Bitcoin is a protocol, kinda like HTTP or Morse code, whoever created it can’t change what things mean unless those using it accept it.

To answer your question with some more technical details, Blockchain use a public/private key pair, explaining what they are and how they work is quite difficult without going deep into mathematics, but in short a private key is a secret number so big it would take billions of years to brute force even with the entirety of the computational power of earth. In short, it’s impossible to guess a private key. On the other hand a public key is a number that’s derived from that first number without a way to going back to it, a very dumb down example would be think on 2 numbers (123 and 5) multiply them and you have your private key (615) add them and you have your public key (128), knowing just the public key you can’t know what the private key is.

Ok, so you have a number no one can guess and another number derived from it, so what? Well, because of the way the public key is derived from the private one you can encrypt things with the public key that only the person with the private key can decrypt, which is cool and all, but the important part here is the other way around: you can sign a message with a private key that anyone with the public key can verify. This is extremely important, because it means that if we use the public key to identify someone, only the person who knows the private key can sign as them, and no one (not even the creator of Bitcoin) can falsify that signature, because to do that they would have to know the private key.

With that knowledge understanding what Bitcoin is is much easier. Imagine your public address is 12345 and you want to send 1 coin to me, my public address being 54321, you essentially send a message saying “12345 gives 1 coin to 54321” and sign it, now a miner will see that transaction, and if you have 1 coin to give they’ll try to build a block of transactions which includes yours. Eventually your transaction will make it into a block, and all blocks that are built on top of it will make it more difficult to revert.

Final details, how do they know you have 1 coin? They tally all of the coins 12345 has received and sent over time. They store the total for each account in memory so they don’t have to calculate it every time, but that’s how they know if you have enough. And finally, every time someone creates a block they can claim a special transaction that creates a specific amount of new coins to any public key they want, that’s how new coins are created.

As you can notice, you sign transactions and no one can falsify that, miners group transactions and it’s in their best interest to be honest (otherwise other miners won’t accept their block and they will have spend computer power for nothing). It’s a system where everyone is kept honest because attacking the system is more expensive than playing by the rules. And the rules are set and forget, although miners can change the rules collectively it requires lots of people to be in agreement and it won’t happen to revert your purchase.

In short, it’s not exactly 0 trust, but it uses game theory to make sure that you can trust the system as it’s in everyone’s best interest that the system remains honest.

If you have any other question let me know.

Let’s talk about Proof of Work which is what Bitcoin uses (Ethereum uses Proof of Stake, and that’s slightly different).

The way Blockchain works is that every block depends on the previous one, I won’t bother with the mathematics of it, just accept that a block needs to have a parent block. The protocol is that the longest chain is the valid one, once your transaction gets on a block miners are incentivized to build on top of that. In short, suppose the chain currently has 100 blocks, your transaction on block 101, a miner that purposefully ignores that block to try to build a different 101 block is racing against every other miner who’s trying to build block 102, because I’d any other miner builds 102 before then he now needs to build 2 blocks before the miners build 1, so on and so forth until he has to accept defeat.

In short, a single miner depends on luck to be able to “rollback” (it’s not really a rollback, it’s a pretend it never happened and move the tokens elsewhere so the original transaction is not valid, in an attack called double-spending). This is why the more blocks (or verifications) are on top of a transaction the harder it is to “revert”. To “undo” a transaction that just happened you have to get lucky twice and build two blocks in quick succession, to undo a transaction from an hour ago you have to build 7 blocks in average before others can build one. To give you an idea of just how unfeasible this is, the reward for finding a Bitcoin block is around $80.000 currently, this means that to “undo” a transaction that happened 1 hour you’re losing the opportunity to earn over half a million dollars (which is what you would earn if you were to find 7 blocks without having to race against anyone else)

Because no one has your private keys, the only way to move the tokens from your ownership is to rollback the chain until that transaction happened, remove it, and rebuild the chain from that point onwards. So, it’s doable, in the sense that it’s physically possible, but unless you can convince the majority of miners that the transaction should be reverted, and even then until the new chain reaches or surpasses the old one the old one is the valid one, so if you only convince 51% of miners and the transaction happened a few hours ago they’ll probably spend a few days catching up, and if in the meantime some miners flip side they might never catch it and miners might abandon your cause as it’s coating them 80 thousand dollars every time someone else finds a block.

Finally, if such a thing were to actually happen, trust in that coin would drop significantly, and with that its price, and with that the money minera receive from finding blocks. So it’s not in their best interest to do that, as it can yield to them losing money from their source of income.

In short, yes, it’s possible, but unless your attacker can essentially burn millions of dollars to fuck with you it’s not very likely to happen.

Doesn’t have to though. All of this is based on smart contracts, to which means the logic is what you make of it. It could, for example, also send some kickback to a platform when activating the game there, so e.g. you buy the game from the game dev directly and you’re given an NFT for it, with it you can download the game from the game dev page, but also you can pay a small fee and get a steam key for it, that fee could be sent to both Valve to justify their involvement, then you might be able to generate similar Playstation key for it, or any other platform. This would be an interesting system where users can buy the game once and activate it for different platforms.

An NFT doesn’t dictate ownership, neither de jure nor de facto.

Sure, just like a property deed doesn’t dictate ownership. Just like money, deeds of any kind are only as valid as what we allow them to be, if our society were to use NFTs to track ownership of something then it would dictate ownership just as much as any other deed and would be enforceable by judges and police in the same manner.

In other words, NFT are a way to use Blockchain technology to obtain a non fungible token, whether that token means something depends on our societal agreements, just like any piece of paper.

I feel that most people who speak very badly or very well about NFTs and crypto in general don’t really understand it.

In simple terms what the Blockchain technology solves is a way to have an append only database with no centralized authority. This is a HUGE accomplishment, but you very likely don’t care about it.

In short, this means that Blockchain provides a way to exchange “tokens” without any user needing to trust each other or a third party. If you can trust the other person, or can trust a third party to be impartial then you don’t really need a Blockchain.

A Token is a representation of something, for currencies a token is a representation of value, and value is a fungible attribute, I.e. 1 of them is the same as any other, like coins, where you can replace a coin for another of the same denomination and they’re worth the same.

However tokens can be non-fungible, which means that one token is not the same as another, think for example house deeds, if someone takes your house deed they can’t just give you a different house deed and be the same.

We use non-fungible tokens a lot on our society, some examples are steam keys, vehicle registrations, or certifications of ownership for expensive pieces of art. We usually can trust valve, the government and whoever issued the art certificate to be impartial when someone tries to sell a game, car or art. But what if you couldn’t? How would you safely validate ownership without having to trust anyone?

That’s what crypto NFT bring to the table, someone had the idea to create a platform where artists could create tokens of authenticity for their art, and sell that to people giving them a way to own digital art in the same way that someone owns a painting. Then crypto bros started pumping that to sell their tokens for a higher price and a lots of people fell for it and started buying tokens representing ownership of things they didn’t wanted or understood to try to sell for s higher price later.

Obviously that scheme fell, but that doesn’t mean the technology is useless or untrustworthy. But for most cases crypto is not needed as most people can trust their government or some other centralized authority.

While I get where you’re coming from, most people don’t understand what’s normal to others because they think their experience is normal. And most of us won’t get to experience someone else’s experiences to figure out what’s normal for others and what isn’t. You might be fully satisfied with your situation because it is a good situation, but it also might be because you don’t know any better and think what you experience daily to be the norm for everyone, similarly to people living in a dictatorship regime who don’t even know about the possibility of living free so they’re content with their situation.

I’m not saying it’s your case, I’m not saying you should feel bad or that there’s something that doesn’t work the way it should. I’m saying you don’t really know how things should work because you only have your experiences to rely on, and your satisfaction might derive from not knowing what something should actually feel/be like in comparison to what it is.

Also not necessarily correct, foreskin protects from chafing and other similar micro fissures that happen daily for people without foreskin (as shown by the person above you having issues running). And while removing a part of you does lower the chances of getting cancer there, if it’s protecting another part of you from something it can increase the risk of cancer on that other part.

It’s very different. One is “I will give YOU money if you vote for me” and the other is “I will give EVERYONE money if I win”. The main difference is that one is not discriminating against who people voted for. The first is buying votes, the second is a campaign similar to “I will retroactively lower taxes for this year if I win”, which I don’t think anyone would see as problematic but it’s exactly the same outcome as the one you’re finding problem with, i.e. give people money.

It’s a stupid campaign because anyone with half a brain understand that he’s not going to do it and that that money would have to come from someplace else, but it’s still a campaign promise similar to any other promise politicians make to ask you to vote for them.

Dude, there’s a limit to how much issues you can put a blind sight and pretend are not there or that the next LLM will fix them. At some point companies will start getting hacked and they’ll have to take action, and that will not take decades.

You have 256 liters of water, and a 234.3 liter jar and are asking how to put the water in the jar. Either get rid of some of the water (shrink the image) or get a different jar (different drive). Writing 256L on the side of the jar will not let it fit more water.

Even by their own estimates it’s 2-10 million dollars per launch, imagine thinking that spending 6 million dollars to get a single rack in space where it can’t be maintained and will become garbage in a couple of years is a good investment. And that’s just the launch price, you still need to build the satellite, with its hundreds of square meters of solar panels and radiators. There’s no point arguing this any more than there was a point arguing hyperloop, until they present a feasible product it’s just big talk.

Cool, so we moved from a single motorcycle to a couple of cars, still a long way from a parking lot. You’re not understanding the issue, the scale is not feasible, you’ll spend millions of dollars to launch a single satellite that’s not even 1/10th of a tiny data center.

Unless I missed something, all of his math assumes 20kW of computers, that’s not even one rack for heavy stuff, of course you can run a data center in space if you send one satellite up for each computer, that’s just unpractical.

Let me put this into perspective, what you’re saying is like someone has an idea for a revolutionary parking plaza, and they’re showing you it’s feasible to spend millions of dollars to park one motorcycle in it.

Yes, they’ve thought of all those things. Those aren’t useful answers

That’s where you’re wrong, this is like the hyperloop or solar roadways, where all of the experts agree it’s a dumb idea but you have a rich person trying to sell that to the public with the promise that they’ll solve the issues by the time they get to production.

You can’t cool things in space effectively, the only way things lose heat in space is through radiation. According to Wikipedia the radiators expel from 100 to 350 W per square meter. My PC generates more heat than that, imagine a data center. A quick Google tells me it’s 5-15kW per rack or 40-60kW per AI rack. Let’s imagine an AI data center, a single rack produces 50kW, so you need 140 square meters per rack. To put this in perspective the space station could host one rack if we removed everything else that produces heat from inside. So you need a megastructure just to host one rack, that will become obsolete in a couple years.

It’s not feasible, it’s just as stupid an idea as a vacuum tube for trains, and brought to you by the same person too.

Yeah, but he also complained about writing which is very funny as we only know that he existed because other people wrote about him.

Futuristic relates to technology level, not time period. Otherwise 2001 or Battlestar Galactica would not be futuristic either.

Edit: just to clarify, obviously futuristic relates to future, but in the context of a story being futuristic it’s about the level of technology being to the future of the current one.

Your point being?

Well, first of all populism isn’t really a defined concept that everyone can agree with. Because of the question you’re asking I’m assuming you’re talking about populism as represented by such politicians as Trump/Milei/Bolsonaro/etc.

In that case the answer is that Populism is not fascism in the same way that elections are not democracy. As in, you can have one and not the other, but they tend to go hand in hand often enough to be very strongly associated.

Sure, you can have a democratic populist, but in history most examples of populism were preludes to fascist. And a fascist government usually uses populism to keep some sort of approval.

Agree with everything except one thing.

It’s just mediocre sci-fi at best

Star wars is not sci-fi, it’s fantasy. People usually make that mistake because most fantasy is medieval and most sci-fi is futuristic, but Star Wars is an example of a futuristic fantasy story. Medieval sci-fi is harder to find, but some Stargate episodes from the point of view of the native of the planet would qualify and I’m sure there’s some 40k or Star Trek examples as well.

In short the answer is this: you have two companies selling you boxes, one that it’s literally impossible to look inside, and another one that’s very easy and encouraged to do so. Even if you know nothing about bombs, if both those boxes claim to not explode, which one do you trust more?

It’s sorta the same thing, it doesn’t necessarily means that the closed box is inherently less safe, but even if you personally haven’t verified that the open box doesn’t contain anything dangerous you can be somewhat safer in the knowledge that people COULD have verified it.