How is it that PoW is better though? No single individual can mine profitably anyway. You also need to be part of a pool to get some share of the profits.
It's easy to dismiss the difficulty of something when all you see is a webpage explaining things very well and simply with some cool graphics. That webpage looks really cool, but this is just a front page of the result. The backend of all the math, equations and thoughts involved wouldn't be so visually appealing. This is just the pretty part result. If you would delve into the actual math and physics that was required for this I'm pretty sure you'd reconsider that statement. Just the study of vibrations alone is probably as difficulty as whatever you're talking about. And that's just one of several areas of study that needs to be considered when making a machine like this. Then you need static mechanics, dynamic mechanics, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, knowledge of manufacturing processes, materials, among others. And each of these topics is HUGE in itself. You probably have no idea because you're a software engineer? It's easy to defend our own realm and dismiss others, when we know little about others' or all we know is based on some cool animations we saw on the web once.
Gold is a metal made in the burning core of dying stars. It doesn't really care about buyers and economy. We use gold for many purposes other than as a store of value, and that is exactly why it became a store of value. It is useful BESIDES being a store of value. Heck if you don't like gold, buy platinum or some other exotic material. Stores value just as well. Bitcoin is useless besides being a store of value. That makes it a bad store of value.
Totally agree with you on this. We're reaching a point where the services some private companies provide are becoming too important to remain private, or at least, being served in a monopolistic fashion where the user has basically no power.
'Never' is a long timespan :) It will be solved, sooner or later. The universe will be fully understood and manipulated. By us, a modified version of us, or some other entity, perhaps even one we created. 300 years ago 'electricity' wasn't even a word. We can imagine what 500 years into the future will be, with an exponentially more advanced tech, worse than a caveman could imagine the concept of 'machine learning'.
I have the opposite experience. I had fears of having heart problems, or in my head, and at some point in my life I went to doctors and they all sent me away, they couldn't find anything wrong. The more incompetent ones might have more suspicious, because they were playing it safe. Better to order more tests and not find anything, than be confident and make a fatal mistake.
One of them even went as far as telling me "Man, there's so many people sick ou there and you're here wasting your time and money while you're damn healthy. Go enjoy life :)"
Maybe doctors think differently in the US or you were just unlucky?
I've used Anki for language learning but didn't find it that useful. A problem I encountered was that while I could remember words and expressions in the Anki environment, I couldn't do it outside of it. Or I could memorize an expression exactly as it was written down, but if I saw a little variation then it was useless.
For language learning I found it works way better to use another technique: ridiculous imagery and word association. Higher initial time investment (have to spend some time for each new word in the first time I see) but after that I don't EVER need to recall it again. It just sticks. I also used that to memorize different alphabets and it's WAY easier and does feel like a superpower as opposed to just brute force memorize something by repetition and recall with no other brain connections between what we're memorizing and what we already know.
Harm maybe not, but used definitely. If you're not useful to a sociopath you will not be in their life. And if something goes wrong, you definitely incur the risk of getting harmed, either physically or mentally.
I attest to this. This book should be required reading in school. There's so much suffering in the world being done to children in the privacy of homes. That suffering goes without punishment and the victims grow up to be perpetrators or victims again (in abusive relationships). And most don't even know how that happened.