alcio's comments

> For your typical solo founder in their 30s, their odds of dying at any point over the next 10 years is something like 0.2%

The real figure is more 2.1% (source: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html)

> Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.

In a weird way, this quote is a good explanation of why cryptos exist: they give the possibility of creating systems evading state controls.

Crime is a relative thing: moving money outside of certain countries is prohibited, in others it's owning property for certain category of people.

yes, you can email it to your miner buddy.

it's possible to spot such transactions if they violate transaction forwarding rules (aka standardness rules) but not consensus rules. for example, a transaction greater than 100kB is not standard but still valid.

Excited to see this new release. Seems to me this would (slightly?) negatively impact query performance for recent data (when the query concerns data is both in O3 and persisted zones), is that the case?

Proof-of-stake coins lack one of proof-of-work coins most important properties: censorship resistance.

In both consensus systems, a censor is someone that has amassed 51% of the currently available stake (in PoW stake is mining machines, in PoS it is outstanding tokens).

In proof-of-work systems, a censor can be unseated by censored parties allocating more capital to mining machines until non-censoring parties own 51% of all machines.

In proof-of-stake systems, it is impossible to unseat a censor: since it owns 51% of tokens, it will also owns 51% of newly minted units in perpetuity (assuming it doesn't stop censoring and doesn't run into issues that would end up slashing some of their stake).

USDT-USD markets are indeed marginal. however, implied USDT price using BTC as a cross shows USDT is valued pretty much at parity with the dollar by the market:

https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/spread/BINANCE%3ABTCUSDT...

inflation in consumer goods might not be high, but financial assets have clearly inflated: a quick look at gold denominated SPY shows it.

In some cases, increasing the fee once the transaction has been broadcast is not possible (original transaction doesn't use replace-by-fee OR child-pay-for-parent is not possible)

"miners somehowd eviate from the conventional wisdom or the norm, which dictates that transactions are prioritized for inclusion based on the fee-per-byte metric"

Miners prioritize by fee-per-byte, except that the on-chain fee only accounts for part of the fee paid for some transactions.

Over the years, many services have popped up where you can pay an out-of-band fee to a miner to include your transactions first.

Of course, this is detrimental to users not using these systems as it biases the algorithms used to determine what is the current best fee-per-byte to pay.

it weighs 490gr and the gold is 87.7% pure, that results in cube of side 2.8cm

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=490+*+0.877+grams+of+g...

Using a full node, you not only sync the history, but also validate it. In recent days, on a modern machine with a good internet connection, it takes less than 12hrs to achieve this.

If you don't care about validating the history, I guess using BigQuery would work but I don't know how to achieve it.

How many AAPL shares have not been traded for the past 2 years? And how many BRK.A?

Bitcoin gives the opportunity to answer those questions contrarily to the complex and somewhat opaque equities ownership rules.

in this case, the defendant got a visa detached from its passport.

from what I could gather from the complaint and his social media (https://twitter.com/virgilgr/status/1161217917427470337), he just never tried to hide it.

According to the complaint, the defendant:

- went back to the US several time after traveling to the DPRK despite being warned not to by the US state department

- had several consensual interviews with FBI agents

- consented to a search of his phone

It's hard to read this and not think that he brought this upon himself. If you really want to do what he did, get a lawyer, don't travel back to the US, don't speak to law enforcement.

When you have traveled to the DPRK despite warnings of the Department of State, visiting the US is not the best decision to take.

On one slide, there's a mention that in 2300, computers will have 10^60 elements in them.

However, there's only 10^50 atoms on Earth.

Swift lost at least $85M in 2016, and that was only 1 partial attack. Had it went fully through, hundreds of millions would have been robbed.

How is the USD worth anything after some many bank robberies?

Bitcoin itself worked as expected, and the fact that no one can easily reverse transactions is one of the features described in the original whitepaper:

"Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers"

> What is it giving you that's worth the enormous montain of precaution that you need to take to secure yourself?

It's giving you precisely the opportunity the Binance hackers seized: doing transactions that no one else wants done. You don't have to ask permission nor trust anyone but Bitcoin itself.

It's funny that the USDC website doesn't list the main use of stablecoins (especially Tether) these days: arbitrage.

When moving fiat between two exchanges can take days and flag your accounts for suspicious activity, moving the same value using Tether is much much faster (~30 mins to 1 hour).

If one observes how does USDT flows, you'll find that it flows between the 3 or 4 major exchanges that use it, with almost no use elsewhere: no major wallets, no merchant acceptance, etc..