Quote from: suchmoon on Today at 02:33:25 AM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on Today at 01:38:57 AM

Quote from: philipma1957 on June 02, 2022, 06:35:24 PM

I prefer Alien 👽 space invasion.

until it actually happens.

In other words.. I doubt they are going to be nice to us... if there were to be such a thing.

Nah, come on. Of course they'll be nice to us, just like we're nice to life forms we consider inferior. The lucky ones will get killed, and others will be locked up in zoos for their own protection, or "domesticated" to entertain the overlords, or become food.

I am not really sure about how far down this alien path that I was going to want to go, and it appears that you have given this a lot of thought, suchmoon.. hahahahahahahaha

In other words, are there aliens in the room with us right now?

Please refrain from naming any particular members.. since I intended that as a rhetorical question...

Quote from: salad daging on Today at 12:13:31 PM

Quote from: AverageGlabella on Today at 12:06:37 PM

Quote from: hisslyness on Today at 11:53:12 AM

A country of 1.4B+ bans bitcoin every a few years! What's another country of 300million going do...

When that starts to accumulate with more countries following then it becomes a problem. There is not anything we can do to stop these countries but it is not good news that these countries are banning btc unless you think that people will get sick of being suppressed and in retaliation they revolt by using btc

This illustration shows what happened to the country https://www.facebook.com/Phemex.official/videos/697310468231523/

What's crypto?

Quote from: OutOfMemory on Today at 12:17:25 PM

Governments want to destroy things that they don't understand or fear.

Does anyone understand "crypto"?

Looks like homer attempted to address a clarification of ambiguity angle...

Quote from: Torque on Today at 01:30:26 PM

Quote from: AlcoHoDL on Today at 01:24:41 PM

In my humble opinion, it all comes down to the link between energy and value, complex and inexplicable as it may be. Energy may or may not create value, but value requires energy. There is no "free lunch" in this universe.

This is one of those complex, philosophical topics where the answer is "Yes, but..."

Yes to what you stated above.

But...there are so many "things" in this world today that took a lot of energy and manpower to create (and thus had high value when first created), but their value has now fallen to near zero because humans no longer value them. They don't just retain their value long term because they had a high energy input.

This could happen to any "thing" created, because value is also subjective and is applied to "things" by the emotions of human beings.

It seems that a point that you seem to be pointing out has also bothered me in terms of some of the attempts to suggest that current and future mining is ONLY valuable because it protects transactions, and surely there is a pretty damned BIG ongoing need to continue to reiterate work that has already been done.. reiterate every single coin (satoshi) that had already been issued (made available). Sure, the earlier coins were issued with a certain amount of energy / hash power that was then required to solve the hash puzzle, but every time there is a new block (tick tock) every single one of those coins (satoshis) is recognized for where it is and for where it continues to have potential to be transacted - even if it may not have moved for 13.5 years.

Since nothing exactly like bitcoin has ever existed, we cannot exactly know how the incentives are going to continue to play out, but we can attempt to project what seems to be the most plausible scenarios based on as much information that we can attempt to bring to the attempt to answer the puzzle by looking at knowns and trying to speculate about the various unknowns.

So for sure there is something to the question that bitcoin remains valuable based on both its design that gets a kind of validity from energy input - but continues to retain its value based on ongoing energy input as well as speculations that energy is going to continue to be input into it.. .and the amount of energy that needs to be inputted does not even have to go in one direction, so we could end up having a blowing up of the world in which bitcoin ends up having to rebuild too, and it could shrink to 1/100th of its earlier size, and the difficulty adjustment would adjust along with it... or at least that's what it has been designed to do, and even the energy of developers (and the public) to continue to look at the project and to make positive proposals (or even to complain) about whether bitcoin is operating in a way that it was supposed to operate or if there might be a tweak that everyone (overwhelming majority or whatever evolving consensus mechanism) might be able to agree in order to make such tweaks.. so the energy of the mindspace and the labor that goes into the matter ends up serving as another way that a different kind of energy might tie bitcoin back to the real world.. and will bitcoin blow up somewhere along the way? is bitcoin not Turing complete because it has a certain amount of ongoing touching back to various aspects of the real world through both energy but also through various kinds of human action that might be able to muster up enough social consensus to make changes.. and if NOT the status quo will continue if the changes are not sufficiently convincing?