wiggler00m

Ordinals don't require a separate token, another blockchain, or any changes to Bitcoin. They work right now.

"tl;dr: Agora is a program that lets you sell files in exchange for Lightning Network payments.

We've been busy these past few months building an MVP of Agora. The basic idea of Agora is very simple: It allows you to host files on a website and charge users to download them. It uses the Lightning Network for payments.

The current version is still lacking a lot of functionality. But we're proud to announce that -- as of August 2021 -- an initial prototypical version of Agora is running at agora.download. It gives you a simple file listing, including Agora's README.md, which you can purchase on the site for the low low price of 1,000 satoshis. Payments can be made with any Lightning Network wallet. Some mobile Lightning Network wallets are Wallet of Satoshi, which is hosted, and Muun, which offers self-custody.

Sidenote: You can also go to the Agora GitHub repo and download the readme from there for free, but where's the fun in that?

Another sidenote: You can also go to the Agora test instance at test.agora.download. There you can purchase our readme for testnet money. htlc.me is a simple Lightning Network wallet that comes pre-loaded with testnet coins.

On agora.download there's also two other folders, blog and paid. They both contain the blog post you're reading. It's free to read in blog, but -- as you might've guessed -- can be purchased for the low low price of 1,000 satoshis in paid.

The Lightning Network is a layer on top of Bitcoin that tries to solve the so-called Scalability Problem. Bitcoin payments are slow to settle and have high fees, making them unsuitable for small, quick payments. The Lightning Network is designed to overcome these problems, and enables microtransactions: Small payments with very low fees that settle instantly. We think that makes it a very good fit for paying for files. Err, I mean, lots of files on the internet are free to download, and that's great! And we don't want to change that. We don't want things that are now available for free to suddenly be locked behind Agora paywalls. That'd be terrible! But there's lots of files on the internet that you pay for in some way, and that way is usually a bit weird. For example you pay by watching ads, or by giving services access to some of your private data. Or by paying with your credit card. (Credit cards are weird, right? RIGHT?) So we think that in some situations it'd be great to be able to use the Lightning Network to buy and sell files on the internet. And that's what Agora is for.

We hope that many people will use Agora to host files for a variety of use-cases, which is why we made Agora open-source. You can head over to github.com/agora-org/agora, download Agora and run it on a server with files that you'd like to sell. Installation instructions can be found in the README.md. (That you can also buy here, for the low low price of 1,000 satoshis.) This is a very early version, so any feedback -- feature requests, bug reports, usage reports and general comments -- are very welcome, for example in the github issue tracker."

Sönke Hahn, 7/31/2021

NB:- This is not me and I am not affiliated with this project but I do think it is super cool.

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

I loved the concept of SETI@home and ran it on a bunch of computers at my university when I was a student.

Cassidy Nelson: This would mean that not only would you be able to have a reliable diagnostic from the get-go before an outbreak begins and then for those first few cases, you might actually be able to instead… on average globally, we have about a 20 day lag in between first outbreak cases and detection of an outbreak for new emerging diseases. That’s way too long. If you could detect those first handful of cases of a new disease, you’re much, much more likely to be able to contain it."

"At the moment, the most common types of testing are PCR testing, which is polymerase chain reaction, and it allows you to detect a pathogen that has a certain section of its genetic code match this test that’s very limited in terms of anything new that comes out. You always have to know about the pathogen beforehand, have to have designed and validated a test against that.

In the last few years though, some new technologies that have come out that are based on metagenomic techniques, which are pathogen agnostic diagnostics. So you don’t need to know anything about the pathogen beforehand. You can put a clinical sample on and it will tell you all of the DNA that is in that sample. And so you’d be able to do things like bioinformatics testing on this and be able to actually work out, “Oh, it matches against my RSV or CMV or other known viruses, or this is completely new and it doesn’t match anything in my bioinformatics data set…

It sequences everything. So you’d imagine like 98% of it is just human DNA, but bioinformatically you just push that out and you usually don’t care about the human DNA, and then everything that’s left over you’re able to analyze…

This would mean that not only would you be able to have a reliable diagnostic from the get-go before an outbreak begins and then for those first few cases, you might actually be able to instead… on average globally, we have about a 20 day lag in between first outbreak cases and detection of an outbreak for new emerging diseases. That’s way too long. If you could detect those first handful of cases of a new disease, you’re much, much more likely to be able to contain it...

Robert Wiblin: Is this affordable?

Cassidy Nelson: So this has started being used in places like in 2014 in West Africa when there was some diagnostic conundrums going on in the Ebola epidemic going on there. Metagenomic sequencing, especially based on nanopore technology, which is a fascinating way to do this is quite expensive in terms of the reagents that are being used, but the costs of that are coming down and the accuracy of it is going up. I personally think though that these platform agnostic ways of looking at pathogens is really the only way forward if to be on top of diagnostics. There’s really always going to be a one step behind type picture if we have to wait to characterize a new pathogen and then design a new test for it based on PCR type methods today.

Robert Wiblin: So the idea is we would just make this the normal way of diagnosing people with contagious diseases. So people come into hospital, they’ve got symptoms and you’d do the sample and you try to sequence everything. You see all the viruses that are going through there. And then you can see whether any of them are weird and whether there’s a pattern of some new disease showing up, hopefully really quickly.

Cassidy Nelson: Yeah, and there’s been great studies that have come out looking at like fever in return travelers, for example: 60% of them never get a diagnosis, but there’s something causing their fever. People have gone on using metagenomic techniques and have gone, “What is the pathogen here? What do we actually have”, as well as other diagnostic conundrums. So people have been starting to do this. It hasn’t been adopted on a wide scale yet, but I’d love to see this adopted and you’d be able to have this in all healthcare settings. So you could have this in your emergency department. You may first limit it to just severe cases. So if you have a severe case of pneumonia or another disease, you don’t have any etiology that you’ve been able to find, you’re able to do these types of tests.

Cassidy Nelson: This would mean that not only would you be able to have a reliable diagnostic from the get-go before an outbreak begins and then for those first few cases, you might actually be able to instead… on average globally, we have about a 20 day lag in between first outbreak cases and detection of an outbreak for new emerging diseases. That’s way too long. If you could detect those first handful of cases of a new disease, you’re much, much more likely to be able to contain it."

"Control over the absorption spectral range of surfaces is of major importance for a wide range of applications, such as selective solar absorbers, thermal emitters, structural colouring water condensation and daytime and night-time radiative cooling. In particular, for a solar-thermal energy absorber operating at high temperature, the absorber should be an SSA since the main cooling mechanism is thermal radiation... an ideal solar light absorber has nearly 100% absorbance within the solar spectrum and negligible thermal emittance within the blackbody radiation spectral range at mid-to-high temperatures (100–500 °C), i.e., an SSA. SSAs can thus maximise the temperature of solar absorbers and increase the efficiency of a heat engine driven by solar radiation."

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-020-0242-y (full text paper)

Could improve the efficiency of solar thermal power stations:

"Control over the absorption spectral range of surfaces is of major importance for a wide range of applications, such as selective solar absorbers, thermal emitters, structural colouring water condensation and daytime and night-time radiative cooling. In particular, for a solar-thermal energy absorber operating at high temperature, the absorber should be an SSA since the main cooling mechanism is thermal radiation... an ideal solar light absorber has nearly 100% absorbance within the solar spectrum and negligible thermal emittance within the blackbody radiation spectral range at mid-to-high temperatures (100–500 °C), i.e., an SSA. SSAs can thus maximise the temperature of solar absorbers and increase the efficiency of a heat engine driven by solar radiation."

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-020-0242-y (full text paper)

"Neodymium is found most often in monazite and bastnasite. Due to the fact that these minerals also contain lanthanides and other rare earth elements, it is difficult to isolate neodymium. The first isolation process involves extracting the lanthanides and metals out of the ores in their salt form. This step is carried out using sulphuric acid, hydrochloric acid, and sodium hydroxide. To further isolate the neodymium from other lanthanides and metals, procedures such as solvent extraction and ion exchange are used. Once neodymium has been reduced to its fluoride form using these processes, it can be reacted with pure calcium metal in a heated chamber to form pure neodymium and calcium fluoride. Some calcium contaminants remain in the neodymium, and vacuum processes are used to remove any of these contaminants. It is an expensive and potentially environmentally harmful process.

In a recent posting (February 1st), it was noted that China produces over 90% of the world’s rare earths, and that Beijing’s export reductions in recent years have forced high-tech firms to relocate to China. An article in a UK newspaper claims to have uncovered the distinctly dirty truth about the process used to extract neodymium: it has an appalling environmental impact that raises serious questions over the credibility of so-called green technology.

According to the report, hidden out of sight behind smoke-shrouded factory complexes lie vast, hissing cauldrons of chemicals in tailing lakes that are often very poorly constructed and maintained; throughout the extraction process large amounts of highly toxic acids, heavy metals and other chemicals are emitted into the air that people breathe, and leak into surface and ground water.

The report concludes that whenever we purchase products that contain rare earth metals, we are unknowingly taking part in massive environmental degradation and the destruction of communities. It is a real dilemma for environmentalists who want to see the growth of the renewables industry but we should recognise the environmental destruction that is being caused while making these wind turbines."

Do you have a source for this by chance?

  - Use auction process
  - Clean up financial statements
  - Base offering on market comparables
  - Include data analytics about your customers
  - Plan for probable terms (taxes, witholding of proceeds, exclusivity)
  - Plan for capital requirements 
  - Disclose in layers
  - Seller’s Goals Are Important
  - Check out The Buyer
  - Use Process to Provide Time to Consider Requests
  - Check References and Style

There is no option to turn it off.

10 meetings is inadequate. You should be willing to do 1000+ meetings if you really want this to fly (or prove it cannot).

You could also explore other business models (ie. rather than charging the practice directly find another way to make money).

Even if it fails, valuable experience, not a waste. Cool idea, and admire your initiative.

The author's site (built with Publish) seems slow to me. Cause unknown. Would like to see more examples.

https://swiftbysundell.com/