Intelligence is about being able to use information, make deductions, inferences or hypotheses. And presumably use that to inform action.

Consciousness is about having an internal experience. I would regard many living things as having consciousness but not a general intelligence.

NIST has defined a timeline for post quantum readiness to be complete by 2035. Crypto migrations historically take a long time; you can't just replace your own stuff, or upgrade just a server. All the clients that interact have to upgrade as well or it all breaks.

One day I just started making somewhat random moves (not terrible obviously, but unusual, and which sometimes gave me a temporary disadvantage). This completely messed with his style of play. He was trying to figure out what my grand strategy was I guess and tied himself in knots. From that moment, I could often beat him.

Bitcoin doesn't use 256 bit encryption, unless you mean 256-bit hashing. The cryptographic algorithms that are mostly under quantum threat are asymmetric, e.g. digital signatures.

You make a lot of assumptions about my team, my management skills and the hours we all work. It comes across as patronising; maybe you should level up your soft skills.

Every time I've been a manager I work longer hours than the people I manage doing things they would hate to do, so they can do the things they are good at.

I do joke with my team though that my role involves drinking champagne in limousines. They get the joke.

The first time I managed a team I designed a whole solution for the team to implement, and they were like "Are we just your typists?!! Why don't you let us do that?". They were right; I stepped back and shared goals and direction with them instead from that point. It's hard to step away from how you did things before and give trust to others to do a good job.

The other thing they highlighted also resonated - if you become a manager of people who were formally your team mates, it alters your relationships with them. I remember feeling quite depressed when people no longer joked around with me in the same way they used to, and I felt a bit isolated. Took me a while to understand the shift in dynamics and not take it personally.

Now, you need to compromise at least 3 safes to do anything on the HSM. If a token is lost, stolen or damaged, there are still 2 others which can be used. Loss or theft of any two tokens does not compromise the HSM. Any unauthorised access to a token can be detected due to the tamper evident bag.

This gives you strong protection and assurance against any malicious insider or attacker. Having a single key (even if protected in a safe) is much weaker, and carries the risk of key loss (so you would have to have token backups, multiplying rather than dividing the risk).

The idea is that on some schedule (e.g. each hour) you use the cheapest forms of energy you can to meet demand, but the final price is set by the most expensive one you had to use. This means that the cheaper forms of energy (i.e. renewables) make more money (which increase their profitability and can be reinvested). Obviously though we need better storage if we rely on renewables or we are almost always going to have to use fossil fuels at some point.

Whether there are better models, I will leave to people who know more than I do, but it is certainly a very common way to do this.