I admit I wondered for quite a while what bca chefs are.

Let me guess - you'd volunteer to run that Raspberry Pi and you'd promise (hand on the bible) that you wouldn't corrupt the ledger?

Interesting. If I drove 1.8 million kilometres with my diesel car, it would consume around 117000 litres of diesel fuel, which at the current prices would cost about 187000 euros where I live. This is 3.5 BTC.

I'm not quite sure whether this means that everyone mining bitcoin should start a taxi company instead, or whether this comparison means absolutely nothing.

Also, the "truly pointless" is in the eye of the beholder. If everyone was perfectly trustable, and nobody would ever think of manipulating the databases in which your "worth" is being kept, then sure - there would probably be no need for cryptocurrency. As it is, banks can lend out more than they actually have, and governments can print money as much as they like.

I happen to have quite some trust in our government, but crypto shows a fascinating alternative.

And don't get me wrong - I think the current energy consumption of btc mining is a problem. We can think of alternatives. But I also think that it's up to me what I do with the electricity going into my house - I paid for the kWhs, so I get to decide what to do with them. I personally think that a lot of energy is wasted watching TikTok movies, but it's not up to me to "heavily regulate" this. If electric energy causes waste, then it should be more expensive, until this balances out again.

I'm really surprised about the mess in .NET versions, and how developers put up with it. In my company, the hyped Microsoft-only developers are on their fourth rewrite of major parts of their apps, and need continuous investment to even keep their stuff running. I don't think there's a single exception to this pattern: I get approached by the hipster coders telling me that "Y is the new X, you should really switch over, everybody's using Y now" and after a while I hear that they're asking for budget to rewrite everything into Z because Z is the new Y.

Meanwhile, our "old-fashioned" C++ stuff just keeps chugging along.

"Hey The Evil Atheist, there's a huge mountain of gold on the parking lot outside that abandoned office on Main Street with a sign that everyone is welcome to grab some. We're all going there, do you need a ride?"

"Nah. It will run out eventually and this is yet another of these "who got there first" spiels, and I don't play that game. Instead I will just sit here and complain later."

Exactly. You don't ask Volvo for a button on the dashboard that disables the warning when you're not wearing the seatbelts, disables the crumple zones, disables the auto-break-on-collision-detection, lets you drive with the lights switched off, lets you operate the navigation system while driving, disables the "maybe it's time to take a break" warning when it detects that you're not paying attention to the road, etc. Instead, you decide "This Volvo which does as much as possible to keep me safe is limiting my freedoms as an adult, so I will choose a different brand." In 2008, Volvo set their "Big Hairy Audacious Goal" that by 2020, "nobody would be killed or injured in a Volvo". Set aside whether they reached this goal or not, it is *their* angle at the market.

And Apple has carefully crafted their brand around "premium good-looking tools which just work". Again, set aside whether they actually "just work" or not - this is their angle at the market.

Come on, we're on a tech site. We *all* had to support family members with their computers, and our first question when we saw their computer riddled with malware would be "did you run anything suspicious?" And every time they told you "No, not at all, I never run things, I just open icons." I put my family on Macs because these are significantly harder to fuck up.

Having a separate app store on a phone opens the floodgates for this situation. Even if you put up a big flashing warning sign. Because the installer of MalwareInfestedFlappyBird will *tell* the user "Halfway the process, you'll see a big red button. Click it to continue installing." And since even "reputable" companies will ask for this (so they can control their own store), it will become yet another "annoying alert to click away."

Do we *really* want to go back to the Java Installer Updater Downloader Manager?

Please separate the product from the hype. The fact that people spent their life's savings on a single tulip bulb says something about these people, not about the tulip bulb per se.

It is not unusual when something cool is invented that people smell quick money and jump on it - often fueled by FOMO and without any understanding of what they're actually investing in. We also see this with tech company IPOs.

To dismiss crypto altogether is something I would not expect from a tech site like slashdot.

And as a final thought, I present an interesting altcoin, with the following specs:
- controlled by only one single node
- 70% of coins held by top 10% of holders
- 35% of all coins generated in the last 0.4% of its entire time of existence

Would you have faith in this coin? Well neither would I. It's the US dollar.

Let's see where they got these numbers. The current hash rate of the bitcoin network is approximately 160M TH/s (https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate). Excuse the weird unit for a second; apparently nobody uses "H/s". The current crop of miners use about 30J/TH, so multiplying these numbers give me something around 5GW for the entire bitcoin network. This number will typically be higher because it's not just the latest generation of mining hardware at work, but there is a strong incentive to switch off older miners because they typically cost more in energy than they are able to mine in BTC.

To convert this to the other strange unit of Wh/year (so we go from Joules to Watts back to Watt-hours and then forward to Watt-Hours per year...) I get about 150PJ/year, so that would be 4.2 x 10^10 kWh/year. The 121,6 TWh/year is therefore "within an order of magnitude".

The 5GW gives a nice impression of how much energy is spent on BTC though. In The Netherlands, most energy plants are burning natural gas, and they're a couple hundred MW each. So you'd need about a dozen of them just to power the world's BTC hash rate.

Interesting. My take-away is that BTC is definitely not a bunch of nerds hashing on their GPU off-hours anymore. I remember having a couple of USB ASIC hashers plugged in to my server and mining about 1 BTC per week.

(And no, I didn't keep them all).

Ah I misread - you meant cryptocurrenCIES. I give you that. Sure - people are free to try, of course. There are a lot of alternative "currencies" in the real world too: coupons and vouchers, for instance. I'm not sure how it is in other countries but here (in The Netherlands) there is quite an economy of these things. It's considered a bit "distasteful" to give people outright money as a birthday gift, for instance, so it happens a lot that you get a "book voucher" or a "dinner voucher" or something like that. The idea is that this is nicer than a 20 euro bill which just disappears in your wallet and ends up being spent thoughtlessly on groceries; instead, you'll remember the person who gave it to you every time you pick up that book you bought with it, or when you enjoy that dinner.

BUT. These things have a "limited validity" and I can't be the only one who finds them at the bottom of a drawer during spring cleaning, only to see they've expired. I'm pretty sure that this is what the printers of such vouchers live off: a certain percentage of them remains unspent.

So you are free to "start your own cryptocurrency" but it's quite unlikely that you launched a "trillion dollar economy". I am also free to print "foobar vouchers" and if people buy them trusting that they will get their value out of them, then more power to me.

Paper money is just an "IOU" issued by the state. The old Dutch bank notes even said as much: on the paper money, it was printed "The bank will pay to bearer X guilders". The paper doesn't HAVE value, it's just a promise. If you've ever held a pre-WW2 German "million Reichsmark" bill or a Zimbabwean trillion-dollar note in your hand, you'd know. And with current digitization of banking, even the PAPER has gone away. It's just numbers in a spread sheet, basically. And where paper money still has some anti-forgery built in, how easy is it to shift numbers around in a spread sheet? The idea is "if I add something here, I have to subtract it there". I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but what's to stop a bank from thinking "what happens when we DON'T subtract it there?" And this actually happens; since banks know that you won't come collect that dollar you put in your account yesterday, they can lend it out to someone else, collect interest, and have your dollar back by the time you come for it. But why stop there? Banks routinely lend out money they don't even have. It's called leverage, and it was mind-boggling when I found out.

To me, learning about cryptocurrency opened a whole new perspective on what money actually IS. Perhaps you knew all along, and you didn't need this insight. I found it super interesting, and I would have *paid* for this knowledge. Instead, it made me a lot of money, but that's just a "welcome side-effect".

The whole idea behind the "difficulty" built into crypto generation is that you CAN'T just "print it". It costs real effort, just like mining gold does. That's why crypto generation is also called "mining".

I joined the crypto bandwagon many years ago precisely because of the fascinating implications - I think of it as "the money equivalent of open source".

If there was a way to cheaply "synthesize gold", it would have serious implications on its value too. A while ago I visited the castle in which Kaiser Wilhelm lived in exile, and one of the items on display there was a cutlery set made of aluminium. Which was hugely valuable gift at the time he received it from some head of state, and yet currently only has "curiosity value".

The value of a currency is based on TRUST. There are numerous instances of hyperinflation throughout history, with paper money almost using "scientific notation" for their face value. It is naive to assume that any specific currency is immune to this. I keep saying it: it only takes for China to say "I'm no longer interested in dollars. You pay for the stuff you build here with renminbi from now on" for the dollar to take a massive hit. The dollar's value is based on trust, just like any other currency: I "trust" that this little green paper I received from you in exchange for my goods or services, will be accepted by someone else in exchange for theirs.

If I sold something to an American for 1$ somewhere in March last year, and I wanted to buy something for it here in Europe today, I would notice that I'd get about 11% less goods/services for it than I expected. And I bet that if the situation in the Capitol had escalated, it would have been even worse.

Why do people keep saying that BTC represents no real value? I know of very few currencies that do - apart from the actual physical coins. BTC is not stock, nor does it pretend to be. That people are using it as investment is *their* prerogative; BTC wants to be a *currency*.

Do you honestly still think that a 100 dollar bill is *worth* $100? It's all based on "what the fool is willing to trade for it". The USA can get away with simply printing bills, giving them to China in exchange for shiny goods, and saying "I prefer not to ever see those bills again. Keep them out of our country please." The day China says "Nah I'm no longer interested in your dollars, haven't you got something else to trade?" is the day the dollar will crash hard. The whole point of bitcoin is that you CAN'T "print them for free", even if you're a government.

And the people saying they're investing in popcorn instead to enjoy "the inevitable crash" - wtf is up with you? Even in the other story about Apple, they're saying "AAPL will crash, mark my words." Sure. I'm sure they will. Just like the East India Company eventually crashed.

Meanwhile, I'm driving a luxury car, paid for by selling a few bitcoin which I mined myself back in the day, for about $10 worth of electricity. Enjoy your Shadenfreude-flavored popcorn.

I would really like to see which percentage of transactions involving gold actually involves buying cappuccinos. I think it's perfectly fine for a certain currency to be "impractical" for day-to-day transactions; and I think BTC is actually more practical than gold.

This is an interesting response, and also (no offence) a rather American one. It seems to me like this is a good example of the drawback of capitalism: a virtuous circle (in theory) which optimizes personal comfort hand-in-hand with corporate profit, with virtually no attention to the side-effects.

The same type of response can be seen when people smirk and say "you can punish yourself with that rabbit food, while I'll enjoy a nice fat hamburger and another bucket-sized portion of sugar water. The fact that you look at me in disgust only makes it more enjoyable to me." Or "you can punish yourself by going for a run like you're some backward pre-industrial savage. We didn't invent cars for nothing, so when I need to lift my fat ass off the couch to stock up on new sugar water and hamburgers, I'll drive."

Given the choice, most kids would prefer sweets and candy over vegetables and exercise. In that case, there are parents whose job it is to point out the balance between short-term satisfaction and long-term consequences. When you live in a free, capitalist society, the whole system is optimized for us to behave like kids. And since we aren't kids, there is no "parent" (or president, or whatever) who will make us "do what's good for us". And this is good, because "democracy is the worst system except for all the others."

So the way to go, in a democracy, is not to force people to do certain things, but to try and convince them. Which is exactly what GP was doing, pointing out in a friendly way that you can drive an electric car and still have fun. There was no guilt-peddling here.

I personally really dislike exercising. I also vehemently dislike people telling me what to do, and I admit to a sprinkling of Schadenfreude when some sporty dude sprains his ankle. But if I can find a way to make exercise more enjoyable (or less awful) for me, like doing online courses while on a treadmill, I'll do it. Purposely clogging up my arteries "just to spite them" is an incredible short-sighted and childish response.

The scary stuff about people talking like this is that "the rich" means "everyone having more than me". The problem is that "taking stuff from the rich" and saying "calling it stealing is just a social construct" is that it creates a dangerous precedent. Who gets to decide who "has too much"? I enjoy birthday conversations with armchair communists. I make more than average in my country, and I gladly pay a lot of tax. But what most "armchair communists" fail to realize is that they ARE the 1%. So I tell them "I see you have a nice phone; I offer to take it from you, sell it, and give the money to some African Children In Need fund. You clearly have enough if you can afford a cell phone." I am sure you will retort by saying you "worked" for that phone, and the "rich" didn't work. I never meet any of your "aristocracy" and all the rich people I've met during my life, are actually working pretty hard and/or made some smart decisions in the past. These decisions were based on the "rules of the game". So don't hate the player. If your new rule is "if you see something you want, just take it from whoever currently has it", then people will start playing the game differently. I would personally invest in guns and bodyguards or something, rather than in promising startups.

I can't speak for Intel since I have no inside information there, but it's definitely not uncommon for big companies to move from "engineer dictated design" to "manager dictated design". There will be someone in middle management who oversees the engineers, doesn't understand what they're saying, and pushes for the wrong decision. The big problem with middle management is that it is very hard to judge their performance. Top level is fine - you just judge the company's stock price; "low level" is also fine - you judge the number of problems solved and/or new features developed. The middle management layer is often composed of busybodies whose job *should* be to make sure there is enough coffee for the workers, that new keyboards and mice are ordered in time, and that there is some level of reporting done to the upper levels so the workers don't have to waste time on it. What they *do* is "play boss", disturb the workers, and spout buzzwords to the upper levels while blaming the lack of progress on the engineers.