China has been cracking down on crypto-currency related things perpetually since 2013 bubble. People used it as an boogyman every time the price went down. It won't matter in the end just as it never did before.
I see no issue with storing 24/192 multichannel audio like what comes on blu-ray audio discs, or DSD streams. For my current hard drive situation, I could store 5 GB per song and easily have enough space to have a very large catalog. But drive space is only getting cheaper.
I'm not talking about noise or other artifacts from the conversion process. I am talking about differences in bass and treble balance that come from different engineering in the converters at different frequencies. In some converters, there are actually completely different circuits that engage for different frequencies. The converters that I have experienced do this, and they all have a noticeable effect on what we hear.
As an engineer, those extra samples are never wasted, and as a listener, I could care less about the "wasted space." Drive space is meaningless at this point. When I buy a piece of audio, give me the highest quality available and I will make my own decisions regarding the frequency I want to listen to it at. The reasons behind not giving the user the highest quality possible all sound like a misguided excuse to prevent piracy.
I doubt that is the case. Most systems which I have used actually sound better at the higher sampling rates. This is not because the sampling rates cause anything to sound better, but because the hardware works better at those rates. In a blind test, you wouldn't be able to decide which one you liked better, only that there is a difference. At least on the machines I have, there are some clearly audible differences.
Why don't the ETH people actually put out some decent templates for smart ICO contracts. It seems nonsensical that their platform is supposedly a "world computer" designed to enable smart contracts when a vast majority of the created contracts fail because of being hacked.
I invested in the ETH pre-sale and have done very well from it, but I have been selling a bit lately because I think someone else will come along with a system that open sources some really solidly vetted template contracts that have been thoroughly penetration tested by professionals.
You are either lying or misinformed. The "big block camp" absolutely does think a user's ability to validate the blockchain is worth keeping. This is why proposals that scale blocks according to Moore's law have been created. This is also why proposals exist which allow flexible block sizes based on need.
You are also ignoring the fact that for most of bitcoin's existence, block sizes were soft limited by miners as appropriate. With soft limited or flexible block sizes, just because big blocks are used sometimes when transaction volume is high does not mean that we will see gigabyte block sizes every 10 minutes for all of time.
The root of the debate is that small blockers have conveniently chosen to ignore the reality that markets and market participants can regulate themselves.
In the small blocker's mind, keeping the power in the user's hands means making bitcoin so expensive that the only people who can use it directly are banks and governments that offer sidechain connections to other networks. They blather on about decentralization while the reality is they are the ones creating centralization.
It is a questionably convenient choice for small blockers because it forces centralization to things that aren't actually bitcoin which is the most logical desire of governments or other bodies who wish to subvert bitcoin.