HTML is a structured document format designed for publishing content online. It gives precise control over elements such as headings, links, images, sections, forms, styling hooks, and layout behaviour in the browser. But the cost is complexity.
Markdown is a lightweight document format that leans toward easy writing, reading, and sharing. It is much simpler than HTML, easier to edit by hand, and works well for notes, documentation, drafts, README files, and content that may later be converted into HTML, PDF, or other formats.
That's why I'll continue to use Markdown for most of my notes and documentation, while I'll only use HTML for "public facing" documents.
Stuff I like, I often store, or make notes of. I don't personally use RSS for it, but perhaps I should make a kebman's curated YouTube RSS feed? It'll be kinda AI heavy tho...
That tends to be the official narrative, but unsure if jet fuel burns that evenly. Though OTOH you're correct, it did start pancaking from the top, so there's that. Perhaps they were simply well-engineered skyscrapers? I guess we'll never know. Idk you're probably right.
This is probably a massive downvote waiting to happen, but I have more faith in 9/11 being a controlled demo. Not out of evil. Just to prevent New York turning into a giant domino show.
Going to Edinburgh Airport, I was reminded that the tiny water bottle I forgot in my bag could be a bomb. I just went "Oh jeez I'm sorry... Here, have some water! You look like you need it!" Then I opened the bottle and drank it. He grabbed it out of my hands and said it had to go to some lab. So I went "Ok then, the chemical compounds in there are ... H2O and perhaps some carbon...? Idk. I'm not a chemist, but I'm fairly sure the worst thing it'll do is make me burp."
But depending on local rules, you can sometimes route around the monopoly: trench your own last-mile (at least on private land), do a neighborhood co-op, connect buildings, etc. It’s sometimes expensive and you’ll hit permits/right-of-way bureaucracy, but it’s totally doable if you’ve got a few (rich) friends or a business willing to back it.
“the conduit is full” is often just BS and a super convenient excuse for incumbents to block competition indefinitely.
Romania is a good example of what happens when lots of small operators aggressively wire dense apartment blocks: brutal competition, low barrier to entry, and suddenly everyone has insane internet.
If digging is blocked, wireless works too. Point-to-point links, WISP stuff, even satellite. The main thing is: you don’t necessarily need your local ISP as your upstream, you just need a path out.
Not AI, but similar sounding incident in Norway. Some traders found a way to exploit another company's trading bot at the Oslo Stock Exchange. The case went to court. And the court's ruling? "Make a better trading bot."
Did you know that porn was quite severely censored in Norway up until the 90's? But suddenly, the censorship stopped. Why? Because of the distributed quality of the internet.
While the Norwegian state may still wish to continue censoring porn in Norway, they deemed the task too difficult and too invasive to continue, so they just dropped it entirely (except of course for certain extreme fringe cases).
I was personally shown clips by the Norwegian Board of Film Classification in the early 2000's showing both grey zone depictions, and clearly illegal depictions of film violence per the law. I am still traumatized from seeing some of that s*t. Legally btw, since they are a state authority tasked to categorize and censor such media, and also educate people with the right degrees. Yet in that meeting, when I asked them how they're handling censorship now, they kind of just threw their hands up in the air and told me directly that "We only give advice on cinema films these days. Look, we can't very well censor the entire internet without also using either extremely invasive or unfair strategies. If you really want some violent or pornographic movie, you're probably gonna get it no matter what we try to do."
So, the morale of this story is, make something ubiquitous enough, or hard enough to censor, and some states might just give up. If you build a truly decentralized system, good luck censoring it. And that was pretty much it for Norway. They had given up on the idea of preventing people from seeing violent or pornographic contents on the internet.
Within political science we speak about effective ways to participate politically. Sometimes that's not screaming slogans outside some government buildings. Sometimes that's simply building resilient and forward secure distributed systems.
Btw. as a side note, the bad guys are still taken. Instead of thought policing entire populations, they're now tending to the guys doing actual harm. The anti encryption bills are just smoke and mirrors to get you to give up essential liberties, so they get more control. It has little or nothing to do with protecting children and you know it.
I beg to differ. As long as we have gentlemen like Pavel Durov getting arrested at French airports, it's definitively at technical question. A decentralized and distributed chat protocol with distributed devs and owners would make it impossible to arrest any one individual, and it would make it exceedingly hard to censor such a platform. But you are perhaps a fed? xD
Is this a good time to plug the creation of chat protocols running over distributed hash tables (DHT) (essentially a decentralized way of creating mini message servers) and with forward security and end-to-end encryption? I made a POF in Rust but I don't have time to dev this right now. (Unless angel investors to help me shift priorities lol...)
Perhaps they could do as on Stack Overflow, and let a downvote cost one point from your accrued points? Or perhaps that's too much of a re-design. It could regulate spam downvotes though. (I think the biggest problem with SO is that your point pool is visible, with gold and silver and so on, which leads to anyone with a high enough sum being treated differently, although that might actually not reflect competence or expertise.)
You can buy or swap it directly from someone else who has crypto without a middleman, and there are services that provide this option for free. For instance this guy bought a car for Bitcoin in Ukraine. ^1 And it saved his life! Depending on the country you may also use it directly for groceries.
The technology is kinda like the telephone in 1880's. A lot of peeps were very sceptical towards it and thought of it as merely a toy, not least because it wasn't widespread and thus the use case for it wasn't well known.
Please refrain from putting words in my mouth. I never said that Bitcoin doesn't have fees. Inventing arguments against things I never said is very uncool.
With that said, using Bitcoin to send value across jurisdictions is still seamless and far cheaper than most alternatives, except perhaps for some other cryptos...
As for using Bitcoin to pay for stuff, sure there are fees, but then there are also fees for using banking services, except more of them are conferred to the vendors and to other banking fees, thus making Bitcoin a pretty great alternative anyway. However it's not the fees alone that makes Bitcoin a preferred choice over banks. It's the whole package, of unconfiscatableness, cutting out middlemen, privacy, and so on, and I happen to think the small fee you pay for that package is a lot better than what you get with fiat. Either way, that doesn't take anything away from the fact that you can do a lot more with crypto than you can with transactions stored in a centralized database.
> a judge may order you to hand over your bitcoin, or face jail time for contempt of court etc.
First the judge must establish that you indeed own the coins within reasonable doubt, which is hard enough on its own considering that Bitcoin doesn't store personal data. Then she must pry the keys from your brain, while proving within reasonable doubt that you haven't forgotten them. And if you have forgotten them, then she can't prove whether or not it's on purpose, so your sentence will likely be commuted. Because at that point there's a higher chance that it's the state committing a crime than you. Meanwhile if you had a bank account full of cash, all the bank would have to do is to freeze it, just like in Canada. You just can't do that with Bitcoin unless you keep the coins on a centralized exchange. And most smart owners don't.
As for bandits and robbers, they exist everywhere, but most of them won't know that you have crypto in the first place, because it can't be readily seen. And so it would be unreasonable of them to risk life in prison just for the off chance that you might own it. Cash or gold, on the other hand... Either way, that's not a reasonable argument against the unconfiscatableness of Bitcoin. It's certainly far less confiscatable than cash, digital or otherwise, and its unconfiscatableness is far superior to that of physical valuables. That's the point, and not that it's stored in some fictional fortress or No-Room (see Dune lore if you don't know what the latter is).
> Regulation resistant: see above. Also, depends crucially on anonimity, which doesn't hold up either.
The argument holds up just fine, because giving up your anonymity is voluntary and not required for Bitcoin to work. Digital cash, on the other hand... And even if the state suspects you of crossing their regulations, they would #1. have to know about it, which isn't likely, #2. they'd have to have good reason to believe you broke their regulations intentionally, and #3. they'd have to spend an enormous amount of resources to get all the evidence, and push the case, which means they'd more likely focus on bigger fish. But if they do spend all those resources on you, it increases the chance that you're living in a horrible surveillance state, and so your best course of action is really to move to a better place, and countries like that do exist. And so the argument still holds perfectly, that Bitcoin is indeed regulation resistant. The reason for that is because state actors (or criminals) cannot in any meaningful way stop transactions that go in and out of different jurisdictions, even if those states are adversarial to Bitcoin or not. In order for them to do that, they'd basically have to shut down the Internet entirely, and not even China does that!
Also please take note of the word resistant. As you may know that doesn't mean airtight or 100%. Most people willingly give up KYC information to central exchanges to trade it, for example. Well, then you voluntarily comply with regulation, so it still holds that it's coercion and crime resistant. And in giving up personal information, it can also be argued that you in fact increase crime resistance as a trade-off, so doing it isn't even a bad trade, say if you want to do it in order to trade on a centralized exchange!
> Crime resitance: much worse than digital money, which is insured and much better protected by the state.
Oh, so your state pays back money that has been robbed from you? Neat! :) Sorry for the sarcasm, but I really expected better from you... Where I'm from, state sanctioned insurance funds sadly only covers bankruptcy. With that said, insurance of self custodied coins is of course quite possible though completely voluntary. And as if that isn't enough, most exchanges also insure your crypto by default, thus voiding the latter half of your argument.
Even so, insurance is a completely different matter to crime! Because when it comes to crime, police everywhere are obliged to investigate any criminal theft of value, no matter if it's cash or otherwise. So I don't see how somehow owning crypto suddenly makes you any less protected by the state. If not, the New York couple who stole billions in crypto this year would be set free.
In fact, since the ledger is public and accessible to all, there is a really great argument for crypto owners being better protected than if they merely lost cash. Especially since you can stop criminals by publishing the ownership of your wallet to exchanges. The police are thus far more likely to catch crypto robbers than if you lost cash.
> Relative privacy: only works for btc-to-btc transactions, or if you spend significant effort.
The neat thing here is that you actually don't have to spend significant efforts to keep Bitcoin private, especially if you generate a new address for each new coin received or sent, which is pretty trivial within this technology. And it's only getting more secure with the Lightning Network. So in sum Bitcoin is moving towards becoming even more private and secure. Either way, nobody's forcing you to buy crypto on centralized exchanges. It's entirely possible to exchange it privately, and many do.
> Corruption resistance: maybe, since privacy is really bad.
Quite the opposite, privacy on Bitcoin is pretty good. Although central exchanges do store KYC data, they won't give it out nilly-willy. It's really up to you whether you want to sacrifice convenience for anonymity though. The same isn't true for most other payment methods, unless you are somehow able to get your hands on large amounts of cash without showing your ID at some point. Outside of that, there is of course a theoretical possibility of losing your privacy if you practise really poor operational security, such as transacting over unsecured channels on what you think is airport wifi.
But even though you keep your anonymity air tight, Bitcoin is still corruption resistant. It stays corruption resistant because the ledger is public, and because bad transactions can be flagged. Thus even though the exchanges or institutions might not know your name, you'll still be prevented from using the coins in your wallet if it's found that they are from illicit activity, thus incentivizing good behaviour. And so even though privacy is really good, it's still corruption resistant.
> the heyday of people using BTC for actual transactions I think has mostly gone.
So entire countries using it as legal tender doesn't impress you? Man, you're hard to please! As for El Salvador, nobody's forcing them to use the Chiva wallet. And afaik you can also transact with it with both through the legacy system and with the Lightning Network.
XRP is special in that it's distributed, but I wouldn't call it decentralized (so you're completely correct in calling it a crypto with a centralized authority). For instance it's possible for nodes to block other nodes at their whim. This is a very attractive trait for banks or groups of banks. But similarly it's a very bad trait for any smaller actor. So sure, it works, but it also gives up huge amounts of control to central authorities. I mean, if you're OK with giving up your freedom to uncontrollable inflation, then go right ahead and use it!
tl;dr: Nothing. But there are some big caveats to that.
Sure, we already have tons of currency transactions going on digitally and on-line, but Bitcoin offers something that the centralized entities cannot, and these are (in no particular order):
Unconfiscatable: Because nobody can take your bitcoins away from you unless you give away your keys.
Regulation resistant: Because nobody can stop you from trading or transacting with your bitcoins at any point if you own the keys. Bitcoin does not care about which borders it goes over, or the regulation therein. (But if you break the laws of your country by making illegal transactions, then you're of course taking a huge risk.)
Crime resistance: Granted, you can be coerced into giving up your keys, but then you have the option to flag your own account for all other parties. Since all transactions are public on the ledger, it will prevent criminal parties from using your funds with full anonymity, thus making them a lot easier to catch.
Relative privacy (but not 100% anonymity): Because nobody can really know who owns an address or a transaction unless they have access to special intel that they usually will only be privy to if they own a ton of third party hardware, software and skill (i.e. if they're operating for a totalitarian surveillance state). Or if you willingly give it up your anonymity to some central authority that promises to safekeep that information, which most buyers do, btw, which decreases regulation resistance while it increases crime resistance.
Corruption resistance: Honestly, if you want to commit crimes or corruption, then cash is a way better vessel for value, since all transactions with cash are near 100% anonymous (barring widespread bank note ID code control which is also limited), and there are several superior ways in which cash may be whitewashed if you have the infrastructure for it. Meanwhile it's surprisingly hard to whitewash Bitcoin given that all transactions are public.
I might even have missed a few value propositions, but those are the most important.
> and even today, actually using BTC for non-investment purposes is a tiny minority
This is increasingly untrue. Take the countries now adopting Bitcoin as legal tender (with the Lightning Network), for example, and the many stories of people using it to make bigger purchases.
> there is nothing here more than you can get with traditional database technology?
Here are some questions that you can test your hypothesis with:
* Can you get distributed and trust-less settlement mechanisms with a centralized database?
* Can you seamlessly send value across jurisdictions and closed borders without meddlers and middlemen with traditional database technology (regulation resistance and unconfiscatableness)?
* Can you escape coercion and control with a centralized database (regulation and coercion resistance), while at the same time attaining great protection against criminal coercion and theft (resistance against crime and corruption)?
* Can a centralized database offer the same and relative anonymity as cash?
* How would any of the above be valuable without markets and speculation? I.e. how would you know the value of what is being sent or traded with you without something else to compare it to?
If you want to answer without merely saying yes or no, then I'd love to see your answers! Perhaps you can convince me to update some of my beliefs. :)
Markdown is a lightweight document format that leans toward easy writing, reading, and sharing. It is much simpler than HTML, easier to edit by hand, and works well for notes, documentation, drafts, README files, and content that may later be converted into HTML, PDF, or other formats.
That's why I'll continue to use Markdown for most of my notes and documentation, while I'll only use HTML for "public facing" documents.