In his latest “Pivot to AI” OpenAI faces cash crunch in 2026 as bills come due, @davidgerard (accurately) says: “#OpenAI works by setting as much money as it can on fire, as fast as possible.”
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@paco @davidgerard@circumstances.run this would be a perfect submission to XKCD what-if (although I dunno if it still takes submissions)
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@paco @davidgerard Former chemist, so a nerd snipe on anything to do with rapid oxidation and other fun material transformations is possible, but I'm going to give it the ol' Fermi problem try first.
A US note (regardless of denomination) is 156x66 mm, or about 0.01 square meter. Let's start by laying them all flat, in a single one-bill layer, to keep things simple. Assuming we're going to burn $100 bills (to maximize our literal cash burn), that's about $10,000 per square meter or 20,000,000 square meters to equal $200B.
This works out to a circular disk of $100 bills about 2523 meters in radius.
Individual bills are thin. They'd burn pretty fast, once lit. If we light the middle of the circle and the flame front expands radially outward by 25 mm (about an inch) per second, that's enough to consume an entire bill (lengthwise) in 6 seconds. Sounds about right, based on how fast thin paper seems to burn. At that rate, it'll take 2523 meters / 0.025 meters/second ~= 100,000 seconds or about 1.15 days to burn the entire disk of flammable currency.
But I suspect that past a certain point, the expanding fire might be hot enough to start igniting things further ahead of the immediate flames, in which case the flame front would expand much faster. Also, you'd likely get some updrafts that would carry burning Benjamins further afield, which would start spot fires in other parts of the gigadollar disk some distance away, each one burning at a similar rate. Spot fires could sharply reduce the total time, easily a factor of 10 or more, especially if they started fairly early on. My Fermi-inspired guess is you're looking at "a few hours, maybe longer if the fire is extremely well-behaved, maybe less if it goes total chaos muppet", to torch things that way.
I don't have a good sense of whether making stacks (more to burn per area, but less area) makes things go faster, and that's a branch of material science I'm not super familiar with, so I'll leave it at that.
@dpnash @paco @davidgerard
Not sure how air circulation will affect the burn rate. There’d be hot air rising from the burn area which would affect the outward spread of flames, effectively sucking air in from the periphery, slowing the outward spread. Any transient air from one side or another might push the flames horizontally. -
@paco @davidgerard Former chemist, so a nerd snipe on anything to do with rapid oxidation and other fun material transformations is possible, but I'm going to give it the ol' Fermi problem try first.
A US note (regardless of denomination) is 156x66 mm, or about 0.01 square meter. Let's start by laying them all flat, in a single one-bill layer, to keep things simple. Assuming we're going to burn $100 bills (to maximize our literal cash burn), that's about $10,000 per square meter or 20,000,000 square meters to equal $200B.
This works out to a circular disk of $100 bills about 2523 meters in radius.
Individual bills are thin. They'd burn pretty fast, once lit. If we light the middle of the circle and the flame front expands radially outward by 25 mm (about an inch) per second, that's enough to consume an entire bill (lengthwise) in 6 seconds. Sounds about right, based on how fast thin paper seems to burn. At that rate, it'll take 2523 meters / 0.025 meters/second ~= 100,000 seconds or about 1.15 days to burn the entire disk of flammable currency.
But I suspect that past a certain point, the expanding fire might be hot enough to start igniting things further ahead of the immediate flames, in which case the flame front would expand much faster. Also, you'd likely get some updrafts that would carry burning Benjamins further afield, which would start spot fires in other parts of the gigadollar disk some distance away, each one burning at a similar rate. Spot fires could sharply reduce the total time, easily a factor of 10 or more, especially if they started fairly early on. My Fermi-inspired guess is you're looking at "a few hours, maybe longer if the fire is extremely well-behaved, maybe less if it goes total chaos muppet", to torch things that way.
I don't have a good sense of whether making stacks (more to burn per area, but less area) makes things go faster, and that's a branch of material science I'm not super familiar with, so I'll leave it at that.
@dpnash @paco @davidgerard yet another countless example of why I fucking love the Fediverse.
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@dpnash @paco @davidgerard
Not sure how air circulation will affect the burn rate. There’d be hot air rising from the burn area which would affect the outward spread of flames, effectively sucking air in from the periphery, slowing the outward spread. Any transient air from one side or another might push the flames horizontally.@qurlyjoe @paco @davidgerard Yeah, there are a *lot* of variables that are hard to envision. This particular scenario is the combustion equivalent of a spherical cow in many ways.
Rising hot air would definitely stir things up a lot, so you probably don’t have the nice clean circular flame front I was starting out with, your “fuel” is likewise going to get disturbed a bit, and you also get embers blown around that can start new fires elsewhere. All of which change the actual time quite a bit, either way.
Possibly actual measurements on dry grass fires (also low mass but rapidly burning fuel) would be informative (how long to burn a 20 million square meter area?) Only observational physics here for this one, not experimental.
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@michael_w_busch @diazona @paco Also: how many trees need to be cut to produce those 2000 tons of rag paper?
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In his latest “Pivot to AI” OpenAI faces cash crunch in 2026 as bills come due, @davidgerard (accurately) says: “#OpenAI works by setting as much money as it can on fire, as fast as possible.”
But I want to know: if we had $200B in, say, $100 notes, and we literally set them on fire:
- would it dispose of the money faster? How long would it take?
- would the impact on the environment be worse or less bad?
I gotta think there is someone on the #fediverse with the wherewithal to figure this out. Surely if we boost this, it will nerdsnipe the right person and we will learn the answer.
@paco @davidgerard I need to buy that almost free methane from US shell cracking industry and just let it fly into atmosphere. usually they just burn it because methane is more potent greenhouse gas, and it's almost free.
please invest in my idea, it's the most efficient way to burn money
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@michael_w_busch @diazona @paco Also: how many trees need to be cut to produce those 2000 tons of rag paper?
> Federal Reserve notes are a blend of 25 percent linen and 75 percent cotton. Currency paper has tiny red and blue synthetic fibers of various lengths evenly distributed throughout the paper.
Currency Facts
The U.S. Currency Education Program shares several unique facts about U.S. currency.
U.S. Currency Education Program (www.uscurrency.gov)
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In his latest “Pivot to AI” OpenAI faces cash crunch in 2026 as bills come due, @davidgerard (accurately) says: “#OpenAI works by setting as much money as it can on fire, as fast as possible.”
But I want to know: if we had $200B in, say, $100 notes, and we literally set them on fire:
- would it dispose of the money faster? How long would it take?
- would the impact on the environment be worse or less bad?
I gotta think there is someone on the #fediverse with the wherewithal to figure this out. Surely if we boost this, it will nerdsnipe the right person and we will learn the answer.
@paco @davidgerard Depends if you burn them in parallel or not and it depends on the oxigen supply. If you would burn this as one big connected line of paper, you would burn something that would go 7800 times around the world, so that would be a roll almost a meter thick going around earth. If you would burn that in parallel, I am lacking imagination how long it would take.
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@paco @davidgerard Depends if you burn them in parallel or not and it depends on the oxigen supply. If you would burn this as one big connected line of paper, you would burn something that would go 7800 times around the world, so that would be a roll almost a meter thick going around earth. If you would burn that in parallel, I am lacking imagination how long it would take.
@paco @davidgerard However, for the fun of it, let us assume that a dollar bill takes 2 minutes to burn. Then burning once around the world would take 975 years!
So burning 7800 times that one after another would take 7.5 million years. So, to put that in perspective, if I can believe my understanding of Wikipedia, 7.5 million years ago Wolves were state of the art, and no-one talked about monkeys.
So yes, if you don't want to burn the money on a heap, it will be slow compared to OpenAI.
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@paco @davidgerard However, for the fun of it, let us assume that a dollar bill takes 2 minutes to burn. Then burning once around the world would take 975 years!
So burning 7800 times that one after another would take 7.5 million years. So, to put that in perspective, if I can believe my understanding of Wikipedia, 7.5 million years ago Wolves were state of the art, and no-one talked about monkeys.
So yes, if you don't want to burn the money on a heap, it will be slow compared to OpenAI.
@paco @davidgerard And yes, this was just a calculation on a lazy day and I may have made tons of little errors. Somewhen in the middle I had a version that confused minutes and days.
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One advantage of doing the test this way is the uncertainty in the time estimate is high enough that nobody (except possibly your financial advisor and some carefully chosen charities) notices you only burned $199.99B instead of the intended $200B.
@dpnash @revk @paco @davidgerard Surely the people to ask are the KLF (or K Foundation)
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In his latest “Pivot to AI” OpenAI faces cash crunch in 2026 as bills come due, @davidgerard (accurately) says: “#OpenAI works by setting as much money as it can on fire, as fast as possible.”
But I want to know: if we had $200B in, say, $100 notes, and we literally set them on fire:
- would it dispose of the money faster? How long would it take?
- would the impact on the environment be worse or less bad?
I gotta think there is someone on the #fediverse with the wherewithal to figure this out. Surely if we boost this, it will nerdsnipe the right person and we will learn the answer.
-
In his latest “Pivot to AI” OpenAI faces cash crunch in 2026 as bills come due, @davidgerard (accurately) says: “#OpenAI works by setting as much money as it can on fire, as fast as possible.”
But I want to know: if we had $200B in, say, $100 notes, and we literally set them on fire:
- would it dispose of the money faster? How long would it take?
- would the impact on the environment be worse or less bad?
I gotta think there is someone on the #fediverse with the wherewithal to figure this out. Surely if we boost this, it will nerdsnipe the right person and we will learn the answer.
@paco @davidgerard burning the cache would have saved a lot of energy wasted and would mean we can have a swimming pool in the summer as my water would not have been used in the local data center...
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In his latest “Pivot to AI” OpenAI faces cash crunch in 2026 as bills come due, @davidgerard (accurately) says: “#OpenAI works by setting as much money as it can on fire, as fast as possible.”
But I want to know: if we had $200B in, say, $100 notes, and we literally set them on fire:
- would it dispose of the money faster? How long would it take?
- would the impact on the environment be worse or less bad?
I gotta think there is someone on the #fediverse with the wherewithal to figure this out. Surely if we boost this, it will nerdsnipe the right person and we will learn the answer.
@paco @davidgerard
Closest test run would be the KLF https://youtu.be/21nhIZ9QF80?si=v6R5hpfydU0G_q_S -
@michael_w_busch @diazona @paco I looked up the capacity of my local incinerator (officially called the "Dublin waste to energy facility") and it says they handle 600,000 tonnes a year.
So the 2000 tonnes of bills would only last a day or so.
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@stufromoz @paco @davidgerard @briankrebs Can’t just pop them into a top loader and expect them the shred like a tissue in your jeans pocket
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In his latest “Pivot to AI” OpenAI faces cash crunch in 2026 as bills come due, @davidgerard (accurately) says: “#OpenAI works by setting as much money as it can on fire, as fast as possible.”
But I want to know: if we had $200B in, say, $100 notes, and we literally set them on fire:
- would it dispose of the money faster? How long would it take?
- would the impact on the environment be worse or less bad?
I gotta think there is someone on the #fediverse with the wherewithal to figure this out. Surely if we boost this, it will nerdsnipe the right person and we will learn the answer.
@paco @davidgerard Wouldn’t call it nerdsnipe. More like nerd carpet bombing
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