Eliminating paper fiat will have a measurably negative effect on economies. Paper money represents a more efficient form of transaction than electronic payment. For the poor who can't afford a cell phone or internet connection, paper money is their only hope of buying/selling. Getting rid of paper fiat makes transactions more difficult and also centralizes the currency aspect of economies which leads to monopolism. Centralizing power and influence in this way is strongly correlated with exploitation, predatory business practices and inequality.

Banning paper money will have a measurable negative effect on economic growth, unemployment, inflation, standard of living & other statistics. It will represent lost opportunity, a higher bar to entry for markets, greater difficulty in small businesses surviving and creating jobs. There's no upside or advantage in getting rid of paper money. And there are definitely many disadvantages.

I have a feeling that OP's post & this entire thread is a question of internet big data application. "What fields, genres or areas is big data technology best pursued?" It may also invoke neural networks and AI software utilized to automatically interpret big data to some degree. Cross reference with applications for blockchain and we might have a winner in the making.

Or maybe its more about information markets and demand? Another option is screen scraping, web crawlers, spiders, OCRs and similar tech. We're only on page 2 and things can so easily drift off topic.

If 60,000 is too unaffordable. There may be other options. I can't vouch for any of these ideas but it could be interesting to think about.

A company known as "Inflation Dome" is selling an inflatable bar kiosk, here:  https://www.evolutiondome.com/inflatable-structures/inflatable-kiosk/inflatable-bar-catering-kiosk



They don't list the price but it may be more affordable and in some ways cooler than a normal bar.

Places like amazon sell steel buildings which can be cheap in comparison to conventional buildings.



The price doesn't include the cost of plumbing, electrical, labor. Or the cost to construct a series of rooms inside the interior to house guests. Also can't comment on whether it conforms to building codes in different countries.

There could be potential for it though as the cost is relatively low in terms of square footage, etc.

I got this today. I'm going to make an attempt to read all these books & review them.



Upon a cursory inspection one of the books "Bitcoin Essentials" is only 100 pages long. Most of them fall into the 220-240 page range. There are two in the 300 page range. And only one is 430 pages. Not a huge amount of material to cover.

I want to do the khan academy and coursera material over one more time also.

If anyone has book, tutorial or video recommendations I would like to look at those as well.

This news comes straight from Lithuania's central bank. China banning exchanges could also be influenced by bankers. Russia too implementing regulation on crypto could be bankers utilizing their influence to discourage crypto. A pattern is emerging which reveals bankers to be the main source of anti crypto regulation in the world.

For those who wondered how Catalonia's independence could have an affect on bitcoin's price. Catalonia being independent frees it from the influence of central banks and anti crypto policy which Lithuania and china are experiencing now.

The same could be said of brexit. The UK being freed from the european union represents a nation which has less chance of implementing this type of anti crypto regulation. In theory, anyway.

I think Mt Gox might have been big around 2014. There was also coinbase if I'm remembering correctly. BTC-E was another exchange. Both Mt Gox and BTC-E are dead now although I've heard claims that BTC-E accounts have been reimbursed to a fraction of their account value.

Crypto and stock market trading are based upon the same market principles. Skill at trading stocks translates to skill at trading crypto and vice versa. There are a lot of people who make money in a single trade, off a single call. The biggest hurdle traders face is consistently winning over the long term. In many cases big wins are often followed by big losses. That's the nature of risk and of trading.

I've looked at Larry Williams trading strategy and I think he teaches some things which crypto traders might not know & might learn from. That's why I recommended him. What separates Larry Williams from other traders is, he has won consistently over a span of decades dating back to the 1980's. He is not well known or famous but his skills are legendary. Feel free to disagree if you like.

If you want pure crypto analysts, here are a few that I follow.

Bram Cohen(creator of bittorrent): https://twitter.com/bramcohen
Whale Panda(I dont know who this person is but their content is good): https://twitter.com/WhalePanda

There are too many wealth redistribution programs which favor the 1% operating in private and public sectors for crypto to make an appreciable difference in status quo, wealth inequality.

Regulations, taxes and economies are structured to ensure the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Bitcoin definitely helps to counteract this negative precedent. But there is such a massive and overwhelming precedent towards wealth being further centralized within an increasingly small minority of the population that it would require major social upheaval and a tremendous paradigm shift for a real difference to be made.

For the last few decades a case could be made for inflation(real inflation) growing at a faster rate than wages. That's a negative precedent which may be maintained for only a very finite portion of time before hitting a catastrophic end point where basic living standards no longer are sustainable. This fundamental observation could be a root problem of why demand for things such as homes and real estate have decreased over time despite the states best efforts to reverse the trend via lowering mortgage loan standards. What are the long term implications of this? That may be a good question.

Most viral marketing campaigns proliferate through peer-to-peer based word of mouth, rather than big brand, top down, advertising. Famous memes aren't backed by multi million dollar commercial runs on primetime networks. Yet they reach millions of people around the globe and can penetrate further into society's collective consciousness than big media names like CNN or Fox News.

If our goal is for crypto to become more mainstream, perhaps that's a route we can take. Grassroots movements. Memes. Peer to peer marketing. Focusing on the type of 4chan caturday business models which allow average people on the internet to compete with big brands in terms of exposure.

If crypto had a rough equivalent to lolcat memes, that would go a long way towards overturning the polarised media coverage which trends towards being anti crypto.

The only trader/analyst I've followed is Larry Williams of https://www.ireallytrade.com

This is one of the accolades which makes him stand out in comparison to other traders:


There are a lot of analysts and traders in the world, but not many who can claim to have turned $10,000 into $1,100,000 inside 12 months trading on the stock market. Then to top it off, his daughter who is the blonde actress in the scifi movie Species, had similar results years later.

According to studies, most traders fail to achieve higher than 5% returns on their investment. There are a lot of people with college degrees in economics who are considered to be experts. But not many of them trade and even fewer manage a decent ROI (return on investment) on their calls.

There are decent resources listed in this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2257205.0

Sites with video lectures, like the links to khan academy, coursera and to a lesser extent udemy are the best resources I've found.

Suffice it to say that a person would need to have a basic comprehension of programming and cryptography to get the most out of it.

If you search on sites like udacity, coursera, khan academy there are many basic tutorials and courses on programming as well as cryptography.

All of the information is there, all a person would need to do is be willing to put in the time and effort.

I've noticed amazon web services offers a free 12 month trial.

https://aws.amazon.com/free/

With it comes "750 hours(per month)" of computational capacity on their cloud.

Has anyone tried to mine using a free account to gain some idea of how much crypto can be generated using their free service?

I know someone must have tried it and there's a decent chance after 12 months of mining the quantity of profit would be very low.

Still seems like something that could be fun. Even if it was no better than CPU mining it would still be cool to mine stuff. What are everyone's thoughts on this?

My impressions are, when experts in the media discuss inflation, the economy, healthcare, job markets, minimum wage, gun control, the war on drugs, deficit and taxes. None of those people have the slightest clue what they're talking about on those issues, either.

Legitimate journalism may have died a long time ago. Now all that remains are agenda based propaganda campaigns which serve as mind control, smears and misinformation designed to influence people into supporting the goals of elites moreso than anything else.

Bill Clinton passed the telecommunications act of 1996 which allowed the media to be extremely centralized, owned and operated by a group of centralized private sector entities. After that everything started to go downhill but its only recently that this has become obvious enough for many to realize it.

This is a good example of how the media is heavily centralized and scripted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2dJxiDkcjA

Bitcoin is used as a savings account by many as it historically accrues a decent percentage gain resembling interest over time from a historical perspective. Its also used to maintain the value of wealth in comparison to inflationary fiat currencies like the euro and dollar. When people are concerned that the dollar or euro will lose value, they can buy gold, silver or precious metals in an effort to maintain the value of their wealth and prevent it from depreciating. Bitcoin/crypto can also serve a similar purpose.

In some cases, immigrants have used bitcoin to avoid extremely high taxes on wire transfers when sending money to their family in cuba & other countries. I think if a person sends money from the united states to cuba via wire transfer it used to be subject to as high as a 50% tax on top of other fees. People used bitcoin to circumvent those high taxes although I can't say if they still do it or if the practice has been abandoned.

There are also many who are too poor to meet the minimum account balance for a bank account. They use bitcoin/crypto in place of a bank debit card or credit card to buy things on the internet. There is also a big demand for stores which accept bitcoin/crypto and so many set up small stores in this niche area where regulations are less demanding and bar to entry for markets is lower than norms.

Truth be told there are many different ways people have found to monetize crypto and I'm probably only covering a small fraction of them.

Very cool and very interesting! I've always wondered why it never appears feasible to utilize a compression algorithm to shrink the size of the proof in this case, or compress data inside blocks in the case of btc.

I think the average data can be shrunk via compression is often by a factor of 1/3rd. From an amateur perspective, being able to fill roughly 3x the amount of data per size would seem to be a worthwhile approach. Especially as compression isn't particularly resource intensive, at least not in comparison to mining cryptographic functions. Adding a compression abstraction layer woudn't appear to bottleneck the process. But I would guess I'm missing some important point here as crypto engineers never seem to bother with compressing data?

International bankers funded Mao Zedong's revolution in china. Bankers are the primary investors in communist regimes throughout history. They funded Fidel Castro, Stalin & Lenin, Mao Zedong. All examples of communism can be traced back to them in one form or another.

What this means is, international bankers still wield a large degree of influence over china today. When china appears to randomly decide to ban bitcoin exchanges, those decisions are likely made by bankers exerting their influence over chinese politicians.

While you may be right that china itself doesnt care what russia does with crypto, the bankers who funded Mao's regime, who still have a great deal of influence in china to this day, do care. And it is they who may exert pressure on china to influence russia into following certain policies regarding crypto.

The united states and some of europe have imposed economic and trade sanctions against russia.

China has not imposed sanctions. This means russia relies on china heavily at this time for trade & economic support.

China may use that leverage to force russia into adopting regulation of crypto or in the future perhaps we will see exchange bans.

This could complicate matters in russia as far as crypto goes.

Europeans do have more freedom in regulated gambling than americans do, that's for sure. In some states in the USA its illegal to play fantasy sports games like fanduel or draftkings. Those sites ban IP's and do some background checks to ensure compliance. It stems from Las Vegas billionaires who run casinos being able to influence politicians into passing anti gambling laws, in an effort to maintain the monopoly over gambling Vegas has inside the united states.

That said, I'm not certain if regulated gambling has many advantages over unregulated. I think some regulated online sportsbooks have been known not to honor big winning bets. That's one advantage Vegas might have, they're legally obligated to honor winnings. Europe is so much better for gambling than the united states is, though. There are many more options.

If anyone is interested in the type of data mining premium code x is referring to btw.

There could be a market for that in sports gambling.

I might consider paying for a detailed data driven breakdown of team/player performance by game, by year. To my knowledge there are a few big data people who do this. They don't release data to the public but they keep the statistics to themselves and use them on fantasy sports games like fanduel. Some of them have been known to do well for themselves & win decent sums of cash in the process.

The power structure of bitcoin is decentralized. Its split between miners and developers.

Some miners wish to centralize the power structure of bitcoin so that miners control everything. To do this they needed a plan to get rid of developers, to take control of the software engineering aspect of bitcoin. That's where the agenda for big blocks comes in.

Miners started a social media campaign intended to fool the public into believing higher transfer fees and slower transactions times were the fault of core developers who "weren't doing their jobs properly by refusing to upgrade to larger blocks" in an effort to wrest control of bitcoin away from core devs.

The truth is big blocks have many negative drawbacks. They weaken the security of the blockchain. They centralize nodes. They don't provide much in the way of positive tangible returns to offset these negatives.

The entire campaign for big blocks was and is a giant scam. Antminer filled many 1MB blocks to only a fraction of their full capacity. There were many spammed transactions caused by miners to raise fees and backlog transactions. Many steps were taken to attack bitcoin and make users unhappy in an effort to influence them into blaming core devs for it.

There is an overwhelming amount of data to support this.