EDIT: Sorry for the long post.


Not at all. I just believe that education you paid for can be of higher quality, and can teach you what you want to learn, way faster than trying to learn something on your own. This really applies to anything out there: hiring skilled experts to do something is usually better than doing something yourself (You ever read "Rich Dad, Poor Dad"?)



That man has very likely spent years learning about all the things leading up to his discovery of electricity. Very likely at a place of higher learning along with other students as well. Science very rarely happens by self-educated types in their own garages (For a good example of that kind of science, search for over-unity or perpetual motion on YouTube). As for why he became brilliant? In part interest and motivation (maybe the farmer just didn't want anything more), and in part just because his brain was more suited to it. Some people process math and physics concepts better. Some visualize things and have a better grasp of art, music, and language. It has little to do with upbringing though. I would guess it has more do to with genes.


The bolded part is a redundant statement that can be applied to everything, and is quite objective. E.g. A tall building is tall because the buildings around it are shorter. It's not just my opinion that this building is tall, nor my opinion that that person is smart. I don't think relativity is subjective. As for the rest, maybe I'm biased in all this. I come from a family of some pretty smart people (Google Tsiolkovsky and Tozoni). Both of my parents went to a Soviet Union public school, yet both were always at the top of their class (my mom is one of those who has gotten a B maybe once in her lifetime). All the other kids were going to the same schools, yet why is she the one who simply "got it" and was able to get to the top while putting in the same amount of work as everyone else? It can't be her upbringing, since her parents rather neglected her. I didn't have good grades in high school, mainly because I almost never did any homework and was often late turning in projects, but that was mostly due to depression issues at the time (the whole in-the-closet gay thing, plus feeling like an adult surrounded by a bunch of immature children). However, I've typically gotten A's and B's on exams despite never studying for them. Most of the time I passed them by just deducing what the answer to a given question was right on the spot, even if I didn't know how to solve the problem before. This while other students around me struggled, and most got B's or C's. (Craziest thing I've done was learn the entire 107 character Japanese Hiragana alphabet, from scratch, 2 hours before the exam, because I kept putting it off, and still got 100% on it.) I don't know why exactly I can do the things I can and why others have trouble with them. I know I have a very high IQ, and psychologists say that that's something that can't really be learned or changed, so I believe them that this is the reason. And, as I've said, I have dealt with a lot of different people out there. Sometimes it's just frustrating how they seem to have such difficulty grasping a concept I'm trying to explain to them, which to me seems so simple. It's not laziness, they just can't process or understand it easily. I.e. some people are just dumb, and not even because they are too lazy to learn to understand something; they just can't do it.



You do need a foundation of facts, or at least "facts," before you can start doing that. As I said, you can't answer the questions if you don't know what the questions are. And that's what schools and universities are SUPPOSED to teach and encourage.


Actually, my grandfather Oleg Tozoni, though not Einstein, is an excellent example for this. He finished public high school in USSR. He and his whole family was on a Soviet blacklist because of the whole "royal family" thing, and thus he was in hiding when he was about the age to be in a university. So, he learned how to forge university certificates, and would "transfer" to a new university from the old one for a semester or two. There he would take a few classes, and once he saw that the KGB were catching up to him, he would run, leaving at night or as soon as possible, forge a new university certificate claiming to be from his old one, and transfer to a new university at the new place he picked to hide. This way he continued to take classes, despite it being a very difficult thing to fight for. Eventually he graduated with a bachelors, then a masters. By the time USSR caught up to him, he was already working somewhere, and they realized he would be much more valuable working for them than dead. So they hired (forced) him to work at their research labs. He continued to take classes, earning a few PhD's and a post-doctorate (I don't think we have that degree level in USA), and helped teach physics at various universities. Eventually he went from learning from school and others to learning on his own (a Doctorate degree actually requires that you discover and add something to the body of knowledge that no one else knew before. You can't just get it by passing tests). Then he made more discoveries, deduced more physics formulas, published books, became the head of the Kiev Polytechnical Institute (think chief engineer at DARPA) and once moving to USA, spent 15 years inventing a magnetic levitation system the concept of which was long abandoned as being "impossible." He was a genius, and note, he did all these inventions and discoveries after a lifetime of study, not by tinkering in a garage after reading some books. If you look through the biographies of other scientists we call "genius," you'll likely find that they had a similar path of vast amounts of study at university to get to where they are. If he didn't go to a university, I imagine he would have done self-study, and would have been either a really smart employee somewhere, or a low-level inventor whom no one relly knows of or takes seriously (maybe only post-mortem, like Tsiolkovsky). He wouldn't have been the top scientist in all of USSR, that's for sure.
As for why other people aren't brilliant? They had the exact same opportunities to learn as my grandfather. Better even. But they just couldn't cut it. The material was too difficult, they couldn't wrap their minds around it, and they abandoned the field. In my business finance undergrad degree, we started with 3 class-fulls of people pursuing the degree, and the final exam of the final class only had about 12 of us left.



I don't know what you mean by that


You do seem to be the intelligent type (Not just based on your writings, but your personality as well), so who knows. Maybe like other smart people, college just seems inadequate to you. To which I would say, try to get to a better college. Once you're done, though, try talking to some people who never even bothered to go. You'll eventually start to see that people are on different levels out there.


That's what high school is for. You are SUPPOSED to think critically about information in college. At least later on after the sudents have gotten over the "it's like more high school" phase. Sounds like you have a crappy college, too.


I didn't say think, I said learn. The skill of being able to force yourself to sit down for a few hours, completely engross yourself in your study material, and actually learn to retain what you have studied. Especially when it comes to tedious and boring material you may have no interest in, but which you may need. That's not a skill people just practice on their own  


I agree that schools have issues that need to be fixed (In USSR, for example, classes weren't adjusted down to compensate those who did bad. You were expected to keep up, period. And other students were expected to help the laggards keep up). But it really sounds like you ended up in a shitty college. Maybe you should research if there is anything better out there, and move there? By the way, I can tell you right now that an Associate's is completely worthless. If jobs are looking for degrees, they will be looking for a BS at least. If they are not, they'll be fine with high school. Your best options are to either go for a BS, or, depending on your skills, go to a specialty school. My friend got an associates in network engineering. It was worthless, and not something he wanted (his parents pushed him into it). Then he spent a year going to a specialist school that only taught truck engine repair, which is what he was interested in. No history, english, or other crap. Now he's happy doing what he likes, and earns a good living.


You may be right, I don't know. I still believe that people should get a foundation to start with, even if all they want to do is play video games all day. You won't know if you are into art, history, languages, math, computers, biology, chemistry, or whatever if you've never been exposed to it. Finance was not a subject in my school (or if it was, it wasn't a requirement), so I was never exposed to it, and didn't get to realize it was something I was interested in until I was 24, at which point I had to start pursuing that education from scratch. This does remind me that there's a fundamental difference in how kids are taught in USSR versus USA though (I don't know if Japan is similar)...

It's late, so I'll answer tomorrow. For now, I'll just say that you must be very young and inexperienced to claim that everyone is born like-minded, and there's no such thing as someone being born a genius. With experience, you'll learn that there are A LOT of REALLY REALLY REALLY dumb people out there, and it has nothing to do with whether they started thinking on their own or not. Some people are just slow, and some are complete morons. And that's not a subjective statement, when there are other people to compare them to.

You are comparing currencies to technologies. Sure, Maestro Cards didn't replace paper Euro notes, but paper Euro notes replaced Italian paper Lira notes, for example. Bitcoin may not replace credit cards, either, but that doesn't mean we can't end up with a Bitcoin denominated credit card that replaced dollar and euro credit cards.


Can you elaborate please? Government and private issued currencies fall due to the issuer falling. Bitcoin has no issuer. Gold and other "hard" currencies fall because they are difficult to store and transact with, and the places trusted to store them end up either succumbing to fractional reserve or to the currency being diluted (like with tungsten found in gold bars). Bitcoin is easy to store and transact on people's personal walkers. So what kinds of pressures and corruption do you have in mind?

Regarding the OP, and the couple of replies after mine, ignoring my point, it's not "Can it replace...?" it's "Can it outlast...?" Do you guys believe Bitcoin can outlast government fiat currencies? If yes, why can't it supplant and replace them?

Psychological trauma from seeing pictures? That's bullshit *waaah*. You don't have the right not to be offended and all that.

I don't see why not. It's really a question of what can outlast what. If you think Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency technology that doesn't depend on any one entity, which can be adjusted, fixed, and changed as it evolves, can outlast fiat that depends on a country's economy and politicians, and is the main thing that allows governments to borrow unlimited amounts of money, then what will happen is that as each government fiat crashes, that country will switch to something else. It could be another government's currency, or it could be Bitcoin. Eventually, as all other government currencies crash and get screwed up, more and more people will move to Bitcoin instead. We're talking very very long term here (even centuries maybe), and likely by then Bitcoin will look completely different from what it is now.

In short, though:
Bitcoin is an idea that is backed by the interest of it's users, who's incentives for it are that it can't be screwed with or destroyed (that's what gives it value).
Government fiat is an idea that is backed by the interest of it's users, who's incentives are to continue to vote for government programs that government can't afford, and continue to print more and more of the currency to reduce the debts of the borrowed money.

Bitcoin simply has a more stable foundation and incentive structure, and thus is more likely to keep swallowing other money up.

EDIT: And if you say something like, "Bitcoin can never be real money, because it fluctuates too much, and you have to wait 10 minutes for transactions," you're an idiot. Currency fluctuation is directly related to how large the currency base is, and technology changes. It's like saying e-mail can never succeed because dialup modems take too long to connect to AOL, and it can only ever be checked at home on PCs.

Please stop it with the bs claims that Einstein or some other brilliant person didn't go to college and they did OK. Einstein went to a university, graduated with a degree, and even taught there. And those brilliant people who dropped out aren't an example of "you can succeed even if you don't go to college," they are an example of "you can succeed if you are brilliant. Especially if you are so brilliant that you have surpassed college and don't need it any more." If you can legitimately claim that you are brilliant, and can see how college will be holding you back from an idea you already have right now, then by all means, drop out and pursue your idea. Otherwise...

There IS one very important skill that schools and universities teach that is hard to learn on your own, and which may even involve having to memorize useless facts: they teach you how to learn. Specifically, they force you to learn how to learn. As for the rest of the education, the "go to class to learn from professionals V.S. use a website to learn it all for free" is also really subject to the near-universal rule of "you get what you pay for." I agree, there are a ton of overprice and extremely low quality universities out there (Phoenix and Streyer come to mind), but if you research the "product" and pick something with the best value, you can get a log more bang for your buck by learning what you want/need from an experienced mentor than on your own (your time that you take to learn something is valuable, too, and it's worth it to have someone who can just answer your question and allow you to move on, than to spend hours researching that answer on your own).

As for degrees, GPAs, and jobs, employers simply want to have their candidates vetted by knowledgeable people and institutions they trust. That will never go away. And it's why a good state or ivy league resume gets looked at, while Phoenix and Streyer ones typically go right in the trash.

Our education system is a problem, no doubt, but I think it has way more to do with people not researching the market or thing they want to do, and the university they go in, before they go and pay for their degree. So we end up with a bunch of people with degrees in things no one wants, or degrees from institutions no one trusts. If universities were truly mentorship and apprentice programs (like many good ones are), and kids actually looked ahead to plan how they would survive with their chosen interest, we wouldn't have these problems.

You are undoubtedly right about why a lot of people go to college. Personally, I wasn't thinking about that much when I went, and only focused on what I wanted to get out of it. Admittedly, I was also lucky in that most of my professors in my master's program were professors part-time, and experts in their field working full-time. So not only did I learn about what there is to learn out there, and actually learned a lot of it, I also got some mentoring from pretty good mentors.
As got why rich kids go, typically it's because they need to start at high level management jobs in their family owned businesses, and it would take too long to start at the bottom.

By the way, I know there are a lot of examples of college dropouts who became very successful, but first, they typically dropped out after getting into a very prestigious university, and taking a few years there, and second, for every successful college dropout, there are probably 40 successful managers and CEOs. So, as long as you're going for a degree that's not stupid (not some liberal arts or humanities crap), I would stick to it.

If someone tries to "play" with lots of transactions, they will only bloat the wallet client's memory. All transactions that happen get sent to everyone on the network, and are held in memory until they get included in a block (or something like that). Remember, a typical block full of transactions right now is about 0.5MB. Since people typically have 1 GB of memory of more, an extra 5mb to even 100mb is memory being taken up by transactions probably wouldn't even be noticed by people running the wallet software. If all those transactions are free, they may crowd out other free transactions for a while, and make it harder for others to send bitcoins for free, but it won't stop it entirely. Plus really small transactions will just be ignored as spam. If those transactions include fees, they will just pay the miners, and will only do this until they run out of money.
FYI, each transaction gets assigned a priority. That priority depends on the size of the fee, but also on how long ago the transaction was created. So if you create a free transaction, and someone else floods the network with their transactions, even if they include a fee, eventually, with enough time, your free transaction will still end up with a higher priority, and will get included.

Satoshi and developers have discussed the idea of DDoS and food attacks very extensively years ago, and made sure it's impossible to attack Bitcoin with that.

Well, it can, using current hardware, it's just that no one wants that right now, because we're all worried about spamming the system.

I didn't know certain cities and counties had their own sales taxes on top of the "standard" state sales tax

It's just a setting in the client, not a hardcoded feature of the blockchain. We can change it if we want.

Just Google "wiki bitcoin scalability" whenever you want to look these claims up

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

So... does this mean that an online business that sells stuff, and files taxes to their one state (along with Federal taxes) will now have to keep track of taxes for every sale, and file taxes to all 50 states (minus the few that don't have sales tax)? Tax accountants will be loving this...

Why are you even taking History if it's something you have not much interest in? For my "social studies" requirement I just took government and politics. Figured they would be good to know for business.

As for what the higher education is supposed to be about, you and your friend are kinda wrong on it, or at least are taking the wrong things out of it. It's not to force you to memorize stuff and indoctrinate you. It's not to give you a degree to let you get a higher paying job. A university can do something that no amount of self-learning can provide, which is that it can teach you WHAT is actually out there that you can learn about. Sure, you can Google and find information about anything out there, but you can't begin to Google if you don't know the keywords or the concepts to begin searching for. That was pretty much my experience while getting my degrees: some of it was reviews and easy A's, some of it was tedious stuff I wasn't sure that I'd need, but figured it's good to know about, and A LOT of it was stuff that I hadn't even considered or didn't know existed, that I learned more about after researching on my own, but wouldn't have even bothered if no one told me about.

Also, regarding your friend, there are plenty of "other ways" to earn money as a male nurse than in the medical/caretaker field

(Honestly, though, as long as he can handle old people shit and piss, he's going into a field that will be in huge demand, now with baby boomers retiring)

I would too, if only because suing an LLC will likely result in nothing happening.

Well, maybe if you all sue Bitfloor LLC, Bitcloor will be able to turn around and sue CapitalOne for damages due to having their account shut down, too. Though they could probably already do that...

"Scammer" = "Attention whore." Stop giving them what they want please.

The number of miners has absolutely no effect on transactions. You can have 1M times the number of miners we have today, or 1M times the hashing power, and transactions will still be limited to 10 minutes per block, and ~500KB of transactions in every block. I believe the hard limit on block size is 5MB. So, if Bitcoin gets popular and hits that limit, we'll have only two options:

1) Increase the block size. This sin't something the developers do. This is something, like with all proposed changes currently happening with Bitcoin, someone (anyone) can propose on the developer's site, other people can discuss and argue about until they figure something out to settle on, and then developers, or anyone, really, can write code to increase the block size, and submit it to the same site. After the actual code itself is discussed and argued about, and no bugs are found, THEN the developers can include it in their next release of Bitcoin-QT, as can everyone else who makes Bitcoin wallets, and typically they pic some date way in the future to make the switch. Basically, everybody will be running Bitcoin clients that have code embeded in it that will do nothing until X date, and as soon as X hits, will start to run the code, causing a "hard fork" (older clients will not be compatible with the new fork). last few times it was a few months to a year that X was set in advance.

2) Bypass the block chain completely when making transactions. This is essentially what all the exchanges to when people trade money. No bitcoin transfer actually hits the blockchain when it's traded - it's all done on their own local software. The only time something is written to the blockchain is when someone deposits or withdraws bitcoin. Similar services will likely pop up that let you deposit bitcoin, and then use the online wallet or a credit card of sorts to spend it, with all transactions being recorded only on the service provider's accounting books. Then, at the end of every day, they will just make one big transaction, sending the coins everywhere they need to go.

That's the labor value of money fallacy (or whatever it's called). What you propose would be fair would involve someone digging holes and covering them up in their own back yard over and over, and getting paid for their hard work. No one cares how hard you work if no one wants the product of your labor. It also doesn't take into account what is actually created, and in out modern economy, the product of your mind is way more valuable than the product of your muscles. Someone higher up on the corporate ladder may spend 5 minutes making a decision, and get paid 10x more than someone at the bottom working many hours pushing levers and moving boxes, but the person who worked hard at the bottom could be responsible for making a few customers satisfied and keeping the business moving for the few hours that he worked, while the person who spent 5 minutes on a decision may have used his vast prior experience to make a quick decision that results in the company surviving for the next few years, and being able to afford to pay that hard worker's pension. You can't just look as how much someone sweated, and say "they deserve more money."

I'm sure you've heard the anecdote about a car mechanic that charges $1,000 to fix an engine with a hammer.

You need to check your numbers. Buying £10 a few years ago, or mining for a few days in 2009, would not get you anywhere near $1,000,000. Maybe if you mined and managed to get every single block every time, it would take a week or two, but that wasn't the case for almost anyone at the beginning. For those for whom that was the case, they deserve the money, because those specific people were Stoshi and first developers. Otherwise we're talking about people getting maybe a few £100k from doing what you said. I suspect all other Bitcoin millionaires are such because they either built Bitcoin businesses that earned them that $1mil, or bought way way more than just £10 worth.


If the bedroom geek managed to make that money, I think there's a reason he made that money. And it's actually money "in the real world." It's no different from someone who wasn't wealthy before, doing something other than Bitcoin to become wealthy (such as the bedroom geek named Bill Gates). As for whether it's good for Bit oin or not, Bitcoin doesn't give a shit about what anyone thinks is good or bad. It just is. And no one can change it, no matter how good or bad you think it is.


And that's your choice to not be wealthy. Again, neither Bitcoin, nor anyone else, cares, since no one can do anything about it.


Stupid people usually lose money very quickly. Or they become smarter, and fix their problems. IMO these sort of scandals are typically the result of a bunch of people getting into something totally new that no one has even dealt with before, and into things they themselves have never learned about before. They are learning on the job, and screwing up in the process. If that were not allowed, no one would ever do anything.



They paid me, and then they want to complain about paying me? Why not just NOT pay me?


Or you can, you know, not pay him.


Quoting you, "I consider myself a pretty geeky bedroom geek (comp sci degree + more), but I acknowledge there's a reason people like me don't (or shouldn't) have a lot of power and money"

Does this make you an evolutionary dead end?