Your weird unfounded claim isn't really worthy of much of a reply. But for any innocent who's reading and is tempted by the bitcoin bro nonsense, here's Satoshi's whitepaper:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pd...

Quoting:

transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5],

There's a diagram too. Those references are:

[7] R.C. Merkle, "Protocols for public key cryptosystems," In Proc. 1980 Symposium on Security and
Privacy, IEEE Computer Society, pages 122-133, April 1980.

[2] H. Massias, X.S. Avila, and J.-J. Quisquater, "Design of a secure timestamping service with minimal
trust requirements," In 20th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, May 1999.

[5] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Secure names for bit-strings," In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference
on Computer and Communications Security, pages 28-35, April 1997.

As you might guess, the paper by Merkle is the one that proposed the cryptographic hash tree arrangement that we now call "Merkle trees." Here it is:

https://www.ralphmerkle.com/pa...

Or the Wikipedia article about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Whether hunt/gathering can be sustainable depends entirely on circumstances

Uh, yes?

Nomadic peoples could move about psuedorandomly due to chance, or move in circles with purpose.

Also yes? Are you sure you're replying to the right post?

Uh huh. Sure it doesn't.

When you consider the electoral collage, gerrymandering, corporate lobbying and PACs, billionaires literally writing million-dollar checks to people to get them to vote (for "any candidate", wink wink), and now the Federal Executive trying to put its thumb on the scales by controlling which and how people are allowed to vote, it's really hard to feel like one person voting makes a damn bit of difference.

One person voting doesn't make a difference. That's called democracy. When it does, you've got some type of oligarchy. One person's vote does, however, count. Your complaints are that each of those votes doesn't count equally, and that's valid. "Counts less" still counts though. And the way to fix all that is by voting for people who will fix it. Even if they're not approved by one of two corporations. Once you've lost the ability to do that, which you are heading towards, then you've only got one option left, and it's not a good one.

The US is operating on something like democracy version 0.7 and you guys have refused to install any significant patches for the last fifty years or so. Meanwhile you've let yourselves be propagandized into believing in things like "coequal branches" and election funding as free speech. You're not going to overturn all that with one vote. But if you don't like being responsible for killing kids, and let's be clear, it's a hell of a lot more than 123, you vote whenever you can. Unless you're okay with it, in which case you also vote.

Do antelope face the tragedy of the commons?

Absolutely they do. Nomadic animals, humans included, use up resources faster then they're replenished. They move because if they don't they'll die. The tragedy of the commons is the natural state of the simplest game theory. It's overcome by the ability to cooperate, which a few species have evolved, and a few more have refined into complex societies, i.e. civilization.

I don't understand why this would boost Bitcoin

I suspect the reason is exactly the one you mentioned: "[you don't] bother with the differences between them and just lump them all together in [your] mind."

Someone says "blockchain" and people think Bitcoin. In truth, the concept of a "blockchain" existed long before Bitcoin and today when someone says it they almost certainly don't mean anything much like Bitcoin's particular implementation, much less Bitcoin itself.

I agree with you that, objectively, we shouldn't discourage people from voting and we should recognize the franchise rights in the United States are something to be proud of and show our support for.

However.

When you consider the electoral collage, gerrymandering, corporate lobbying and PACs, billionaires literally writing million-dollar checks to people to get them to vote (for "any candidate", wink wink), and now the Federal Executive trying to put its thumb on the scales by controlling which and how people are allowed to vote, it's really hard to feel like one person voting makes a damn bit of difference.

I live in a very red state. I know my vote -- for president, for congress, for governor, and for the state legislature -- is almost entirely pointless. Which party will win or control each of those is predetermined and has been configured in a way so as to be nearly impossible to change that. Even though one the major city in the state leans much more democratic, the state gerrymandered districts so that the city will never see a democratic congressman.

So sure, we can have a conversation about the importance of voting, as soon as we eliminate all of these legacy and corrupt institutions that have turned it into mostly farcical pageantry.

I asked chatGPT. It basically recommended all of the things they've already done: using strategic reserves, easing import restrictions and reducing refinery bottlenecks. Then I asked if it was aware that the US is at war with Iran. So it searched the web, presumably read some recent news and recommended reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

So maybe they did ask chatGPT.

it isn't faced by nomadic hunter-gatherers

Hunter-gatherers are generally nomadic because of the tragedy of the commons. They show up, hunt and gather out the area they're in with no motivation to manage it sustainably, then move elsewhere to do the same thing again. Nomads don't "face" tragedy of the commons, they pack up and leave. It becomes a problem that needs to be solved for civilizations because they give up that option.

It didn't. Hash trees are nearly 50 years old. Bitcoin's novelty was proposing a 1) a practical proof of work system based on computing hashes 2) a distributed transaction system based on it where the users would perform the processing.

The proof of work system has proven to be enormously expensive and Bitcoin processing was quickly taken over by large organizations so it failed to achieve (2) as well.

The SEC thing the story is about has nothing to do with Bitcoin. It uses "smart contracts" which is an Etherium thing. Etherium notably started with a different proof of work algorithm to try and fix the problems with Bitcoin's, then dropped proof of work entirely.

Voting doesn't matter - it never did

Bullshit. By repeating this you're among the worst offenders. You're encouraging other people not to participate in their democracy. You guys have steeped yourselves in propaganda for your entire history and an active corruption and anti-education campaign for at least the last fifty years but you're not that far gone. Yet.

Plus my votes potentially won't count in the next election.

Yeah, voter suppression is bad hey? Stop doing it. Encourage people to think about their vote, cast it, and protect it, because it does matter.

hey will deliberately put their military forces in or near schools and hospitals.

Like these ones? The US department of defence operates more than a hundred schools, many of them on military bases. They pretty much all have hospitals too.

Are you American and eligible to vote? If so, then you are. That's what the very first line of your constitution, "We the people" means. It's a declaration of popular sovereignty, the idea that political power originates with the citizens.

If you voted for the president or representatives who placed Hegseth in power then you're extra responsible. Ditto if you didn't try to recall for those representatives or if you don't vote in the next election for the candidate most likely to ship off anyone involved to be tried for war crimes.

I remember looking it up at the time and I'm pretty sure Google Maps had it listed as an elementary school. It certainly is now:

https://www.google.com/maps/pl...

basic incompetence and a complete disregard for human life.

The first bit of this sentence is absolutely wrong.

I don't know, that sentence seems to describe Hegseth pretty well, along with the people who put him in his current job. Unless you're arguing that his incompetence is more advanced than "basic."