s of tons of lead to create 1kg of gold this way - and that limit is set by fundamental laws of particle physics that the LHC itself has confirmed in experiments. It would cost somewhere in the range of 1 million dollars of lead to make 1 thousand dollars of gold assuming you had the most perfectly engineered machine. That's the limit imposed by reality.
"While less frequent than the creation of thallium or mercury, the results show that the LHC currently produces gold at a maximum rate of about 89 000 nuclei per second from lead–lead collisions at the ALICE collision point." There are approximately 3.05 x 10^24 nuclei in 1 kg of gold. I don't think English has a world for a number with that many zeros after it. The LHC also consumes electricity at a scale similar to a city of 300,000 people. I'd bet $5 interstellar travel is closer to happening than mass producing gold this way.
The gold supply is actually somewhat elastic, "A" is giving it a lot of credit for scarcity. The world is full of gold mines and deposits that are just barely not profitable to extract - until the price goes up. Not to mention discovering new deposits or eventually mining the bounty of the asteroid field. Plus the LHC just made a gold atom, so... y'know.... that's one more atom. Gotta be a least a dozen of 'em now.
Gold started to dip when articles came out stating that the Large Hadron Collider was producing small plaques of gold inside the collider from the smashed lead particles it was colliding. It basically proves that gold cannot remain a top performing asset because in a variable length of time it will be able to be synthesized completely from other metals like lead, making it's scarcity zero. Currently you need LHC and time, but it really won't be long until it is abused by breakthroughs in science. Bitcoin is also not safe though, due to its weakness to quantum attack, which also will jeopardize it's stability if they don't start the upgrade process soon. Fun stuff
Thats to run the LHC. But what if they find other ways to power it? The article mentions that they doubled the output of gold with upgrades. What if they upgrade it to output more? You are thinking too one dimensionally. There are many ways to improve the process, including making it run on less.
\> LHC dude the price of running LHC compared to the PICO grams (10 to the minus 15) produced by accident will make this specific gold worth more than anything you know per gram so noone is gonna run LHC to make gold :D
From https://www.home.cern/news/news/physics/alice-detects-conversion-lead-gold-lhc : The ALICE analysis shows that, during Run 2 of the LHC (2015–2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were created at the four major experiments. In terms of mass, this corresponds to just 29 picograms (2.9 ×10-11 g). Since the luminosity in the LHC is continually increasing thanks to regular upgrades to the machines, Run 3 has produced almost double the amount of gold that Run 2 did, but the total still amounts to trillions of times less than would be required to make a piece of jewellery. Notiwthstanding that the gold existed for just a tiny fraction of a second, the amount of money this cost to do will have been massively more than the amount of gold they managed to produce. Still. Science is sexy.
Funny thing. Let's do the napkin math. Total LHC investment - about $10 billion. If this cost was invested into Bitcoin mining infrastructure, according to ChatGPT: Budget Breakdown • Mining Hardware: $4.96 billion • Infrastructure Setup: $2.5 billion • Electricity Budget (1 year): $2.54 billion Operational Performance • Total Hashrate: ~331 EH/s • Network Share: ~37.85% • BTC Mined Daily: ~341 BTC • Daily Revenue: ~$35.4 million • Daily Electricity Cost: ~$6.95 million • Daily Net Profit: ~$28.4 million So basically it would generate almost $30m worth of BTC daily. I haven't checked the math but you get the point
From a similar article: "the team calculated that between 2015 and 2018, collisions at the LHC created 86 billion gold nuclei — around 29 trillionths of a gram. Most of the unstable, fast-moving gold atoms would have lasted around 1 microsecond before smashing into experimental apparatus or breaking into other particles" I still prefer crypto to gold, but the article is not really a flex for crypto imo.
However, the gold created in this process is ephemeral. The high-energy gold nuclei exist for only a tiny fraction of a second before colliding with the LHC’s infrastructure and disintegrating.
tldr; Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have achieved a groundbreaking experiment, observing the transformation of lead into gold during high-energy particle collisions. Using the ALICE Zero Degree Calorimeters, researchers detected gold nuclei created when lead nuclei lost protons in near-miss collisions. While the gold produced is ephemeral, the study offers insights into particle accelerator operations and fulfills the ancient alchemists' dream of chrysopoeia on a subatomic scale. *This summary is auto generated by a bot and not meant to replace reading the original article. As always, DYOR.
Not the answer I received from chat GPT when I posed the exact same question. "As of February 2025, the most powerful computing network on Earth is the El Capitan supercomputer, which became operational in November 2024 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, USA. El Capitan achieved a performance of 1.742 exaFLOPS (quintillion floating-point operations per second), surpassing previous records. El Capitan's architecture comprises 43,808 AMD 4th Generation EPYC 24-core CPUs and an equal number of AMD Instinct MI300A GPUs, totaling over 11 million cores. This design enables it to handle complex simulations and computations, particularly for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration's stockpile stewardship program. In the realm of distributed computing, the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) stands out. As of 2024, WLCG integrates approximately 1.4 million computer cores and 1.5 exabytes of storage across over 170 sites in 42 countries. It processes more than 2 million tasks daily, with global data transfer rates exceeding 260 GB/s, supporting the data-intensive experiments conducted at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. While blockchain networks like Bitcoin have been described as powerful due to their vast number of participating nodes and significant hash rates, it's important to note that their computational power is specialized for cryptographic hashing rather than general-purpose computing tasks. Therefore, their capabilities differ fundamentally from those of supercomputers like El Capitan. In summary, El Capitan currently holds the title for the most powerful centralized computing system, while the WLCG represents one of the most extensive distributed computing networks globally."
Well I like the theory of there being multiple universes of limitless quantity, and that when that weasel of whatever the fuck dicked around with LHC long ago, that fractured our reality, and those of the universes in closest proximity, giving us the fucked up bullshit we got now, but Craig actually was, but in a very very similar universe. Unfortunately, we don't know how to recreate that warp, so here we are. Lesson? Hodl.
I got into volunteer computing with BOINC where you can give your spare computing power to scientific projects like the LHC at CERN and bought some gridcoin to get started. For that I needed bitcoin to exchange it. I kept some of the rest bitcoin on my wallet and forgot about it. 2 years later it broke it‘s ATH and I remembered that I had some of that magic internet money. I then started to learn more about it and here I am.
People at the LHC working on a nanosecond chart right now
>You're mistaken- our theoretical physicists would detect it because their models would suddenly stop making accurate predictions that translate to the real world. That's the point I was trying to make with the charged electron example: Non-experimental science still involves observations in the real world. Suppose there's a new particle that didn't exist until yesterday. We don't have an explanation for it, but it turns out, that's the actual nature of reality. There's new particles sometimes. We don't interact with it at all _except_ in the LHC for a few days then it goes away. We repeat the experiment enough times that we're confident it wasn't a mistake. A decade later we see the same thing with another new particle, different from the first, but the same in that we don't interact with _except_ in the LHC for a few days, then we never see it again. How does a theoretical physicist think their way to that experimental result? It's like calling a soccer analyst a soccer player. You may be a great analyst and you may understand what the soccer players are doing better than they do but you're not a soccer player unless you play soccer. Which takes me to the next... > A lot of times the distinction between experiment and theory is rather arbitrary anyways. Who are the "real scientists" involved in experiments using The Large Hadron Collider? Only the people who were physically present when the experiments occurred? Did their previous theoretical work suddenly become "science" at that point? When does someone cross the boundary and who should we include or exclude is very muddy, but I consider it a bit of a "is a hotdog a sandwich" sort of question compared to the question of what is or isn't science. If we both agreed to go play soccer and you showed up with a chess board we have bigger problems than whether or not we're soccer players. If we're playing chess, we're certainly not playing soccer. And if we played soccer as kids but don't play anymore, maybe we're soccer players? Maybe the word scientist is like that. I care that people generally know what soccer is and isn't or when they're playing it or playing another game. And a lot of what people say is "backed by science" simply isn't. They're playing a different game but want to drag in the word science because of the respect that word garners.
I have a thought that it was created at C.E.R.N. just like the Internet and the LHC.
It somewhat depends on who works it out first though. Any serious use of it to brute force secure systems is very likely to reveal its existence if not it's source. It would need to be used sparingly if at all, even then the more it gets used the higher value the targets the more likely it is realized that someone has it. My fear is not that a nation state would go after bitcoin, my fear is that an adversarial state already has a quantum computer and is sitting on it in case of war. >but the idea that the proof-of-work principle can't be updated to bring quantum computing down to par is a worrying one. Is anyone serious and in the know saying such a thing? There are already programs for PQC (post quantum cryptography) and encryption algorithms that are believed to be effective at securing vs both traditional and quantum computing. When I say believe to be, this is because it can't be proven without trying to break the encryption with something that doesn't exist yet. Just because we don't have it yet doesn't mean we can't do math around how we think it will work. It's kind of like the concerns about the possibility of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could create a black hole at ground zero and wipe us all out. The chance wasn't zero, so there was a possibility, but the likelihood was effectively zero.
I am SO excited about all the data we're getting from LIGO and JWST latelt. If you're interested in crunching data for Einstein or other projects, join us over a /r/BOINC4Science :). I don't know if there's any JWST data, but I know LHC has a project you can crunch for as well.
I just noticed something on the LBC homepage. It says like this: “The "Large Bitcoin Collider" (LBC - a homage to LHC) is a distributed effort to find at least one collision of private Bitcoin keys by creating addresses to private keys in a continuous 2^160 range. These are checked against the list of known BTC addresses with funds on them. In the rare event of a collision, the funds on the address in question would become accessible to the collision finder.” So the amount of private keys is increased after they started this? Is it possible to increase it even further? Maybe all this wallets they found was predates this change and now it might be not possible? (Or am I just wishful thinking?)
LHC has met expectations, scientifically, though.
Yeah they probably coulda gone 4k realism but their target audience isn't staff at NASA and LHC while on a break.
Simple 2 steps to do this 1. Fire up the LHC again 2. Merge 2 dimensions
In case anyone is interested in what those numbers mean, the large scary looking number in the tl;dr is the expected energy per collision, but in a different unit than what is generally used to measure electricity usage (electronvoltts instead of terrawatt hours). A quick Google conversion of electronvolts to terrawatt hours gives 6E-22 TWH per collission. CERN itself seems to use about [1.3 terrawatt hours per year in total](https://home.cern/science/engineering/powering-cern#:~:text=The%20Large%20Hadron%20Collider%20(LHC,megawatts%20during%20the%20winter%20months.), which is a decent bit of energy, but also incomparable to either traditional banking or bitcoin's energy usage (about 1/70 of what it takes to mine bitcoin alone, no transactions included). If you don't think the knowledge is worth gaining at that energy usage then, I mean that's a fundamental disagreement, but propping up a big scary looking number to use as whataboutism for a process that uses seventy times more energy is just kind of silly. CERN does scientifically important work at a seventieth of the electricity usage. They are just a bad example to use.
> energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts Actual total energy consumption of the LHC is as follows "The total power consumption of the LHC (and experiments) is equivalent to 600 GWh per year, with a maximum of 650 GWh in 2012 when the LHC was running at 4 TeV. For Run 2, the estimated power consumption is 750 GWh per year." This is about as much energy as is used by 5-10,000 people in a rich country and is thus trivial in the big picture.
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Very disturbing indeed.. >Nor are the problems exclusive to the LHC: In 2006, raccoons conducted a "coordinated" attack on a particle accelerator in Illinois.
$768BN for defense? That's ~174 human genome projects, with 2 LHC's thrown in for fun. Fucking hell our priorities are fucked.
"We can transform mass into pure energy, such as through nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, or matter-antimatter annihilation. We can create particles (and antiparticles) out of nothing more than pure energy" About a thimble full of matter was turned into pure energy in the Hiroshima nuclear explosion The LHC uses vast amounts of energy to produce tiny bits of mass They are equivalent but not the same. Sorry you are not made of energy. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/03/21/ask-ethan-if-einstein-is-right-and-e-mc%C2%B2-where-does-mass-get-its-energy-from/?sh=3762e22617b4](https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/03/21/ask-ethan-if-einstein-is-right-and-e-mc%C2%B2-where-does-mass-get-its-energy-from/?sh=3762e22617b4)