I've not got a penny invested, nor am I ever likely to, but I find your posts to be most informative, and appreciate the insight very much, Dan.

This and the politics thread, are two of my favourites on Blonde. If you'd told me that would be the case a few years ago, I'd have been rolling on the floor laughing.

Thanks, but when I look over some of my first posts I cringe . It's a learning process for us all!

In that case, why do 99% of the world's devices run software from Microsoft, Google and Apple rather than Linux? The latter is completely open source and free, been around for decades and has thousands of developers choosing what is best.

I'm gonna take a stab at this (do I need to disclaim everything I'm not certain of now?). Microsoft, Google and Apple are built for dumb users. Dumb users are most people because computers are difficult and confusing. People that create complex software where it is absolutely imperative that everything is open to scrutiny such as the air industry, NASA, self driving cars etc will be using linux. BTW cash machines still use windows XL.

PS I totally agree that blockchain is going to be as transformative as the WWW, just don't think cryptos will be.

*Puffs cheeks* I'm gonna do my best to explain why this isn't the case another time. A blockchain on it's own doesn't mean much, it's just a ledger and isn't immutable. I have said it time and time again but immutability is the greatest asset to bitcoin.

I get it will make mining bitcoin cheaper but I thought there was something more altruistic and utopian going on. if it's just about the costs of mining bitcoin I probs still don't see the point. Is it

a) It will be really cheap for miners to mine so xxxx (undefined) good will come from this
b) At least one criticism of btc (ie burning loadsa fossil fuels) will go away or
c) Some other thing

I has to know

I don't actually know Apologies, it's completely my fault. I don't actually think the mining of a bitcoin costing a lot of energy is at all a problem, so the relation between that and talking about green energy is not what I was intending. It's my fault for being off topic.

I don't know this for certain but I'm pretty sure I know more about renewable energy than you do. I've probably done a similar amount of research in to renewable energy and 'green' products as you have in to crypto currencies.

You've called people on here in the past for making sweeping statements about cryptos without doing their research and now you're doing exactly the same with renewables. You've looked at a trend and used laws that were made over 50 years ago which apply to a completely different industry and come to a conclusion that we're going to get almost free energy at some point in the future.

I firmly believe we'll get to a state of close to 100% clean energy within my lifetime (I'm funking for another 40 years) but I'm under no illusions that it'll be anywhere close to free. I think it'll cost about the same as it does now, probably more.

I've gone down the 'green' route myself and installed solar panels a battery and an air source heat pump. I did an insane amount of research before deciding whether or not it was financially viable. The conclusion was that it wasn't even close but I did it anyway because it gives me a nice warm feeling. Apparently it's much better now than it used to be but it's still very shit. With subsidies it just about works but take those away and it just does not work.

I love the thought of de-centralised energy. I've got my panels and I also have a pretty Tesla battery that those panels charge up. If everybody in my local area had the same set up and we could connect to a few decent sized wind turbines as well then we'd probably have free energy for the next 20 years. Unfortunately we'd have to spend about £20k each up front (not including the wind turbines) but hey who needs to recoup their capex in Utopia.

Everyone isn't out there to make lots of money no, it's just the same 1% who have been and always will be that we have to worry about.

It's going to take some kind of cataclysmic event to level us all out and make us realise that we should actually think about each other instead of ourselves. Millenials (I hate that term) are just as bad as every generation prior. Why have you bought your cryptos? Is it because you want to encourage the de-centralisation of currencies and help us towards a better future or is it because you want to make a butt load of money? Go on, be honest.....

That's great that you have researched so much, it would have been great if you had given us some in depth thoughts about why prices of green energy will probably be the same or more expensive in the future.

BTW, I think it's great you've shared something that you have done in regards to green energy.

It's all gone off topic, probably my fault. I will stick my hand up and say that I don't know much about green energy. In fact I don't know much about anything, I am just taking what facts and theories are available to me and applying them to some future possibilities. With that, I have just been shot down which is what I expected, but anybody who makes bold statements or predictions is to expect such a thing.

Regarding your question I bought my bitcoin at the start of 2017 because I was extremely curious about the technology. The hype was pretty low at that point although there was beginning to be a little gossip in the poker industry. In the beginning I found it very exciting and was trying to increase my btc holdings by trading and buying into other projects, but as time went on my perspective changed. I mostly just hold BTC now. I hold BTC because it is the safest form of asset in the world ainec, I keep enough money in the bank to pay the rent and some bills. In the not too distant future I will be able to pay both of those with my btc anyway and I expect by then it will become very easy to have a digital wallet that trades between the pairs (and many other cryptos) very quickly. The fact that my btc will grow in value against the dollar is incidental but inevitable. BTC will continue to rise and fall, rise and fall, but the trend in the long term will always be on the up. I will not be at all surprised when btc has another insane bull run, and another one after that...and another.

You are kidding right? You've said some good stuff on this thread but this right here is complete hogwash.

If the margin cost is close to zero where's the incentive for anyone to produce it or install/upkeep the infrastructure to get it from the turbine to your server farm?

The only reason people make wind turbines is to make money. The profits available from green energy are improving hence the reason more people are installing it but if those profits tend towards zero that market disappears really fast.

What if everyone produces their own energy at an extremely low cost?

Your perspective seems that everyone is out there to make lots of money, do you think that trend is continuing among the millenials?

I wish you were right with this I really do but I'm afraid you're in a dream world if you think energy will ever be anywhere even close to free.

I don't dream about this, I just look at the trend and use Moore's and Swanson's law and quickly come to the conclusion that the price of solar and other energy will reach a point where it is virtually free. Just because something seems inconceivable, doesn't mean it isn't going to happen. Of course it's inconceivable, just like in Moore's law the amount of transistors on integrated circuits will continue to double every 2 years, creating an exponential rate of improvement. I don't mind being called "a dreamer" since I am sure when Gordon Moore's law was first conned, people in their 50's who were alien to computers would have just brushed it off and called these people new to computers as "dreamers". Well it's 2018 and 50 years later Moore's law has held up pretty well. It is probably close to reaching it's saturation point now hence why we will never reach 100% aggregate efficiency in converting energy into production.

The idea of almost free, limitless renewable energy is very nice, and obviously renewable resources aren't being fully exploited yet - but I think there may be some quite considerable, and possibly insurmountable, infrastructure problems to overcome for that to happen.

I agree with everything apart from the fact it's insurmountable. It is already possible, the energy source of wind sun and geothermal are free and unlimited and will have an extremely small carbon footprint in comparison to current methods that require oil.

Wikipedia wasn't built for free; it spends tens of millions of dollars a year. What you mean is that it's content is provided by free,  it's structure and programming isn't.  It isn't good because it's open sourced - it's good because it's a charity with a large income and an army of volunteers - this isn't going to be a system that's available for the majority of open source projects.

I was thinking about this today and thought my argument wasn't particularly great. Wiki is in fact one of the greatest things about the internet but it isn't self sustaining. I think a stronger argument for open source is that if you have 100 engineers working for the best AI company in the world vs a project that is open to everyone in the world to create AI, the open source project will be better. In the former, you have a system where a small group or even one person decides what is best, in the latter quite simply the people choose what is best. Just like with the bitcoin network, if someone creates something better then they will simply choose that.

It's true that several countries have currencies which have less trust in them than bitcoin; and it is viable that bitcoin could replace the dollar as their alternative - but that's a pretty niche market.

Niche- denoting or relating to products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.

It's not niche, we are talking about millions and millions of people here. Bitcoin is already reaching hundreds of thousands of these people despite being an experiment that started just 9 years ago.
[/quote]

The idea that people can open source entire industries and have a self perpetuating system which funds itself is great - but how do you get there? The enclosed system works - but it isn't compatible with our current system and I don't see any function for how you can get between the two states. (also what are you going to do with the massive unemployment caused by all the automation?)

We can get there by thinking about the future, if we can all agree that a system that is less selfish and agree that working together as a network is more efficient and better for the human race as a whole, then we can do it. I think that the oil industry and the idea of capitalism is going to be around for a long time, just like I believe FIAT monetary systems will be around for a long time. When we went from horses to cars they shared the same roads for a long time, in fact in the beginning it was made extremely difficult for the cars (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws).

The massive unemployment caused by automation is something that I have wondered for as long as I first had a bank account. If 100% jobs became automotive from tomorrow and everything is done for us, what on earth is going to happen? The best conclusion I have come to is that it will work itself out. If you apply this hypothetical situation to the way we see money and employment, it wont work. Quite simply, the way money and employment is perceived when our great grandchildren are adults is going to be very very different from today.

[traditional]

In what way is current productivity linked to fuel?

In terms of aggregate efficiency, the amount of energy required to go from fossil fuel to productivity has reached 15-20% in the 90s (Sorry I can't reference this) and this is the ceiling we have reached. The margin costs of green electricity will one day reach close to $0. It is not hard to exponentially grow in efficiency when we have free resources to do things.

What evidence is their of this massive boom in renewable energy which will push the cost of electricity down to virtually zero?

The evidence is when it happens. As per Moore's law, just like how the power of computers had an exponential curve, so will the the price of green energy go down.
 
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/06/china-becomes-a-driving-power-for-solar-energy-with-86-point-5-billion-invested-last-year.html

And how does it make any sense that this will wipe out profit margins? Surely if the input costs go down and productivity rises traditional businesses will be able to save even more money by reducing their workforce and the most likely effect will be their profits go up(?)

Yes, for traditional businesses that can reduce input costs, profits will go up.

In what way is open source better? Why would it become more normal to accept that this is the case? What would be the impetus for that to happen? And how would it lead to a better quality of life?

When the internet was just beyond it's infancy and the wealthiest 20% had access to it, Wikipedia was laughed at. The phrase "where did you read that, wikipedia?" is still mocked. Yet if you want the fastest and most reliable source of information, you know where to go. That has been the best example of the power of open source and has been one of the millions of uses for the internet. It has helped spread information and knowledge faster than any other time in history. When you ask what the impetus for such movement or what motivation people have, it is the fact that the human race are hard working and inspiring people. Wikipedia was built for free by people, for free* and is in fact, free to use to this date. How many people will be using encyclopedia britannica in 20 years? How many of our children will have ever even heard of it?

*I believe wiki had some staff, but it is easy to imagine it having close to little.

I don't understand. How will it be wrong in the future? How will they feed their children then?

Sorry, the point was not about how that person won't be able to feed his children, that is a deeper topic. I mean that if you add production or resources to a country for free, then that is better for the country as a whole.  Perhaps not my strongest point and I probably don't understand this to a deep sense.

The major problem is - what do cryptocurrencies do better than what is available currently?

There's a limited answer with international money transfers (for example); but the vast majority of people don't need to make transfers of any particular size in any particular speed. It might help in future for buying a house (for example) - and some organisations are looking at the blockchain to help protect the Intellectual Property rights of creative people's work; but unless and until anything on the blockchain can be shown to be an actual improvement over what's currently available then why would anybody ever switch to it?  And as these examples suggest - even when the blockchain does provide a better option isn't the most likely long term outcome some specialised niche role for it?

I am going to talk about bitcoin instead of cryptos since I believe that despite many other cryptos have a place in the world, that they will be a poor investment overall compared to bitcoin.

What does Bitcoin do better than currently is a huge question. How about you put yourselves in the shoes of an Argentine or Venezuelan or Cypriot (some time 10 years ago ish) or Zimbabwean. I am sure there are other examples. People in these countries have literally been at the mercy of their governments because of how the monetary system works. People get their wages in Venezuela and they race to the supermarkets for food (if they find any) since people actually have full time jobs going around the shop increasing the price of food, every hour. What kind of store of value for means of exchange is that? The first big purchase of something in terms of todays money was an apartment in Argentina worth $1.5m around 7 years ago. The person selling the apartment refused to take pesos (or whatever the currency was called that year) because the inflation was around 100%. He kept all his funds in USD. The problem with paying with USD is that the bank wanted to charge 10% for the service- $150,000. These people luckily already had a solution- they settled in bitcoin.

So why would anyone switch to using a blockchain? Well many many people already do use bitcoin daily. Some of us are lucky enough to store our value by means of a bank that is run by a stable government, and despite saying this, the method of fractional banking and the absurd printing of money in the past couple of decades doesn't make sense to me whatsoever. If I were to chime in and say how would other blockchains be a part of our daily lives? It means people can create a protocol for a service that businesses already do. In the not too distant future, we can expect services such as freight companies to be completely automised without any ceo, supervisors or anything of the sort. The technology is already out there, it is the infrastructure that is lacking. Automated driving, loaded by robots, tracked and paid for using blockchain because it is completely trustless. The idea of said service will be created in open source by a lot of people, that will be run and continuously funded with their own cryptocurrency, that will be secure because it is the interest of the miners and holders to reach a consensus on every decision that effects the nature of the business and the effect on people around the world. And if you don't like the idea? Make a better one, because people will choose yours if it is better.

The greatest aspect of the future of open source, AI and cryptocurrencies* that most people fail to recognise is the power of people working together as a network. Crypto is a small part of a revolution that is happening in front of our eyes. I think it's important to take some steps back to see where we are going and what has been achieved. *I mostly refer to bitcoin

In the past 50-200 years the idea of money and economy has changed very drastically. Money is began as means of exchange to remember who owed what, in fact it began with shells made into necklaces that could be traded with other tribes for the food that they were best at hunting (there are perhaps some other more interesting reasons too). Money has evolved dramatically and when we hit the second revolution of electricity in the united states the monetary system had eventually evolved into fractional reserve banking. The economy has done very very well but the problem that I believe many people that have been involved with money their whole lives is that this is the only feasibly way that the world goes round and that anything else is unimaginable. That is kind of true until recently, it is better to look at production rather than economy when we see ourselves as a human race going forwards. Money has been seen as zeroes and those zeroes generally represent success and power. The problem is, this is a very incorrect way of thinking. Productivity is slowing in many parts of the world as we have hit the ceiling on productivity using fossil fuels. Soon enough, the cost of electricity will be virtually free and productivity will go through the roof, ultimately profit margins will come close to zero for many types of old fashioned capitalist business and corporations. With our current idealistic view on profits and success, this would scream disaster. It is already obvious to me and others that anything that is open source that takes the power away from corporations and to the people is the future, but to many it is not. I truly believe that when it becomes more normal to accept this, then we will see an almighty leap forwards in quality of life and naturally we can officially call it a revolution. A typical example of how people think in the current mindset of economy and profit is I have been looking to do some volunteer work in asia for communities, I was criticised because I could go and do a job that a local could do instead, which could help feed his children. Their point is correct, but in perhaps 10 or 20 years, we will all agree that it is infact wrong.

When we talk about cryptocurrencies and bitcoin, we are easy to poke holes in what is right and wrong. People trying to make a fast buck out of a scammy ico for me is a defunct and piss poor approach to what is the biggest and most important technology any of us will likely see in our lifetimes with exception of the internet. Scammy icos has nothing to do with a poor technology, nor does it undermine it. It is human behaviour for some people to have ulterior motives to make money in an unfair way.

Bitcoin was not the first time someone had tried to create a technology that undermines all banks and our ideas of the monetary system but for the first time some very bright spark (probably Nick Szabo) found the solution to a monetary system that is better than gold. What's amazing is that it took 5000 years, probably because gold had every characteristic needed for a perfect means of exchange and value. Bitcoin is better than gold in every single way imaginable.

The Justice Department has opened a criminal probe into whether traders are manipulating the price of Bitcoin and other digital currencies, dramatically ratcheting up U.S. scrutiny of red-hot markets that critics say are rife with misconduct, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The investigation is focused on illegal practices that can influence prices -- such as spoofing, or flooding the market with fake orders to trick other traders into buying or selling, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the review is private. Federal prosecutors are working with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a financial regulator that oversees derivatives tied to Bitcoin, the people said.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-24/bitcoin-manipulation-is-said-to-be-focus-of-u-s-criminal-probe

I think we can all get behind this. It's like back in the day when people used to say stars was fixed and full of robots, except this time it actually is fixed.

Well I've just discovered this Revolut app which sounds promising. You can swap currencies around willy nilly at optimal wholesale exchange rate, I've mostly gotten it for withdrawing/spending money abroad more easily, but they're meant to be introducing crypto currencies. How mad would that be exchanging from crypto to cash and back all in one app? Least I think that's what it means, could be wrong.

Coinbase has prompted to send one euro via SEPA, took 15 mins to set it all up through Lloyds then told me 1 euro is below the minimum threshold, so googling it tells me ithey charge £15 to do so but then SEPA direct debit is free. Hmm I'm not paying £15 to send 1 euro...

A couple of my friends who own a bitcoin merchant company are at the end stages of developing an app called blox where you can trade fiat and many cryptos at the click of a finger. These sorts of apps will flourish soon but they take time. Crypto is still pretty new so expect lots of processes such as wallets/exchange/user interface to be unviable.

Big changes at Sharkscope today, everyone has to re Opt In as far as I can see.

I can only assume this is GDPR-related? If not, why?

In GDPR terms, how will THM proceed from here?

Interesting times.

Were you not logged in?

Was always more of an Age of Empires man myself.. !

What a game. AoE IV is in development btw.

I have AoE 3 on my steam account but was trying to finish 2 first but got sidetracked

will put it on my todo list once i sort out Civ

I played quite a bit of AoE 3. I don't have it on steam but I think it's cross platform. If you fancy a game lmk.

(6x2)+2 = 14 x5 is 70 add 4 and multiple by 9

Nice one. Within 30 seconds?

Was always more of an Age of Empires man myself.. !

What a game. AoE IV is in development btw.

I always check the reviews of the car hire company before using them. If you have the time and energy, you can get some good deals out there but most of the "cheap" car hire companies are just pure scammy trash. Amazing that this still goes on in this day and age.

...

When very innovative things happen we begin with the hard core innovative and enthusiasts, then will follow smart people, then will follow people that listen to smart people, then will follow the hoards. Even very stubborn and stupid people end up being part of a revolution (see: the internet).

The internet was monetized because of porn. When the porn industry starts investing in the blockchain - that's when everyone should pile in

Even though you might be being facetious, it is slightly true. The impact will just be that people can buy porn without a private entity knowing their preferences. You can still download porn and nobody knows you're watching it (if you know what you're doing).