What is a bitcoin, proof of work compute payments, the blockchain or public shared ledger? Are you confused about bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies that have recently experienced meteoric declines in relative value to popular inflated fiat currencies like the Euro, USD or RMB?
The main idea with crypto currencies that a public ledger or running list, shared between mining rigs, for users of coin wallets and similar, rig computers that use cryptographic mining ASIC or GPU compute capacity, which does high speed matrix multiplication and similar advanced data math to solve cryptographic encryption problems at wildly fast rates to fill in all the public shared ledger entries of crypto coins exchanges, purchases between the buyer & seller without allowing the buyer or seller to know anything else about each other, providing both anonymity & privacy, part of the reason bitcoins are used to pay for grey and black market goods. Let me give an example.
Let's suggest that I, as a citizen or random member of the public, in America, want to buy a Stinger Missile & its related Command & Control module & Launcher tube. In America, its illegal or NOT legal for citizens to purchase, own, buy or sell this kind of surface to air missile system; most of which previous & current production are being supplied to Ukrainian forces through proxy states in the EU and elsewhere right now, to help the Ukraine fight off the Russian invasion & Russian armed forces & Russian soldiers. This Stinger missile system is expensive, all said for the command module, launcher tube and a single missile, perhaps $35,000 more or less depending on the seller on the dark Web who will willingly ship one if paid enough bitcoins. With bitcoin, the purchase enables the buyer to remain unknown to the seller & the seller to remain unknown to the buyer. The transaction exchange updated onto the public ledger. When the buyer pays the seller, an edit to the blockchain, computed on mining rigs, made that assigns the bitcoins to the seller from the buyers account, updates the buyers & sellers account balances to represent the coins moved from one party to the other & shares this on the blockchain, with all computers that mine verifying encrypted transactions, constantly. In a way, mining rigs are like a distributed elastic cloud compute platform that enable crypto currencies to function without any centra authority, bank or government, just like Amazon.com leverages infrastructure built by other people!
I have a random X miner that acts like a 270 space heater running 24/7 in my bedroom, that I made out of a 2019 home-built gaming rig, that uses 3 graphics cards, NVIDIA GTX-1650, to produce 86Mh/S or eighty six million hashes per second, which the Nice Hash software using different mining algorithms inside a "bulldozer" software environment inside a shell scripted runtime that runs as a executable in Windows 10 as an application, that leverages our highspeed internet connection on Comcast to constantly compute blockchain hash math & accounting calculations for what is known as Random X mining, or the compute capacity needed for all of the non-bitcoin blockchain crypto-coins other than bitcoin, since bitcoin is only profitable to mine on hard to buy ASIC miners, or application specific compute elements (look like a shoebox), specialized computers made with hundreds of ASIC chips, each chip massively parallel (millions of cores) with optimized gate logic tuned specifically for the highest performance hashing, exclusively. I get paid for mining, in tiny fractions $0.25 USD2022 worth of BTC at a time, many times per day, 24/7. Profitability for such a rig depends on electricity prices per kWh & the BTC payment for the hash power of your computer. I have been doing this for about 2 years & it's more than paid off my initial computer & rig building costs 3X more or better now & continues to make a net ROI since my equipment all fully depreciated or the sunk capital costs are minimized completely while electricity and dusting the rig Maintenace time and effort are my main ongoing operating costs, plus the internet, but we use internet access in many other ways at home other than for mining. I am holding these BTC for the long term, as a long-term investment, since the short-term volatility or price swings of BTC so extreme. This is why BTC ETF's do not make sense- they would increase exchange fluctuations or BTC volatility, something the FTC & SEC agree with me about!
The reason governments do not like Bitcoin or BTC is because it's sometimes used to launder money, to fund & facilitate crime & illegal trade & illegal activities. Many online illegal drug marketplaces (emerge, killed, new emerges) (whack a mole) keeping law enforcement guessing, operated by allowing people to buy LSD or real Heroin (not Fentanyl), paying with BTC. That gets to a point about legalized cannabis. When weed was illegal, no one ever knew what they were getting when they purchased cannabis from a friend. It was always dried cannabis flowers of an unknown strain, random if you will, of different strengths or potencies, so dosing was always a guessing game. Thankfully each puff of smoke has a relatively small dose, so it's easy for the cannabis smoker to titrate to a comfortable high without overdosing, easily. Thankfully with smoking cannabis, the dose to toxicity ratio very wide or the curved graphical relationship between a dose and its effect relatively flat, as there are literally almost no documented deaths from THC overdose.
Alcoholic beverages on the other hand, kill people with alcohol poisoning regularly, because ethanol has a much steeper dose to toxicity curve or narrower range between the amount of alcohol that will get someone buzzed or drunk and that dose which will give the person a total loss of consciousness or acute alcohol poisoning. The liver can only break down so much ethanol at a rate related to the livers health & size, which depends on the alcohol consuming persons physical size, age, gender & even race or strain of human, since liver functional capacity varies based on all of those factors. With beer for example, it says on the bottle, can or case, what the exact ABV is, typically around 4% for lighter beers, up to around 9% for imperial IPA or stouts or barely wines. Wine itself typically 11-18% ethanol, while spirits or hard alcohol around 40% ethanol content.
The point being that when something like alcohol, taxed controlled & regulated, it minimizes harm to the consumer by allowing consumers to make informed choice, since they can know how much alcohol they are putting in their body using information from the product labels. If someone buys black or grey market heroin from a drug dealer, they have no practical way to know the strength or potency or to assay the purity, and its well known that throughout the value-chain from poppy plants to heroin, the illicit heroin cut with adulterants, including Fentanyl, which is cheaper & easier to synthesize synthetically with organic chemical manufacturing & laboratory techniques that can be easily learned online, or in amazingly educational books like TIKAL or PIKAL by Dr. Alexander & Anne Shulgin, for example, which the DEA calls a "Cookbook for Psychedelic Drugs" like the extensive section on how to extract DMT from a plethora of natural plant sources in nature. Dr. Rick Strassman's Spiritual Molecule, hit erowid.com & read about DMT :P Illegal drugs have no labels indicating their strain, type, kind, purity, strength, potency, content, ingredients, or other useful information, like instructions on how to use it wisely, what not to do with it, warnings & safety information, like the Surgeon General's warning labels on boxes of cigarettes or on alcohol packaging labels. With illegal drugs, users are flying blind. Though legal drugs have problems too.
The point is, when drugs are illegal, drug users have no idea what they are getting and many heroin users or opioid addicts are dying of fentanyl overdose because unlike heroin, fentanyl has a steep, hockey stick shaped dose to toxicity ratio, such that the difference between a pleasurable dose of fentanyl and that of a fatal overdose, so small that it's hard to measure up, even with a highly precise scale called a laboratory balance; so sensitive to mass differences that the measuring plate located inside a little glass enclosure with a loading door, to keep air variations from affecting the nanogram level precision measurement. You open the door & load your sample, then close the door and allow a little time for the temperature & mass measurement to stabilize. Think hospital lab precise analytical scales that cost as much as a motorcycle. Most druggies do not know the purity of the smack they are buying & do not own or know how to operate a precise scale to measure out their hits of fentanyl laced heroin accurately.
Many prescription drugs kill their users, patients, who were prescribed these drugs with terrible possibly fatal side effects like PML a deadly brain infection, by their board-certified doctors. You probably know of meth or methamphetamine as toxic stimulant that causes brain damage; did you also know that in America methamphetamine a schedule 2 prescription drug. I had a friend in high school that was diagnosed with narcolepsy, who was prescribed 30mg of methamphetamine tartrate, citrate & hydrochloride salts pressed with binders & colorants & labeling impressions front and back inside a rotary high volume pill press by a pharmaceutical company. He would take prescription meth pills every morning & afternoon, to help him stay awake during the day. Many of my friends in college were prescribed and taking similar stimulant amphetamine salt mixes, like Adderall, to combat tiredness from a lack of high quality or enough sleep and to improve their academic & athletic performance; to address ADD or ADHD symptoms, caused by excess sugar intake & glucose toxicity mostly, etc.
With prescription drugs, the purity listed right on the bottle label or easily available online, well known, publicly available information, just like the taxed legally sold alcohol & recently legal cannabis products. When people buy cannabis products in states where cannabis legal, the cannabis consumer can learn about the CBD & THC content levels, terpene content, strain type and more. Cannabis comes in foodstuffs like edibles, drinks, concentrates, vaporizer cartridges, as flower or pieces of dried weed; sticky glistening little chucks of female cannabis plant flowers covered in sparkly trichomes crystals the cannabis plant produces as sunscreen, since it originally grew in high alpine zones where the UV levels are more intense. In deserts & hot arid environments, one strategy that plants use to protect against sun damage is to put crystals of salt or similar high refractive index materials, on the outer sky facing surfaces of the stems & leaves, like salt scrub or salt brush plants for example, to help the plant minimize evaporative losses of water.
Drug addicts need help from social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, or friends and family members, not criminal inditements, felony convictions for drug possession & other non-harmful crimes without victims. Many illicit drugs' laws are equivalent to a hypothetical law preventing overweight people from buying sugary foods or beverages. No law like this exists because people would not stand for it, the same reason that alcohol prohibition failed miserably in the United States. Back then illegal alcohol sales funded all sorts of other criminal activities in organized crime networks. Cannabis, for example, Schedule 1, at the federal level in the United States, illogical scientifically in the medicine of pharmacology or fake news or misinformation in terms of the lack of empirical science in the scheduling.
Cannabis should have been unscheduled or Schedule 2 if the law made rational sense. I promote & endorse facts, factual thing, reality, science & technology, the truth, whatever is real in reality in the real world. I am not great with grammar or writing in English as you are well able to tell from reading my blog articles, that was never a strength of mine as a student. I care more about the content or information, what someone is like, not what they look like. The content of their character as a person, not their appearance. Appearances can be deceiving. You cannot read a book by looking at the cover. Like camping and cannabis, you can't really know about them without doing it. Start with a 10 mg dose & go light & wait 4 to 6 hours to see how your body responds to edibles, where most people start with legal weed.
The human body contains CB1 & CB2 receptors. THC & CBD are modulators of these receptors. The brain makes its own cannabinoids called Anandamide or the bliss molecule sort of like THC and 2AG the anti-inflammatory mediator sort of like CBD. Phyto-cannabinoids, from the cannabis plant, namely THC & CBD plug into these naturally occurring human receptors, that are located in the human brain and most other organs of the human body. This is why some people experience unpleasant side effects when they eat too many edibles, or smoke too much weed concentrate. The old wisdom, drink to be merry, not to be drunk; the same can be said of cannabis, so go with smaller doses at first & less is more. Abusing cannabis can reduce the brains production of Anandamide & 2AG, which can give rise to addiction potential & other problems, psychological, social or emotional.
Banks have been using digital ledgers on their private networked servers, to facilitate credit & debit purchasing transactions all along, for decades. With Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the network of miners getting paid for their compute capacity utilization, are editing & sharing the blockchain ledger. With credit and debit, there is no privacy, the buyer & seller can learn a lot about each other. Governments can shut down your debit or credit card, bank account access & other official digital currencies easily.
With Bitcoin, it's the wild west & there is privacy. When a person purchases something with BTC there is also no buyer protections. For example, if the seller sends the wrong item, there is no way to get a refund, no one to call for customer service and support. With credit and debt, the issuing bank offers a lot of protections with credit cards & some protections with debit cards, though I highly advise that you never use your pin number in public, and only use your pin number at the bank ATM machine. When buying something with your debit cards, always hit enter or cancel *read the terminal screen for instructions* and use your debit card like a credit card; the money comes out of your account instantly just like a normal debit transaction, but you are not giving away your pin number to random potentially unsecured or compromised payment terminals which can be easily hacked.
I try to catch people who are modifying ATM machines or payment terminals with skimmers or similar card capture technologies. I roll around with an EDC hand cannon waiting for someone to do something harmfully illegal so I can take justice into my own hands by holding the person with force until the police that I call with my smartphone show up to arrest the criminal, bad person or wrongdoer. I carry a folding tactical knife that I hand sharpen on a whetstone regularly to keep its razor-sharp edge honed. I also regularly carry pepper spray or bear spray devices for self-protection - I call this knife, gun & pepper spray combo a triple play, where the pepper-spray the default, the knife is backup & the pistol for times where the knife not enough.
I studied & practiced martial arts growing up & can use my hands as a last resort, to disable an attacker. I can take a pen or pencil or rocks or dirt or a bag or utensil or cup or mug, furniture, office supplied, books, paper, anything near me, to bludgeon, strike, hit, stab, blow, knock, or similarly impart mechanical energy into the criminal or bad person. I know how to poison people, how to make IED's, how to use radioactive materials & explosives to cause great harm; think CBRNE; I was trained by the best & am a Patriotic American and Defender of Democracy & Freedom & will never allow myself or anyone near me to come to harm if I am able to stop it.
I support the Ukraine and other democracies like Taiwan & hate the CCP in China. I am a Patriot & serve & protect people around me, as part of my goal of helping other people and to stay prepared & sharp & on point, of a clear sound mind, ready to take on anyone or any problem constantly. I sleep lightly & listen for badness, excited by the possibility of stopping crimes in action. I have a history of regularly calling the police to report crimes that I observe. I am community natural helper and actually care about helping other people. Helping people gives me an enhanced sense of purpose, meaning & value as a person. This is also why I believe in blockchain technology & run a crypto mining rig / in part to leverage my idle gaming computer hardware, that was purpose built to play CS:GO (Steam gaming, Counter Strike: Global Operations) buttery smooth high framerates & thus fluid gameplay; I have an ASUS F17 gaming laptop for that now & it works great, with the same i5 and GTX1650 though in lower thermal dissipation TDP variants so the weaker 150w power-adapter cable can energize the discrete chips sufficiently. I am actually writing this posting on that gaming laptop ^^
So, credit and debit for the surface web e-commerce & first-person brick and motor purchases at Target, Safeway, Friedmeyers, Costco, Marshals or similar, at restaurants & other physical businesses nearby. Crypto currencies can be used in legal surface ways like credit & debit but are sometimes used for other privacy focused transaction where the buyer & seller do not want to know about each other & want to keep their personal identity private or unknowable. Those who have much, stand to lose much, if manipulated. Someone with nothing to lose a very dangerous person, they will kill you for almost any reason. When a person is destitute & hungry, their brain cannot afford to engage benevolent higher thinking with extra calories liberated by wealthy access to excess foods like most Americans, for example.
Not safe to travel on foot in Seattle anymore, because there are too many homeless criminals wandering around with nothing to lose, who have many felony convictions, who have been in and out of jail for their entire adult lives, roaming around, causing Dying Seattle, the death of Seattle businesses, all while overcrowding the sidewalks and other places with trash dump style camps of filth & a disgusting lack of sanitation or hygiene. The Seattle City Council meanwhile confused about how to address this issue. Sensibly, it would make sense to send in scores of social workers to help each drifter & mentally ill person obtain social services to redeem & help the mentally ill homeless & drifters, druggies & weirdos.
Christ Jesus would go down & minister healing miracles to those most in need. As a Christian and Follower of Christ Jesus, believe all people can be fixed & that sometimes that requires capital punishment & appreciate that they publicly beat criminals in Singapore. I fondly reflect on that punk American, Michael Fay, who obtain fame in the news in 1994 by being sentenced to 83 days in a Singapore prison, along with 6 strikes from a cane (flogged by a long bamboo rod) publicly / that I saw on TV as an 11-year-old child :) since he thought it was cool to vandalize nearby cars with spray-paint. Some punk teenagers did that to my black car recently, sprayed bright orange hard to remove paint all over the driver's side. Sadly, I was not present, or I would have taken their paint, called the police & made sure their parents paid for the repair. I had to DIY the repair, since I am a cheapskate, frugal, and did not want to pay the extortionate repair costs at local autobody shops, out of pocket & my insurance deductible too high, in order to keep monthly rates low, for it to make sense to submit as a claim.
That gets all the way back to illegal activity, drugs of abuse, crime & banks. See, I believe the real thief the Federal Reserve, polluting the money supply with too much access that gave rise to hyperinflation, driving up gasoline, food & fuel prices much faster than wage increases, making the basics in life more unaffordable to millions of regular American people & people in other countries too, like in the Ukraine. I am not complaining, just pointing out that quantum easing in excess gives rise to increasing currency inflation of fiat currencies like the United States dollar, for example!
I see all of these MAB drugs on TV with their warnings of toxic side effects potentially fatal or worse. I know that big pharma well-meaning but ultimately profit seeking, & that the same is true of agrochemical companies, big oil or big tobacco or big alcohol or big processed food companies, like Monsanto, the grocery manufacturers association that blocked GMO labels, 3M, BASF, I know this big industrial companies are all focused on making a profit / they have to be in order to pay so many employees fair wages.
Everyone for sale, who works, everyone hustles a product or service of some kind. People even hustle themselves with labor jobs, prostitution, working at UPS or FEDEX, or worse Amazon warehouses, in construction & other physical labor jobs. Sweat equity where people invest their body into their work & make things happen. People have to do something, with their minds and muscles to make it happen, all human activity on Earth. Nothing happens automatically. You have to apply yourself to make a difference in your life. So, squeeze more life into your finite time alive and get out there into the world & help other people more & make the world a better place than when you entered it.
Thank you so much for reading my blog. The ads on this blog produce tiny of about $60 per year, so I am mostly not doing this for income LOL // who knows, maybe one day my many thousands of articles will catch on, perhaps I will get a lucky break. I hope when computers analyze what I have written they & other people will be able to tell that I am one of the good guys in the world, trying to make sense of it all & trying to make the best of life, guided by a desire to make the world a better place & an ongoing goal to help other people anyway that I can imagine. There is a great movie called School of Life that I highly recommend & book "Go Giver" that might inspire you in a similar way, hopefully!
Crypto currencies are just peer networks of miners that function to operate a blockchain ledger to keep account of coin exchanges between buyers & sellers without disclosing other information about either party. Because BTC enables quasi-absolute privacy in value exchange transactions, sometimes it's used to pay for illegal, unsavory, or questionable things; things that people should not be buying if they were executing honorable reasoning & thoughts, the way the New Testament of the Christian Bible tells Christians to conduct themselves; as ethical, moral, honest, humble, fair people, who treat other people with dignity & respect, just like our Lord & Savior, Jesus Christ, Praise be to God!
No comments:
Post a Comment