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He spends big money on security.

Any American worth that much is safer in a discretely armored car than on foot.

If you let fear dictate your life, you are correct.

You should. And you do too. Otherwise, you would’ve never looked both ways before crossing the street, and you would already be dead.

Do you feel that road safety dictates your life?

Your example seems to miss the point.

Of course I look both ways but I still cross the street.

I've watched people (friends included) who have let fear so overcome them that they frankly miss out on life. Won't travel, nervous about even leaving their home…


He could have a discrete security detail nearby.

The good that BTC will do in the long run is worth the investment. Civilization getting out from under fiat currencies - once and for all - is a massive step in the right direction.

I'm curious as to what's your time horizon for "in the long run". When is this transition to bitcoin going to happen?

In the long run BTC as a universal digital global currency will be more efficient than the fiat currencies it replaces.

That dreams is dead. Bitcoin is never going to be a universal digital currency. No-one (*) uses it for that purpose now, because they discovered it was rubbish as a cash system

(*) Approaching no-one on a global scale.


In the near future every nation state will be vying for the largest stake of the BTC mining pie and the BTC race will be bigger than the Space Race and the Nuclear Arms Race combined and adjusted for inflation.


Why? BTC is not just worthless, it has negative value due to how much electricity it takes to securely mine new blocks.

It's worth around 85k USD at the time you wrote the comment

Only because it is being subsidized by 20 to 40 gigawatts of electricity. It is basically a ponzi scheme where the increasing difficulty transfers wealth from new comers to early adopters.

Did you read the paper? There exists a technology that has purely enforceable property rights. What is that actually worth? I don't know.

Yeah yeah, I've read the arguments about liquidity issues, shutting down the rails, making it illegal to trade, etc. but that's beside the point and depends on a thousand future variables to play out. So I don't know if btc will make it or not, but I do know property rights mean everything to humans. They literally determine whether not one is a slave (I am my own property). So just the ability to have a technology enables pure property rights to a world where nobody really has enforceable property rights over anything seems pretty interesting to me.


Property rights are enforced with guns.

That's why Monero is superior; no amount of guns is going to help somebody steal property that they don't know you have.

A 5$ wrench bar is enough to make you give me all the moneroj you have eventually. I won't know when that point is and will just continue using the wrench until I am sufficiently sure you have given me all.

So is theft. Depends on who has the most guns.

> So just the ability to have a technology enables pure property rights to a world where nobody really has enforceable property rights over anything seems pretty interesting to me.

Bitcoin doesn't enforce property rights. The only thing you own is your bitcoin. The fact that I "own" my house and the land it is built on is enforced by the state with guns.


You're not getting what I'm saying. Before this technology, the concept of property rights could not be defended, depending on the attacker. This tech allows that, even if it is just for one use case.

That's like saying cars have negative value because of how much oil it takes to run them.

Cars have the benefit of transporting humans and goods around.

It's more like saying a hypothetical car which moves itself by using gasoline as a propellant rather than fuel for its combustion engine would have negative value.

Sure, using fuel (of all things) for propulsion would be one way to move a vehicle, but it would be inefficient by design.

Bitcoin, at least, was created during a time where there was no alternative to security-by-inefficency, but PoS and other consensus mechanisms are pretty battle-tested now


Bitcoin has the benefit of being the first way in human history of being able to transfer value between two countries in a way that a corrupt bureaucrat, judge, or customs official can't freeze, reverse, or steal it. That's the benefit Bitcoin brings humanity, and to me, I prefer it to having a car.

Proof of Stake is an absurd security proposition. Stakeholders are immediately centralized. In every single PoS coin, the governance immediately becomes the exchanges because they always hold the most coins. They can and have used this to guide PoS coins towards governance unfavorable to the users, like as happened with Steem.


Bitcoin consumes 20 to 40GW to process 7 transactions per second. Using 30GW means about 4 billion joules per transaction. And transactions per second don't scale with more electricity. It is the least efficient technology ever created.

Diminishing value certainly it's called depreciation

But cars are useful.

Like it or not in the end it will just be BTC. China will stop exporting Bitcoin mining tech. Nation States will dump money into proprietary BTC mining tech and keep it to themselves just like military tech. The US needs to see this reality and focus on domestic BTC mining tech like the future depends on it.

why? the easy solution is to let china monopolize bitcoin mining, and the value of bitcoin crashes. then the USD will stand unopposed and the chinese will end up with a bunch of useless equipmemt

It comes down to semiconductor manufacturing, not ASIC design. Taiwan, Korea, USA are still on top.

LOL. The Sam Altman plan. Or the US could just put Bitcoin on the Entities List and forbid any US citizen and any US owned entity from investing or trading Bitcoin and Bitcoin derived financial instruments, probably force 25% or more of the Bitcoin money to pull out, crater Bitcoin value, and not perpetuate this atrocity against nature and humanity.

"Democratizing finance" my a**.


An interesting point is that any nation state or corporation can focus resources on either AI or BTC, but not both at the same time. BTC is a sure bet in the long run while AI is potentially capable of delivering a faster ROI with no hard guarantees. As BTC FOMO hits every country on Earth it's likely that AI will take a 100+ year backseat to massive state sponsored BTC operations. It's not hard to imagine a situation where governments restrict AI HW manufacture and limit electricity for AI as a means of supporting the national BTC effort.

"BTC is a sure bet in the long run "

7 transactions per second is NOT a sure bet.


At 7 TSP BTC is far more fungible than Gold.

That doesn't make any sense at all.

And don't discount the negative sentiment around bitcoin as the nest of types that deserve to be completely wrecked financially, because they add no value to society, as in a Ponzi scheme. It seems inevitable to me this scheme is going to end some day and nobody is going to give a damn. It'll be the "Good Riddance Coin", filled with negative sentiment.

It's post-peak tech. Channel flipping is the ideal format for channels and other content that can take up a whole screen.


That PEGI 18 rating likely boosted Balatro's sales.


It'd be interesting to see how big a CPU chip scaled up to be big enough for a human to fit in (were it hollowed out) would end up being.


Reminds me of the Monster 6502. Not quite what you're suggesting, but still a large discrete monster of a board.

https://monster6502.com/

Instead of a hedge maze maybe we can have VR "walking through a 8086 or 8088" chip style maze in the future.


Not a whole chip, but an important section of one:

https://www.zerotoasiccourse.com/post/3dcells/


They're usually 150μm thick. Humans fit in about 300mm thick spaces, so you need 2000x linear scale.


Not to answer your question exactly but ...

Chips seem to be around 25mm sq, and the smallest features around 10nm. If you scaled up so the smallest feature is one mm then the chip would be around 2.5km square. (over 1.5 miles on each side)

If the smallest feature was about the width of human hair then divide the above by 100.


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