Something to think about before we all decide we want to be a "cashless society", especially when the U.S. also currently fears EMP attacks from North Korea, Russia, etc
If you want EMP resiliency, you may want to invest at least a few billion into it. Of course, steering the governmental budget to spend money on stuff that only raise electrical bill and will only prove its worth in an emergency and catastrophic situation is a hard pill to swallow, especially when there are competing priorities.
We're not going to get it from China. Anti-static Mylar bags are touted on Alibaba as "EMP protection". They're not.
[1] https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/regulations_laws/documents/offi...
Yes, that's a thing.
You need a record of all transactions for tax purposes. If I give merchant a dollar, they give me a donut, and don't record the transaction, that's a crime - they're not paying sales tax/VAT on that, and also obtaining unrecorded tax that is used to pay "black salaries" in cash without paying the appropriate income & social security taxes.
The ritual of giving a receipt to you (and you putting it straight into the waste bin) visibly demonstrates that the business routinely creates the receipts for all (most?) purchases, it ensures that in the vast majority of cases the receipt actually gets produced, and if a business is routinely not producing these receipts (or having fake info in these receipts) then this would be clearly visible to the general public. This ritual has a certain social value in enforcing tax compliance, so that's why it's required despite the paper cost.
1. How much energy is released?
2. Over what time period?
3. In what forms?
4. At what distance from the target / victim?
A bullet which misses you by a millimeter might as well be 1,000 km away. It requires direct contact with tisue to transact damage. Where it hits you also matters, and in many cases, a light interaction with an extremity (hand, foot) may do little damage, whilst a trunk or head shot will be critical or instantly lethal. Much of that comes from the transmission of fluid shock through the body. (Watching super-slow-motion video of bullets impacting various targets on YouTube is ... interesting and informative.)
A nuclear bomb delivers energy to the target in four major forms:
1. Prompt ionizing radiation. This is a pulse which lasts for a tiny fraction of a second, and is rapidly absorbed even by the atmosphere. It can be lethal or disabling at relatively close range.
2. Thermal pulse. Depending on the size of the weapon, this will ignite directly exposed flammable materials at ranges from a few hundreds of meters to a hundred km or so. This can be mitigated with white or reflective paint, or intervening structures.
3. Blast wave. This is the physical shockwave of the weapon (as well as any material picked up by it) which causes much of the direct damage.
4. Radioactive fallout. This is long-term radiation delivered generally downwind of the blast site. Exposure follows the seven-ten rule. For each increase by a factor of seven in time, the radiation falls by a factor of ten. A 1,000 rad dose 1 hour after the blast is 100 rads 7 hours after, 10 rads 2 days (49 hours) later, and 1 rad after two weeks.
The detonations of nuclear weapons are fast, on the order of a microsecond (on one-millionth of a second). In large part it's the ability to deliver all its energy virtually instantly which gives a bomb its power. An alternative understanding comes from the idea of "generations" of nuclear interactions and their timescale -- a typical nuclear blast occurs over about 50 generations, after which the core has generally spontaneously disassembled past the point of sustainable reactions.
(There's a pretty good Quora article on that point here: https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-a-nuclear-explosion-take)
Chemical explosives are far slower -- I believe closer to milisecond (thousandth-of-a-second) range. Or: a nuclear explosion is as much faster than a chemical explosion as a chemical explosion is to change taking a full second.
A table of chemical reaction velocities peaks at 10,000 m/s, or 1 km/s, or 1m / 0.001s, suggesting a typical deonation period of 0.001ms - 1ms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_explosive_detonation_...
Meteor and meteorite impacts are often described in terms of megatons or Hiroshima-bomb equivalents. The Chelyabinsk meteorite is estimated to have released the energy of 20 - 30 Hiroshima-sized bombs, approximately 400 - 500 kilotons of TNT. However:
1. It did so primarily at an elevation of ~30 km,
2. over a period of 5 - 10 seconds,
3. in the form of light, heat, and sonic blast
Much the same as you experience the same total change in kinetic energy whether you decelerate from 100 kph in 10 seconds or 0.01s, the difference is in the total shock and stress, as well as the energy delivered.
TL;DR: a modest-sized nuclear blast high in the atmosphere or above it could have relatively modest ground impacts whilst delivering a strong EMP effect.
Sometimes it's physical disruption or damage. Very often though it's interference with energy cycles or communications and control. See various neurotoxins or the effects of cyanide (it blocks ATP cycling in mitochondria -- directly affecting the cellular energy cycle).
EMP is an energy signal that causes direct physical damage to long-length or fragile conductors, disabling both energy transmission and processing equipment, and communications systems.
Optical comms systems are unaffected, however. And systems based on microwave repeaters don't have the long-length conductors that telegraph systems did in the case of Carrington.
(That last line was a pretty good answer and did not really need the rest of the post above it, informative as it was ;-)
But the general case of such events is one element I've reflected on.
Granted, it would suck for a while.
Note that this is not just theoretical. The American Starfish Prime nuclear test did significant damage to electrical systems in Hawaii, and the Soviets destroyed a power plant in Almaty with one of theirs.
As for physical bitcoin, which can be transacted offline. Just hand it over like a dollar bill:
Still mostly useful for larger amounts, though, due to the relative high cost of hardware, but it's new.
20:1 the Bitcoin people would propose some sort of buffered/delayed transaction solution. Of course that wouldn't work as there's no way of telling when you'd have restored power or connectivity. Puerto Rico is looking to have nothing for several weeks if not longer, much like the Ice Storm of 1994 in Western Tennessee.
No false promises. No silver bullet. Just a social experiment.
The way you put it sounds like the early bitcoin believers were pretentious know-it-all getting over their head.
What we tried to do was just something new related to money. And we did. We took risk. We were mocked. We invested time, energy and resources in a system we knew was experimental, unreliable and untested.
And it did a dent.
I would add, despite very negative people like you.
Have fun when you run into the same lesson left unlearned from the 70s - distributed permission-less databases like blockchains cannot scale without becoming centralized. The more people that wish to participate, the growth rate starts jumping from exponential to exponential * log with the bandwidth and storage requirements to ensure every other node on the network is properly updated.
"People didn't create bitcoin to replace cash. Years ago, the community tried to create an alternative to all existing money systems. That's all."
Cash is a money system. You contradict yourself.
You mean it may fail ? Yes, we are aware. Since the beginning. That's what "experiment" comes from.
> Cash is a money system. You contradict yourself.
Being an alternative is not being a replacement. Just like the bike is an alternative to a car, and not a replacement for it.
You seem to have a terrible grudge against bitcoin. I'm sorry about it, but it's irrelevant here. You may like it or not, but don't give the early community objectives we didn't have.
We never sold a magical solution. We were not some 14 years old kid in a hoodie screaming "kill the banks".
We hoped. A lot. We dreamed. We did noticed and disliked a lot of flaws in our current systems and institutions and explored other ways.
But as intelligent people, we know very well the limit of the project and how much it can hurt.
So keep your negativity to yourself. It's uncalled for, and definitely unwanted.
Bitcoin can, as of now, scale to support the current needs of 10 billion humans. Some of those solutions are still being completed (eg: beta, not golden master) but there's little theoretical risk, and while there will be bugs there's little indication of anything stopping it, should that level of adoption be desired.
Most likely you don't understand what bitcoin actually is.
If every single human were mining, no, it certainly could not. If there are only a few miners and a bunch of participants, maybe. To boot, Bitcoin can't even support my needs. It's too slow for transactions unless I pay some other middleman, it can't cut my gemstones, it can't solder my LEDs, it can't run my Verilog sims, it can't raise my cat or feed my husband. Bitcoin doesn't sate my thirst nor does it provide me with my medicine - actual needs.
"Most likely you don't understand what bitcoin actually is."
I don't need to understand bitcoin to understand that we tried exactly this back in the 70s and apparently people didn't learn the lesson THEN. Distributed permissionless databases simply can not scale if everyone participates. The technology then, as now, simply does not exist to handle that amount of storage and bandwidth. It likely won't in another 50 years, if we even make it that far.
Having over 30 years of experience in computers and networking and databases, I look at this and say "Go back to school, one with a proper education involving some actual history regarding computers and databases and networking." All you learn is how to code and don't learn about what's already been done or tried, so everything is new to you when it was already seen, tested, or envisioned before I was even born.
The metal was just a convenient pick because it was useless for tool and weapon making, and didn't degrade quickly if left in some damp place.
A lot of counterfeit gold has insertion of other metals in the center (tungsten for example which has a similar density)
https://static6.businessinsider.com/image/505a1d2eeab8ea8610...
Wikipedia: Because the density is so similar to that of gold (tungsten is only 0.36% less dense), tungsten can also be used in counterfeiting of gold bars, such as by plating a tungsten bar with gold
It's pretty hard for me to teleport a $100 bill to someone a continent away, so Bitcoin works as analogous to cash as so far been invented.
I agree that Bitcoin does in no way replace paper cash, simply complements it by extending many of it's features to the digital space. It also can be improved on drastically.
But that doesn't matter.
All you're saying here is that it's going to be a few more years and a much higher bitcoin price until you convert over.
That's your loss.
Because the truth hurts the value of Bitcoin. Bitcoin people have paid groups on many discussion sites to downvote any negativity. I'm almost sure the administration here allows it because vote manipulation should be easy to detect, and that's knowing how the vulnerable upvote/downvote system works.