It's been a while since I've paid 5% to convert anything and there are many alternative services for transferring and converting money that don't rely on the absolute garbage that is trying to use bitcoin.
True for legit use cases. For the trillions of dollars in black market transactions, not so much. That is why Crypto is a thing, there is a real use case for it. And while that exists, it will have value.
Crypto currencies are a lot of things. "Convenient" is not among those things. I've tried several times to use bitcoins but it's a total pain in the ass, so I own zero bitcoins. Bitcoin? more like shitcoin. I'm joking, but seriously - bitcoin has to be the world's least convenient way to pay for anything.
Sort of true. Spending not so much, but moving, it is awesome. Try moving hundreds of thousands of dollars across borders in near real time with any other method.
And sure for legit folks this might not be a priority, but for the trillions in currency used in black markets, avoiding government scrutiny is a primary driver.
if your laptop/phone can connect into your home VPN, then what you carry with you, maybe in another country, could be inspected by border-police/
The benefit of SSL VPN is it browser based, so no client on the machine, and no history. If you access your SSL-VPN in a private window/incognito mode, it is effectively invisible to anyone inspecting your device.
At that age one is still a child and still tends to have poor judgement. I know I did back then.
Tell me about it. My 14 year old has gone from regular problem free kid to arrested for shoplifting, to suspended from school for smoking weed, to home-made dyed hair and tattoos in the space of the one month!
It's like payback for all the things I did to my parents when I was that age...
Far too many novice users have no understanding what a VPN is.
Everyone I know has one to get around stupid geoblocking restrictions. The Internet is not designed for geographic borders, so attempts to enforce them are what drives the VPN industry.
It's still a bubble and a scam. The fact that it's gone to $6k doesn't negate either of those.
It might be a bubble, but bubbles still make lots of people rich.
It's no effort to call a bubble, the art is predicting the pop and getting out immediately prior.
I'm more curious as to why bitcoin's dominance has been steadily increasing since July.
My take is that up to now BTC was just a nerd thing. Now it is breaking mainstream it is about to go stupid. I heard a guy at work say he's shifted his retirement fund to BTC (already made 50% this year). The demand market is shifting from a few million nerds, to hundreds of millions of semi nerds, until it hits the billions of regular folks. BTC is the de facto crypto currency so will be a magnet for users new to crypto. The supply/demand potential could see this thing hitting $1mil/coin (sounds stupid I know, but why not?)
When the power goes out the world as we know it will end. Bitcoin or not will mean zilch.
We had a power outage the other week, no-one died, and BTC still went up. Or are you talking a global permanent world wide power outage? Like the kind that happens all the time???
The world will become total chaos and you can only pray that fiat money/gold/silver will still be worth anything at all.
So out of all the millions of possible scenarios, that's one and you're backing that one only? Talk about speculative investing strategies....
What I meant is it does now earn value. ROI was not the appropriate term. I think earnings would be better as when you buy a stock you get a share of the money earned. When you invest in a home you get rent, etc.
There's two ways to earn money off any investment, earnings and capital gain. Currency trading is all the latter.
7B is just too many, no matter how we try to live.
I heard the same thing at 6B, 5B all the way back to 1B, in fact I think the Romans may have even voiced concerns when there was only a few million.
Assuming we do want to scale it back, the easiest method is peace and prosperity. There's a direct correlation between wealth, happiness, and smaller families. I recall seeing something where most of the west is already in stable growth mode (eg Japan is already negative) and that most population growth is from the developing world and immigration.
The courage of Apple giving some minimum-wage tech schlub the title of "Genius" says *everything* about Apple, its branding, and the customers it serves.
And here is where you go wrong. Science is merely a method for finding the most accurate explanations. So one person's 'science says...' isn't a declaration of truth as with religion. It is a declaration of a possible explanation for an observation, along with all the information you need to independently validate or invalidate it.
Any person has the ability to challenge this information and replace it with a more accurate explanation.
Isn't that what Genesis says?
No because Religion says I am right and if you disagree you'll die a horrible death. So you better do what I say and give me money and let me rape your kids.
No-one can ever question it, and there is conveniently no way to independently test any of it. It always exists 100% within the gap of current knowledge so as to avoid any real scrutiny.
The two concepts are the complete opposite of each other.
The whole gaming genre has been so polluted by this P2W crap that it just isn't worth the time, and since older games that have not been recompiled for 64 bit which haven't been updated are wiped off Apple's App Store, what is worth playing is pretty hard to find.
And you need to learn not to bite. The troll got modded into oblivion, but his efforts remain because you bit back.
Internet 101: Don't feed the trolls.
And of course, it is not as if the U.S. isn't doing exactly the same thing. Sponsoring pro-US politicians/movements in other countries in the hope of favourable outcome.
And if that doesn't work, we sponsor rebels and arm them with weapons to take out the government by force.
I have no problem with this. You can't expect that by playing nice your enemies will too. National Security is actually a thing. Where I have a problem is when everyone involved calls out a potential threat and the guy at top ignores it without any justification at all. That negligence is bordering on treason.
Hillary never really managed to coalesce her voter base around anything quite as rousing. The best thing she had going for her was that she wasn't Trump. She needed a miracle, not some protesters staying home.
She didn't need a miracle, she already had the popular vote so she just had to distribute her effort more evenly. She just needed to get out of her echo chamber to the swing states in the heartland. I find it astounding that she thought she could win the swing states without even showing up.
1. Arrogance. She didn't think she had to campaign in the swing states. She actually believed in that "blue firewall" nonsense.
This is 99% of it. Not campaigning in swing states is pretty amateur stuff.
2. Trump's billions of dollars in free media coverage. Nobody in the press would denounce him because they were getting too many hits.
He got denounced plenty, but the stupid vote doesn't care for such things.
3. Russia. Russia. Russia. (insert Brady Bunch joke here). We had an ex-KGB pro with the full backing of his nation throw his hat in the ring for Trump.
This is less a Hillary thing and more a general threat that still isn't getting the coverage it deserves. Russia has been playing this game for decades. I recall a thing I saw years ago how the Soviets were pumping millions into the hippy protests in the 60's in an effort to disrupt and divide. This will continue way past this election unless something is done.
4. Her health. She really was too old for this shit.
No worse than Trump, or Bush snr, or Reagan etc. Plenty of old retards in politics.
5. 30 years of bad press. Not just the emails. Everything. The Republicans knew she was going to run for president at some point. They have a multi-billion dollar media machine dedicated to their cause (Fox, Beitbart, all of Koch media, etc, etc). They've been hammering away at her since her husband left office.
And she still could've won which shows how pointless that effort was.
6. TPP. Crap deal for everyone except the ruling class. In an election about jobs that hurt a lot.
I find it hard to see how anyone can call this either way. If there's one thing we know about economics it's that economists get it wrong most of the time. Tossing a coin is equally valid in predicting such things, so I take it with a grain of salt when anyone claims to know how that would play out exactly.
7. Warmongering. In an effort to show everyone that a woman could be "strong" she went around the world pissing off our allies. A lot of folks figured she'd get us in a war. Meanwhile Trump was saying he wouldn't do that. Jokes on them, he's already got us on the brink of two new wars (to add to the 7 we're already fighting, look it up).
This is one I didn't get. Hillary was warmongery for a Dem, but she was still less warmongery than any Rep POTUS in 40 years.
That's about it. Folks mostly agreed with her on everything except the TPP because most Americans are genuinely conservative. e.g. they don't want much change except maybe some more help from the government (for them only of course, not those lazy Blacks^X Welfare slobs). She's a right of center moderate. Exactly what most voters wanted.
TPP seemed to be used by luddites who think they can wish globalisation away. The genie can't be put back in the bottle, technological advances in transport and communication networks make this impossible to reverse. So you may as well accept there'll be massive changes to our way of life and try and deal with it with a forward thinking leader, rather than an orange man-baby clown...
I do contend though that government is not a good manager of anything it controls
Government just mean governance. So you're implying that anarchy works better? The solution to bad governance is better governance, not no governance.
nor does it provide services efficency.
More efficient than you. If you think otherwise why don't you tender for the many govt contracts worth billions each year and get rich?
Kind of the nature of the beast.
Yes with size comes complexity, but you can't avoid complexity by simply wishing it away.
The less government you can have, the better,
Quite provably false by every example or war of uprising that results in suffering for millions of people. Quality of life is directly correlated to quality of governance.
the less government has control of the individual, the better.
See above. The whole 'small government' philosophy is logically flawed. How do you quantify small? Less than what number? Is there a magic umber that is considered small, or do you apply the "less government" logic all the way?
Should the USA be run by a million public servants, or 1? I'd love to see your model of how the USA being run and managed by only 1 person results in a better outcome than now.
There are few exceptions to this.
Personally, I prefer to be in control of my own destiny and be responsible for myself over having government in my business all the time... but that's kind of what the whole revolutionary war and how the colonies in America were founded.
Also known as the Free Settler myth. It's a myth and it's time to grow up.
Slashdot Mirror
When the Ethereum bubble pops...
Hasn't it already? It dropped 2/3rds of its value in the last 4 months. Although having said that I just noticed that it's up 10% today!
It's been a while since I've paid 5% to convert anything and there are many alternative services for transferring and converting money that don't rely on the absolute garbage that is trying to use bitcoin.
True for legit use cases. For the trillions of dollars in black market transactions, not so much. That is why Crypto is a thing, there is a real use case for it. And while that exists, it will have value.
Crypto currencies are a lot of things. "Convenient" is not among those things. I've tried several times to use bitcoins but it's a total pain in the ass, so I own zero bitcoins. Bitcoin? more like shitcoin. I'm joking, but seriously - bitcoin has to be the world's least convenient way to pay for anything.
Sort of true. Spending not so much, but moving, it is awesome. Try moving hundreds of thousands of dollars across borders in near real time with any other method.
And sure for legit folks this might not be a priority, but for the trillions in currency used in black markets, avoiding government scrutiny is a primary driver.
if your laptop/phone can connect into your home VPN, then what you carry with you, maybe in another country, could be inspected by border-police/
The benefit of SSL VPN is it browser based, so no client on the machine, and no history. If you access your SSL-VPN in a private window/incognito mode, it is effectively invisible to anyone inspecting your device.
At that age one is still a child and still tends to have poor judgement. I know I did back then.
Tell me about it. My 14 year old has gone from regular problem free kid to arrested for shoplifting, to suspended from school for smoking weed, to home-made dyed hair and tattoos in the space of the one month! It's like payback for all the things I did to my parents when I was that age...
Far too many novice users have no understanding what a VPN is.
Everyone I know has one to get around stupid geoblocking restrictions. The Internet is not designed for geographic borders, so attempts to enforce them are what drives the VPN industry.
It's still a bubble and a scam. The fact that it's gone to $6k doesn't negate either of those.
It might be a bubble, but bubbles still make lots of people rich. It's no effort to call a bubble, the art is predicting the pop and getting out immediately prior.
I'm more curious as to why bitcoin's dominance has been steadily increasing since July.
My take is that up to now BTC was just a nerd thing. Now it is breaking mainstream it is about to go stupid. I heard a guy at work say he's shifted his retirement fund to BTC (already made 50% this year). The demand market is shifting from a few million nerds, to hundreds of millions of semi nerds, until it hits the billions of regular folks. BTC is the de facto crypto currency so will be a magnet for users new to crypto. The supply/demand potential could see this thing hitting $1mil/coin (sounds stupid I know, but why not?)
When the power goes out the world as we know it will end. Bitcoin or not will mean zilch.
We had a power outage the other week, no-one died, and BTC still went up. Or are you talking a global permanent world wide power outage? Like the kind that happens all the time???
The world will become total chaos and you can only pray that fiat money/gold/silver will still be worth anything at all.
So out of all the millions of possible scenarios, that's one and you're backing that one only? Talk about speculative investing strategies....
What I meant is it does now earn value. ROI was not the appropriate term. I think earnings would be better as when you buy a stock you get a share of the money earned. When you invest in a home you get rent, etc.
There's two ways to earn money off any investment, earnings and capital gain. Currency trading is all the latter.
Wait he sold his bitcoins for $14??
Those 7 would be worth $42,000! Who is the fool?
Yeah, that's the joke. And you a good joke only gets funnier when you explain it...
Yet here you are...
7B is just too many, no matter how we try to live.
I heard the same thing at 6B, 5B all the way back to 1B, in fact I think the Romans may have even voiced concerns when there was only a few million.
Assuming we do want to scale it back, the easiest method is peace and prosperity. There's a direct correlation between wealth, happiness, and smaller families. I recall seeing something where most of the west is already in stable growth mode (eg Japan is already negative) and that most population growth is from the developing world and immigration.
Who is the Fool? The Fool, or the Fool who follows him?
Or the Fool who Fool's Fool, Fool Fool Fool....
The courage of Apple giving some minimum-wage tech schlub the title of "Genius" says *everything* about Apple, its branding, and the customers it serves.
FTFY
Science says...
And here is where you go wrong. Science is merely a method for finding the most accurate explanations. So one person's 'science says...' isn't a declaration of truth as with religion. It is a declaration of a possible explanation for an observation, along with all the information you need to independently validate or invalidate it.
Any person has the ability to challenge this information and replace it with a more accurate explanation.
Isn't that what Genesis says?
No because Religion says I am right and if you disagree you'll die a horrible death. So you better do what I say and give me money and let me rape your kids.
No-one can ever question it, and there is conveniently no way to independently test any of it. It always exists 100% within the gap of current knowledge so as to avoid any real scrutiny.
The two concepts are the complete opposite of each other.
Would they be fighting with bear hands?
Or maybe their bear arms? It's a Constitutional right after all...
The whole gaming genre has been so polluted by this P2W crap that it just isn't worth the time, and since older games that have not been recompiled for 64 bit which haven't been updated are wiped off Apple's App Store, what is worth playing is pretty hard to find.
There's no P2W in Counterstrike, just skill...
You're trolling too hard.
And you need to learn not to bite. The troll got modded into oblivion, but his efforts remain because you bit back.
Internet 101: Don't feed the trolls.
And of course, it is not as if the U.S. isn't doing exactly the same thing. Sponsoring pro-US politicians/movements in other countries in the hope of favourable outcome.
And if that doesn't work, we sponsor rebels and arm them with weapons to take out the government by force.
I have no problem with this. You can't expect that by playing nice your enemies will too. National Security is actually a thing. Where I have a problem is when everyone involved calls out a potential threat and the guy at top ignores it without any justification at all. That negligence is bordering on treason.
Hillary never really managed to coalesce her voter base around anything quite as rousing. The best thing she had going for her was that she wasn't Trump. She needed a miracle, not some protesters staying home.
She didn't need a miracle, she already had the popular vote so she just had to distribute her effort more evenly. She just needed to get out of her echo chamber to the swing states in the heartland. I find it astounding that she thought she could win the swing states without even showing up.
1. Arrogance. She didn't think she had to campaign in the swing states. She actually believed in that "blue firewall" nonsense.
This is 99% of it. Not campaigning in swing states is pretty amateur stuff.
2. Trump's billions of dollars in free media coverage. Nobody in the press would denounce him because they were getting too many hits.
He got denounced plenty, but the stupid vote doesn't care for such things.
3. Russia. Russia. Russia. (insert Brady Bunch joke here). We had an ex-KGB pro with the full backing of his nation throw his hat in the ring for Trump.
This is less a Hillary thing and more a general threat that still isn't getting the coverage it deserves. Russia has been playing this game for decades. I recall a thing I saw years ago how the Soviets were pumping millions into the hippy protests in the 60's in an effort to disrupt and divide. This will continue way past this election unless something is done.
4. Her health. She really was too old for this shit.
No worse than Trump, or Bush snr, or Reagan etc. Plenty of old retards in politics.
5. 30 years of bad press. Not just the emails. Everything. The Republicans knew she was going to run for president at some point. They have a multi-billion dollar media machine dedicated to their cause (Fox, Beitbart, all of Koch media, etc, etc). They've been hammering away at her since her husband left office.
And she still could've won which shows how pointless that effort was.
6. TPP. Crap deal for everyone except the ruling class. In an election about jobs that hurt a lot.
I find it hard to see how anyone can call this either way. If there's one thing we know about economics it's that economists get it wrong most of the time. Tossing a coin is equally valid in predicting such things, so I take it with a grain of salt when anyone claims to know how that would play out exactly.
7. Warmongering. In an effort to show everyone that a woman could be "strong" she went around the world pissing off our allies. A lot of folks figured she'd get us in a war. Meanwhile Trump was saying he wouldn't do that. Jokes on them, he's already got us on the brink of two new wars (to add to the 7 we're already fighting, look it up).
This is one I didn't get. Hillary was warmongery for a Dem, but she was still less warmongery than any Rep POTUS in 40 years.
That's about it. Folks mostly agreed with her on everything except the TPP because most Americans are genuinely conservative. e.g. they don't want much change except maybe some more help from the government (for them only of course, not those lazy Blacks^X Welfare slobs). She's a right of center moderate. Exactly what most voters wanted.
TPP seemed to be used by luddites who think they can wish globalisation away. The genie can't be put back in the bottle, technological advances in transport and communication networks make this impossible to reverse. So you may as well accept there'll be massive changes to our way of life and try and deal with it with a forward thinking leader, rather than an orange man-baby clown...
Ask yourself, is what I'm hearing designed to unite or divide? You then have your answer to who the real enemy is.
The age of the 'average user desktop' is over. We are moving into the 'Workstation' era.
Actually more people are moving the other way, desktop to laptop/tablet/phone...
LOL.. If you like it, great for you.
I didn't say I like it, I said it works well.
I do contend though that government is not a good manager of anything it controls
Government just mean governance. So you're implying that anarchy works better? The solution to bad governance is better governance, not no governance.
nor does it provide services efficency.
More efficient than you. If you think otherwise why don't you tender for the many govt contracts worth billions each year and get rich?
Kind of the nature of the beast.
Yes with size comes complexity, but you can't avoid complexity by simply wishing it away.
The less government you can have, the better,
Quite provably false by every example or war of uprising that results in suffering for millions of people. Quality of life is directly correlated to quality of governance.
the less government has control of the individual, the better.
See above. The whole 'small government' philosophy is logically flawed. How do you quantify small? Less than what number? Is there a magic umber that is considered small, or do you apply the "less government" logic all the way?
Should the USA be run by a million public servants, or 1? I'd love to see your model of how the USA being run and managed by only 1 person results in a better outcome than now.
There are few exceptions to this.
Personally, I prefer to be in control of my own destiny and be responsible for myself over having government in my business all the time... but that's kind of what the whole revolutionary war and how the colonies in America were founded.
Also known as the Free Settler myth. It's a myth and it's time to grow up.