Nicely put.

UASF proved the power of users with nodes, NOT the hodlers. Hodlers were totally out of the loop and were not in the decision making.
In fact, economic powers such as coinbase and barry silbert's fund were not able to do anything because nodes said (indirectly) that they will go with the core and it was not economical for miners to go and do a split.
They would have been losing many millions a day. It is a bit funny that you are indirectly arguing for POS (power to hodlers) while saying that POW is better. No paradox here?

"UASF stands for User Activated Soft Fork.
It’s a mechanism where the activation time of a soft fork occurs on a specified date enforced by full nodes; a concept sometimes referred to as the economic majority."
https://cointelegraph.com/explained/uasf-vs-uahf-explained

"The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism." by Satoshi N.

cannot quote ^^^it properly.
It's not mining elitism, it is how it works since Satoshi made it public.
If you think that owning btc makes you or anyone else a contributor, no it does not (in a POW system), but it does in a POS system where you mine using your stake.
IN POW system miners and node-owners control the system.
Simply owning btc is OK, but you are effectively cut off out of all decision making that might affect your btc.
This is just a statement of fact, nothing personal.

hey, do you mine btc or did you ever mine or run a node?
if yes, then kudos, and if not, then you are riding someone else's train here, I am sorry to say.
In order to support btc network (POW) by mining you have to have roughly one S9 (13.5 TH/s) per each 5 BTC that you might have (at this very moment).

Anything else, and you are contributing less than your claim on the network, therefore some third party have more power (you relinquished that power to them). Contribution via node is less clear, but could be calculated as a derivative of the total node number.

If you simply buy and hodl, sorry, you have a claim on something you don't really control in any way.


True, personally, i see POW as superior, albeit some were also extending ideas about POW collapse if btc prices would get too low as difficulty adjustment happens only roughly 13 days or so.
I see POS as psychologically attractive to financiers because they understand the concept of a "stake" very well.
However, all software or policies implementations of POS so far were mostly flawed.
The problem of ETH is that they think like a central bank and keep jerking the network params one way or another. The problem of EOS is centralization.
Both are no good long term, which is good for POW, but i am not sure that "perfect" (one and done, without jerking the network) POS is theoretically impossible, but maybe it is.

CL: two stadiums full of people who paid good money plus hundreds of million people watching this on TV and all they got was 0:0.
Happy that I did not watch it (this time).

I agree, however, I worry that current rent seekers (which are dominant in the current economy) will simply transplant themselves onto POS, thereby strengthening it.

@HM

Do you think that it is possible that very soon (maybe they are doing it already) AI would have close to perfect market predictions?

I saw this article about protein folding. Best scientists were beaten by AI with a large margin.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/2/15/18226493/deepmind-alphafold-artificial-intelligence-protein-folding

Interesting points there: will scientists (apart from those programming AI maybe) become obsolete?
A large part of doing science is based on being able to stake the claim that you did something first (discovery, etc.).
Personally, I don't see much use of doing science of you are doing so at some primitive level when AI gets all the "best parts".
This would feel awful.
There will be a crisis (maybe limited to natural sciences, though).
We could be already in it and will realize it soon.

55000 would be nice, though.
micg is writing responses so fast that one have difficulty correcting typos  

plus 27.6% tax in US, which makes it a nonstarter for anyone with more than 5c/kwh.

Right. There is also pesca-pescatarian...
https://youtu.be/IC-ZBJ-Kw2E?t=25

jk

I am cool with any diet (as long as I don't have to be convinced otherwise), same as religion.
Once it starts to involve moral issues, it's a slippery slope.

BTW, some cholesterol is good for you.
A couple of examples:
1. Without cholesterol your cells' membranes would freeze during winter like butter in the freezer, resulting in an effect similar to liquid N2 treated terminator (in T2).
2. Without cholesterol, men would get no testosterone and females no estrogen, which would be a bummer.

yeah, not sure what is better since you probably paid the last 40 years for it in higher taxes.
Once you are old(er), I agree that the fixed price med cost is the best, but our respective countries are set up in a way that precludes 'jumping ship" and enjoying what is more advantageous to you when you want it, right?
I had japanese friends in US and they all told me that US is better for younger people with more chances to advance over the "old guard", but they all wanted to go back when they are older because of more respect for older generation in Japan. US varies in different regions too.

right now BETI is about -2.09.
About 29K at BETI=0
80K at BETI=1.0 (as the last peak).

However, this is just for today.
80K number might have no meaning (not close to any round number) in a year or two.

yeah...watch out if they will find something positive...immediately the price would go from 5c to $100-1k a pill.
It would be worth it, right?
I remember how during the first swine flu the cost of a weekly dose of tamiflu went from $10-20 to $300 or higher on the internet (local pharmacies were out for months).
It was worth it as well, just as $20 per btc tx was in December of 2017. People went crazy trying to get in the block immediately.

it could, but short telomers are mostly associated with aging.
The most relevant quote is this:

If you are into this stuff, here is an excellent review (with free access):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3896987/

it's funny for you to say that.
Wasn't Methuselah 969 year old when he died, according to Genesis (5:27).

telomers would not solve anything, you would get more cancer as a side effect (a fact).

That's the study i was talking about somewhere above, but it is just a start.
Personally, I don't like SENS and A. de Gray. Too much ideology and too little actual science.
However, extending life as a gradual process appeals to me.
Extended 10 years, then during these years, maybe something that extends 20 years would be found, etc, etc.

I would gladly dispose of most of my crypto (mostly btc) if there is a reliable, albeit expensive treatment, but only under a condition that it is a 'healthspan".
It only makes sense if you feel and look younger.

like this: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain..."

Oh, well, but let's fight for it, although chances are slim.

They have tencent (literally) in a form of wechat.

I know a bit about this approach, called senolytics. One problem is that aging is not considered a disease, so companies have to pursue some aging effects indirectly.
However, senolytics do not significantly increase the lifespan (so far), but they do affect the 'healthspan'. In animal trials, older mice became more healthy, but the average life duration was not affected. There were similar preliminary results (first part) in a first pre-clinical human trial.

A typical senolytic cocktail includes desatinib and quercetin.
Medical grade desatinib is expensive and is an anti-cancer drug needing prescription, so, personally, I decided not to bother with sourcing it for a simple reason that we would probably have something better (less toxic) in 5-10 years.
Quercetin, on the other hand, is readily available, is a naturally occurring molecule (present in apple's peels and in blueberries), so i did try it for a month, which is what one clinical trial did.
No discernible effects one way or another, apart from feeling slightly better (a bit more "robust"), but, of course, I did not do a proper study, so it could be purely psychological.
I would probably pause for a month and do it again. Three weeks on D+Q was the duration of the first human trial, so i also used a similar time frame (without D).