The bitcoin protocol doesn't know anything about wallets. It only knows about private keys, public keys, and hashes of public keys. You can send bitcoins to any address, whether or not it is in the same wallet, whether or not it is the same address, or it whether or not is owned by you, somebody else, or even nobody.

Margin trading is simply trading using borrowed money or coins. When you buy coins on margin, you borrow money to pay for the coins. When you sell short, you borrow the coins that you sell. It can be very risky because you must eventually return what you borrowed regardless of whether you make a profit or not.

What about base-64 encoding instead of hex? That's only 2 characters per word.

I perform a one-way transaction sending bitcoins to APMEX and they perform a one-way transaction sending gold to me. That sounds a lot like money.

I don't think it is any different. Give me an example and I'm pretty sure I can show you a way to earn dollars in the same way.

You don't need the issuer's permission to buy or sell tokens, or to set up a market to buy or sell tokens. That the whole purpose issuing tokens. What does it have to do with morality?

More accurately, mining will never be unprofitable for some miners for any significant length of time.

Cointelegraph will publish anything. Their articles are crap. They have even promoted scams.

I completely agree with these two paragraphs. I disagree with the rest. The problem is that Roubini fails to distinguish between the technology and those charlatans who promote it in order to take money from naive and greedy people.

Suppose your are on a site discussing dollars and the U.S. monetary system, and somebody asks, "is there a decent way for newbies to actually make money?" You already know the answers to your question.

I find that posts translated by google translate are frequently hard to read and I don't feel like spending the time it takes to unscramble the translated text.

I don't think there is a way to measure entropy of the generator from the outcomes. Also, when somebody says that something has "N bits of entropy", they are assuming an ideal RNG.

As for measuring the quality of your dice rolling, I think that simply measuring the uniformity of the distribution for a large number of rolls is probably sufficient, since a roll is probably not significantly affected by a previous roll or the time of the roll or the conditions during the roll.

If you want to be more thorough, then here is some information about other tests you can run: https://ws680.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=906762


That's an extreme statement. You could say the same thing about Brownian motion. In the end, it doesn't really matter if it is truly random or not. The end justifies the means when it comes to an RNG.

I think what you are describing is a vehicle like the Chevy Volt, but with the gasoline-powered generator being replaced by hydrogen. It could be an effective solution, though it is not necessarily the best solution.

The units are completely arbitrary. You could also say that for every ounce of gold there are 320,000 satoshis, or that for every satoshi there are 2.7x10¹⁷ atoms of gold.

If one group of nodes disagrees with another group of nodes about the validity of a block, then there is a fork, and each node must decide for itself. Nodes that agree with you are "good" and nodes that disagree with you are "bad". That is not a consensus.

Consensus is not the main element of trust, PoW is. It is PoW that prevents a node from changing the information in the block chain. It is PoW (along with the network effect) that prevents a node from accepting an invalid block.

Here is my take...

Infinity is not a number or a place, so you can't go "to infinity" in the first place.
Infinity is a concept, so there can be a "beyond infinity", depending on how you define "beyond" and "infinity".

BTW, while we're on the subject, a dimension is also not a place, so you can't go to or come from a dimension.

I think it can be even simpler.

When the information is updated, the updating computer must spend money before the others will consider accepting the update. If the update is valid, then the update is accepted and the updating computer is paid for its work. If it is not valid, then the update is rejected and the updating computer is not paid. This process ensures that computers are motivated to submit only valid updates. When there are competing updates, then the update that costs the most is accepted. This ensures that undoing an update is very costly.

BTW, I don't think that consensus needs to be explained since it is implied, and more importantly, because it is actually more a result of the process than a part of it.

The energy used in PoW must be "wasted".

Because of the difficulty adjustment and the economic incentives, the equilibrium cost of PoW approaches the value of the block reward. Even if the result of PoW is useful, then the cost of the "wasted" PoW will still approach the value of the block reward. So, nothing is accomplished by making the PoW generate something useful.

Let me demonstrate by example:

Suppose a hash rate of 1 exahash per block costs 1 BTC in energy costs and earns 1 BTC per block on average. In this case, 1 BTC worth of energy is "wasted".

Now suppose that a use for hashes is found and 1 exahash can be sold for 0.5 BTC. We can now say that only 0.5 BTC worth of energy is "wasted". Not so fast. Mining costs 1 BTC per block, but now earns 1.5 BTC so miners will certainly increase their capacity in order to make more money.

In this scenario, miners will double their hash rate on average. Note that the difficulty will also double because the total hash rate has doubled.

Now, 2 exahash per block costs 2 BTC, but it earns 1 BTC per block plus the hashes sell for 1 BTC. As you can see, we are back where we started where 1 BTC worth of energy is "wasted", even though mining also generates something with value.

In case you were wondering, the case where hashes initially sell for more than the value of the block reward also gives the same results, assuming a normal demand curve.

I think "deadly" might be a slight exaggeration.

Look, I am a cryptocurrency expert, too. In my opinion, some people are taking that spot way too seriously. It is funny. Get over it.