Microwaves deliver something like 50% of their energy per inch of penetration of flesh. Which means that it delivers even less energy to any given cell than the same wattage of infrared light would. So we have less energy per photon, and the photons smeared out over a large volume.
And it isn't like the effects of microwaves are particularly mysterious. They bump up the energy of molecules, and they do so in increments that very rarely break them (that's the non-ionizing part). Basically, pure diffused heat. Incredibly painful if you happen to catch a kilowatt from a microwave oven magnetron, or a klystron from a radar emitter, but also far less damaging than the same flux of visible or infrared light.
UV is partly ionizing and partly not. However, it always carries more energy per photon than visible light. What we call radio, even including microwaves, is in the opposite direction. Microwaves carry even less energy per photon than infrared light, and if you told someone you were afraid of a 2 watt quasi-spherical infrared emitter they'd fall over laughing.
SJWs always project. The big news orgs started tossing around "fake news" in an attempt to slander other news sites. But, true to the 2nd rule, we found out that they were the worst offenders.
Remember how all of the news sites said that Hillary was going to win? That was Fake News. And there are collages of and video compilations of crying people who put their faith in that fake news.
If you aren't reading 20 or 30 different sites and cross referencing the stories, and checking sources, and watching videos to find out what people actually said - you aren't well informed. If you are getting all of your news from like 2 or 3 sites, no matter which sites they are, you might as well be reading the news from another planet.
Pretty much every news site you come across has a bias. The cable news sites (CNN, MSNBC, etc) are sure that Mueller is going to impeach Trump any day now. Pro-Trump sites are less monolithic, but they are hoping that Sessions is about to indict half of DC.
Elsewhere in this thread, I linked to conservativetreehouse.com, which has a far better record than most sites at digging for actual facts, but you need to pay attention when sundance is offering his opinions - he tends to be guardedly optimistic. It is probably the best starting point around, but you still need to use it as a starting point, not an ending point.
The_Donald on reddit and/pol/ will throw a ton of stuff at you with highly variable quality. CNN or MSN or nearly any other part of reddit will do the same thing but with the opposite slant.
Notice that the DOJ Inspector General's office is prepping Congress and the public ahead of important witness testimony. Analysis here: https://theconservativetreehou...
One month from today, they intend to release 1.2 million documents. Think of it as a late Christmas present for America.
You are delusional. You are literally living in a fake news bubble. Turn off CNN and MSNBC and take a look at what the DOJ Inspector General has been releasing. The dirt isn't falling on Trump or his people, it is falling on Mueller's "investigators".
Also, notice that so far the only actual Russian involvement in the election to have been demonstrated was pro-Hillary and pro-BLM Facebook ads. And so far all of the "Russians" attempting to collude with the campaign were actually Democrats.
If you don't seek out some real information, you are going to be in for a very rude surprise when this doesn't turn out the way you are hoping.
"Lying to the FBI" is quite a ways away from where we started, which, if you may recall was "attempting to work with that same power (Russia) to scuttle an opponent's election bid".
Michael Flynn's job was literally to make contact with the governments of other countries, including Russia, after the election. Slashdot won't let me write that key word in huge letters for emphasis, so I'll just have to repeat it. AFTER the election. After. After. If anything he did after the election scuttled Hillary's chances before the election, I'd say that his impending Nobel prize for a working time machine would be worth it.
As it is, he decided not to contradict his boss (Pence) while having what he thought was an informal water-cooler discussion with a colleague, but was actually an interrogation without his lawyer present, conducted by an FBI agent who is probably going to (literally) hang for sedition because all of this happened as part of a (literal) conspiracy to (literally) overthrow the legally elected President.
Do you have any idea how incoherent your philosophy of economics is?
The others are necessary, but they don't either add to or subtract from the overall economy.
I can only conclude that you are making this up on the spot. For something to be both necessary, and to have no effect is self-contradictory. You can't possibly have thought about this in advance or you'd have seen it yourself, and presumably not written it out.
Entertainment is value creation, it's a new desirable good where none existed before.
Hang on a second... Is business management a desirable good (or service) or not? Business owners desire it, pay for it, and consume it (as much as anyone consumes entertainment). Do you have a rule for deciding which things are desirable goods, or are you just winging it?
There wasn't a money shortage
Zimbabwe had a "money shortage". I've got one of their ten trillion dollar bills in my collection. It is worth far more on ebay as a curio in the US than it is as money in Zimbabwe.
Do you know what that ten trillion dollar bill really is? It is the theft by the powerful of nearly 100% of the savings of all of the powerless people in that country. Ask someone from that part of the world who had their life savings wiped out by hyperinflation how they feel about money that their government can inflate at will.
Due to the various shady customers of anonymous funds transfer acting as a net detriment to society.
Yeah, yeah, we get it. You are a totalitarian control freak.
The algorithms might be (and that's hard to prove)
Actually, trivial to prove. In the bitcoin-core client source, it is in the file validation.cpp. You can add it up with pencil and paper if you want, or, if you have access to some sort of machine that can perform additions and rightshifts, you can ask it to add the numbers up for you.
CAmount GetBlockSubsidy(int nHeight, const Consensus::Params& consensusParams) {
int halvings = nHeight / consensusParams.nSubsidyHalvingInterval;// Force block reward to zero when right shift is undefined.
if (halvings >= 64)
return 0;
CAmount nSubsidy = 50 * COIN;// Subsidy is cut in half every 210,000 blocks which will occur approximately every 4 years.
nSubsidy >>= halvings;
return nSubsidy; }
the whales can tank bitcoin, etc.
No, they can't. They could toss around the exchange rate, but bitcoin is not the exchange rate. Oh, and people can (and have!) messed with exchange rates since exchange rates have existed.
In your world, does management create value? They don't feed anyone or transport anything, but they make the workers more efficient.
How about insurance? Risk management doesn't actually feed anyone either. Is that wasted?
How about banking? Lending doesn't feed anyone. Is it a waste for producers to have access to capital?
What do you think about art? No one eats art, at least not that I know of. Do you denounce art?
Your theory of value is straight up Marxian, and you still think that you should be entitled to dictate what work should be done.
Creating money does not create value
Serious question - what do you mean by "creating money" here? Do you mean like physically printing dollar bills? Or inflation in general? Or a new money system? Or do you mean that the invention of money as a concept added no value to the world?
The problem with bitcoin, now, is that it costs so much more than printing a dollar to calculate a new bitcoin. You are confusing this with creating value, while losing the benefit of all of that electricity is a net cost to society greater than the cost of printing a dollar.
If the bitcoin was just another inflationary fiat system managed by the powerful at the expense of everyone else, you might be onto something. But bitcoin isn't that - it is a money system that cannot be manipulated by anyone. No government and no bank gets to skim 5% of the world's savings away each year in inflation. Can you really see no value in that?
I pile on insults because it makes the tedious enterprise of talking to you more enjoyable for me. But I never make the mistake of merely insulting - I've made many points, which you've ignored. You are still ignoring them.
Here's one:
The computing effort is not wasted, it has been voluntarily spent to do work that people find useful.
Now, I don't come right out and say what that work is for two reasons. For one thing, we are discussing bitcoin and if you don't understand how the network places transactions into order, you are even less qualified to be discussing bitcoin than I thought at first, which would be incredible considering how low my initial estimate was. The second reason is that it doesn't really matter. You are not emperor and you don't get to decide what is a "benefit to society".
What is your response to that? Nothing. You just repeat your claims. You don't make any arguments, you provide no logic, you cite no reasons or authorities. You merely repeat yourself.
How did you respond to my citation of definitions for a term that you used incorrectly? You burn your dictionary and declare yourself the victor. Bravo. Golf clap.
In your own mind, you may be the pinnacle of eloquence, but everyone else reading this can see that you are just repeating the same baseless claims over and over again.
I try to be civil to engage you, and this is what I get? A steaming pile of your own subjective opinions passed off as objective facts. Read your post from the point of view of someone who doesn't think the sun shines out your ass if you wonder why I hold you in such contempt. Anything that Bruce doesn't understand is useless. Nay! Worse than useless - actually a "detriment to society".
Work can never be stored - it is always consumed. If you paint your house, you can't decide to unpaint it and get those hours of your life back. But you still do it, either to make your life more enjoyable by having an aesthetically pleasing home, or to protect the other work you've put into your house from weather, or because you think you'll be able to exchange the house for more money later.
Bitcoin does not "represent" the work done on it, or the electricity consumed by the network, or silicon in the chips it runs on. Bitcoin is a decentralized ledger, nothing more. The computing effort is not wasted, it has been voluntarily spent to do work that people find useful.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a Bernie-bro like you thinks that people should be spending their work on things that you want instead of things that they want.
I live in a rural area several miles outside of a town of about 2500 people. Two different cable companies have fiber optic service at my address and the phone company has a fiber-fed DSLAM about 2 houses down so I could get good DSL if I really wanted to.
One of the cable companies is a national brand, and the other is a local company that has designs and funding lined up and ready to go for every city and town in the area that they aren't already in. Every winter they convince another town or two to ditch the monopoly, and every summer they build a brand new cable plant or two from scratch, right alongside the incumbent's wires.
The monopoly franchise may have been necessary once upon a time, which I really doubt, but I can say with absolute certainty that it is not necessary today. If anyone has only one option, their problem is local, either the city is granting a monopoly, or their state is making it impossible for startups to operate.
I agree 100% that people need to fix their local problems instead of demanding that the federal government punish the rest of us so that they can keep being lazy.
One thing that I think should have abundant federal regulation is municipal ISPs. If the people of a city want to form one, I think they should be able to, and I also think that there needs to be strong rules to keep the local government from abusing their monopoly. For example, they should not be able to use taxpayer funds.
Originally, people used the money they wanted to because they wanted to use it. Later on, rulers used the power of the state to force them to use worthless money, by fiat - that's where the expression came from. Now people are choosing once again to defy the government fiat and use money that suits their needs instead of the needs of their rulers.
But yes, if you ignore the one fundamental and unalterable characteristic of "fiat money", bitcoin does indeed possess some of the same secondary and accidental characteristics.
In the interests of being civil, I will precisely diagnose the root cause of your error. You've allowed yourself to be hoodwinked by the theory of "intrinsic value". There is no such thing. You can melt down a gold bar, or grind it to powder or examine it in a microscope or a particle collider and never will you find a particle of value in it. You can shred a paper dollar or examine the spectra when you burn one, and you'll find no evidence of value there either. You can chisel a yap stone to dust in a futile search for "value", or you can read the software that manages checking accounts at your bank or processes credit card transactions at a merchant bank and you'll never find "value".
All things have value only because, and only to the extent that, people expect that they can use them or trade them for other things they want. That is the only value, and it isn't intrinsic to the thing, it is instead in our brains.
And when you phrase it the way I did just now, you'll see that "trade them for other things" is just a special case of the more general "use them". Not only does bitcoin have no "intrinsic value", bitcoins don't even exist. They don't even exist in the abstract intangible sense. And yet, they still have so much utility that people use them voluntarily - no fiat needed.
fiat (noun): 1. a command or act of will that creates something without or as if without further effort 2. an authoritative determination - dictate 3. an authoritative or arbitrary order - decree
Fiat money is a currency without intrinsic value established as money by government regulation
Now pray tell us all exactly which government established bitcoin as money by dictate or decree...
If you can remember whatever it was that established your credibility, you might want to consider sticking to that topic, whatever it is. Because you don't even know the stuff that your teacher would expect you to know walking into an Econ 101 course on the first day, and talking about things that don't know even the most basic definitions of is going to tank your brand.
Go browse the block explorer for a while. Pretty much none of the pools actually looks very closely at the fees or does any hard math on them. In most blocks, you'll find one or two transactions with dozens of inputs for roughly the same cost as the many one or two input transactions.
If you prefer to avoid small change in your wallet, it is trivial to gather up a few small inputs to redeem instead of just taking the smallest one larger than the desired output.
Also, there was no sales pitch - all of the cheerleaders you were listening to were freelance, and if they were selling bitcoin as a micropayment option, they were just as stupid to say that as anyone else must have been to have believed them. It doesn't need to take over all transactions to be successful - just handling inter-bank settlements would be a nearly-incalculable positive change for the world.
Bitcoin is decentralized. There is no "official" bitcoin anything. Even the blockchain itself is just an agreement between independent parties. Don't take anything that people say about it too seriously; their opinions don't mean shit.
We are so far away from the shoeshine boy stage that it isn't even funny. Also, bitcoin is an odd blend of tech-adoption, which follows an S-curve, and an investment, which does not. (Note that I don't consider bitcoin to be an investment and don't encourage it, I'm discussing a conceptual model used by "the masses" here.)
Usage of bitcoin for commerce is growing by leaps and bounds, still very early in the S-curve. In other words, more people are buying bitcoin to use as money than ever before. I don't know how to disentangle those purchases from the speculative purchases, and neither does anyone else.
For that reason, and a few others, bitcoin is unusually resistant to our ordinary methods of price discovery. My guess is that the price today (literally right now) is high compared to what it will be in a few weeks or months or whenever the short term trend reverses, but the price this year is still low compared to what it will be in a few years when the long term trends swamps the recent short term movements.
(Please don't mortgage your house or gamble with money you can't afford to lose with a smile.)
The US dollar is backed by the faith in the US government
This sentence has zero information content without proper definitions for the following terms:
"backed" "faith" "US government"
While you are working on that, please consider that once upon a time, the US dollar was "backed", in gold, by the "US government", and despite our "faith" that our notes could be redeemed for money (gold) at any time, that faith (and backing) was broken nearly 50 years ago.
Money is an umbrella term for things that have certain properties. An instance of money generally meets all or most of the desired properties. Other than that, the only sensible definition that I've ever seen is the circular definition that money is what people use as money. What gets used as money can be predicted, somewhat, by understanding the desirable properties.
Bitcoin is an electronic system that attempts to implement as many of the properties of the abstract platonic concept of money as it practically can. I've seen it argued, and I mostly agree, that it does a better job of implementing the desired properties than anything else. It isn't perfect here and it isn't perfect there, but in totality and weighted by our current needs it is better than any of the alternatives, including gold, USD, etc.
Is the exchange rate in a bubble right now? Maybe, or "probably". Is it a tulip-bubble that will pop and then disappear forever? Almost certainly not, at least not if you consider cryptocurrencies in general - the chances of bitcoin specifically disappearing in the future is much better than the chances of bitcoin-the-idea disappearing.
Absolutely nothing that you listed is a short, much less a naked one, with the one exception of, thank God, an example of an actual naked short.
Your examples were: venture funding, venture funding, development contract, hedging, hedging, hedging, naked short. Note that the first three do not happen on markets at all, while the hedging happens on markets that will enforce with the utmost strictness a very hard cap on your exposure. If you reach your credit limit on a futures exchange, the exchange itself will cancel out your position by buying inverse contracts, leaving you with a cash debt and your counterparties whole.
Meanwhile, short selling a stock at the exchange level merely involves executing the sell order and never delivering. Your brokerage will get listed in the FTD report (FTD = Failure To Deliver) showing the outstanding settlement, but as far as I can tell, there is no other consequence.
Slashdot Mirror
Microwaves deliver something like 50% of their energy per inch of penetration of flesh. Which means that it delivers even less energy to any given cell than the same wattage of infrared light would. So we have less energy per photon, and the photons smeared out over a large volume.
And it isn't like the effects of microwaves are particularly mysterious. They bump up the energy of molecules, and they do so in increments that very rarely break them (that's the non-ionizing part). Basically, pure diffused heat. Incredibly painful if you happen to catch a kilowatt from a microwave oven magnetron, or a klystron from a radar emitter, but also far less damaging than the same flux of visible or infrared light.
Don't waste your time. The California Department of Health is a political body, not a scientific one.
UV is partly ionizing and partly not. However, it always carries more energy per photon than visible light. What we call radio, even including microwaves, is in the opposite direction. Microwaves carry even less energy per photon than infrared light, and if you told someone you were afraid of a 2 watt quasi-spherical infrared emitter they'd fall over laughing.
SJWs always project. The big news orgs started tossing around "fake news" in an attempt to slander other news sites. But, true to the 2nd rule, we found out that they were the worst offenders.
Remember how all of the news sites said that Hillary was going to win? That was Fake News. And there are collages of and video compilations of crying people who put their faith in that fake news.
If you aren't reading 20 or 30 different sites and cross referencing the stories, and checking sources, and watching videos to find out what people actually said - you aren't well informed. If you are getting all of your news from like 2 or 3 sites, no matter which sites they are, you might as well be reading the news from another planet.
Pretty much every news site you come across has a bias. The cable news sites (CNN, MSNBC, etc) are sure that Mueller is going to impeach Trump any day now. Pro-Trump sites are less monolithic, but they are hoping that Sessions is about to indict half of DC.
Elsewhere in this thread, I linked to conservativetreehouse.com, which has a far better record than most sites at digging for actual facts, but you need to pay attention when sundance is offering his opinions - he tends to be guardedly optimistic. It is probably the best starting point around, but you still need to use it as a starting point, not an ending point.
The_Donald on reddit and /pol/ will throw a ton of stuff at you with highly variable quality. CNN or MSN or nearly any other part of reddit will do the same thing but with the opposite slant.
Here is Jim Jordan laying out the basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Notice that the DOJ Inspector General's office is prepping Congress and the public ahead of important witness testimony. Analysis here: https://theconservativetreehou...
One month from today, they intend to release 1.2 million documents. Think of it as a late Christmas present for America.
You are delusional. You are literally living in a fake news bubble. Turn off CNN and MSNBC and take a look at what the DOJ Inspector General has been releasing. The dirt isn't falling on Trump or his people, it is falling on Mueller's "investigators".
Also, notice that so far the only actual Russian involvement in the election to have been demonstrated was pro-Hillary and pro-BLM Facebook ads. And so far all of the "Russians" attempting to collude with the campaign were actually Democrats.
If you don't seek out some real information, you are going to be in for a very rude surprise when this doesn't turn out the way you are hoping.
"Lying to the FBI" is quite a ways away from where we started, which, if you may recall was "attempting to work with that same power (Russia) to scuttle an opponent's election bid".
Michael Flynn's job was literally to make contact with the governments of other countries, including Russia, after the election. Slashdot won't let me write that key word in huge letters for emphasis, so I'll just have to repeat it. AFTER the election. After. After. If anything he did after the election scuttled Hillary's chances before the election, I'd say that his impending Nobel prize for a working time machine would be worth it.
As it is, he decided not to contradict his boss (Pence) while having what he thought was an informal water-cooler discussion with a colleague, but was actually an interrogation without his lawyer present, conducted by an FBI agent who is probably going to (literally) hang for sedition because all of this happened as part of a (literal) conspiracy to (literally) overthrow the legally elected President.
Sedition is the technical term for it, not mutiny.
That would be news to those of us who have been following this very closely. Please provide a citation.
A better title for the story: Major internet routers still inexplicably accepting unauthenticated BGP announcements
Reminder set. See you next year.
Do you have any idea how incoherent your philosophy of economics is?
I can only conclude that you are making this up on the spot. For something to be both necessary, and to have no effect is self-contradictory. You can't possibly have thought about this in advance or you'd have seen it yourself, and presumably not written it out.
Hang on a second... Is business management a desirable good (or service) or not? Business owners desire it, pay for it, and consume it (as much as anyone consumes entertainment). Do you have a rule for deciding which things are desirable goods, or are you just winging it?
Zimbabwe had a "money shortage". I've got one of their ten trillion dollar bills in my collection. It is worth far more on ebay as a curio in the US than it is as money in Zimbabwe.
Do you know what that ten trillion dollar bill really is? It is the theft by the powerful of nearly 100% of the savings of all of the powerless people in that country. Ask someone from that part of the world who had their life savings wiped out by hyperinflation how they feel about money that their government can inflate at will.
Yeah, yeah, we get it. You are a totalitarian control freak.
Actually, trivial to prove. In the bitcoin-core client source, it is in the file validation.cpp. You can add it up with pencil and paper if you want, or, if you have access to some sort of machine that can perform additions and rightshifts, you can ask it to add the numbers up for you.
No, they can't. They could toss around the exchange rate, but bitcoin is not the exchange rate. Oh, and people can (and have!) messed with exchange rates since exchange rates have existed.
In your world, does management create value? They don't feed anyone or transport anything, but they make the workers more efficient.
How about insurance? Risk management doesn't actually feed anyone either. Is that wasted?
How about banking? Lending doesn't feed anyone. Is it a waste for producers to have access to capital?
What do you think about art? No one eats art, at least not that I know of. Do you denounce art?
Your theory of value is straight up Marxian, and you still think that you should be entitled to dictate what work should be done.
Serious question - what do you mean by "creating money" here? Do you mean like physically printing dollar bills? Or inflation in general? Or a new money system? Or do you mean that the invention of money as a concept added no value to the world?
If the bitcoin was just another inflationary fiat system managed by the powerful at the expense of everyone else, you might be onto something. But bitcoin isn't that - it is a money system that cannot be manipulated by anyone. No government and no bank gets to skim 5% of the world's savings away each year in inflation. Can you really see no value in that?
Good for who?
Obviously, it isn't good for the banks. They make their money by manipulating money.
It would, however, be good for us to stop them from doing that.
I pile on insults because it makes the tedious enterprise of talking to you more enjoyable for me. But I never make the mistake of merely insulting - I've made many points, which you've ignored. You are still ignoring them.
Here's one:
Now, I don't come right out and say what that work is for two reasons. For one thing, we are discussing bitcoin and if you don't understand how the network places transactions into order, you are even less qualified to be discussing bitcoin than I thought at first, which would be incredible considering how low my initial estimate was. The second reason is that it doesn't really matter. You are not emperor and you don't get to decide what is a "benefit to society".
What is your response to that? Nothing. You just repeat your claims. You don't make any arguments, you provide no logic, you cite no reasons or authorities. You merely repeat yourself.
How did you respond to my citation of definitions for a term that you used incorrectly? You burn your dictionary and declare yourself the victor. Bravo. Golf clap.
In your own mind, you may be the pinnacle of eloquence, but everyone else reading this can see that you are just repeating the same baseless claims over and over again.
Sigh.
I try to be civil to engage you, and this is what I get? A steaming pile of your own subjective opinions passed off as objective facts. Read your post from the point of view of someone who doesn't think the sun shines out your ass if you wonder why I hold you in such contempt. Anything that Bruce doesn't understand is useless. Nay! Worse than useless - actually a "detriment to society".
Work can never be stored - it is always consumed. If you paint your house, you can't decide to unpaint it and get those hours of your life back. But you still do it, either to make your life more enjoyable by having an aesthetically pleasing home, or to protect the other work you've put into your house from weather, or because you think you'll be able to exchange the house for more money later.
Bitcoin does not "represent" the work done on it, or the electricity consumed by the network, or silicon in the chips it runs on. Bitcoin is a decentralized ledger, nothing more. The computing effort is not wasted, it has been voluntarily spent to do work that people find useful.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a Bernie-bro like you thinks that people should be spending their work on things that you want instead of things that they want.
I live in a rural area several miles outside of a town of about 2500 people. Two different cable companies have fiber optic service at my address and the phone company has a fiber-fed DSLAM about 2 houses down so I could get good DSL if I really wanted to.
One of the cable companies is a national brand, and the other is a local company that has designs and funding lined up and ready to go for every city and town in the area that they aren't already in. Every winter they convince another town or two to ditch the monopoly, and every summer they build a brand new cable plant or two from scratch, right alongside the incumbent's wires.
The monopoly franchise may have been necessary once upon a time, which I really doubt, but I can say with absolute certainty that it is not necessary today. If anyone has only one option, their problem is local, either the city is granting a monopoly, or their state is making it impossible for startups to operate.
I agree 100% that people need to fix their local problems instead of demanding that the federal government punish the rest of us so that they can keep being lazy.
One thing that I think should have abundant federal regulation is municipal ISPs. If the people of a city want to form one, I think they should be able to, and I also think that there needs to be strong rules to keep the local government from abusing their monopoly. For example, they should not be able to use taxpayer funds.
Originally, people used the money they wanted to because they wanted to use it. Later on, rulers used the power of the state to force them to use worthless money, by fiat - that's where the expression came from. Now people are choosing once again to defy the government fiat and use money that suits their needs instead of the needs of their rulers.
But yes, if you ignore the one fundamental and unalterable characteristic of "fiat money", bitcoin does indeed possess some of the same secondary and accidental characteristics.
In the interests of being civil, I will precisely diagnose the root cause of your error. You've allowed yourself to be hoodwinked by the theory of "intrinsic value". There is no such thing. You can melt down a gold bar, or grind it to powder or examine it in a microscope or a particle collider and never will you find a particle of value in it. You can shred a paper dollar or examine the spectra when you burn one, and you'll find no evidence of value there either. You can chisel a yap stone to dust in a futile search for "value", or you can read the software that manages checking accounts at your bank or processes credit card transactions at a merchant bank and you'll never find "value".
All things have value only because, and only to the extent that, people expect that they can use them or trade them for other things they want. That is the only value, and it isn't intrinsic to the thing, it is instead in our brains.
And when you phrase it the way I did just now, you'll see that "trade them for other things" is just a special case of the more general "use them". Not only does bitcoin have no "intrinsic value", bitcoins don't even exist. They don't even exist in the abstract intangible sense. And yet, they still have so much utility that people use them voluntarily - no fiat needed.
What did you do before that made people think you were worth listening to? Its been so long, I honestly can't remember.
But let me help you out here. From a dictionary:
And from Wikipedia:
Now pray tell us all exactly which government established bitcoin as money by dictate or decree...
If you can remember whatever it was that established your credibility, you might want to consider sticking to that topic, whatever it is. Because you don't even know the stuff that your teacher would expect you to know walking into an Econ 101 course on the first day, and talking about things that don't know even the most basic definitions of is going to tank your brand.
Go browse the block explorer for a while. Pretty much none of the pools actually looks very closely at the fees or does any hard math on them. In most blocks, you'll find one or two transactions with dozens of inputs for roughly the same cost as the many one or two input transactions.
If you prefer to avoid small change in your wallet, it is trivial to gather up a few small inputs to redeem instead of just taking the smallest one larger than the desired output.
Also, there was no sales pitch - all of the cheerleaders you were listening to were freelance, and if they were selling bitcoin as a micropayment option, they were just as stupid to say that as anyone else must have been to have believed them. It doesn't need to take over all transactions to be successful - just handling inter-bank settlements would be a nearly-incalculable positive change for the world.
Bitcoin is decentralized. There is no "official" bitcoin anything. Even the blockchain itself is just an agreement between independent parties. Don't take anything that people say about it too seriously; their opinions don't mean shit.
We are so far away from the shoeshine boy stage that it isn't even funny. Also, bitcoin is an odd blend of tech-adoption, which follows an S-curve, and an investment, which does not. (Note that I don't consider bitcoin to be an investment and don't encourage it, I'm discussing a conceptual model used by "the masses" here.)
Usage of bitcoin for commerce is growing by leaps and bounds, still very early in the S-curve. In other words, more people are buying bitcoin to use as money than ever before. I don't know how to disentangle those purchases from the speculative purchases, and neither does anyone else.
For that reason, and a few others, bitcoin is unusually resistant to our ordinary methods of price discovery. My guess is that the price today (literally right now) is high compared to what it will be in a few weeks or months or whenever the short term trend reverses, but the price this year is still low compared to what it will be in a few years when the long term trends swamps the recent short term movements.
(Please don't mortgage your house or gamble with money you can't afford to lose with a smile.)
This sentence has zero information content without proper definitions for the following terms:
"backed"
"faith"
"US government"
While you are working on that, please consider that once upon a time, the US dollar was "backed", in gold, by the "US government", and despite our "faith" that our notes could be redeemed for money (gold) at any time, that faith (and backing) was broken nearly 50 years ago.
Money is an umbrella term for things that have certain properties. An instance of money generally meets all or most of the desired properties. Other than that, the only sensible definition that I've ever seen is the circular definition that money is what people use as money. What gets used as money can be predicted, somewhat, by understanding the desirable properties.
Bitcoin is an electronic system that attempts to implement as many of the properties of the abstract platonic concept of money as it practically can. I've seen it argued, and I mostly agree, that it does a better job of implementing the desired properties than anything else. It isn't perfect here and it isn't perfect there, but in totality and weighted by our current needs it is better than any of the alternatives, including gold, USD, etc.
Is the exchange rate in a bubble right now? Maybe, or "probably". Is it a tulip-bubble that will pop and then disappear forever? Almost certainly not, at least not if you consider cryptocurrencies in general - the chances of bitcoin specifically disappearing in the future is much better than the chances of bitcoin-the-idea disappearing.
Absolutely nothing that you listed is a short, much less a naked one, with the one exception of, thank God, an example of an actual naked short.
Your examples were: venture funding, venture funding, development contract, hedging, hedging, hedging, naked short. Note that the first three do not happen on markets at all, while the hedging happens on markets that will enforce with the utmost strictness a very hard cap on your exposure. If you reach your credit limit on a futures exchange, the exchange itself will cancel out your position by buying inverse contracts, leaving you with a cash debt and your counterparties whole.
Meanwhile, short selling a stock at the exchange level merely involves executing the sell order and never delivering. Your brokerage will get listed in the FTD report (FTD = Failure To Deliver) showing the outstanding settlement, but as far as I can tell, there is no other consequence.