It stands to reason that;
- People are generally either watching Netflix OR working. Very rarely do you get both at the same time.
- Netflix usage is low during working hours but high in the evenings
- Work-from-home usage is high during working hours but low in the evenings
- Work-from-home traffic is likely a lot less than Netflix traffic. Company VPNs, Skype etc will use a lot less bandwidth than Netflix content.

I also read a couple of days ago that ISPs have already commented something similar; They can already handle Netflix fine, so the work-from-home addition to the networks really isn't a problem.

Yep, accidentally catching an innocent person in the net and promptly & politely letting them go is one thing.

But if your net only catches 1% of the bad guys it's meant to be detecting - then it's just providing a false sense of security at the cost to law-abiding citizen's time & privacy - in addition to the cost to run the system in the first place.

That's very difficult/impossible to know.

Bitcoin is about 2/3 of the overall crypto market cap - so you might think that those small peas push crypto's energy usage to 1.5 switzerlands.

It's not quite that simple though because most of the coins' hashing requirements will not be directly proportional to their $-equivalent value or relative 'size' or popularity. It would technically take no more or less energy to run bitcoin at 200b market cap vs 200t market cap.

I know of some alternative coins that make being energy efficient part of their ethos. Nano, for example, relies on a Proof of Stake mechanism which only requires a tiny amount energy relative to Bitcoin's Proof of Work.

So there could be some small coins that are using a disproportionately large or small amount of energy & the only way to know would be to individual investigate every single one of them.

I feel like cryptocurrencies are going through somewhat of an industrial revolution right now. The big productive ones are the ones burning coal & killing the environment - but while they prove out what works and making the case for distributed trust & taking control of your own money, they are also demonstrating what doesn't work; energy demands and usability. The next wave of cryptocurrencies are looking to learn from bitcoin's successes and failures to create something better. Something that has the distributed trust of bitcoin, but something that requires less energy. The steam train of bitcoin will be replaced by the shinkansen of something else. The wheels of progress are turning and it's exciting.

My AVR has a simple toggle option for 'midnight mode' which is essentially what you describe; making loud things quieter so you can hear the quiet stuff without the risk of a surprise explosion waking up everyone in your house.

Unfortunately it's not nearly configurable enough to provide a useful level of compression & I still have to jack the volume up to hear mumbling or relatively-quiet dialog. I've since turned my centre front speak up (a LOT) and it's made it much better.

I initially assumed it's a misconfiguration in my surround sound or something - but having watched movies around friends houses who all have the same problems, and even these /. comments - the problem seems to actually be crappy mixing in newer movies and TV shows. Older movies & shows are perfectly intelligible.

Like you say, this is probably a side effect of mixing stuff for the perfect theatre experience - and I suspect they're prioritising the 'theatre experience' because DVD/blu-ray money for home-watching is drying up because of cheaper streaming services. Even if 99% of movie watches happen at home - they don't care because 90% of their revenue is from theatre sales. They're prioritising money over consumer experience and that's left everyone at home with a shitty audio mix.

Radiation damage to DNA can sometimes be repaired - but its not always repairable. There are a lot of factors, but ultimately if the damage is not repairable, the damage will often escalate into some form of cancer.

Radiation around Chernobyl still damages DNA & causes cancer in all mammals - not just humans.

Animals thrive in Chernobyl because there aren't any humans there. They are still having their DNA damaged by ionizing radiation though - which will give them cancer if they live long enough.

Wild animals rarely get cancer simply because they don't live long enough. Other things kill them before they're old enough for cancer to be a concern for them; predators, disease, accidents etc.

Those issues are being solved - and the solutions are being tested and proven right now. We live in a very exciting time. Here are some examples;
- Bitcoin's lightning network is hoping to move the bulk of day-to-day transactions off of the blockchain with only final settlement happening on-chain
- Bitcoin cash has opted to use larger blocks so more transactions can be mined into a block at a time
- IOTA & Nano's DAG offers better sharding & scalability than a traditional single blockchain
- Pre-mined coins, like Ripple, can remove the need to spend CPU cycles creating new coins if they can solve (or ignore) decentralisation via other means
- Coins like Ethereum are looking to move away from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake for a bunch of reasons, including better scalability & throughput

There are loads of cryptocurrencies that use blockchain or some derivative of it to achieve safe transactions with immutable history - which is the key use case for cryptographically secure chains of data.
Many of the buzzword-bandwagoners who haphazardly throw words like 'blockchain' into their earnings calls often miss the point of what a blockchain is good for and often just think blockchains can solve everything.

You're missing the point. Using large amounts of energy cycling through calculations is a side-effect, not the purpose. The purpose is using proof of work as the core mechanism to bitcoin's decentralised trust model.

There are other mechanisms that could be used like proof of stake or even proof of importance - but those trade different pros and cons and aren't as proven as PoW at this point.

Using large amounts of energy isn't the problem. Using large amounts of fossil-fuel energy is. Many miners are setting up camp in Iceland where they can take advantage of geothermal energy and environmental cooling.

The solution here isn't "Use less energy because I didn't understand why you need to use so much". It's "use energy more responsibly".

Nothing wrong with facts. Nothing wrong with opinions. But opinions presented as facts is another thing entirely.

'wasted energy' implies there is no benefit or use in bitcoin mining.

Different people have different ideas of what is beneficial or useful - needless to say, many people clearly find mining bitcoin beneficial and useful otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. As a get-rich-quick scheme or for ideological views of currency and traditional banking - either way, people are doing it for a reason.

So who are you to say they are wasting energy?

Some london underground lines are 11'8

But those tunnels shouldn't be the benchmark. They're small because they're old. Their small diameter prevents the tube getting higher-capacity double-decker trains (a la, Paris' RER). London's newest tunnels (crossrail) are using RER sizes nearer 20'.

> accidentally created the strongest controllable magnetic field

Was it accidental or controllable? I feel like you can't have it both ways

I haven't done much research, but a quick google finds this article that says the current average fee is about 1 satoshi per hop (fractions of a cent) and "the costs of spinning up a node and routing payments via the lightning network are not that high".

Presumably those running nodes that take 1 satoshi aren't doing so at a loss - so I think banks would really struggle to undercut the super-cheap nodes. Maybe a bank can run at a loss for longer than everyone else - but after the banks have killed competition and hike up their fees - the competition will come right on back.

Big banks are free to participant in the lightning network just as much as everyone else is. That is, free as in speech - not as in beer.

Big banks (or you and I) are also free to set whatever settlement fees they want. That is also still free as in speech.

But let me tell you why that won't be bad for consumers...

Big bank charges $1000 to settle a fee? I can undercut them at $900. Someone else undercuts me. Someone undercuts them etc. It's a race to $0 fees and is good for consumers.

Unlike the traditional banking model - the banks won't have exclusive control to set fees. Instead, they would have fair competition with anyone and everyone.

The only way that would change is if, someone up-ended lightning network and made it less free-as-in-speech. Eg, government regulation saying that only registered financial entities confirming to KYC/AML etc may use it. They'd have a hard time enforcing that, but they could just plain outlaw free competition and that is how you hurt consumers.

It's a gamble. However, from what I've read; this drop isn't a result of fatal or bad news. Nobody has outlawed cryptocurrencies - nobody has broken their technical implementations. Nothing particularly exciting has happened recently in cryptocurrency news.

So, given that nothing happened to kill cryptocurrencies - I'd say the price will rebound. I could only speculate what the timeframe for that might be though - it could be days, months, weeks or years. It may also go down more before it goes up.

My personal gamble is; the price will probably go down a bit more, but by the end of the year, it will probably be up more than a traditional bank's savings account will be.

If you're looking to make a quick buck...it's very high risk. If you're looking to make a buck in the longer term, it's still high risk - but less so.

I'm not sure if it varies by country, but here at least, the uber app lets you tip. And the uber driver cannot see how much you tip until after they rate you.