Yep, bitcoin has been doing really poorly over the past 3 years.

You might like to take a look at blockchain.info and note that just about every single transaction that's being posted right now includes a (non-mandatory) fee. It looks like your entire argument is founded upon a fallacy!

gameable how?

The security of people who don't spend isn't at stake. Their coins can't be stolen even if there's a 51% attack. Plus the security of people who make transactions isn't at stake - their transaction can't be altered even with a 51% attack. What's at stake is people who perform a 51% attack doing some double-spending. Even so, I don't see why people wouldn't just increase transaction fees up to the point where that is infeasible.

OTOH it doesn't seem like the worst thing if there was a low level of constant inflation. As far as I understand, that's still an option, if everybody agrees to update their client so the network doesn't fork.

It's like you didn't even read what I wrote at all!

"The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the time it took to find the previous 2016 blocks." So if it takes 14 days (2016 * 10 minutes) to mine 2016 blocks, the difficulty is exactly the same. If it takes more than 14 days, the difficulty is lowered. If it takes less than 14 days, the difficulty is raised. The difficulty has nothing to do with how many new coins are being generated.

Thus, if there are fewer miners, it will take longer to mine the blocks at the current difficulty, so when the next 2016 blocks have been mined, the difficulty will decrease.

Also note that as the difficulty decreases, it becomes cheaper and cheaper to mine. So the difficulty will adjust to whatever it has to be so it's economically feasible based on the amount of fees gotten from the transaction volume.

The difficulty of mining scales with the amount of miners. If the amount of miners drops, the difficulty will drop, such that you still get a block every ten minutes or so. Then the only danger is that it is easier to mount a 51% attack, since there's less total mining power. Everyone who transacts in bitcoins will have an incentive to keep the difficulty high enough such that this is unfeasible. Plus, all the transaction fees are optional - you can put out a zero-fee transaction, or a 5 BTC-fee transaction, if you like. If the recommended fees that Bitcoin Core suggests are not sufficient then everybody can just offer more fees.

Check out potholer54's series on climate change. He seems to do a good job covering what the climate scientists actually say vs. what the media reports, which is usually inaccurate (on both sides of the issue). In particular you should watch the one titled "The evidence for climate change WITHOUT computer models or the IPCC". Most of climate science doesn't rely on computer models.

Also note the IPCC doesn't do any research, rather they "[assess] the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change."

There's a difference between treating somebody differently because they are factually different (e.g. it is silly to try to get a man pregnant, but makes sense to make the same attempt with a woman; it makes sense to separate men and women in sports) vs treating them differently because of a belief that has no basis in reality (e.g. dark-skinned people are less intelligent, women are less intelligent, women can't learn how to do X, etc.). Let's keep the former while getting rid of the latter. "isms" fall into the latter category, but people sometimes go too far and slot something that'd fit into the first category as an "ism", which is equally silly (it'd be the opposite belief, treating them the same because of a belief that they're the same when in reality they're not).

But women are more valuable. Kill 90% of the men and the population will continue on quite well. Kill 90% of the women and you've got a problem.

True, that's mass though. Mass isn't the same thing as matter. I'm considering the electrons, positrons, photons, etc. to all be matter.

There is no physical process which starts off with X matter and ends with more or less than X matter. That equation just points out the energy (aka potential for work) that a certain amount of mass has. Energy isn't a thing, it is a property of matter.

Since matter is neither created nor destroyed - it merely changes shape - everything is as old as the universe. We are all stardust.

That's actually funny. I hadn't thought of it but social security is a Ponzi Scheme, just a government-mandated one. It's not that you put money into the system and you get the money back out when you retire. Rather, you put in money to pay people who have already put money in, and when you retire you get paid by new people putting money in. The reason a Ponzi Scheme collapses is that people stop putting money into it. The difference with SS isn't that it isn't a Ponzi Scheme, but rather that you're legally required to put money into it. As such you're right, it'll never collapse - unless the law changes, which it might. Whichever way the law changes, either someone will end up being screwed, or the gov will have to pay them what they predict they would have gotten from a different source.

So essentially SS is a ponzi scheme where you are extremely unlikely to lose your money, while bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme where you are perhaps likely to lose your money.

Sure, but you can say the same about anything. Take a company's stock, for example. There are 1,000 shares. Early on the trade at $5/share. Later they trade at a higher amount - say $500/share. The people that bought it at $500/share can only make money so long as other people are willing to give them that amount for it. If they can't find a buyer, they lose money. Yet nobody would consider this a Ponzi scheme, I hope.

It's just disingenuous to call it a Ponzi scheme. "Ponzi scheme" is being used not as an accurate descriptor, but as a not-quite-accurate term that has negative connotations. It's just FUD, more or less. Call it what it is - a protocol and a public ledger where people are currently willing to pay money to post a transaction to their account, and where people might not be willing to do so later. Not quite as bad when you put it that way!

Yes, finally Java added features that other languages have had for years and years.