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While absolutely valid this isn't the only problem: One other complication is that conclusions from experimental studies often don't apply to the real world, i.e. people behave differently in experimental settings. Thus in any case you can either have good control over confounding varables but very limited scope (experimental studies) or bad control over the setting but the ability to observe real live behavior (field studies).

But it gets worse: Two people with identical behaviour can have quite different motivations and thus identical observable behaviour can result in quite different consequences. I.E. 5 hours a day playing games can be both healthy behavour or an addiction/a means of suppressing thoughts or memories, depending on the person. So you'll always have that massive confounder called the mind, in every setting. Which means you have to inspect the mind itself, which only works indirectly, i.e. by interacting with the person, asking questions, trying to find out the motivation behind a particular action. And the person often doesn't really know, because a particular decision probably wasn't chosen consciously.

I haven't seen NY saying the spotify CEO won't see their kid again unless Rogan disappears from the platform - that would be blackmail.

We know from practically every field of human behaviour that even experts, when not guided by strict predefined rules, are simply unable to objectively assess social situations. E.G. in educationals settings, even experienced teachers sensitized for the topic are usually unable to correctly observe how their praise-punishment ratio is or the ratio of interacting with boys/girls or with loud and quiet students.

It simply isn't reasonable to assume that parents, completely untrained in objectively evaluating these kinds of settings, assess the effects of sugar consumption correctly.

Edit: I can also see this with aquaintances who also believe in sugar highs: They only report this for the sugars perceived as worse than the "healthy" sugar sources, e.g. they project a sugar high if the kid gets a piece of cake, but not if it drinks 300ml of undiluted apple juice.

I read that as: vendor-controlled software sitting in hardware will be buggy and those bugs won't get fixed. Thermal protection implemented in user-controlled software can, over the long term, provide better safety because bugs can be fixed.

I think I know what you get at, but it is important to differentiate between e.g. someone with social anxiety overcoming their anxiety to take part in society (the good way of "trying to be normal") and someone repressing what should actually be worked on (the bad way, hurting both the person, and, long term, society).

The important point with all things regarding the human mind (education, psychology etc.) is that one strictly can't infer what actually happens from outside observation alone. Let's say there exist two persons, A and B, and both play 6 hours of videogames a day. But person A is a perfectly healthy introvert, while with person B this actually is addictive behaviour concealing mental health problems the person hasn't found the strength to confront yet. It depends on how they feel while playing, and how they feel when not playing.

I think you are mistaken here. Strong privacy laws in Germany are decades older than Facebook et al., and to some degree have constitutional level. Similar for other EU countries before the europization of the variants of national law (which actually weakened German privacy and consumer protection law in some minor details).

Big Ad companies have a core business model that is simply incompatible with the values implemented here. That is the whole secret of why there are so few Big Ad companies founded in the EU. Calling that anticompetitive is mistaking cause and effect.

> to someone of moderate learning/intelligence.

It's mostly about the learning, not the intelligence, i.e. current state of research shows only loose correlation to intelligence (g factor) and favors models that use a domain-specific skill to explain maths competency. Intelligence will certainly help, but its effect is quite overvalued.

So option a) - the whitepaper doesn't reflect reality. And the solution was to make transactions more expensive and slower.

> there are chains of blocks.

With the caveat of the blocks being single transactions and the "blockchain" reflecting only single accounts.

If someone comes around and claims to have invented a perpetuum mobile, it is not my duty to disproof them.

> Projects such as what?

Such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.

> First of all evidence that it isn't a 'blockchain'?

It's in their whitepapers, read it up. With all due respect, I don't get the feeling you know what these words mean. Hint: the G in DAG stands for "graph", so it can't be a blockchain.

Take a step back for the moment and think about it: The inherent problem cryptocurrencies have to solve, when you take away central coordination, is the trust issue with the data. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies tried to replace the trust in the central institution with trust in the implemented market incentives. That's why there is mining. They didn't put mining into the equation because they liked putting out CO2. There has to be something expensive to compensate for the lack of central coordination. That is why crypto is so horribly slow and expensive. The inventors didn't sit around and thought of creating the slowest possible implementation, it simply has to be expensive so that forging the ledger is expensive - because that price is the only thing preventing the rewriting of history.

With a central institution you don't have this problem: If say Paypal is the only institution allowed to write onto the ledger, you can easily have 100k ops per second or more - because these literally are simple writes to a conventional database.

You simply can't have both. In cryptocurrencies, by definition, everyone connected to the net has write access to the ledger. So you have to have a method to make writing to it expensive. If some project comes around and claims to have invented something that can only be described as an economic perpetuum mobile, i.e. having neither central coordination nor expensive writes, it is their burden of proof. Just like bitcoin did.

Edit: I looked into Nanos whitepaper and apparently Nano is trivially DDOSable for very small amounts of money. Have a look yourself:

Page 7: 4.2million transactions = 1.7G ledger size. So a transaction is 405 bytes.

Page 8: A GTX 1060 can calculate 1.25tx/seconds.

Pre Covid a GTX was 200€ and could spam the ledger with 43.74MB/day. So one only needs to invest 100k€ to flood the ledger with 22G/day / 660G/month.

So either a) the whitepaper lies, or b) Nano is completely broken, or c) There is centralization somewhere to ward off that spam.

No, it's the other way around. Bitcoin only employed approaches that were well-researched already, the innovation essentially was combining these together. The projects I mentioned claim that they can achieve better performance without the known costs of bitcoin (really slow, really energetically expensive). It is up to them to post proof how they achieve that.

> So what is a 'proper' / 'real' / 'true' cryptocurrency then? Are there any true Scotsmen here?

Projects with some form of blockchain, which Stellar and Ripple don't have. They are essentially just a horizontically scaled, classic database (running on the nodes), which the clients access. The nodes each have a full copy of the database. There's no blockchain, no mining or any substitute etc.

> Nano

I only replied with the projects named by posters before me. Nano has no blockchain, only a DAG (a proven, decades-old data structure used e.g. in spreadsheets). Nano invented their own consensus protocol. They have the usual suspicious claims (fast, no transfer fees, no/low energy costs) that are only really achievable with a centralized design (i.e. a conventional database). How can they achieve security without heavy costs for appending to the ledger?