Agree 100%. Eton then Oxbridge then government, it's a well-trodden path. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson from the moment he was born probably had a decent percentage chance of becoming prime minister, utterly independent of whatever intelligence or aptitude he might or might not have. Inequality of opportunity is a terrible thing, and is only growing. I often wonder if the UK might be better if we'd had a French-style revolution.

Agreed that democracy requires an electorate with sufficient education and knowledge. I do also think that rights come with attendant responsibilities - if you are given the right to vote, then it's incumbent on you as a voter to ensure that you are as well-informed as possible, so that you can make a responsible decision. Far too many people here (and I daresay in other countries, too) don't make the effort, and have opinions that are simply regurgitated newspaper headlines.

I think this is caused primarily by two things: Firstly our society has advanced sufficiently that (almost) everyone has shelter, food, safety and healthcare - which reduces interest in politics for many people. You are far more likely to feel politically motivated if your survival or well-being is at stake. Obviously it's a good thing that we have progressed to this level, but it's a shame that it impacts negatively on the democratic process. Second point then is that those with a reduced interest are more likely to respond to emotive clickbait and tabloid headlines, which makes them easy to manipulate by the powers that be. Someone who is disengaged is not going to be swayed by an in-depth study of trade deals.

True I suppose, and it is always important in life to assume nothing and question everything. Givewell do seem quite transparent, they say on their front page that they don't receive any fees, and they also have a page dedicated to their own mistakes, which is kind of refreshing. I take the point though; there is always an element of trust involved.

Sorry for derailing the thread - this is about UNICEF.

This is good news, thanks for sharing. I'm glad that a major charity is accepting crypto!

As an aside, and for those who love drowning in stats, this online charity evaluator site is very useful in helping you to decide how best you can help those in need, and how to ensure that your donations are going to the intended recipients rather than being siphoned off by middlemen.

I totally agree. Religion is a method of social control. A very effective one too, particularly in early societies. You don't even need a police force if you have a simple rule sheet and an omniscient celestial overseer who can condemn you to hell for any infraction.

No, I'm saying pretty much the opposite of that. I'm advocating government by a parliament of elected representatives - it's vital that the people in power are held accountable for their decisions. All I'm saying is that when an important decision has to be made, it might be a good idea if the decision is made by the people who have been elected to do so, rather than delegating it to people who don't understand what they're voting for. 

The Brexit situation just highlights for me that referenda referendums plebiscites are in general not a good idea.

We had a roughly 50-50 split between Leave and Remain, and many (arguably most) voters didn't have a f***ing clue what they were voting for. Yes we have fatalist Remainers who think the economy will collapse completely when we leave, but we also have Leavers who are outraged that the UK is still full of people from India and Pakistan - which aren't even in the EU! FFS. If you are a racist xenophobe who hates people with a different skin colour, you're not going reduce immigrants from those countries by putting a ban on white Europeans coming in.

The referendum has highlighted that people are idiots. The reason we have elected MPs is so that they can make informed decisions for us, not so they can just delegate anything of importance to the knuckle-dragging half-wits on the street. If I want someone to do some dentistry on me, I'll get a dentist to do it. If I want to move house I'll hire a conveyancer. If there is a political decision to be made that has profound importance for the future of the country, I want our MPs to make it, not the first random slack-jawed yokel who shuffles out of McDonalds.

Second problem with referenda is that these things force people to take sides. If the politicians decided, then probably the vast majority of the population wouldn't feel strongly about it one way or another. With a popular vote the opposite is true, you force people to take sides against one another, with the result that they dig in, establish battle-lines, become entrenched, and will hold their position no matter what comes against them, be it opponents, objective facts, context, whatever.

I think there is a distinction here between evolution and prioritisation.
We have been conditioned to think and prioritise in a capitalist way. This pushes us towards valuing accumulation of money and consumer goods above concerns such as the welfare of individuals, establishment of a 'fair' society where everyone has equal opportunities, establishment of a guaranteed minimum standard of living with universal rights such as free speech, healthcare, fair trial etc. Pursuit of money actively works against many of these things.
I think there are two areas where it impinges on evolution. One is welfare of the natural environment. In pursuit of money we have created this climate crisis, which has a direct impact on our future survival. Second is the increasing effects of advancing technology. Natural evolution works on a long timescale. Artifical evolution is coming, with designer babies, DNA engineering etc. Our evolution as a species will be increasingly determined by how we apply technology rather than on blind chance and survival-of-the-fittest. And how we apply technology will be based on our values and ethics, which is where capitalism can have a large effect.

Alts do look under-priced against Bitcoin when we consider historic levels. Does this mean that they were too high and are now correctly priced? Or does it mean that they were correctly priced and are now too low? Personally I think it's somewhere in the middle, they were somewhat over-priced and are now somewhat under-priced. I say this mainly because the market has a tendency to overshoot in both directions. A huge price rise is always followed by a bit of a pullback, and the same for huge drops, usually followed by a bit of a recovery.

Based on this then, I would say alts should experience a price rise vs Bitcoin fairly soon, although how pronounced that rise might be is a different question.

I think a common factor amongst people who are extremely rich is that they made their money by starting up their own businesses. If you work for someone else, then you are unlikely to make millions.
This obviously doesn't mean that the way to become a millionaire is to start up your own business. It just means that if you're a (self-made) millionaire, then it's likely you did.

If you do set up your own business, you are unlikely to make a vast amount of money... it is very rare, and often relies on a combination of outside factors as well. Bill Gates didn't make billions just because he set up Microsoft. He also happened to live in the right area of the right country, in the right time period, and had access to the right university facilities.

Crypto is certainly a way to make a lot of money from very little. As with business, some of it is due to good sense and good judgement, making the right decisions at the right times, and some element of it is also blind luck.

I do think alts, ETH among them, are starting to look quite bullish. We have seen attempts to drive the price down, but support has held quite well and we are now pushing upwards again. If we can reach and maintain the previous highs - so for ETH about $210, then I think we are set up very well for a surge towards the post-bear highs, which for ETH is around $310. And if we can get to that and hold, we are in a really bullish position. I'm sure there will be plenty of bumps on the road, and it's early days yet, but it's starting to look quite promising.

ETH price at the moment has little to do with ETH itself, it's more the whole market movement. I have to say it does look somewhat under-priced against bitcoin however, and once this reaches a certain point ETH will start to look severely under-valued, which is the one thing that could provoke an altcoin bull run.

$15k doesn't seem likely at the moment, at best this is years away, once smart contracts are fully integrated into society. We haven't really even seen the first stirrings of this yet, ETH is still used predominantly as an ICO platform. Give it time. 5G adoption should help as this should bring in more IoT usage, which in turn will benefit hugely from smart contracts.

I was not paid for my Ivory Tower logo, below. This is an outrage, given all the hard work I put in copying this image from the web.

A common misconception is that it is tower as in 'tall pointy building', when in fact it is tower as in 'he who tows'. The expression 'ivory tower' is actually used in many cultures to refer to a hard-working elephant. Yes, he doesn't have any ivory in the image I used - that's because his tusks have been worn down by all the hard work he's doing.

My approach is to always be skeptical, and whenever I'm assessing the veracity of any claim, the first question I always ask myself is 'what's in it for them?'. In some cases it's obvious - for example climate change deniers who have commercial interests in fossil fuels, but in other cases it can admittedly be very difficult - who funded which "independent" report. However I do think that 'what's in it for them?' is always the most important question to ask. If nothing else, it sets you on the path towards objective truth.

I think we need to make a distinction: the ideal is decentralisation rather than blockchain (for me at least). We need a decentralised currency, as this moves power away from the corrupting influence of banks and governments. Blockchain comes in because it solves the trust problem in a decentralised system. Blockchain is a great way to establish a consensus and inviolable 'truth' of transaction history, and removes the need for one party in a transaction to have trust in the other party. So I think blockchain is a method to achieve the goal of decentralisation, rather than blockchain being the goal in itself. We shouldn't necessarily be thinking 'what can blockchain do', but rather 'what can decentralisation do, and how can blockchain help to achieve this'.

I seem to remember a lot of hype around Xtrabytes a couple of years ago. Obviously it didn't really turn into anything. I'd be wary in general of coins that have a history of being hugely hyped. In this specific case, looking at that price moving remorselessly towards zero, I wouldn't go anywhere near it.

Safex I don't know anything about, but after a quick look at coinmarketcap I would stay away from this one as well. It doesn't look like a hot project that is ready to soar in price.

A good point, but this can be extended and improved by blockchain. I'm thinking specifically of smart contract platforms here. Ethereum for example could be used to write contracts that stipulate that the money is sent whenever a certain set of conditions is fulfilled. So at the moment I would imagine the wiring of money is done with a lot of manual intervention, but in the future we can use smart contracts on blockchain to increase speed and efficiency and drive down costs. And really we are not just speeding up the process and making it more secure, we are also improving accuracy, we are creating a consensus immutable record for traceability, and we are eliminating (or at least minimising) any manual intervention and its associated costs and delays.

Digital money that can be transferred easily and cheaply is overdue. Cash is on the way out, and bank cards really are more relevant to an era of national economies. The world has been a global economy for a long time now, and something like bitcoin is I think a solution that is long overdue. Of course blockchain has uses beyond the solution to the above. Security and immutability are prime concerns now as we fully embrace a digital world. Blockchain will I think be vitally important in the coming years.

Investing in crypto - at least in the good coins, BTC and some high marketcap alts, is certainly good for the long-term. Crypto has a bright future, and bitcoin and the big alts will very likely increase substantially in price in the coming years.

From a trading perspective though, things are different. It's all about when to buy and when to sell, obviously, and for someone who wants to trade, I'm not sure that now is a great time to buy in. It depends on the coin to an extent, although the market does often move as one. Often a bear market is a better place for short-term traders, and we've just come out of a bear.

People really need to start looking at charts using the logarthmic scale instead of the linear scale. For something that has periods of exponential growth, like crypto, a linear chart hides much of the history. Ups and downs prior to an exponential growth phase just get reduced to flat lines, and so the linear chart doesn't tell the story of what actually happened. All you see is what has happened in the latest cycle.

For anyone who thinks bitcoin is a bubble: go to CMC, look at the charts over all time, and then crucially switch it from linear to log view. Voila. The growth pattern is as plain as day.