magnamerc

In countries like the DRC or Nigeria, with large oil and natural gas reserves, who are we to tell them that they can no longer exploit those reserves for their benefit? If we don't want oil and gas to be extracted for wealth, then we need to force market dynamics in such a way as to make the exploitation of oil and gas unprofitable worldwide. We have zero moral authority on dictating what these countries can and cannot do with their own resources

I don't want to discourage you, because everything counts, but I think the real problem with climate change isn't in the West, it's in the rest of the world. The West had the luxury of using cheap carbon in the early 20th century to industrialize and build out infrastructure. India and countries in Africa haven't had that luxury, therefore they are going to use as much carbon as is necessary to industrialize. It would be hypocritical for Westerners to criticize them for it. The only way to change that is if Western countries governments actively exported low-carbon tech to help them leap-frog a centralized power distribution network and go straight to in-situ decentralized power generation without it affecting their rising quality of life. This is a societal, market economics and technological problem. Cutting out meat won't help nearly as much as developing lab grown meat will. Rather than attempt to change individual behaviors, we should strive to make low carbon technologies that align with existing behaviors.

Except bitcoin can't be manufactured on demand. I'm sorry, but this is a terrible analogy. There's a reason why people compare bitcoin to gold, because it makes for a better analogy, despite the fact that gold is actually ubiquitous throughout the solar system, and bitcoin is actually finite. For the record, I own zero bitcoin.

As did I, hence why I commented that it feels like ultracrepidarianism.

If that were true, then they would come to a different conclusion. There are several examples of useful applications that are live today that would be otherwise impossible without a public programmable blockchain.

As soon as blockchain is even mentioned on HN, everyone loses their freaking minds. For some people that tout themselves as intellectuals, they just seem to parrot that 'blockchains are useless' without even taking a cursory look into the technology. It seems to me that a lot of people here fall into the category of ultracrepidarianism.

Bitcoin isn't programmable money. That's Ethereum

Why re-invent the wheel when MakerDAO DAI exists, which is a much better solution to the problem of a decentralized stablecoin.

Yes I remember this as well, but the real rally was from 1.2k to 10k from January to November. I do remember the spike from 10k to 20k in December, and it did seem very unnatural to me, but it could have also partly been due to euphoria.

ICO mania really started in April, and the ETH/BTC ratio rose to its ATH in June/July. This drove a ton of hype into cryptocurrencies, and naturally every single crypto rose spectacularly. BTC would have never gotten to 10k if it wasn't for the ICO mania of Summer 2017, IMO.

The Bitcoin rally of 2017 was caused by Ethereum, specifically the rise of ICOs.

I would pay a lot of money to be able to play a human level Emperor+ level AI on civ

I work with planes and it's not at all uncommon to find lightning damage. In fact, there are generic repairs for particular locations prone to lightning strikes.

You can take a look at the eth2.0 specification here https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs. They have solved the nothing at stake problem, and they currently have 8 independent client implementations written in different languages that can 'talk' to each other on a multi-client testnet. They are much further along then people may realize.

Yeah that's why I added analog in brackets haha. But I believe you're correct

You can buy pre-cursors (or known as analogs) like 4-AcO-DMT online from Lysergi. They are sold as a 'research chemical', however they metabolize into psilocin so it is indistinguishable to psilocybin. Obviously you should take every pre-caution before ingesting any substance by doing your own research, and looking into the authenticity of the supplier.

You can extend this to mechanics/technicians. Manipulating a large screen when your hands are full of grease.

Even pseudoanonymous blockchains like Bitcoin aren't completely fungible like cash. You need to use privacy only cryptos like Monero, or zero knowledge proof contracts on Ethereum for that.

Would the Universe exist if there were no conscious beings to observe it?

Apparently this also breaks Moneros privacy by identifying a BTC address associated it (even without KYC). You need to buy Monero from LocalMonero if you want to be truly private.

I believe Veil (which is a dapp built ontop of the Augur protocol) supports DAI, which is a decentralized stablecoin built by MakerDAO.

The only market on Augur right now for USDT is the following one: https://predictions.global/augur-markets/will-tether-usdt-tr...

There's no liquidity though, which is a problem obviously.

In their implementation, it appears you'd need to create an account by calling the contract https://github.com/pickhardt/escrovery/blob/master/contracts...

So it wouldn't work with existing accounts/addresses.

You could open up a prediction market on Augur.

The issue is still design/construction and political red tape. It sometimes takes decades to fund and build a nuclear plant, and we don't have decades. We should be focusing on easily deployable solar and wind, even in developed countries. I'm not against existing nuclear power plants (I get my energy from a CANDU reactor), I just think we need to ramp up solar because it kills two birds with stone by tackling the issue in all parts of the world simultaneously.

IMO, safety with regards to nuclear reactors is a moot point. The problem with nuclear reactors is that they are centralized and costly. You can't deploy a nuclear reactor in undeveloped countries because you still need to deploy the infrastructure. That's why solar and wind are the only viable solutions. Solar is decentralized, cheap, and mass produced and can be deployed in a matter of days. Storage is following a variation of Moore's Law, so we can expect storage cost to continue to drop over the next decades.

It's on EOS though, a network prone to cartels. Yeah, no thanks.

It's not a perfect system, and of course cutting edge drugs take longer to get approved for coverage under pharmacare. This is an election issue, and it's very possible that we get national pharmacare coverage over the next few years, and cases like these are the driving force.

The difference is that we as a country are willing to pay more taxes so that every single person gets drug coverage, and it's reasonable to expect that this will happen in the near future, even for expensive cutting edge drugs.

Why use PoW in combination with PoB (proof of burn) instead of using a dBFT style PoS like tendermint for the blockstack chain?

Pretty sure the USD will remain the main money laundering tool in the world. The USD as cash is partly fungible, whereas Libra is not.

The only reason the Russian agents involved in the 2016 misinformation campaign got caught was because they used Bitcoin to purchase their equipment.

My experience is completely different. I'm in Canada and the ER wait lists are usually a couple of hours. I'm also seeing a specialist in Toronto for procedures requiring image guided sclerotherapy. I bet I'd be fighting tooth and nail with insurance companies to cover that sort of procedure, which would likely run in the 100s of thousands of dollars, yet here I am getting it for "free" no questions asked.

I've never once even thought about money or insurance at all when receiving healthcare and I couldn't imagine thinking about costs when I'm already worried about my health. Americans are delusional if they think their system is better.

I find it kind of funny that you think AWS will still be around in a hundred years.