Age acceleration. It is a fact of life. The first 5 years of my "conscious" life seem about 4 times as long as the next 30. I believe, if this acceleration continues, the last decade of my life will be about a day long in the eyes of my 3 year old self.
Remember being forced to pay $200 for the "15th edition" of your professor's book because
We deport people who don't agree with socialism. Everybody else, COME ON IN!
More on bitcoin. Something I still am too lazy to start studying and understand.
Finally, I have not given Delusion Damage its due. If you have not visited him, you should as it is the single largest source of traffic and the single greatest aggregator of various right/mano/econ sites. Make it part of your daily regimen.
About the German home-school family. Perhaps if they had simply come in and overstayed their visas, they would have been OK. That they followed the legal process and did it legally puts them on the radar to be singled out for deportation.
ReplyDeleteOr, maybe they should have gone to Mexico first, then come in across the border and simply stayed illegally.
Not much you need to understand about bitcoin. It's a decentralized currency, controlled by no-one, based on cryptography. It's currently experiencing controlled inflation, but will eventually hit a cap, at which point it will be incapable of inflation but capable of essentially infinite deflation. And it's currently trading at over $70 per coin.
ReplyDeleteThere, now you know all about it!
DelusionDamage.com hasn't worked for me in months. All I ever get is the last blogpost.
ReplyDeleteHere in Florida? We have cock roaches that are easily the size of your thumb (and can fly! Flying mega cock roaches, people!) And the occasional moth the size of a humming bird.
ReplyDeleteDon't even ask about the size of the lizards we get down here.
@Alex, are you sure that bitcoin is decentralized? To me it looks like, for the system to work, it still needs a central registry which tracks the spending chains (so that you don't spend coins which you already spent).
ReplyDeleteBTW, how does bitcoin survive EMP?
ReplyDeleteBitcoin is a semi-decentralized cryptocurrency. The 'central' part of it is the volunteer network who use their graphics cards and new FPGA/ASIC rigs to compute transaction blocks, and are paid in newly created-out-of-thin-air BTC for generating that block.
ReplyDeleteBlocks are hard to generate. In order for bitcoin to have any control on inflation, the algorithm introduces a difficulty factor that basically states that the resulting hash of a transaction block + random number must be below a certain point, thus making 1 in a billion (or trillion) hashes the 'legal' hash and thus a valid block of transactions. Blocks are multi-verified by the network and consensus is what validates a transaction. Each block currently garners 25 BTC. The network is designed to geometrically reduce this reward until around 21 million BTC, in which transaction fees will be used in lieu of algorithmic rewards for paying miners.
BTC is like silver, except less physical. Without taking over the mining network (which is currently HUUUGE) or breaking asymmetric cryptography (quantum computers would crash BTC's value), BTC is considered safe from theft and relatively scarce. Its main attraction is in being digital, transferable remotely, and unseizeable. Conversely, losing your wallet private key or forgetting the password the key is encrypted with will result in a permanent loss of your BTCs from the general BTC money supply.
BTC is pseudononymous; each transaction is recorded in the miner network from the very beginning of a bitcoin. Disclosure of your wallet address would reveal to anyone interested every transaction you have performed. A way of solving this is liberal use of many wallet addresses and use of bitcoin laundering services (which "tumble" the coins among thousands/millions of addresses for you). Bitcoin may be secure enough, when used in combination with Tor or i2p, to be used as the transaction medium for a theoretical assassinations market.
With BTC, big banking loses. Let us hope quantum computation is at most a pipe-dream, but if not I only recommend BTC for transactions and short-to-medium length investment (buy 'n hold).