throwaway271818

I think a lot of technical people interpret interview questions literally. Like yes of course the prompt starts with a negative - but you don't actually have to answer the question fully and literally, this isn't a college exam.

You could for example start talking about how you thought something was a colossal failure only to realize looking back that it was an incredible learning experience and how sometimes the only way to learn big lessons like that is by trying the experiment. And how it's only a failure if you stop. But you kept going so it wasn't really a failure.

Honestly we should probably take a page out of politicians' or media trained people's playbooks and not even answer the question as asked but relentlessly steer towards what you really want to talk about.

Ah, but they’re calculating e-waste in the form of specialized mining hardware (ASIC) that, at present, goes obsolete every few years.

The e-waste generated this way is not an intrinsic cost of handling a transaction, since the hardware could hypothetically be reused or recycled. It seems unwise to think of it as an irreducible cost per txn, rather than a dynamic figure that would likely improve over time (especially if the carbon externality were appropriately taxed)

Where did you get the 100g of e-waste figure from btw? Is that, roughly speaking, the e-waste mass of storage/txn * total number of nodes?

Another throwaway because I don't want friends to know, but another thing about being poor that people who are not don't really understand is how much family can keep you down.

If you are the only person in your family to go to college/make lots of $$$, there's this overwhelming feeling to want to help your immediate or even extended family as much as you can. Sending them a large chunk of your salary eats into your ability to save and reinvest that money into more wealth.

It's kinda like having someone in the family who is a drug addict and is incapable of keeping a decent job and providing for themselves. Except instead of drugs they're just trying to survive, and instead of it being a single person you can easily dismiss for being an "addict", it's your whole family.