Not, even if you only consider between one and a hundred, it'll be strongly tilted toward low numbers, which means that prices, which are typically like X.49 or X.99 or more rarely X.00, will often float in the aggregate in the 40s or 90s before sales taxes in places that have them. So, if there is no sales tax, one would expect a strong band just under $1 or 50 cents, and if there are, it'll be more complicated, but still not evenly distributed across all possible cents.
err... how Bitcoin works, or how the speculative bubble around cryptocurrencies circa 2019-2021 worked?
Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example), and occasionally for international money transfers - my French father once paid an Argentinian architect in Bitcoin, because it was the easiest way to transfer the money due to details about money transfer between those countries which I am completely unaware of.
The Bitcoin bubble, like all bubbles since the Dutch tulip bubble in the 1600s, did follow a somewhat similar "well everyone things this thing is much more valuable than it is worth, if I buy some now the price will keep going on and I can dump it on some sucker" path, however.
> Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example),
For the record - the illegal transactions were thought to be advantaged by crypto like BTC because it was assumed to be impossible to trace the people engaged in the transaction, however the opposite is true, public blockchains register every transaction a given wallet has made, which has been used by Law Enforcement Agencies(LEA) to prosecute people (and made it easier in some cases).
> and occasionally for international money transfers - my French father once paid an Argentinian architect in Bitcoin, because it was the easiest way to transfer the money due to details about money transfer between those countries which I am completely unaware of.
There are remittance companies that deal in local currencies that tend to make this "easier" - crypto works for this WHEN you can exchange the crypto for the currencies you have and want, which is, in effect, the same.
Anonymity/untraceability was not the primary reason for using BTC towards black/grey markets. Bitcoin can be used pseudo anonymously , and the fact is you simply cannot send money to your grey market counterparty via any method but cash without it being flagged/canceled, and if you can't send cash (which has its own problems), bitcoin is the only option.
Online drug markets existed before BTC, and today there is a problem with "mules" being used (people who have legitimate bank accounts that are used to transfer money for groups that engage in illegal activities)
Sending money to a "grey market counterparty" has had workarounds for some time, and continues to have workarounds.
People were fooled into thinking crypto offered anonymity, and were surprised when they realised every single one of their transactions was sitting in the public chain available for anyone to read.
Digital wallets provide LEA's with clear evidence of transactions with a given party when that party's anonymity is unmasked, and it's there in perpetuity.
Had Epstein being using BTC to do business, every single one of his clients would be known.
Your last line is incorrect (by your own earlier descrdption of BTC):
> had Epstein used BTC every single one of his clients would be known
Had Epstein used BTC And we discovered his BTC address(es) we would know what BTC addresses he sent BTC to. Simply by knowing his BTC address(es) alone we would not know anything about who he sent BTC to except the addresses he sent to. And if we know only one of Epstein's addresses and only one of the people associated with one of the recipient addresses, this would not necessarily give us any information about any of the other parties involved. With opsec BTC retains the quality of pseudoanonymity (a technical term). Epstein, who is known for laundering money, likely could have converted cash to BTC without connecting his identity to the addresses many times over.
I would be very surprised to learn that pre-BTC online black markets had equivalent volume as modern cryptocurrency markets.
Mining rigs have a finite lifespan & the places that make them in large enough quantities will stop making new ones if a more profitable product line, e.g. AI accelerators, becomes available. I'm sure making mining rigs will remain profitable for a while longer but the memory shortages are making it obvious that most production capacity is now going towards AI data centers & if that trend continues then hashing capacity will continue diminishing b/c the electricity cost & hardware replenishment will outpace mining rewards.
Bitcoin was always a dead end. It might survive for a while longer but its demise is inevitable.
Great idea. As a "visual type" this would be so much more intuitive to decipher. I prefer TUIs over GUI exactly because they're simpler and work hard to focus on the essential. This is low hanging fruit to enhance TUIs.
Agree. Gist of the FA is about "calm technology". Title should reflect it better.
Also agree on everything author mentions. I can't attest to all examples but I know what a UI is.
Author mentions center of focus of attention. We should hear more often about the periphery of our attention field. Its bandwidth so to speak is a magnitude lower compared to the center but it's still there and can guide some decisions quite unintrusively to flow.
(Major) eye movements are a detriment to attention, which itself should be treated like a commodity (in case of a UI thousands use, moreso like a borrowed commodity).
I made my own web app using boring technology(1). It's not available anywhere since it's completely tailored to my own needs so probably not useful to anyone else. Also some parts of the code need cleanup and there is no documentation.
(1) SQLite/Django/Bootstrap5/Unpoly app. SQLite is used for all the data and the full text search. Huey is used for background tasks. Tinytags gets metadata from audio files. LastFM API provides similar artists functionality. YT-DLP is used to fetch music that is not easy (for me) to get (no bandcamp, only on streaming, old stuff not easy to find...). Bootstrap provides a clean look and the usual responsive stuff. Dropbox API is used to maintain a copy of the music files in my dropbox account. The app currently handles a collection of 70k files and runs on a raspberrypi behind the caddy web server.
They mentioned tabbing and screen readers quite a few times.
I found the "jumping" ordering quite concerning but further down in the article they mention "tolerance" that seems to be a way to allow the layout to be more consistent in terms of ordering.
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