Yeah, but those do actually have uses 

That's where Google stores their pallets of cash 

I'm no different from a clock, a robot, or a computer. Same mechanism bound by physics, just a tad (a lot) more complicated and a bit more aware of my surroundings. So, by extention, a clock and a robot would have to have a soul, too. In which case, why would I give a crap about something so trivial and abundant?


Didn't you quote some laws about entropy and energy not being able to be created or destroyed earlier? Those same laws state that there can't be infinite energy. And, as we now know, the universe is not full of infinite energy. It's actually not even a "something out of nothing." There is just as much antimater in our universe as there is matter, both of which was created during the big bang, and if you were to take everything that exists in the universe and sum it all up, you would get exactly 0. All matter will get canceled by antimater. This was a hypothesis, or at most a fairly well supported theory, until we started up the Large Hadron Colider. When we did that, and started to monitor the results, we actually found many instances of tiny big bangs happening, where matter and antimater seemingly popped into existance out of nothing, proving once and for all that something (a +1 and a -1) can come out of nothing, as long as the sum of it was still nothing (0). And it also only confirmed the fact that there is no infinite energy. There is only a limited about of +1, which is offset by an exact amount of -1.



Are you sure it wasn't just some fancy-word gobledegook? About two or three decades ago things were "atomic." Before then things were "space age." Before then they were "electonic" or "electromagnetic." People latch on to new fancy terminology, and make shit up with those words just to sound smart, despite their claims still being made up shit.


Your ego is just your brain's neural network. Do you mean that you killed off a bunch of your brain cells? I think we can sort of guess that already. Have you ever actually stopped your brain, and your body, from functioning? Tons of other people have (accidental and induced comas). How come their experiences are all exactly the same, which is that they were not aware of anything during that time?


What is taking place outside of that spot?


Our reality of the universe is the only one we are experiencing, but the universe is existing everywhere with and without us. If we are everywhere through consciousness, are you proposing that your consciousness can break the fundamental rule of physics that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light? If not, how did your coonsciouness reach the far parts of the universe in just the time since you were born?


No need for a dummy. An idiot would suffice. Give the drug to a willing test subject, and watch his brain patters and changed in brain chemistry. That gives a pretty good picture of what happens, and why.
Humans had 250,000 years of your types of claims, and to prove any of the stuff you are talking about. Still waiting for proof.



I know because I am still sane. Because I didn't take drugs, and because I can still tell what is real and what is not. My brain still works as designed by nature. When something is completely broken, it often can't even tell that it's broken, because they very things that tell that thing that it is broken are themselves broken.
And FYI, we understand dreams pretty well too. In layman's terms, your brain's long-term memory centers convert things from short-term as fast as they can, often slapping things one on top of the other, and dreams are basically your brain performing a defrag function on your memories, in order to organize all those network pathways I mentioned more efficiently. That's why dreams are often about recent experiences, why they can sometimes seem to f'ed up, and why lack of sleep for a long time can literally drive someone insane (I *almost* minored in psychology, dropping it with only two classes to go)



It's just too bad that there's no way for you to prove it, by, say, telling something about some history past that can be verified,  or explaining some conncept of astrophysics that can actually be verified when tested (so far your claims have actually been contrary to tested and confirmed astrophysics concepts)

Would be kinda funny, ironic, and maybe even uncomfortable, if in the next year or two the US went into another even bigger recession (maybe spurned by more debt fights and an actual default), and the price of BTC goes to $1,000 only because USD plummets by 25% to 50%. We would essentially be having a huge celebration because of a USD crash  

(not that I think USD will crash that much. All those tanks and aircraft carriers are still worth a lot)

Why not get some coders together and put together a competing service? The demand is obviously there, as are people willing to make that happen...

Imagine you have a bunch of 6-sided dice, which are your "life" that needs to survive and evolve.

1) What you are describing, involving random mutations and entropy:

You throw the dice, get a bunch of random numbers. They don't actually mean anything, since you can randomly pick any numbers as survivors, and toss any other numbers aside. This isn't how evolution works though.

2) Let's say there is still entropy, but now we add evolution, where the results of the randomness have meaning. In this case, anything that is 4 or above "survives," anything that's 3 or below we throw away. This is similar to 4> being a beneficial mutation that helps the creature survive, and 3< being a bad mutation that kills it (like cancer or a defect).

You throw the dice, get a bunch of random numbers. You throw away all the ones that are less than or equal to 3. Now you have a bunch of survivors of 4+. Pick them up and throw them again, you'll have fewer survivors. Keep repeating, and you'll eventually have none left. This is basically a species that exists in entropy, where it's genetic mutations are guided by its environment (evolution), but there is no outside influence to propagate it, so, as entropy states, it will fall appart into maximum entropy.

3) Now let's use the real world we live in. There is still entropy, and there is still evolution, but now there is an outside source of energy, like the sun, which allows this species to survive and reproduce.

As in 2, you throw the dice, throw away anything that's 3 or below, and keep everything that's 4 or above. Now you can use the outside energy source to "reproduce" the dice. For every die that's still around, add another, basically doubling the amount of survivors. Throw again, and repeat. If you are lucky, this species will keep growing in number. If not, it will die out, and some other luckier dice thrown by someone else will take over.

This is the right way to think about evolution: it has a source of outside energy (sun, geothermal, etc) as opposed to being an issolated system of entropy, and although the genetic mutations are random, they are selected and guided by the outside environment, such as longer hair helping survive in cold climates, and harder skin or faster legs protecting from predators. Yes, eventually, once the sun's energy will run out, this system will fall apart as well, just as our actual sun and solar system will.

Flat earth was fairly easy to disprove: just keep traveling, and you'll go beyond the horizon, or built a tower tall enough, and you can see farther, even over the flat ocean. I'd love to see the problems you mention regarding the big bang. I'd also like to hear an alternative explanation to the fact that the universe is expanding, and at a decelerating rate, which also includes all the considerations for time, space, speed, and gravity, and how they play on each other (the farther you go back in time, the closer everything is, the stronger the gravity, and the slower the time moves, so essentially, you can't go back in time without time itself slowing down more and more). So far everything we have observed in the universe keeps confirming this theory.

If by "soul" you mean "infrared light," then sure, but then that soul is pretty much worthless and meaningless too.


Sorry, not according to all the evidence we have, and there's tons of it.


You mean "quantum" quantum? Or "new age bullshit" quantum? Because even quantum theory doesn't break the speed of light.


Speaking from experience? Can you test this theory to verify it?


Because "space" is "nothing." There is nothing out there far away. Or more specifically, there isn't anything at all out there far away. Again, space doesn't "exist." It's just an area of that nothing that you claim can't exist, which we separate using our own abstract boudnaries (such as the outer shell of a lead sphere, or the limit beyond which light and energy has not traveled yet.)


Ah, but I am not there. I am not inside the hypothetical lead sphere, and no one is in the space outside our universe's expansion. So there is still nothing there.


Do you need to experience a car crash to know what it is like, what damage would result from it, and whether it will kill you? Or is sticking a couple of crash test dummies into a test car, crashing it, and observing and analyziing everything from the outside enough? I posit the second one is sufficient. Likewise, I don't need to take drugs to know that the chemicals some druggie takes affects his brain in some specific way, and fucks up their head with hallucinations. There's plenty of scientific experiments tracking all the effects from the outside already. We know we can dream and imagine stuff. Using drugs to do it doesn't change it from being just dreams and imagination. Sorry.


For you, maybe...


Thinking this way would greatly oversimplify reality...

The first one also bombs abortion clinics, kills gays and transsexuals, is typically very racist and jingoistic, and it is extremely likely that, if the law wasn't there to stop them from doing it, would be perfectly happy wth stoning sinners or burning them at the stake as well. Both are quite subject to irrational mob mentality.

I knew at least 4 who have just BTC1. Some of them wanted to see what it was and just bought BTC1 to play around with, others got BTC1 on a paper wallet as a gift and still have it. Not sure about those who have less than 1BTC. I suspect there may be a few newbies with that amount, if they were only comfortable putting about $100 into it to start.

LOL! You know, somehow I don''t think that places like Switzerland, Australia, Russia, Brazil, and even China will give a sh*t if the dollar falls. They have their own economies that don't depend on the dollar as much as you hope.

There are now three services that let you use SMS to send and receive bitcoins. But regardless, this major problem you mention sounds like the same problem that the internet had. Remember that fad?

We knew there were about 65,000 users on MtGox as far back as Summer of 2011. MtGox also claimed to have 25,000 new applications every month this past winter, and 50,000 new applications in March and April. Blockchain.info also recently mentioned reaching 300,000 wallets. The defunct instawaller boasted about having over 1 mil wallets, though many of those may have been throwaways. We also have a list of Bitcoin-QT downloads that  shows that this wallet has been downloaded 2.9mil times already (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/stats/map?dates=2009-01-01+to+2013-04-30). Even if some of those were downloaded and abandoned, there are tons of users who used other services, like blockchain, electrum, multibit, or android wallets instead. So I would estimate the current number of bitcoin users at 1,500,000 at the bare minimum, and more likely closer to 2.9 to 3.25 mil.

Read the recent Area 51 book. Apparently make iin USSR, by captured German Nazi scientists.

Regarding the OP, I don't like the idea of other people killing some other people in my name. BUT, the idea of religious fanatics, who are blindly convinced that what they are doing is righteous, who don't fear death because they are convinced they will go to heaven, I dislike even more.

Live in barns? Visit prostitutes? Hang out with lepers and turn the other cheek? That sounds like Phinneas Gage! He's even got the beard!

That doesn't mean you can move energy/matter from one space to another. If I create that lead sphere and take it into the vacuum of space, I didn't destroy energy, air, or photons inside it, I just let them espace into the surrounding areas. Also, if you say that there is no such thing as nothing, that would mean the energy of the universe is infinite, and that either the universe has existed for ever, or that light travels faster than the speed of light. So that no matter how far you go, you will always have energy and matter. But we know that's now true. We know that the universe was created 13.8 billion years ago, and we know that light travels at a limited speed, so we know that there is absolutely nothing farther than 13.8 billion light years away. There is a limit boundary to the universe, and if you travel faster than the speed of light to get past that boundary, eventually you will get to a space where no matter, energy, light, or universe exists.



How does what is outside the box change the fact that inside the box there can still be nothing?


If you are "experiencing" nothing, then that nothing exists, since you are experiencing it... right?

Stop making shit up.


Nope. It doesn't exist. Inky thing that exists is the boundaries surrounding that nothing. Once you move beyond those boundaries, you will be the only thing existing there. Everything around you will be nothing, and not exist.


It itsn't experiencing something, it's having a lack of experience. That's what nothing is - a lack of everything, including lack of anything for you to experience. It's like saying bald is a hair color.

At the risk of sounding sexist, men are interested in business finance and investing, women are interested in home finance and building a nest egg for their kids and their own retirement (those women who only spend money their husbands earn, we are not interested in anyway). So... Uh... Use that.

Running low on food is a pretty good "kick in the ass"


More likely, people will separate themselves into communities, with those who want to work living in secured areas, with security keeping out those who don't want to work, feel it's unfair that they don't have other's money, and do nothing but sit around or riot. Which is fine, as long as the choice to start contributing in some way is always open, which it should be.


No, these are the jobs of the present. No one knows what kind of jobs we will have in the future. Only that if we continue to progress economically and technologically, that there will always be something new to do. To believe otherwise is to assume that what we have now is it, and we won't have any more inventions or new things.


Not if they need things like food, safety and security, or long-term retirement plans.