Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
A quick primer, and what do they have to do with EA?
Bitcoin mining takes off in Venezuela due to hyperinflation of the local currency and nearly-free electricity.
China is starting to shut down legal BitCoin use.
What makes Ethereum special?
Ethereum already using as much electricity as a small country.
Rhys Lindmark on Twitter and Patreon
Harry Potter – is it super pro-capitalist/consumerist?
Pingback: Rational Feed – deluks917
1.) Has anyone considered tying the computational work in a cryptocurrency to useful computations? Like Seti@home and other projects where volunteers donate computational work towards projects they think are useful (finding very large prime numbers, looking for alien signals in data from radiotelescopes, calculating things around cancer research or so..).
2.) About bitcoin being used for illegal stuff: The difference is basically (to me) that the government has control over bank accounts. For example, during the Krim separation crisis there were a bunch of bank accounts used by rich russians in the US that the US government froze.
Source: http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/03/20/u-s-freezes-assets-of-russian-businessmen-and-bank-close-to-putin/
So basically, I think it comes down to how much you trust the government that has control over your money. If they start removing your access to your Government-Money for crimes (maybe even controversial crimes like whistleblowing) then the good of having a currency that you still have access to might be bigger than the problems created by enabling certain crimes.
3.) When you talked about nicecoins the first thing I thought of was an episode of community where they more or less had something like that.. it didn’t work out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Development_and_Condiments
PS: I find it weird that the url of the wikipedia article doesn’t contain any information that it’s about an episode of a TV show..
Also on that topic: If a company hires one out of 50 applicants the first thing they do is filter them. And even if society in general doesn’t care much about that score it might still come into play there, because it’s an easily applied filter, it doesn’t matter how they do it, their goal is to reduce the number to five applicants that they’ll actually have a conversation with. Sure, if there’s only 5 applicants to begin with they probably won’t filter much, if at all.. but that’s not always the case.