I don't think I've ever seen it so flat.  It looks like a...



Merry Christmas to all.

To take your point even further. If I look at one of my own wallets I can see around 50 or so receiving addresses, each one containing a small amount of btc, which represents a small amount of bitcoin I received from some past transaction.  Therefore, my wallet alone represents about 50 data points, spread out, in that Bitcoin Rich List.

I do follow the data within the Bitcoin Rich List, just to see how bitcoin is moving about.  But to form any real conclusions with what is happening with the rich list, it would require further research, and correlations with other types of bitcoin's data.


Taking aside, the OP's distorted views of bitcoin, this above must be one of the most nonsensical comments I have ever read on the internet.

Not understanding who can benefit from solar panels, nor understanding what is meant by "value" will produce gibberish.

Maybe the problem here is a result of having a general disgust of "decentralization":

Decentralization of power.  (solar panels)

Decentralization of money.  (bitcoin)

Does this thread really need anymore replies over what franky1 has already stated ??

I think not.

Unless you are dealing with some highly radioactive material, or trying to study solar flares or supernovas, you will not run into "gamma rays".

As franky1 puts it, this is not related to bitcoin.

It has been defined, described, explained to you countless times, by many, over and over again, and every which way.  Yet it seems it is you who are unable to understand.

Or, rather, it is you who are pretending to not understand, and therefore you are maliciously just wasting people's time on purpose.

And here you have practiced two textbook examples of a propagandist:

1.  Keep repeating a lie, "bitcoins aren't real", and hoping it sticks and that some will believe the BS.

2.  "Accusation in a Mirror", as a quote taken from the French psychologist's 1970 book on the topic:

That is, you are the one using "language manipulation" to lure people into believe an untruth, and yet you blame others for such actions.

... except that, as you can see, no one here is falling for it.

This reminds me of a comment I had made here, back in 2019:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5157696.msg51594701#msg51594701

tadamichi, you just described, in a way, how science progresses.  That is, it's individual scientists verifying experiments done by others, others that they may not know. They are all trying to decipher, unravel a great mystery that is an ultimate truth.  The final truth of how the universe works is unknown, we only know a tiny bit that has been unraveled by experiments and observations.  This is how our understanding advances.  At least, ideally.  Sometimes it doesn't work out that way, think of the epicycles of astronomy of the past.

And, like you state, the process keeps those out that have a poorer understanding of science, since they would be unable to reproduce those same experiments, since "you can't fake your way in".

For the case of bitcoins it is a bit easier.  Bitcoin's final truth is somewhat known since the source code is public for all to see.  And if it's too complicated to follow, to understand it in code form, many have written articles, books, to help explain it, like the white paper or the book: "Mastering Bitcoin" by Andreas Antonopoulos.

What is unknown about bitcoin is what will be done with it in the future, what other layers will be built on top of it (the lighting network is an example of a secondary layer).

Then how did you type your comment just now, so that others can read it across a "fake" internet.

Or, numbers really are fake and this whole universe is fake, and it's all just happening inside your head for your benefit, and only you are real.

You highlight something I had been noticing.  My comments seem to be getting simpler and simpler, as though I was being forced to remove the layers of abstraction.  It is as though I was molding my comments so that any small child could understand it.  But even this type of simplification has not sufficed, which leads to the next comment, that Snowshow is just being intentionally obtuse.



Here we thought that some interesting idea about bitcoin was being laid out in the OP, but rather this thread has become a study in the mental gymnastics of a ... fill in the blank.

I now realize that I have found the Achilles heel in the mentality of this "Snowshow".

He doesn't think that mathematics is a valuable resource, therefore he doesn't understand that information is a resource.  Because they can't touch it, hold it in a bag, throw it at a wall.  You can't punch an idea.  And yet, it is one of the most powerful resources humankind has.

You know some of the earliest computers were used to calculate trajectories for artillery.  These "calculated trajectories" were used to successfully hit the enemy with shells of ammo, or explosives.  One cannot hold a "trajectory" in your hand, it's just numbers.  

But guess what, I bet these trajectories held great value to the commanders in the battlefield.  They were probably worth their weight in gold.  Or, now they may be worth there weight in bitcoins.

Ha, gotcha.

I tend to keep my comments simple and succinct.  Any normal person would easily be able to follow my comment's logic. 

Your reply, on the other hand, shows that you are intentionally pretending to misunderstand. 

You are projecting.

I see what you mean here, I see what you are trying to figure out.

You think some "resource" needs to be transferred, but you want this "resource" to be made of some atoms.  Or, at least that's what I think you meant.

There are material resources: computers, their wiring, the electricity that make them run are made of atoms, electrons, and charges that flow through the wires. These material resources help computers, the internet, and bitcoin to function in a timely manner, but they aren't necessary for the internet or bitcoin to function.  What you are missing, and can't seem to understand is that the "resource" incorporated in a bitcoin transaction is actually "informational".  It is wrapped up in its cryptography, in the mathematics that allow it to work.

There is value in understanding the following knowledge:  1+1=2.   If you can't understand why that type of knowledge is valuable, then you will never understand why exchanging bitcoins for products across the globe can have value.

Wo, the level of cognitive dissonance in that statement is rather high.  Most people's cognitive dissonance varies, on a scale of 1 to 10, most can be at 2 or 3.  It would seem yours goes to 11, and is permanently set at 11 as this thread shows.

About your little "5 paper stickers", what you seem to miss is that "on an alternate Earth"  (like in Sliders) those stickers might be the form of money, of some kind of payment system.  Maybe on that alternate Earth a system was setup a long time ago that made these little stickers have a kind of meaning that most agreed upon, so that it meant it had some value in that world, so that those people could exchange it for goods and services.

Here on this planet, there has been a long history of humans attaching a value, to an agreed upon item, and then this item is used as a base with which to exchange goods and services.  Maybe you should look this up on your own, but for example a long time ago we humans on this planet used shells as a form of money, then later some used silver bars, then it was small knives made of bronze, then instead of small knives it became easier to carry small metal coins with a stamped engraving. ... At some point paper money gets invented, with all its trappings, then credit cards with its trappings.

Then along comes an interesting invention that most call the "computer".  It is difficult to nail down the creation of the earliest computer, but around 1822 Charles Babbage is credited with creating a difference engine, which some credit as being one of the first mechanical computers.  Later he designs an analytical engine, which is considered to be the first Turing machine.  As far as I know, all computers these days are Turing machines.

Skipping ahead a bit -- by the 1950's we get electronic digital computers, which are far more successful than the older analog tube machines.  The transistor made a huge impact on getting these machines to shrink in size.

Then guess what happens next.  People notice that these machines can be linked electronically together, this would allow these machines to do more than any machine can individually.  Then in 1969 the US department of defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) awards a contract for development of the ARPANET.  This was the start of what we now use as the "internet".  You are able to read this comment on this page because of the work done to create the internet.  You are now using this "internet".

Then, sometime at the end of 2008 someone introduces, on the internet, a protocol that runs on the "internet", and which can be used to trade things, just as if it were money, as if it were the shells, or the pieces of metal, "coins", that the early humans used so many years ago.  Except that this electronic protocol has many new features that those old "coins" didn't have.  For example, this new protocol, let's call them bitcoins, can be sent via the internet, and it's a piece of electronic data that cannot be easily replicated, thus giving it value that will hold as one person sends it to another via the electronic channel, the internet.

So these "bitcoin" perform a similar function on this planet as your "5 paper stickers" do on that other Earth.

I realize you won't understand this, because either you are incapable of understanding, or because you pretend to not understand.  I simply leave this comment here for others who are still learning.

Agreed.  In my past studies I've also found the use of "we" in the academic papers: math, physics, cosmology, etc.

It turns out that the use of "we" is simply the polite way to write the paper, whereas the use of "I" or "my" comes off as too arrogant and thus detracts from the topic in the paper, and so, "we" is predominantly used when presenting the results of an experiment, since it is meant to show that it is also the experiment that produced the data and not necessarily just "me".

https://www.enago.com/academy/we-vs-they-using-first-or-third-person-in-a-research-paper/

(this of course, suggested to me that Satoshi was working within some university setting, or possibly some national laboratory, while creating bitcoin.   )

So then you are saying that you have a different meaning for the term "exchange".

I showed you a simple example that shows that your "impossible" scenario is easy to pull off, and your response to it is to make up a new meaning for an English word.

This would appear to be heading into wasteful nonsense, or maybe that was your intent.

I just read a series of articles from 1835, written in The Sun, a New York newspaper.  In which Sir John Herschel, a famous astronomer at the time, using his great new telescope "of an entirely new principle", tells us that he has spotted life on the Moon.  And that these creatures are humanoid in shape but with wings, like that of a bat.  He is calling them "bat-like winged humanoids", or rather "Vespertilio-homo".

This is were we get the term "Moon bats".



The image above is a lithograph of what can be seen through the new telescope.

"impossible" you say, well guess what, I have done the "impossible".   ... I'll use simpler numbers for the example, but it would still apply to your larger numbers.

A few years ago I bought a piece of hardware for 5 bitcoins.  After the exchange was made, I received the piece of hardware that I wanted, and the builders of that hardware received my 5 bitcoins.

But here is the interesting part that relates to your "impossible" scenario:  ... Someone else, call them "Bob", that wanted ten pieces of the same hardware, that I had just purchased, would have needed to spend 50 bitcoins.

And so here we have the impossible happening: someone named Bob, once their purchase goes through, was able to get ten times the value for their 50 bitcoins than I did with my 5 bitcoins.

This all happened without the exchange of any dollars, or any other foreign currency.

I, on various occasions have used bitcoin without someone needing to purchase them from me.  That is, there was no exchange of dollars, or any other foreign currency.

How is this possible you might ask?

tadamichi already lists some good examples.  I would simply be repeating what they have already said.

And, there will be other uses for bitcoin in the future that we are currently unaware of.  ...  Consider the internet in 1990, before they came out with the world wide web (www).  Could you have seen all of the uses for http ?

Your second comment is correct in the sense that a collection of people in a market of bitcoin, trading, determines bitcoin's price, but the part I have bolded is, I am afraid, a bit incorrect.

Bitcoin does have inherent value.  As I was just explaining to someone (someone that just asked me about bitcoin, even though I have stopped telling people about it, I'll still reply to questions if someone asks).  Among its many inherent values there is one that seems very interesting and it may be one of those properties that first alerted people to something new going on here.  

I explained it this way:  ... So, you have used computers.  You know about directories and files (text files, jpegs, pngs, executables, etc).  You know that you can make copies of these files.  You can make as many copies as you want of these files.  This is a piece of electronic data, and anyone can make as many copies of this data as you want, so they have some, although little value, individually.  ... One thing that the blockchain technology produces is a way to make unique pieces of data.  Once you send someone a small piece of bitcoin, no one, not even you can send someone else a copy of that same piece of bitcoin.

So here we have for the first time in the history of computers (as far as I know), in the history of electronic data, a technology that can produce unique, uncopyable, pieces of electronic data.

This is one of the, among many, inherent values of bitcoin.

I'd have to agree here also.  I sometimes either scroll past or just skim the really long posts, but JayJuanGee seems to pull them off rather well, somehow.

Are we on a slow climb?  Is 17593 really the bottom?  I think only Captain Hindsight really knows.

That really is a great summation of the situation.

It does remind of how just a week ago I was explaining it to an anti-bitcoiner, someone who didn't want to get, who was fighting me for some reason, as if I was the one that was causing them anguish for having created bitcoin (I don't know).  Anyways,  I put it to him this way: 

It's not like someone is going to come out next week with something better than the internet.  The internet was a massive achievement, but what would this new thing need to be for everyone to just drop the current internet and start using something else.

His response was:  ... what do you mean??  There has been newer and different internets.  "web 2.0".  Then he holds up his iphone and says look at this new internet on here!

At that point I gave up.