A blockchain only has value if it's immutable. Proof of work, the thing that consumes all that energy, is how the Bitcoin blockchain is made immutable.
Many have tried, and none have succeeded, in a better method with the same security. A blockchain isn't immutable (solving the byzantine generals' problem) just because it is - but because of the computing power thrown at securing it.
I just switched from Gmail to ProtonMail because I wanted the most secure email provider. This little feature change by Google does nothing to change any of the important factors - one being that with ProtonMail all my emails are stored using client side encryption.
You cannot, ever, trust a US company where National Security Letters come into play.
You could expect tech news site to know the difference between different crypto coins. No matter if you try to mine Bitcoin on millions of computers you will not get any, only dedicated data centers with thousands of ASICs can reach the hashing power needed.
Monero, like some other altcoins, can be mined on CPUs and/or GPUs.
Of course bitcoin can be exchanged for anything of worth. This is obvious to anyone who does a few minutes of research into the subject.
The question then naturally becomes, why do you claim differently when you obviously haven't done that research? What purpose does your post serve?
(20% of all remittance between South Korea and the Philippines is done via Bitcoin. Overstock are extremely happy with their sales in bitcoin. Those were two examples of actual use - I'll let you find all the rest yourself)
Luckily instant transactions at low fees are implemented right now (as in the next few hours) on Bitcoin, with the inclusion of SegWit, enabling Lightning Networks.
I was a Premium user since they launched. The changes to the free tier last year caught me by surprise, and sure enough, since I had no reason to pay for Premium I stopped. I remember getting an automated questionnaire as to why I stopped being a Premium customer and I explained clearly that they now offered the full feature set I was interested in in the free tier.
Now they're apparently changing it so that one feature I want (emergency access) becomes part of the Premium package. Fair enough, they'll get me back as a Premium customer. LastPass is one of those tools I happily pay for, no questions asked.
Bitcoin has never been untraceable, nor marketed as such by anyone who understands the technology. With that said, we'll see MAST and Schnorr signatures as well and that will indeed open up for transactions where the originator cannot be proven, smart contracts (surpassing those in Ethereum) etc.
If you want quick settlements in the thousands per second for people buying lattes I don't think those need to be cleared on-chain, though.
Segwit, due to be implemented in the original Bitcoin code within a few weeks, allows for side channels (lightning networks) where such quick clearing & settlement can be performed. There's no real limit to how many transactions per second can be done that way, although it's a different kind of settlement than the completely decentralized version that's on-chain.
Hi, my name is Troed, and I suffer from prosopagnosia.
For various degrees of the definition, I'm not a "normal person". Between 2-10% of the population suffer from it, to various degrees. In the severe cases, like mine, it's a cause for many social mishaps.
I long for the day when my glasses can do the facial recognition for me, the one that your brain provides and mine doesn't.
I'm unsure whether you meant to claim that the numbers you gave supported him, but no, they really don't. Saying he's right on "principles" while being horribly wrong on the actual facts is the whole point. He claims the number X will happen REALLY SOON NOW - BE SCARED!, and X doesn't happen.... and that's been the case throughout his whole career.
1) He did not mean soot from wood burning stoves in India/Africa with "smog" btw, that's where the millions of deaths due to pollution comes from. Electrify now! Doesn't matter if it's coal plants or solar for this.
2) Food supply has outstripped demand. Vitamin A deficiency is a real threat though, so make sure to hit the nearest anti-GMO protestor on his/her head since they're blocking golden rice.
3) DDT hadn't reduced life expectancy to 42 years. Neither has anything else. You can't be right "on principles" when you're so horribly wrong on the facts.
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollutionis certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
***
He's awesome. Please give him more grant money for the comical art value alone.
Surely mass extinctions can happen in the future. I'm less sure he supports those biologists who claim where in the midst of one now though (the difference between his comments on it in 2017 as opposed to that from 2006).
Apparently Doug has had the scientific decency to change his views on new data. Or, to use his words:
Surely we’ve earned our place in the pantheon next to the greatest ecological catastrophes of all time: the so-called Big Five mass extinctions of earth history. Surely our Anthropocene extinction can confidently take its place next to the juggernauts of deep time—the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic and Cretaceous extinctions.
“People who claim we’re in the sixth mass extinction don’t understand enough about mass extinctions to understand the logical flaw in their argument. To a certain extent they’re claiming it as a way of frightening people into action"
“Many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, [...] as scientists we have a responsibility to be accurate about such comparisons.”
Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history.
True, of course (maybe with some slight adjustment to the exact timing). The idea that the globe is ever static is a problem when talking about "survival" of species.
The Great Barrier Reef is about 500,000 years old, but it hasn't always looked as it does today. Reefs on Australia's continental shelf have taken on many forms, depending on the sea level, and the current formation is about 6,000 to 8,000 years old.
According to the Australian Institute of Marine Science and other scientific research, the current reef began to form during the Last Glacial Maximum. This period, which occurred from about 26,500 years ago to 19,000 to 20,000 years ago, ushered in significant environmental changes in the region, including a dramatic drop in sea levels.
The land that forms the base of the Great Barrier Reef is the remains of the sediments of the Great Dividing Range, Australia's largest mountain range. About 13,000 years ago, the sea level was 200 feet (61 meters) lower than the current level, and corals began to grow around the hills of the coastal plain, which had become continental islands. The sea level continued to rise during a warming period as glaciers melted. Most of the continental islands were submerged, and the coral remained to form the reefs and cays (low-elevation sandy islands) of today.
Slashdot Mirror
A blockchain only has value if it's immutable. Proof of work, the thing that consumes all that energy, is how the Bitcoin blockchain is made immutable.
Many have tried, and none have succeeded, in a better method with the same security. A blockchain isn't immutable (solving the byzantine generals' problem) just because it is - but because of the computing power thrown at securing it.
Sony Xperia XZ1, Android 8.0 Oreo
On the market since weeks.
https://www.androidcentral.com...
I just switched from Gmail to ProtonMail because I wanted the most secure email provider. This little feature change by Google does nothing to change any of the important factors - one being that with ProtonMail all my emails are stored using client side encryption.
You cannot, ever, trust a US company where National Security Letters come into play.
IOTA is completely centralized. When this has been pointed out to the project maintainers they have responded quite badly.
Stay away.
https://medium.com/@ercwl/iota...
That's why I specifically mentioned "Bitcoin". Ethereum isn't Bitcoin.
You could expect tech news site to know the difference between different crypto coins. No matter if you try to mine Bitcoin on millions of computers you will not get any, only dedicated data centers with thousands of ASICs can reach the hashing power needed.
Monero, like some other altcoins, can be mined on CPUs and/or GPUs.
In major currencies, cash is linked to gold held by the central bank (e.g. Bank of England) or similar.
That depends. Which year do you believe it is currently?
Of course bitcoin can be exchanged for anything of worth. This is obvious to anyone who does a few minutes of research into the subject.
The question then naturally becomes, why do you claim differently when you obviously haven't done that research? What purpose does your post serve?
(20% of all remittance between South Korea and the Philippines is done via Bitcoin. Overstock are extremely happy with their sales in bitcoin. Those were two examples of actual use - I'll let you find all the rest yourself)
Luckily instant transactions at low fees are implemented right now (as in the next few hours) on Bitcoin, with the inclusion of SegWit, enabling Lightning Networks.
I was a Premium user since they launched. The changes to the free tier last year caught me by surprise, and sure enough, since I had no reason to pay for Premium I stopped. I remember getting an automated questionnaire as to why I stopped being a Premium customer and I explained clearly that they now offered the full feature set I was interested in in the free tier.
Now they're apparently changing it so that one feature I want (emergency access) becomes part of the Premium package. Fair enough, they'll get me back as a Premium customer. LastPass is one of those tools I happily pay for, no questions asked.
Bitcoin has never been untraceable, nor marketed as such by anyone who understands the technology. With that said, we'll see MAST and Schnorr signatures as well and that will indeed open up for transactions where the originator cannot be proven, smart contracts (surpassing those in Ethereum) etc.
If you want quick settlements in the thousands per second for people buying lattes I don't think those need to be cleared on-chain, though.
1000 BTC would be about 3 million USD. That's an order of magnitude, or two, lower than the daily trading volume.
https://blockchain.info/charts...
Segwit, due to be implemented in the original Bitcoin code within a few weeks, allows for side channels (lightning networks) where such quick clearing & settlement can be performed. There's no real limit to how many transactions per second can be done that way, although it's a different kind of settlement than the completely decentralized version that's on-chain.
The best part of all this is that it tells the rest of the world how much we should trust software produced by US based companies.
(I'm not the GP)
Hi, my name is Troed, and I suffer from prosopagnosia.
For various degrees of the definition, I'm not a "normal person". Between 2-10% of the population suffer from it, to various degrees. In the severe cases, like mine, it's a cause for many social mishaps.
I long for the day when my glasses can do the facial recognition for me, the one that your brain provides and mine doesn't.
I'm unsure whether you meant to claim that the numbers you gave supported him, but no, they really don't. Saying he's right on "principles" while being horribly wrong on the actual facts is the whole point. He claims the number X will happen REALLY SOON NOW - BE SCARED!, and X doesn't happen. ... and that's been the case throughout his whole career.
1) He did not mean soot from wood burning stoves in India/Africa with "smog" btw, that's where the millions of deaths due to pollution comes from. Electrify now! Doesn't matter if it's coal plants or solar for this.
2) Food supply has outstripped demand. Vitamin A deficiency is a real threat though, so make sure to hit the nearest anti-GMO protestor on his/her head since they're blocking golden rice.
3) DDT hadn't reduced life expectancy to 42 years. Neither has anything else. You can't be right "on principles" when you're so horribly wrong on the facts.
Quotes from Paul Ehrlich:
***
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollutionis certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
***
He's awesome. Please give him more grant money for the comical art value alone.
Again, what _might_ happen in the future is not at all the same thing as being in the midst of one now. So, no.
Surely mass extinctions can happen in the future. I'm less sure he supports those biologists who claim where in the midst of one now though (the difference between his comments on it in 2017 as opposed to that from 2006).
Feel free to contrast with the parent post I replied to:
"The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history"
That's the kind of fear mongering junk science statements Doug is complaining about.
Your quote is from November 28, 2006
Mine is from June 13, 2017
Apparently Doug has had the scientific decency to change his views on new data. Or, to use his words:
Surely we’ve earned our place in the pantheon next to the greatest ecological catastrophes of all time: the so-called Big Five mass extinctions of earth history. Surely our Anthropocene extinction can confidently take its place next to the juggernauts of deep time—the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic and Cretaceous extinctions.
Erwin says no. He thinks it’s junk science.
“People who claim we’re in the sixth mass extinction don’t understand enough about mass extinctions to understand the logical flaw in their argument. To a certain extent they’re claiming it as a way of frightening people into action"
“Many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, [...] as scientists we have a responsibility to be accurate about such comparisons.”
- Smithsonian paleontologist Doug Erwin
https://www.theatlantic.com/sc...
From the paper:
Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of
the Holocene temperature history.
True, of course (maybe with some slight adjustment to the exact timing). The idea that the globe is ever static is a problem when talking about "survival" of species.
The Great Barrier Reef is about 500,000 years old, but it hasn't always looked as it does today. Reefs on Australia's continental shelf have taken on many forms, depending on the sea level, and the current formation is about 6,000 to 8,000 years old.
According to the Australian Institute of Marine Science and other scientific research, the current reef began to form during the Last Glacial Maximum. This period, which occurred from about 26,500 years ago to 19,000 to 20,000 years ago, ushered in significant environmental changes in the region, including a dramatic drop in sea levels.
The land that forms the base of the Great Barrier Reef is the remains of the sediments of the Great Dividing Range, Australia's largest mountain range. About 13,000 years ago, the sea level was 200 feet (61 meters) lower than the current level, and corals began to grow around the hills of the coastal plain, which had become continental islands. The sea level continued to rise during a warming period as glaciers melted. Most of the continental islands were submerged, and the coral remained to form the reefs and cays (low-elevation sandy islands) of today.
https://www.livescience.com/62...
There is absolutely no science whatsoever that indicates any climate effects that will support a statement like "the people are fucked".
(IPCC AR5 WGII is a good start for more information on the subject)