Just another reason to be against liberty.

And thus have no chance of beating Hillary. Gender based voting is going to become a major issue this election.

That first sentence proves that you have NOT read Laudato Sii, and are still speaking out of ignorance- because just about everything you just said is in there.

I don't dumpster dive much more these days, it's not worth the effort.

Then configure your miners to not accept these transactions.

Essentially the blockchain is exactly this: A way to record information in an unforgeable way, for a fee to the miner. Bitcoin works, and the only way it can work, is by being a system that behaves in a desired way when each player maximizes their own benefit. (To a small extent this can be affected in a centralized fashion because the community can develop the reference implementation to a desired direction, but that may or may not turn to be anathema and may or may not be a powerful enough tool.)

True, blockchain bloat causes problems, and it's a limited resource. The bitcoin solution is to sell the space to the highest bidder, because generally that maximizes the seller's benefit. In a sense, someone saying "that's not what the blockchain is for" is very similar to someone complaining that people are using lithium to make these stupid batteries, driving its price up, and "that's not what lithium is for".

Whether Bitcoin can survive all the technical challenges in the long term is not at all obvious. For all we know, it might be that the entire model is game-theoretically self-destructive if analyzed thoroughly enough. In fact, it has provided quite a few surprises where the incentives have turned out to be something different than anticipated, causing weird scenarios where e.g. in some situations it's advantageous for a miner to not immediately report a found block. So far none of these have been such that they would cause a death spiral, but that's far from a given. (Arvind Narayanan's blog posts on the topic are quite insightful; you might want to start from https://freedom-to-tinker.com/...).

make the entrants build a working prototype *first*, without any governmental money up front

Waitaminute, Congressman. Why would I fund your campaign, if you're not going to vote to give the public's money to me? I thought we had a deal: you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

Took me about 4 hours:
http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html

I think if you read the whole thing, you'll find he's a pretty equal opportunity offender, sexual libertarians got a good hundred paragraphs against their lifestyle as well.

Not fault alone, of course. In many ways, I blame liberals of both stripes- fiscal conservatism these days is strongly libertarian, and thus, liberal.

One said says I want to fuck who I want to and damned the consequences tomorrow, we'll just kill any inconvenient product of sexual abuse. The other side says I want to profit from who I want to and damn the regulations, I am not my brother's financial keeper.

Both are putting radical self interest- liberty ahead of the common good- and liberty is liberalism.

And that's what went wrong with slavery in the United States. Too much whip, not enough bread. And then 70 years later with capitalism, too much whip, not enough bread.

Today we have too much bread and perhaps not enough whip, but what is there left to do?

Yep. And I could just see Franklin D, old Curmudgeon that he was, shouting to the Bonus Army "Get off my lawn!"

The Roman Emperors had it right- buy a bunch of state owned bakeries, and give everybody their "Daily Bread" (referenced even in the Lord's Prayer, though Christ had us thanking God for it instead of the Emperor).

Keep the slaves fed, they won't revolt.

At first it wasn't. At first- the War on Poverty had exactly ONE purpose- get the Bonus Army off of Roosevelt's front lawn.

Everything about it since then has been to prevent the revolt that almost did happen.

A huge part of the reason that America has turned leftwards, is because the Republican party has chosen to prioritize fiscal conservationism over social conservationism. Family no longer comes first for most of the Republican leadership, as shown in their marital woes.

The Democrats were always going to go Left, at least the Republicans *could* have given us another choice.

I mentioned the +/- zero thing in another comment elsewhere in this tree, actually! So we're all on board there.

It's not really that signless infinity is a contender for 'consensus' inasmuch as number systems which use signless infinity have utilities different from systems that have signed infinities, just like integer math continues to exist despite the 'improvements' of fractions and decimals.