If a currency is backed by fiat, it is fiat.
The fact that it uses some cryptography doesn't make it a cryptocurrency in my opinion.
Bitcoin price can be manipulated in the same way by the FED as well, without tether in between.
This is a problem with those currencies (or rather with people who give fiat an actual value), not with Bitcoin itself.

As for other currencies you mentioned in the title. Ethereum is not very secure, not very reliable, but is relatively fine when you take other altcoins in consideration.

I am not very familiar with EOS, but on Ripple I will not even comment. If you need a banking system, use a banking system, but don't call it a cryptocurrency.

You really don't need Ethereum smart contracts for this.
Bitcoin already has time lock transactions which can be easily used in this sense.

A time-lock transaction can not be added into a block before a certain block or time is reached, so you can spend those bitcoins until that time limit is reached.
This is why you can create two transactions every year, for example, where you send your bitcoins to yourself with a usual transaction and then spend them in a time-lock transaction to your children. If you are unable to send a new transaction until the time runs out, your time-lock transaction will be confirmed and your children will be able to spend your bitcoins.

You would be able to create a wallet where this is done by default whenever you spend your bitcoins.
I think you can use lightning network with this as well, since this is a very basic feature that every transaction can have without messing with the scripts inside the transaction.

Concepts should reside in memory, since they take a lot of time to learn.
If you need to search on the Internet every time you want to understand something, you can't be efficient.
But some easily searchable things are better to not bother remembering, so you have more space in your brain for more complex ideas.

Same thing happens for spreading low IQ genes, I would assume. This factor wouldn't influence the results of an average IQ of the population, because it would be just as hard to spread lower IQ genes in this sense.

As for not being aware of the social issues you are talking about, I think I have a pretty good idea what you are talking about, but if you want to explain further the exact issues, I would be happy to listen. If you are talking about the same issues that I see many well-educated and/or seemingly intelligent individuals have, than I assume this has more to do with other personal characteristic rather than intelligence, such as discipline, bravery, temperament and moral values.
IQ and knowledge are common excuses for such differences, as it makes those individuals feel superior.

I am not familiar with your definition of smart, but I usually refer to people who are more knowledgeable about various sciences.
Mostly natural sciences, but I admit that social sciences can be useful as well so I consider some of those people smart as well.

I run the same version of Bitcoin Core on both of my nodes and one has a significantly bigger blocks directory (~20 GB more).
Do you maybe know where these transaction index data is being stored, since this node with a bigger blocks folder is also the one with transaction index enabled?

I hear these complaints often. Being smart has no drawbacks whatsoever.
Girls love smart guys, other people do as well. No one feels threatened when you are nice to them and when you show them that you understand them.
They would love to listen to your smart advice if you show them that you are on their side and that you won't judge them.

It isn't rare to see smart people blaming all their social problems on being smart and it is very obvious that it is just an easy excuse that doesn't make you feel bad about your imperfections. Being funny is something smart people are really good at, not dumb people.
It isn't hard to find very popular smart people. Most popular adults are quite smart, this tends to be very important quality to everyone in adulthood.

As for technology allowing people not to memorize a bunch of small unconnected details, that doesn't have anything to do with intelligence.
If you want to use your intelligence and deeply understand a certain subject, quick searches on the Internet will not help you at all.
You need to spend time if you want to understand something. If anything, technology made people who can memorize a lot of useless things obsolete.
Now everyone can tell you what is a capital of some small African country in a second, but very few will be able to explain to you some deep concepts in physics, math, chemistry, etc. This is a good thing. Chimps are a lot better at memorizing things than humans anyway, this is not a sign of intelligence. This is a good tool for intelligent people that allows them not to worry about exact data, but understand the concept instead.

As for the number of children thing, that is very debatable and not really good to generalize.
There are societies that put a lot of importance in education, intelligence and having a lot of children.
Not just individuals, but whole societies.
That stereotype usually comes from the relatively recent increase of population in developing societies (and societies that are now developed but experienced this increase when they rapidly developed in the relatively recent past). As societies develop, medical services in those societies develop as well. And a lot of people forget that child mortality was very very high before antibiotics and vaccines. When these advancements in medicine (and hygiene) arrived instead of 80% of your children not reaching adulthood people started seeing these numbers drop to virtually 0%.
That is why it made sense (and in some very poor places still does) to have a lot of children, since most of them died.
They sometimes weren't even given names until a certain age. This took time of course for people to naturally adapt to and therefor there was a large boom in population that exist in developing countries now.
This made a stereotype that poor people have more children (which was true in the past when most of them died) but now some are in a process of adapting (having a lot of children with low mortality) or are still experiencing these horrible rates (some very poor African countries).

Nowadays it doesn't make sense to have more than 2 children, because competition is higher and it is harder to raise more children with enough education, skill and wisdom to get a job, family and prosper and earn rank in a world where there are many educated people. Poorer people didn't always had a chance to compete on such level and had to insure survival first and competitiveness later by having more children that they couldn't educate, but had to have in order for few to survive.

Uh, who knows really...
We are talking about averages here, it is not like actual people whose IQs were higher dropped over a decade.

Many things can influence statistics...Maybe more people that have lower IQs are being tested now compared to few decades ago.
Maybe tests are better now and early IQ tests didn't do a good job in measuring an IQ.
Maybe people just care less about them these days and aren't trying as hard to do them well or who knows even, it might be just a random drop due to a statistical nature of averages.

Since this is an average maybe there are just more people that have very low IQ now compared to before while everyone else have the same.
Maybe before people with very low IQs couldn't survive for long or didn't even get tested for their IQs or something.

It really could be anything. It isn't like we have hundreds of years of sample size with exact same tests and a big portion of the population being tested or something. This isn't exactly a science like measuring average global climate where we precisely determine CO2 levels and temperatures for hundreds or thousands of years with a huge sample and many scientists working on it. Psychology isn't really that deterministic for these large scale things generally, it is hard to scientifically precisely determine abstract mental things like this.

Patent trolls will always exist. I even heard of some folks that apparently patented the idea of an app contacting a server to keep it's data.
Pretty idiotic, but it is a profitable business if you have no conscience.

Blockchain technology should be decentralized and permissionless anyway, so I don't see this as much of a problem.
If a government can stop a cryptocurrency then I don't think it should exist anyway, to be honest.

Well I can tell you that the blockchain data on my Ubuntu node is about 183GB while on an OpenBSD node is around 199GB.
Other data, such as chainstate maybe increases these numbers by 2GB.

So I would assume it has to do with the file system as well. I guess not all systems keep data written in the same way.

I see a lot of people talking about 51% attack here.
I don't think that attack should be considered a "destruction of a blockchain system".

Destruction of a blockchain system would be something that either destroys every copy of the blockchain or make it impossible for a blockchain to exist in future. I can't imagine anything that would be able to achieve such a thing.

The transaction is confirmed now, but in future you can accelerate it suing a CPFP method, although this would be quite unfair in an exchange transaction where multiple users (and the whole service) will benefit from the fee that you paid.

If your really want to add something neat, you should add RBF to your wallet, so if a user decides that he wants to increase the fee, he can make another transaction with a bigger fee.

Sorry for answering your question two weeks later, but no, I was not familiar with Inktober before, but it looks really cool.

Bisq je jedina za koju ja znam gde mozes trgovati fiat<->crypto.
Ovde ne koriste ljudi to ali ako mozes koristis SEPA uplate (telenor banka?) onda mozes trgujes sa ljudina po Evropi.

Seems like a low estimate. Malware creators should step up their game.

I don't see this an issue for Monero, as long as most of the hashpower is in hands of the legit users, it really isn't Monero's problem.
Using someone's machine to mine crypto is honestly a pretty harmless way of using malware. When you compare it to ransomware, stealing sensitive data, recording someone's movements, using their webcams, recording their audio, stealing their money, using someone's CPU for a while is really not that big of a deal in my opinion.

This is simply brilliant.

Uh, who knows what is the reason of a price drop really. It could be something quite unrelated or it could be that the investors are expecting a massive sell-off from the attackers that would decrease the price for a short while, so they are preparing for it by selling first or something.

Either way, I think it is normal or maybe even quite beneficial for these exchanges to get hacked, really.
People should use Bitcoin for what it is, a way to control your own money and keep money in their own wallets.
When they need to make an exchange, they can use decentralized exchanges like Bisq, other than that it really isn't much of surprise to me for centralized exchanges to get hacked.
Banks get hacked all the time as well and these exchanges have bitcoins which are a lot easier to use than fiat so obviously it will be more useful to hackers.
All of these exchanges are just accidents waiting to happen, it isn't anything new and Bitcoin will obviously be absolutely fine after these hacks.

We survived the Mt. Gox hack, we can survive all others.

I am not sure if a topic called "Hocus Focus Locus" belong in "Serious discussion" board, but the question does seem a bit like a "ramble".

Other than that I don't know what you expected with this topic, we probably all agree here that this is a bit shitty thing to do, but we can't do anything about it, so I don't really see a point for the discussion.

I thought that you need to run "-testnet" when you start bitcoin-cli, since I don't think it is aware of the configurations for the daemon on it's own.
Although I don't understand why it would connect to 18332 then.

Make sure you have a bitcoin.conf file with right permissions in .bitcoin and run "bitcoin-cli -testnet -rpcuser=user -rpcpassword=password".
Other than that you might want to check out debug.log file if you are still having issues. It is in the .bitcoin directory as well.

I actually disagree with our old timer ranochigo and think you should run a full node.
Bitcoin Core never slowed down my Internet when I surf and I have a similar bandwith as you.
I usually have between 20 and 80 incoming connections, so I assume peers don't find too many problems when they connect to me.

Full nodes really need to send and receive data when there are new blocks (4 MB max every 10 minutes) and the relaying of transactions is probably not as important. I don't know how a client optimizes all of this, but I can just tell you that I don't have any issues and I doubt that I would still be getting connections from many peers if the node was too slow.

You gave the right address, you just received the wrong coins. They should've warned you that what they call Bitcoin isn't what rest of the world calls Bitcoin.