So, last fall, me and this girl, a neighbour in our apartment block, were getting very pally, and I felt it opportune to pop the question. The effect was dramatic, she ran away from me. Then, some months after, she seemed to be warming up to me again, but once rebuffed, I kept the distance, and to be fair, there were other, newer girls in my life now.

Last night, I woke up around 2 AM to what I felt was a commotion in a car parked outside our apartment block. Some folk in evening wear were trying to move somebody outside the car. Perhaps that person was drunk, I felt. In the crowd I could only see the bodies as their face was turned away from me, but the person wasn't swaying as when someone gets very drunk.

Then, as they were "walking" her to our entrance lobby, I saw her face. Lovely one piece black dress perfectly fitting her oh-so-slimness, her face was fixed in total stupor. Hands in front of her totally expressionless face, as if pushing something forward, eyes blank, the stupor was massive.

Later, a mutual friend explained it as a "persistent habit" that had "grown strong" on her because of her obsession to lose weight.  I'm still grappling with the implications of the bullet I had dodged through no effort on my part!

So, a few nights ago, I chanced upon the FM Radio app on my LG G6; and scanned the stations (in Mumbai). To my surprise the AIR FM stations played some really good music through the night, some classical, some Pop, and mostly soft golden oldies that gelled well with the silent night and into dawn. The presenters were also good and their commentary was to the point.

Do any of you listen to FM Radio in India? If so, what are your favourite stations? And, any recommendations in particular?

In case you haven't come across this bit of information earlier, the .forum domain is opening up for registration. Several registrars are already accepting pre-registration for free.

Of course, bitcointalk.org has it's own brand identity built up over the years; but it'd make sense to hold on to bitcoin.forum and bitcointalk.forum. btw, another .talk tld is about to come on the scene, so you can reserve bitcoin.talk as well, when that happens!

The Whitepapers of various projects essentially set out the core workings of their business model.  I was wondering, what protection exists for the ideas in your Whitepaper?

Copyright protection is one obvious solution, but that merely protects against outright plagiarism. It would be very easy to replicate elements of an existing business model without invoking the plagiarism charge.

The more reliable solution would be patent protection. But, how many of the hundreds of ICOs have patent protection for their business model? In fact, it would be invariable that they might be intruding on somebody else's patented claim(s).

So, what is the ground level situation regarding patenting Blockchain stuff?

Any experiences, anecdotes you might care to share are welcome!

Now, a lot of people think that the soul belongs to another dimension, different from our 4D world, (three dimensions and time). But, I was thinking, what if the soul is made up of cold dark matter. That way, it could be effectively in another dimension, even while staying within our 4D world.

This Dark Matter, and Dark Energy, is thought to make up 85 percent of the Universe, and our ordinary matter that is seen and known makes up the remaining 15 percent. It doesn't react with ordinary matter, but is attracted to gravity. Hence, "clumps" of dark matter surround galaxies. There are two types of dark matter, ordinary dark matter which is fast moving, and cold dark matter, which moves very slowly. This we know from gravitational observations.

These cold dark matter particles are very slow moving, and once they are gravitationally attracted to a particular human body, (or, to any living body), they will remain 'glued' to it until it breaks apart, as happens when it decomposes upon death.

Then, as the religions say, the soul is "liberated". So, maybe, these discrete dark matter particles that have their own dark matter body unknown to us and made up of strange dark matter particles, could possibly be attracted to a new organism again. Re-incarnation! And, the "transmigration of the soul"!

But, how does "karma" fit in here? Perhaps, there is some interaction between ordinary matter and dark matter, and this "colours" the dark matter soul, and restricts it to a kind of body in the next life, that is a reward/ punishment for the karma of the earlier life.

But, the question remains: what is the goal of existence in this schematic? And, what is liberation from the point of view of this schematic?

So, I was wondering, should I watch this moon landing documentary, as it would inevitably end up being. After all, how much can you tinker around, given the basic facts, and the old photos and film of that event. And then, there's that already high bar set by the 3D movie, Gravity.

But, the way this otherwise staid old story has been deftly delivered with an emotional charge is simply superlative.  Full marks to the Screenwriter Josh Singer, and the Director Damien Chazelle (of 'La La Land' fame), as well as the male and female leads, Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy respectively. The facts are all presented as the high points, but the back story of the people behind them elevates this film to a level of brilliance. Most certainly Oscar-worthy.

My only crib was that the movie isn't 3D, but given the emphasis on the emotional back-story, that may well be a justifiable decision.

Watching it again, in IMAX!

Here's the link from which I gleaned this particular nugget:

https://qz.com/india/1418897/after-strangling-bitcoin-india-may-launch-its-own-cryptocurrency/amp/

The particularly relevant part runs as follows:

“The panel is also discussing amendment of the Currency Act to make possession of any cryptocurrency, not approved by the government, a punishable offence,” said the government official.

Happy days ahead for Bitcoin if it ends up on the "approved" list, as I guess it well might. Reason: too many Bitcoin hodlers in the political class and the bureaucracy!

It's all over the news that China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) has been running a covert program of implanting spy chips in motherboards. These devices are very small and go unnoticed. They have been thought to affect Apple and IBM and even US Government and Pentagon computing systems and networks.

Since the computing hardware for Bitcoin is pretty much similar, it's entirely possible that the PLA can hack the Bitcoin system through these devices. But, what can they achieve in the Bitcoin ecosystem, apart from revealing the identities of the transactors? Would it be possible for them to corrupt the wallets, or hack the exchanges, or even successfully carry out a 51 percent attack? What other hacks can they achieve on the Bitcoin (and all Altcoins in general) ecosystem?

This is the one thing I don't quite understand about the talk of Bitcoin's "scarcity value". Sure, "21 million coins only" does give the impression of scarcity prima facie. But then, each coin is divisible to the tune of one hundred million Satoshis. While currently, there's no way to transact a single Satoshi without paying significantly more transaction fees, if 1 BTC reaches US$ 200K as some analysts speculate, then even that won't remain a miniscule transaction anymore.

Thus, in effect, rather than there being 21 million Bitcoins in circulation, the effective value would qualify as: there being 2,100 trillion Satoshis in circulation. This is way beyond the wildest, furthest estimates of total global money supply.

Why then the talk about Bitcoin being in scarce supply?

I am asking this question because I just came across a "Full Member" account with exactly 100 Merits and JUST 140 posts and activity.

Now, I've been posting with karma in mind ever since I joined; yet, 16 is all I could muster across 200+ posts, some of them merit-worthy yet uncredited. Naturally, I felt mighty envious of this guy, and decided to see what secret sauce his posts have that mine, more in number, lacked.

Imagine my surprise when I meticulously read through his posts; and found that most of them were trollish, and a few substantial ones were ordinary in content. And, here's the key, NONE of his posts show any award of merit!

This is the account in question:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1006130

A couple of months back, I watched the proceedings of a Blockchain and Cryptocurrency conference, perhaps in Seattle, courtesy of the Instagram live story feature of an Influencer. Most of the presentations were standard and clinical.

Then this ICO bunch came on-stage. Music blared out, the room darkened except for stage lights, and then these guys started grooving to the music as a means of promoting their Cryptocurrency. The influencer flipped out and terminated the live feed at that point!

What do you folk think of this strategy? I for one will never take them seriously. Will you? Or, is it that these guys raised some seed funds, found out that's as far as they could ever go because their coin was all wrong, and then decided to make the best 'use' of their funds to have a gala time on stage and during the conference. Do you agree with me that they should've been more reserved, because after this infraction nobody will ever take them seriously ever, their reputation seems tarred and feathered by this indiscretion?

Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision of Bitcoin as an honest alternative to fraudulent and crony-capitalist Federal Banks sought to take the power of creation of money away from the Central Banks and put it in the hands of the common man. What was the alternative?

An overthrow of the prevailing corrupt system orchestrated on the lines of the Communust insurrection in Russia, China, and elsewhere. These sought to physically overpower and overthrow the offending institutions, and proceeded to replace them with financial institutions acting per their ideology. The Soviets attempted and lost, the Chinese and Vietnamese deftly side-steppped the issue, and the latest wannabe Venezuela has now ended up neck deep in the financial quagmire.

In this light, Bitcoin seems like a welcome ray of light, a beautiful alternative to the cancerous polity that is decaying the Western body politic. But for this schematic to work, the mechanics of Bitcoin have to be less 'malleable'. How so?

Whereas Bitcoin is expected to transcend the nation state, a majority of the miners operate out of China exploiting it's subsidised electricity. Secondly, those very institutions that corrupted the fiat dispensation are now looking to make merry in the Bitcoin arena with their synthetic (non-BTC based) trade offerings.

So, while Bitcoin offers these perennial offenders a chance to reform and redeem themselves within the ambit of a peaceful transition; if they continue their old '1 percent' ways, then not only will their system fail, worryingly it'll drag down Bitcoin with it.

Then, the only option will be a new ideological 'system reset' that physically overpowers and removes the extant institutions; and Bitcoin well may find itself unfortunately entangled with these latter ones in that case.  Therefore, it is important for Bitcoin to discover this ideological situational awareness, in preparation for the troubled times ahead.

Chris Hedges, author of the book, 'America, A Farewell Journey' states that the amount of quantitative easing that ended up fattening the economic criminal bankers of the 2008 recession episode could have ensured not just Universal Basic Income for every citizen, but also free health care and education for every American, and great improvements in the crumbling infrastructure. But, it went to the 1 percent. In previous times these were the outrages that fomented revolution.

Hence, Bitcoin needs to do it's own 'housekeeping' on these matters, not only to avoid the backdraft from these evils, but also so that it can remain robust should such a physical systemic overthrow, that renders the Bitcoin introduction infructuous, take place.

In fact, Bitcoin could explore the possibility of forestalling such physical revolution through it's own unique policies and abilities to influence the economic situation. But, for that, the Bitcoin community must realise this ideological situation, and elevate Bitcoin above it's current 'novel commodity for trading and profiteering' status. The vision of Bitcoin as set forth in Satoshi's paper was expansive and idealistic, but operationally it seems just like another profit-making tool of the '1 percent'. This needs to change.

So, Nucleus Vision is shutting down it's Telegram channel. By way of explanation, they have said that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and their own website are sufficient enough to get their message across to their userbase, and to interact with them. Glad that finally somebody has seen some sense.
 
The way most Telegram channels of ICOs function, it's inevitable that Telegram is about to become redundant in ICO marketing strategies.
 

All fakes!  That's the feel I get from my recent monitoring of the Telegram space.  I have seen channels with genuine subscribers, and these are boisterous places, with messages flying thick and fast all the time.

And then there are the 'other' channels, for the newly launched ICOs, mostly silent bar the daily posts, and a few welcome messages here and there. These channels would at best contain less than ten new posts on any given day, yet their subscriber count runs above twenty thousand!

A cursory observer would be definitely impressed. So was I with one such channel that has 27,000 members, until the total lack of engagement made me wonder. If there are tens of thousands of people on this channel, surely ten or twenty might feel like posting something at any given occasion. But no such luck, apart from a few admin posts rotated daily, there's no interaction.

Then I came across an ad that promised fake Telegram subscribers, and the mystery was solved! For about USD 400, you could get 20,000 fake subscribers. Add a couple of hundred real subscribers, that would cost slightly more, and you have a perfectly impressive setup.

For good measure you can set up an admin bot to weed out the spammers, or have a good social media team member manage this account. One of these 20k+ ICO accounts didn't even have an admin; because spammers were posting external links and nobody seemed to intervene.

Given this real state of affairs, maybe someone ought to call Telegram's bluff when it comes to ICO marketing. Unfortunately, this will never happen, because with marketing budgets for ICOs running into the hundreds of thousands at the very least, throwing away 500 bucks for a nicely padded Telegram account is such a no-brainer!

So, I was thinking, for the long term, even if Bitcoin goes below USD 6000, no worries, 5000, 4000, much the same. Hodl for the long run.

But, the vitality of Bitcoin is maintained by the continuous mining of Bitcoin. On an average these mining costs are USD 3000 to 3500 approximately. So, what happens when Bitcoin falls to that level?

Maybe the mining rigs won't mind bearing losses for a few months if they sense an upside later on. But, what if they don't, and start bailing out?

In that case, USD 3000 or whatever the lowest cost of mining Bitcoin will effectively become the null point. If Bitcoin falls to that point, downwards beyond that is a steep vertical cliff wall, and an inevitable fall to Zero.

Because of unhelpful Indian laws relating to Cryptocurrency, I'm thinking of obtaining an Estonian eResidency, and starting the ICO/ Blockchain Company virtually in Estonia.  Has anyone here used this Estonian eResidency route before?

Also, will my ICO/Blockchain Company be recognised as an European (Estonian) Startup? I'm asking this because there are several incubators/ accelerators that are open to European Startups exclusively.

There's so much hate and negativity going around about the latest Star Wars Hans Solo movie no thanks to mainstream newspaper reviewers, a lot of people have put off viewing it. In my opinion, this is a big mistake because this new film is superb.

Apart from the usual Star Wars fare, it was Emilia Clarke and the narrative wrapped around her that I found compelling for a second viewing, and possibly more.

Emilia Clarke, Game of Thrones, I know, I know, but I have watched none of that. Yep, a total GoT virgin. Maybe, I'll watch it when I'm slightly older, and come of age, because GoT seems to have lot of mature viewing stuff.  

Watch the movie in IMAX 3D from the seat row closest to the scene that is still comfortable on your eyes. Guaranteed to make you fall in love with Emilia.  

Not that this can ever happen to Bitcoin BTC, but the 51% attack on Bitcoin Gold BTG certainly raises red flags for the smaller cryptocurrencies.

https://qz.com/1287701/bitcoin-golds-51-attack-is-every-cryptocurrencys-nightmare-scenario/

A news report suggests that Bitcoin fell from its $20,000 high water mark immediately after Futures trading of Bitcoin was opened. The seasoned traders pounced upon the innocent Bitcoin community like wolves in a sheep pen.

You can read the full report here:

https://www.ccn.com/bitcoin-price-drop-from-20000-likely-due-to-market-manipulation-traders/

Given these circumstances, don't you think it prudent to ban futures trading in Bitcoin? After all, it isn't part of Satoshi's original Blockchain protocol at all.  It's more of a loophole that allows professional traders to prey upon the innocent Bitcoin community.

Here's an amusing take on the Consensus 2018 do in New York, that somebody termed as the 'Coachella of Bitcoin'!

https://mashable.com/2018/05/14/consensus-blockchain-cryptocurrency-conference/