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People are rewarded in proportion to the risk they took. It couldn't be any different.

This is rididulous. How many dark markets accept cash? Bitcoin works just fine for them.

That is exactly the point of proof of work. Criticizing Bitcoin for this, is like criticizing DNA Evidence for being hard to fake.

Cool.

I think there's a good heuristic here: Would the reasons justify invading a country, if it had never been a part of "your" country?

Invading a country to abolish slavery is morally justifiable, invading a country because you want to tax them isn't.

You specifically mention that the comparison with crimea is wrong. And yet all your arguments apply to the crimea (and any other secession) too.

How does voting (on anything) not qualify as speech?

You know how much I'm justified to spend to protect myself from loosing 2% of my money in one year, due to the central bank adding 2% to the money supply?

If my time horizon is 1 year?

That's right: 2%

If my time horizon is x years?

-0.98^x + 1

15$ in transaction fees is nothing.

Also, props for the title, which mentions the money sent as if that were relevant for the transaction fee, as if the transaction were a percentage of that.

I wonder how much of all this is just lust for drama. What are they actually fighting about?

DATABRICKS IS A TRULY UNIFIED APPROACH TO DATA ANALYTICS AT SCALE

That sounds like a calendar + recipe aggregator idea.

> I watched through the entire 3 minute video, only because I found it increasingly amusing how long they were taking to "get to the point".

I think that's on purpose. They want you to invest time in it so that the sunk-cost-fallacy prevents you from admitting to yourself that it's a scam. It's the same reason that many courses start with a free video "but first, a little bit of history" or something.

Looks cool, thanks.

Are those people going to be good and happy programmers?

Yeah, as a noob I'd find this a lot less offensive then being told to type some mind-numbing text.

No it's not. What needs to be explained is why you cooperate if you know that you will never play with the same person again. And the answer is that by doing so you get in the habit of automatically cooperating in similar situations in the future and other people recognize this habit and trust you.

Taking lots of energy is literally the point of proof-of-work. Criticizing Bitcoin mining for using lots of energy is like criticizing DNA evidence for being hard to fake.

"Go into history class and the teacher says, 'Open your computer. We're going to go to rome.com and we're going to watch an archaeologist explore the Catacombs this morning in real time.' What a learning tool that is!"

I think that hints at the error. Computers aren't made for the "read/watch this thing" model. When we used computers in school it was to research some subject, answer some questions and that worked great.

There's a fundamentally wrong view of the way algorithms are written implicit here. Take for example a recommendation algorithm for porn. It's not written by some programmer expressing his tastes in code, like he would in language, it's written by analyzing the tastes of lots of people. If the result is racist - maybe people prefer black men and asian women - then it's because people's tastes are racist, not because the programmer is racist.

Every day Bitcoin survives proofs that it works.

This does not at all explain human behaviour: Most people would not shovel all the snow themselves while their counterpart chills in their car. And many people cooperate in prisoner's dilemma situations.

What explains human behaviour is that with every action we program ourselves to follow certain strategies and rules and that others can judge to some extent which strategies we programmed ourselves to follow. Thus we have an incentive to follow strategies that lead others to trust us, so that we'll have more opportunities for cooperation in the future.

This but unironically.

Programming getting easier doesn't just mean that fewer or less skilled programmers can build the same thing, it means that things can be build that couldn't be build before.

Google wouldn't exist without C++ (as opposed to assembly language). Facebook wouldn't exist without PHP (as opposed to C++).

Servers are only going to get cheaper. Programming is only going to get easier. If anything, things like search engines and social networks are going to become more competitive.

If someone has a genius idea for making a better engine, he won't work for google, he'll create his own.

Implicit in this fear of centralization is a kaczynskiist belief that "everything that can be invented has been invented".

People predicted some company taking over everything forever, and in fact even before the web existed sci-fi-authors imagined a centralized network, were from the servers to the software everything is provided by the government. It's never going to happen.

I don't know about altcoins but I doubt learning about new ones and setting them up is worth your time.

The electricity mining Bitcoins costs with a normal CPU/GPU though is definitely more then you're going to make. (Even if your PC is on anyway, just the added cycles.)

EDIT: This is a good place to remind everyone that most people in the original gold rush lost money, their health and years of their lifes for nothing.

Why would they do that? Isn't Play Store the way Google monetizes android?

No tragic failure ever said that either.

I think a replacement for cloudflare is important because Cloudflare can censor any site (and they do if their CEO wakes up in a bad mood) and their captchas make it impossible to use tor.

I think the opposite is true. Russia was among the countries where spreading communist ideas was punished the most. Marx and Engels were free to write in Britain, yet there was never a communist revolution there.

"In university, we only received heavy theoretical training and a lot of Ho Chi Minh’s ideology with communist party history"

"its colleges and universities are failing to prepare youth for more complex work"

This is the future for the US too ;-)