Actually, I looked it up rather than going from memory: BTC difficulty updates don't happen every few months they happen every 2016 blocks, which is roughly every two weeks. And the process is entirely automated, adjusting the difficulty to maintain a new block rate of about one every 10 minutes. In fact, the "2016" number was chosen because it's the number of 10-minute intervals in two weeks. This is all part of Satoshi's original design.

The most recent adjustment happened on Feb 7, and it was a downward difficulty adjustment. This wasn't a new phenomenon; downward adjustments are much less common than upward adjustments, but they've happened many times in the past.

So, BTC adapts automatically to price changes that making mining more or less profitable.

Difficulty is updated every few months. This is a routine process. I'm not sure that it has ever been decreased rather than increased, but I don't think that will be a significant obstacle.

Too bad you didn't set it up the day before. You could have restored the snapshot and brought him back.

Apparently the math doesn't work out on that. Most likely, they expect to have enough ad-viewing users for training.

It's spelled Doxygen, but I don't think Linux uses it.

A little bit of it will

I'm sure they're fine with that. If you're not going to pay and not going to look at ads, why would they want to spend compute and bandwidth on you?

Even better: Tell the AI to go replace all of the potentially-unsafe constructs. LLMs are really good at that sort of refactoring.

Police and courts are clearly relevant (to enforce all of those debt contracts that underlie the currency), but can you explain how, exactly, military forces are relevant to "enforcing" the USD? What, exactly, does "enforce" mean in this context?

You're conflating non-deterministic with chaotic. You can have a perfectly deterministic system that exhibits chaotic behavior, meaning that the tiniest difference in input often produces a wildly different output.

I think hallucinations may just turn out to be an essential feature of sufficiently-rich models. People hallucinate, too. Mostly we're better at identifying our hallucinations. Mostly.

I think cryptocurrencies are super easy to understand, and the last clause of your sentence just spelled out everything anyone needs to know.

If you're into cryptography, you might find the details of how they work interesting (well, moderately; there isn't any really interesting cryptography there), but none of that has any bearing on whether it makes sense to put your money into it.

Nonsense.

It's debatable whether HFT is a net positive for the market (it does provide positive value, ensuring that pricing is consistent across markets), but it definitely doesn't "rig" the market. If you're trying to compete with the high frequency traders at their game, you're going to lose, but you're also doing it wrong. For people who don't spend all their time reading quarterly reports, the right way to do it is to put your money in a decent mutual fund or index fund, and let it grow. If you want to get more aggressive than that, then the way to do it is Buffet-style value investing: Identify companies with good products, in good markets, with good management and good long-term strategy, and buy and hold.

It's got more than that behind it, too. It's backed by a massive network of debt contracts obligating people to do work in order to generate value in the form of dollars. That's how dollars are created: When banks issue loans they create the money[*] they're lending out at the same instant they create the loan contract that obligates someone to repay it.

Fiat currencies (which BTC is not) are essentially built on the legally-enforceable promise of people to do work in the future. They're backed by human energy and effort.

There are some science fiction stories in which civilizations have found a way to store large amounts of energy safely in small coins, which are used as currency. In those fictional civilizations, when you give someone money you are literally giving them power that they can use to do things. Some fantasy worlds do the same with congealed magic as currency (I recently read the "He Who Fights with Monsters" series, which has a world that does this). The value of such a coin is what you can do with it, completely aside from anyone's opinion about the value, and what you can do with it is defined by the contained energy. That would be the perfect currency, because the coins' worth is 100% intrinsic.

But fiat currencies are almost as good! They aren't encapsulated power to do stuff, but they represent a promise by some person or people to do stuff. They're very nearly 100% intrinsic value (unlike, say, gold, which has a little intrinsic value plus a lot of speculative value).

Bitcoin, on the other hand, is 100% speculative, with nothing at all backing it.

[*] It used to be the case that they arguably only created ~90% of the money they lent, but the reserve requirement was reduced to zero. Even before then it was debatable because while loans "tied up" reserve capital, requiring the banks to hold it in reserve, they did hold it, they didn't lend it out. In any case, with a 0% reserve requirement banks definitely now create every dollar they lend.

If it comes to that, the difficulty can be turned down to make mining profitable again.

I wish it would just end.

You're completely wrong to equate bitcoin with the stock market. When you buy shares in a publicly-traded company you're buying something real, a portion of an actual business that owns real stuff, has real employees, makes real stuff and sells it to real people. Exactly how much that company is worth, so exactly how much your share is worth, isn't really clear because calculating that value requires a lot of guesses about what the company, and its market, and the economy as a whole, are going to do in the future. But it's definitely worth *something*.

That's not true of bitcoin. You won't hear people talking about bitcoin "fundamentals" the way they do with stocks, because bitcoin doesn't have any fundamentals. It's just vibes, all the way down. Oh you can talk about hashrates and work factors and the cost of mining equipment, etc., but none of that has any actual value. If the governments of the world united and successfully banned cryptocurrencies, all those ASIC rigs would be useless. If they were still using GPUs at least you could repurpose them for AI, or graphics.