uh-quan

There is no "good parenting" fix that will keep children from trying to access inappropriate content, forums where unhealthy conversation takes place, pornography, and worse. Being a good parent does not and cannot remove the curiosity, temptation, and ability to access bad content. This is a problem with the human condition, not bad parenting.

As a parent myself (and, I hope, a good one), I have found it very difficult to effectively monitor and limit my children's ability to access these things. And I have more facility with technology than the average parent. It's a complex and frustrating problem and the stakes are high.

Original spelling is intended, a purposeful and humorous misspelling introduced by a meme.

Canada: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-protests-frozen-bank...

And the automation failure that doxxed someone who donated to his campaign and got that person fired from their job.

I think the thrust of sayings like "the learning curve is a wall" is to indicate that there is little to no slope, which is to say you don't get the benefit of time spent learning easier parts step by step until you know a lot of the system and can handle the more difficult aspects of it. Instead it feels like you either know how it all works or nothing about how it works, and it's hard to figure out how to start and get a foothold, so to speak.

This is a nice response. Thank you for sharing.

This is all well-trodden ground.

First, if you are concerned about things like confiscation, then you take the recommended security steps such as running your own node. At that point confiscation is indeed difficult (not impossible) and blocking access is essentially impossible. A government would have to prevent you and anyone who could act on your behalf from having any access to the Internet in order to stop the transaction being propagated on the network.

As for savings: I stand by my assertion. In its early years, yes, bitcoin is going to be volatile. But as anyone who has held bitcoin for 3+ years knows, it retains and grows value over the course of years exceptionally well. Savings implies a medium- and longer-term horizon — think years, not months — and on that horizon bitcoin has always been a winner.

I think there are more people in this world who care about the harms of inflation and capital controls than you are giving credit to. I care about preserving my wealth from debasement, as do all of the people I happen to know who hold bitcoin. And I suspect I might have a better feel for the "pulse" of bitcoin users than your 99.9% estimate, which (forgive me) strikes me as being detached from reality.

Bitcoin produces a money that cannot be debased by inflation on a whim and which is very hard to forcibly confiscate. It can be transferred in minutes to any place on the globe, across any number of borders and past any capital controls, with transactions that cannot be stopped or censored by even the most powerful and invasive government on Earth. It's a safe haven from fiat currencies and almost a perfect medium of savings.

Unless we are working with a weird and strict definition of "tangible," I'd say it's tangible good that is, rightly, valued by many millions of people.

Animal fats are great. One of the staples of healthy human diets for hundreds of thousands of years.

Sure: in the United States, social media companies have been diligently removing content critical of government COVID policies and recommendations, even criticism from scientists and doctors who are speaking as professionals.

The US government hasn't requested that social media companies do this, but the result is the same.

It is silly if by "escape government control" one means avoiding taxes, buying illegal substances, etc.

But if by "escape government control" one means a currency that the government cannot interfere with to censor/stop transactions, or a currency that cannot be debased on the government's whim, the public ledger is exactly why bitcoin can do what it does.

Although it's true you introduce some level of trust in that scenario, it's patently false that you lose all the benefits of bitcoin. A company offering accounts via Lightning would have all of the standard reasons not to cheat customers.

And again, keep in mind we are talking about access to money -- a money that cannot be debased -- for those people living in the poorest and most terribly governed areas of the world, where debasement, hyperinflation, and the utter destruction of savings is commonplace.

Even if they don't get the full benefits of on-chain bitcoin transactions, they will still be light years ahead of where they were relying on failed local currencies. A massive improvement even in the worst case scenario, helping to lift real-world folks out of poverty. This is something to applaud and cheer for, not shake your head at or mock.

>Yes there is they need a channel, which costs $20 to open and $20 to close.

No, they don't need to open a channel via the blockchain. They can have an account with a third party, for example.

Energy isn't being wasted, that's the point. What proof of work and the blockchain allows is a monetary network that (a) does not rely on trusted third parties for verification, whose (b) unit of currency does not rely on states or central banks, which cannot be trusted to avoid inflation.

Whatever else you may think of those features, it's a bit weird to call it pure waste when clearly millions of people find this incredibly valuable.

That's why second-layer technologies like the Lightning Network are being built.

Bitcoin doesn't have to function as a currency to be wildly successful (since being a currency isn't the only relevant use case), but with second layer networks it will be able to.

> Is someone in the third world chomping at the bit to pay $40 to open and close a single LN channel when that’s 10% of the GDP per capita of some of those countries you plan to help? Probably not.

In such cases, there is no reason such users can't "enter" bitcoin through a second layer such as the Lightning Network.

Why would they do that if it isn't real bitcoin?, you might ask. Well, for one, their local, tin-pot-dictator created currencies are often worthless, meaning that even second-layer bitcoin is a far more sound and reliable currency.

And who is to say $40 for an on-chain transaction is an "egregious fee"? It turns out having access to the world's most secure, decentralized, unstoppable, set-in-stone, uncensorable, trustless, non-inflationary monetary network is a valuable thing. Maybe so much so that $40 per on-chain transaction is a bargain in the bigger picture.

>As far as scaling Bitcoin goes: prove it. It’s been a decade and it still does 4tps.

Sure. The Lightning Network already exists, is working and in use, and can in principle do essentially unlimited TPS.

Bitcoin doesn't need to scale to millions of TPS to be successful (since payments and microtransactions aren't its only use case), but it so happens that it can do that through second layer technologies.

It's far from clear that Aurelius was a bad emperor. Most historians have judged him to be quite a good one, in fact.

Rather than a weakness, the teleology inherent in Stoicism is part of what makes it attractive against the ubiquitous reductive materialism of the modern world. One can just as easily point to materialism's lack of teleology as a critical weakness that ruins any virtues it might otherwise have had.

I also disagree that his journal reads as though it was meant for publication. In fact I get the opposite impression when reading it, that a man like Aurelius would have been mortified to know some of these entries would be known and re-read by audiences of millions of people for thousands of years to come.

It's also not clear how having a son who turned out to be a bad man and heir would count against a philosophy that explicitly rejects the idea that we can control such things.

That isn't quite what Epictetus means by what's under our control.

Back then one could generally travel from one end of the Roman Empire to the other (e.g., from England to Persia) safely, on well-built and -guarded roads, needing knowledge of but one language and possession of but one currency — all this despite traveling through a dozen+ diverse cultures and nations on the trip. A few centuries later, and for more than a millennia afterward, that would be impossible. But Epictetus would still categorize the success of such a journey as something out of our control: What if a robber attacks you, in spite of the general safety of the roads? What if you fall off your horse and snap a leg? What if you get sick? What if a storm unexpectedly hits during a sea voyage?

Similarly, on a trip to the moon: What if the rocket fails to launch? What if it launches but explodes in the atmosphere? What if your second-stage engine fails to fire? What if, en route to the moon, an electrical malfunction depletes your oxygen reserves to dangerously low levels? Etc. I pick these examples because they've all actually happened, despite our best efforts to the contrary.

The moral question Epictetus considers is not, What is it Man (in the abstract) is capable (sometimes) of doing? The question is, what is truly under your control? What is the interior castle into which no one and no thing can invade if you do not permit it to enter? What are the implications of having such an interior fortress, and how might we leverage that control to live happy lives?

The answers to those questions have not changed in the thousands of years since Epictetus asked them. Stoicism is a perennial philosophy.