I will not buy this record, it is scratched

Im also satoshi.

I've never seen a great application for big coin other than 2:

1. If we had set up phone calls, emails, and text from the beginning so that a sender pays a dime for each message -- refundable by a whitelist of the receiver--- we'd have no spam and very few scams and a lot less phishing.

It seems like a bitcoin lightning or etherium with a low process cost would have made the protocol universal across providers and nations.

And once such a high volume protocol was established actually using it as cryptocurrency would probably have been less risky and more ubiquitous.

But that boat got missed....

2. Moving money across national borders when a totalitarian govt restricts it. This includes the use of this to prevent a rogue government from native inflating its currency. So better controls on the govt and dictators.

Otherwise I can't think of any use thAt isn't done more efficiently by a trusted central authorized server. Like ach or Visa. This includes inventory tracking. There's just no use case where distributed bookkeeping is superior in the real world

Who puts up paywall stories? Who upvotes them?

Okay. This will take a little economic theory to understand so I hope you appreciate I'm taking your question seriously and not passing it off as snark.

You probably have heard of Nash equilibria? These are points on a multi-player economic manifold in which no party can make a move to improve their outcome. The surprising aspect of these is that they are often not the optimal or pessimal points of operation. The prisoners dilemma is a classic illustration of rational behaviors driving them to the pessimal outcome when they could also both win in the optimal outcome.

that's usually as far as most introductory classes go but there's much more to explore here.

Keynes argues that when recessions occur, everyone is getting less and so spending less which leads to getting less. It's a stable Nash equilibrium . But theres another stable point too. Every spends more, and makes more money. The problem is you ccan't get the system to move from one stable point to the other more desirable one by the players own actions. He reasoned that an outside force could temporarily cut a channel in the manifold coinnecting the two points in a way everyone would move to the better point. his prescription was to borrow on the future higher productivity and inject spending into the system. Whether you agree with his prescription is a good solution isn;t the point. The point is about an. Outside force being able to cut channels.

That only works when the outside force has a strong enough market power to literally change the economic manifold itself. In the case of a bussiness when it has enough monopoly it can do this. And that's considered a hazard.

How a bussiness wields that strategy and whether it helps or hurts is immaterial to observing the existence of it. So for example, we very often see governments spending into recessions as Keynes advised but then forgetting about paying back the borrowed money as Keynes also advised. (Politicians not Keynes are to blame for the imperfect application of his strategy).

So while we don't know why amazon does what it does, we do know it can do this kind of market shaping. The fact that they lower the whole market is evidence of this. How it benefits amazon one can only speculate on. (For example, the reason target lowers prices is presumably to acquire more regular customers at amazons expense. They are in effect purchasing a customer base. Amazon can defeat that purchase and profit later from the retained customer base after target reaches the end of its finical gambit. But the why doesn't matter here. The point is amazon has enough power that it alone can determine if target succeeds.

It's the flip side where we get back to the manifolds. How then does amazon walk from the Nash equilibrium at the low price back to the Nash equilibrium at the high price? A small bussiness can't do it. That's the whole point of a Nash equilibrium. YOu can't induce the other players actions to favor you.

But amazon was testing ways to do just that using its market size. And it works.

Thus it is able to literally alter the market manifold. This is considered a bad sign of monopoly practices even if nothing bad happened in a particular case.

Here's the thing. Normal bussiness activity isn't considered normal when a party is a market maker. This is recognized in law. Things you can do when your activities are insufficient to really move the market ae not allowed when your actions literally change the market. That's the issue. And that's the part you are missing, causing your confusion. The actions amazon is taking aren't bad ones in and of themselves. They are just bad ones when you add in the fact that amazon controls so much of the market.

I think that people who pray genuinely are digging deep and recognizing their sins, hypocracies, and shortcomings. They are atoning. God likes that because corruption isnâ(TM)t just in the sin, but in the lack of recognition of the sin, the lack of being sorry, of humbly understanding oneself and the nature of the world and existence. God likes atonement. He doesnâ(TM)t answer prayers as payback, he answers prayers because atonement makes the world a better place. âoeAnsweringâ prayers is the Kingdom of Heaven manifested through the suffering of atonement.

"...when you hover over an underlined link in a chat, Bing Chat may show an advertisement first, followed by the legitimate download link..."

WHAT? Is that real? LINKS have ads by M$?

The absolute dystopian future has engulfed our timeline. There is no coming out of this alive.

In the early years (which lasted over a decade) it was always "...and then one day we will aggregate the data and sell targeted ads!" This always sounded suspicious.

I have a client who looked at G Search results for their company - they usually have an ad blocker, but they turned it off. All their competitors were there, buying their company name as an adword. The way the ads look makes it very difficult to tell they are ads. Google's suggested solution is to try to outbid competitors on your own company name.

We spent $1500/month on this. After a year or so, we turned it off. No difference in traffic. All of G's advice, documentation, way of thinking about the web and the Internet, are geared toward the idea of you giving them money, if not right now, then later. This attitude has seeped into the deepest corners of everything they do. Even their explanations of technologies are all tainted.

People, even the people who don't know enough to have an ad blocker, realize that all the G search results are designed to be in the interests of Google only. We all try to eek out our own little bit of value from them, but we know we are in for a a few seconds of pain each time we do a G search, no matter how benign.

When you post to /. do not imply that you have ever watched a stream of any sports event (or any other video or audio or reading material or artwork...) -- slashdot is under constant surveillance for these kinds of leads and /. ownership has ongoing subpoena against it to report and give root access to every account belonging to a piracy suspect! Further, the root access they have to your system is instantaneous such that all your real-time data (location, texts, open-mic phone, etc) is permanently archived to use against you when the laws are changed in the future!

It was supposed to read "gag"

Do not understand you - your link was to a 4 year old article about how FF messed up their add-on signing?

FF NOT enshitified. Sick of /.ers always coming down on FF. There are a few little places where they run ads and "shit" -- but all of these are easier than shit to turn off. They try to experiment with ways of making money, but unlike RedHat (much less Chrome, Safari, etc) they try to stay inside the spirit of the open web and Free Software.

I have dabbled into the FF dev community, and it is not some cesspool of crap -- far from it. It is very smart, friendly folks who try hard to help you join and learn. It's such a large project that you need to adjust, but most of the dev adjustments you might need to make all make sense -- FF has build cool tools over the years.

Google, Apple, MS have all worked hard to spin their bullshit and /. people have either fallen for it or else must just be bald shills. For years /.ers have made a cottage industry of complaining about FF. I'm sick to death of it.

In Spanish "dineros van poof" means the money vanished went away in a puff of smoke

You sound like a Fox News incel.

You understandably ridicule a post with a naive understanding of reality but rather than simply attacking the speaker let's discuss the real matter here. First it's not really about fairness but public objectives and the policies to implement them. We can all disagree on what the objectives should be but once you have an objective the next question is how to achieve it. Let's say for example you notice that rising rents are driving a crucial social strata and workforce out of your village ( say the next generation to work the farm) or city ( entry level office workers) and the market place design is exacerbating this. You don't want to reengineer your capitalist society because you mostly like it but you can implement some social policy to correct defects that are abbetation in the market. One approach is some complex set of regulations and a large group of public employees to monitor, adjudicate and enforce these with scalpel precision and long range planning. Another approach is simply to give a tax break or cash incentive for a general behaviour like say building low income housing. Not precise but much less government infrastructure. This is sometimes the better way. Not always. But sometimes. People complain when companies pay no taxes because of loopholes but if they are getting those by implementing public policy goals that's good. The problem of course is when corrupt politicians slide useless loopholes in or loopholes live beyond their design lifetime.

Many things like that happen. For example needle exchanges or maintainence doses of narcotics freely given out to addicts can have huge benefits to societies in terms but people have moral feelings about these that make them fight against sensible policies for sensible objectives. Sure would be nice to straighten out every addict but you can't do that even at the level of supervision found on a navy ship or prison so one needs to consider other policies that oversight so we can get the benefits to society from reducing the harm of addiction that society bears.

One can consider universal basic income in the same way. What's the objective? One objective that's worth noting is that productivity in many countries isaffected by high opportunity costs. People can't take risks to move to a new job because 20% of families have a member with a preexisting condition that is uninsurable without some alternate access to insurance such as employer provided insurance. ( that in fact is the real benefit of Obama care to society-- workforce mobility with less insurance concern) . People are reluctant to start bussinesses if they don't have the ability to bridge gaps in cash flow. If you go to cities in Europe you see thriving small single person shops not mega chain stores because people can take risks with their incomes and still have medical care, a future pension and maybe eat. It's not that you are subsidizing unprofitable byssinessss it's that you got better productivity and more entrepreneurship by more energetic oeole by taking risk out of the equations with a social safety net. These societies are in many ways more entreneurial than one's based solely on large capital accumulations directing market decisions.

So if one can look at things from the point of view of objectives not fairness or morality many things like helicopter money or scholarships for poor people make a lot of sense. You could administrate the money or you could just hand it out. Which method is better depends on the situation. But worrying that someone might waste the money may be not useful. A lot of money is wasted on regulatory agencies trying to prevent waste.