My suggestion for a flag would be:
- Green background (colour of Islam)
- Oil geyser in the middle of the foreground, surrounded by a ring of US (and allies) soldiers.

Exactly. Bitcoin may in future be regarded as a safe haven and a ideal store of value, but that's certainly not the case at present. Bitcoin price is positively correlated to the mainstream markets, not negatively. Stocks go down, so does bitcoin. Stocks go up, so does bitcoin. We are absolutely not seeing huge new buy pressure on bitcoin in response to coronavirus.

Perhaps now is a good buying opportunity, as the price is dropping and we all expect it to increase in future - but that's a separate question.

There are countless opportunities every day, and no-one will ever make the most of all of them. The best we can do when looking at a missed opportunity is to analyse why we acted as we did, and take steps to make a better decision next time.

But the most important thing is not to dwell on it. It is impossible to get everything perfectly right all of the time.

The big problem here is not the quarantine itself, but the fact that someone leaked the plans to the press before they could be put into place. This caused thousands of people to panic and try to evacuate from the north - the exact opposite of the intended effect of the plan.

This sort of flagrant disregard for human safety just for the purpose of selling a story is appalling. I hope the perpetrator is prosecuted.

It's not Turkey itself, it's the stuffing 

Totally agree that it's not just a bitcoin problem. Also agree that although QCs have advanced significantly it is still a big leap to develop one capable of cracking ECDSA and breaking bitcoin.

The big question for me is how the move to quantum-safe cryptography will be implemented. One downside of decentralised projects like bitcoin is that it can take a long time to achieve consensus... but it is vital that consensus is achieved prior to a capable QC becoming available.

I suppose a problem is that we each have our own internal definition of what constitutes a merit-worthy post. Personally, I'm aware that I have trouble awarding merits to those posts where the user has clearly put in a lot of effort but where I disagree fundamentally with their conclusions. I know that I need to work to overcome this mental barrier - we can't promote a community where everyone agrees with anyone who might bestow merit; that would turn us into a bunch of 'yes men'. It's a difficult one. If you merit a post, that can be construed as agreeing with its content, when that's not the case. Perhaps others have the same problem?

...must ...try ...harder

"Bitcoin - your money is secured by the laws of the universe"

I'm afraid this isn't true. Classically, yes, no problem. However, quantum computers are on the way.

All current public key cryptography will be vulnerable to a QC running Shor's algorithm. It takes 2^128 operations to derive a bitcoin private key from a public key. This is a huge number, and relates to the image above. It's effectively invulnerable to a normal attack from a classical computer. However, for a QC running Shor this drops to a much more manageable 128^3. ECDSA just falls apart.

This is why we should all be concerned about quantum computing, and take preventative steps to secure blockchains right now. There may be nothing large-scale and commercially-viable yet, nothing capable of cracking asymmetric cryptography yet... but 'yet' is the keyword here, viable QCs are coming, and likely sooner than we imagine.

Have a look at https://blockchair.com/compare

It doesn't cover everything, but it lists most of the top chains. There is an 'add to comparison' button in the top left.

http://bitinfocharts.com/ has a few more, again not everything.

I think the list can be useful, but must be treated with caution. On occasion it can be very unfair to stigmatise someone as a merit hoarder. I am of course speaking out of self-interest, as my name does crop up on that list, but I feel that I do give out enough merit. If you look at the sent and received on my profile, I'm giving out merit most days.

Take December for example; I am 33 on the list. What happened was that I received around 40 merit in the last 3 days of the month. I'm not going to quickly dump the sMerit from that on the first posts that I find before the month is out, instead I'm going to award them when I see good posts. If people were to throw merit away as soon as they received it, it would undermine the whole system.

In general I have a steady inflow and outflow of merit, which I believe balances quite well. The whole thing gets skewed when I receive a lot at the same time, generally in the Quantum Computing threads. I don't know if those are more frequented by merit sources, but that might be one explanation for the fact that I get way way more merit there than anywhere else.


Don't stop now, damn you, I'm only 59 away from Hero!
Please can you edit the post to make the word 'Joking' bigger font size? And red. And bold.

This I think is the crux of the problem, and it's not limited to the US, it's a global phenomenon.

What happened was that the Berlin Wall fell, and with it communism. Then socialism, the more moderate and acceptable face of the political left, was tainted by association. The left moved ever rightwards in an attempt to remain electable during and in the aftermath of the 'greed is good' Reagan/Thatcher years. So the two main parties, once espousing ideologically very distinct philosophies, became more and more similar to one another. They both sought the same sort of voter. The left abandoned its traditional core support of the poor working class. After all, it didn't matter if they moved to the right: so long as they remained the left-most party, then the poor working class would still vote for them, right?

No, wrong. What happened was that the poor became disillusioned and disenfranchised. No-one represented their interests any more. They had no-one to vote for. And increasingly, as politics move rightwards 'the poor' came to encompass more and more people, including the young, the lower-middle-classes, etc.

A political void opened up, and into this stepped the populists like Trump, policy-light but always ready with media-friendly soundbites, claiming to represent the average voter, those 'left behind' by the political mainstream. And they did this by appealing to people's base prejudices. It's very simple but tremendously effective. Where the mainstream career politicians are hamstrung by the necessities of diplomacy, the populists face no such constraints. Indeed their freedom from constraints is what makes them appealing. Trump can blame everything on the Mexicans, he can build a wall to keep them out, he can demand that his Democrat opponent be locked up... and on and on. And he rode that populist wave all the way to the White House. Trump's administration is government by pithy soundbite; whether there is substance behind these utterances or not is immaterial, the soundbite itself is the message. If Obama or George W had come out with even one of the things that Trump says every five minutes, there would be outrage and calls for them to step down... but Trump doesn't have this, the outrage is part of what empowers him: because it is the outrage of the establishment, and he had positioned himself as an outsider. It's a huge strength; nothing they say can hurt him. This is why the impeachment was a stupid idea; he was guaranteed to be acquitted by a partisan Senate, and it then becomes very easy for him to frame the attempt to remove him as a last desperate gamble by the establishment. It just cements his power-base and even draws more voters towards him, the valiant underdog swimming through a sea of corruption.

To belatedly get back to the Democrats then, and the left generally across many western democracies, the political centre has become poisoned, and the outsiders are now seen by many as a best hope for a representative who is truly representative, who stands up for the interests of the common man (and indeed woman). This I think is why Bernie's popularity is growing. At the same time it explains why the DNC are trying everything in their power to stop him winning: because the party and the voters that the party should represent have moved apart. The party is more centrist than the people who vote for them. Both parties are. The electorate is becoming more polarised, and the mainstream political class from both parties are becoming more similar to one another and, on occasion, indistinguishable from one another.

So what will happen?
I think on the one hand that politics is cyclic. If the DNC defeat Bernie, or Bernie wins but Trump beats him, then it's not the end of everything. Support for Trump will fade as ordinary people see that their living standards haven't risen. It took a while for them to lose faith in the mainstream politicians, and it will take them a while to lose faith in Trump, too. But they will eventually, and centrism will likely come around again as the popular option. Democrats will regroup and will win again.
On the other hand, if Bernie wins and then gets the presidency, and is able somehow to get some of his policies enacted, then this is a huge opportunity for the US to shift the whole global narrative leftwards, away from the 1980s Reagan legacy and towards a future where inequality is reined in and government genuinely cares for and represents the welfare and the best interests of the electorate.

Either way, yes, I am very confident that the Democrats will survive. But what we mean when we say 'Democrats' may shift a little bit from what it is now. Politics is nothing if not malleable.

Most citizens are civilians, i.e. non-combatants. We are edging into Geneva Convention territory here.

A kamikaze pilot in a Japanese war plane howling down on a US ship is certainly the enemy.
But what about an 80 year old fisherman from Okinawa who just wants to catch fish to sell in the local market, and live quietly with his family?
What about a teenage pacifist from Kyoto who protests about his government attacking Pearl Harbor?
What about a nurse from Tokyo who twenty years previously emigrated to the US and married a Texan rancher, but never became an official US citizen?

You can't assign guilt to these people, or declare them a threat, just because the pilot was Japanese. That's racism.

In my country there have been attacks on Muslims because people think: Terrorist attack. Terrorists were Muslims. Therefore all Muslims are terrorists. It's the same thing.

To take it to the point of absurdity: imagine a situation where a man named Mike robs a bank. The answer isn't to imprison everyone in the country whose name is Mike.

I think this is a bit circular. Stablecoins are pegged to fiat. They are just a bridge between fiat and crypto. When something is described as a stablecoin, it is stable relative to another source of value.

Volatility is not a property of bitcoin, it's a property of the current crypto markets. In terms of global finance, crypto markets are young, immature, low volume, and unregulated. This makes them prone to volatility due to speculation and manipulation. This volatility is self-perpetuating because of its own history. We are all well aware of say the 2018 bear market. Every minor price fluctuation triggers FOMO or panic-selling, which amplifies the original movement.
As the markets mature, as volumes increase, and as we move towards the mainstream and encounter legislative standards such as KYC and AML measures, then the volatility will decline.
Bitcoin can be the ultimate store of value, stateless, decentralised, uncorrelated (or negatively correlated) to real-world assets. The current volatility means that the idea of Bitcoin as a store of value is laughed off by short-sighted loud-mouthed idiots in the media who confuse current-state with end-state. We are nowhere near end-state.

The link from cissrawk should give you everything you need. However I don't think you should be focusing on activity. Presumably you want to increase your activity in order to rank up. You will discover that there are both activity and merit requirements for each rank, the pertinent part of cissrawk's link being the table below.

Increasing your activity is easy; just make some posts. Increasing your merit is somewhat more of a challenge, and in practice, for the vast majority of people (myself included), it is merit that is the gate to the next rank. In theory, if you make good, constructive posts that are valuable contributions to the thread, people will award you merit. There are numerous threads that advise on how to get merit, but they basically all paraphrase the above.

^Jollygood summarises the situation very well and succinctly here.

The extracts you cited are interesting and do give an insight into both a wartime mindset and a 1940s mindset. The problem I have with them, and with your example above, is the word 'Japanese'. Whether or not these thousands of people are legally US citizens is an irrelevant technicality. Morally they are US citizens if they have settled and made a life in the country. What we do with your example family is to let them live their lives as normal, without fear of bigotry or prejudice or persecution, in a free country. Once you start labelling this group is American, this group is Japanese, then it becomes an abstraction and you lose sight of the actual people involved. And huge numbers of people at that.

I've been to Germany and I've been to Japan. The people there are people, just that. We may have different cultures and traditions, but fundamentally we are the same everywhere. In wartime there is forced conscription, and normal people are made to fight to the death against one another. Doesn't mean they want to do that. Doesn't mean that suddenly all these normal people across the world who happen to have Japanese ancestry become a threat. And it doesn't mean that we should label them as 'Japanese', when that is being used as a synonym for 'enemy'.

@Spendulus: We may disagree here, but I think that if I hadn't invoked the spectre of Trump, then we might more or less have the same conclusion: an apology is not sufficient; the best form of reparation would be to step up the fight against endemic racism and xenophobia. I may believe that Trump is part of the problem, but I will concede that he is at least partly a symptom as well as a cause.


You do raise an important point here. A line must be drawn, but where? Let the Japanese citizens do whatever they want. Okay, but what about those Japanese citizens who have no children and no roots in the US? Those who are in the US temporarily, perhaps on holiday, and had zero intention of staying? What about Japanese holidaymakers who are also Japanese army officers? What about those who are Japanese military intelligence officers? Those who are influential figures in Japanese industry and society?

My point I suppose is that with each increase in potential threat, we reduce the numbers dramatically: most Japanese citizens who are also US citizens must be trusted, and would in any case have little power to influence the war. Japanese army officers who happened to be on US soil are perhaps a different case. If we focus on those Japanese citizens who do constitute a genuine threat, we are likely left with a handful. In which situation these cases can be judged on their individual merits. The important point here is that we are making the distinction not because they are Japanese, but because they are in the enemy army. We are judging not with a blind racial distinction, but instead with genuine reason.

But instead of this, what they actually did was go with a simplistic broad-brush approach that dealt harshly with a huge number of innocent people on the basis of ethnicity. This sort of decision is fundamentally counterproductive and works to inflame tensions within a country, promoting racism and xenophobia and fostering division at a time when everyone should be pulling together.

We agree on this much, right?

I suspect that there may be an inverse correlation between McDonalds customers and people who are worried about contracting coronavirus, so I'm not convinced that CV will have any effect. I'm perfectly willing to be swayed by evidence to the contrary, however.

As a 77yo healthy-eating McDonalds customer who is in there at 6am and is also a bitcoin enthusiast, you may proudly consider yourself an extreme outlier.

As a nice counterpoint to the story of Frank Emi, you may be interested to read about the very different wartime experience of another Japanese American, Daniel Inouye. There's an excellent obituary here, too.

A second generation Japanese American, Inouye was born in Hawaii and attending university there at the time of Pearl Harbour. He signed up for the US army immediately after the ban on Japanese Americans was lifted. He was part of the famous 442nd regiment, the most decorated regiment in US army history, and composed almost entirely of Japanese Americans.

Inouye was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. His most famous battle was in Italy in 1945. He was running towards a German position, with a live grenade in his hand. Just as he was ready to throw, a German grenade hit him and almost entirely severed his throwing arm. Using his other hand, Inouye freed the grenade from the clenched fist of his useless throwing arm, and managed to throw it through the bunker window before it went off. Unbelievably, he continued the attack, killing another German before eventually passing out.

Apologies if everyone is already well aware of his story, as he was a very prominent politician, played a role in the Watergate investigation and chaired the Iran-Contra hearings, and towards the end of his life became president pro tempore of the Senate, and so third in line in the presidential succession - I am not American, so it was new to me.

If you're interested, there's a slightly irreverent but informative and entertaining brief look at both of their lives in the Drunk History TV programme: Frank Emi and Daniel Inouye.

The resolution was introduced by Albert Muratsuchi, a Democratic State Assemblyman of Japanese descent.
Feb 19, 1942 was the day that Roosevelt signed the order to incarcerate the Japanese Americans. Every year, Muratsuchi has introduced a bill to mark Feb 19 as a day of remembrance. But this year, he introduced the resolution instead.
I think that's why they're doing it now, just that this year he's pushing a little further than he usually does. Possibly because we are nearing the 80yr anniversary, and he wanted to do it this year instead of next as 2020 is an election year. Don't know - just speculating here really. I wouldn't want to inflame things again, but there is a direct reference to Trump's actions in the quote below.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/17/us/california-apology-japanese-internment-trnd/index.html