Just out of curiosity, who else bought coins?

Why do you say Segwit would kill BTC in under 5 years? Can you provide something concrete, not based on conjecture?

Sounds like a diluted, slightly misconstrued Steve Jobs quote.

Utility refers to the harnessing of all available cores.

Let's say China has 1,000 cores and the USA has 500 cores. If China used every core every second of the day for one year straight, it's utility would be 365,000 core-days per year, maximum. With half as many cores, the USA max would be half of that, or 182,500 core-days per year.

Suppose both countries consumed 150,000 core-days of processing in a year. Which country would have the greater utilization?

The USA would since it used a higher percentage of its supercomputers resources.

Most supercomputers have cores that sit idle for weeks at a time. It is very hard to keep them all busy.

I'd like to thank everyone for their input. I've read all of the replies so far. I see I'm not the only one who had this experience. I've been googling around to get an education on load balancing and bandwidth forecasting, and it seems there are white papers that have it down to a science. In the end, the almighty dollar has its say. If a company wanted all clients to experience 100% uptime, it would be far too expensive. They coined terms such as "acceptable unplanned downtime," which should make all of the readers at least somewhat upset. A company can decide which percent of its customer base will suffer through service unavailablility, and scale their hardware deployment to satisfy that metric. Everyone outside of that fringe: tough crap. I'm not sure I liked learning about it this way.

Yeah I don't know who at Microsoft thought some of that junk was a good replacement for simple GUI objects. It's almost as if they want coders and interface designers to be totally separate, neither group to have the skills to do the other group's job.

Good job saving your hair though

By any chance can you code graphical user interfaces using C# and XAML? Someone told me that has a very steep learning curve as well as being a seemingly ridiculous "requirement" Microsoft is forcing everyone to learn under Windows.

I'm now officially fed up with CoinBase. They rapidly accept my money when Bitcoin price is rising and I purchase, but if BTC has peaked and I need to sell quickly, the app conveniently becomes busy, and cannot process my request to sell.

They're basically forcing me to take losses.

Can anyone recommend a TRUSTED app with an exchange that is quick to process all requests that is also easy to use? I would prefer one in the USA. And one that works on the iPhone.

Thanks.

It depends on your definition of economy and what is meant by inflation. Bitcoin doesn't have inflation but it has "level of difficulty" in mining. So, in a sense, it has the same type of "deterrent," or intangible force acting against the wide proliferation of the monetary unit. It's like friction in Physics. It opposes all motion and is responsible for things wearing out, so people tend to think of it as a bad thing. But then there's ice on the road, and over-reduction of friction becomes much worse.

By fine tuning the counter-force, in the real world and in the economics of bitcoin, you get the desired result of rewarding those who were the early participants.

Good luck with your project.

Just out of curiosity, from the initial list, which skills do you possess?

It's always nice to have something "in hand." A system that is entirely based on virtual transactions runs the risk of total collapse in the event a loss of centralized data, or if there's chaos once the system is restored and people disagree with the new accounting.

Still, it's hard to argue against bitcoin. It has made tremendous progress due to its wide range acceptance.

I'm not a programmer. But I am looking to chat with a few.

Although by "paper" you probably refer to "what the paper represents" and not the actual paper itself...recall the United States destroys tons of paper bills every year because it physically gets worn out. In fact, didn't Canada experiment with a new, thin, plastic dollar? I remember seeing that on TV one night.

No matter what medium backs up the currency of a nation, it will always symbolize the "atom" of that nation's "unit of work," and therefore will probably always be with us.

It's also impossible to get 100% utility out of any supercomputer on the top 500 list. The overhead required to manage so many processors requires software running on many processors themselves. The "computer" is only "super" if you can give it something massively-parallel to work on. There are many problems that are not well suited for that.

The Chinese are using many slow AMD processors that use less power than Intel. The USA uses faster Intel cores for many of its top 500 entries, and it gets greater UTILITY per supercomputer than China can achieve at present.

It's like China has bigger airplanes, but makes fewer flights with most seats unfilled.

I'm not sure what you mean by the status. It arrived. Wrapped in some tissue paper and not much else but still unscathed and fine by me.

https://s29.postimg.org/tte62zxfr/image.jpg

https://s29.postimg.org/la00o3wev/image.jpg

We've been on the way to becoming a cashless society for a while now. ATM cards are largely replacing your actual currency, and credit cards become like mini-loans to extend the cash you don't have on hand that you weren't using anyway because you have a debit card

Some people say you need to be born with certain qualities to become a very successful entrepreneur. Others say if you just work hard at something, you will achieve greatness. I don't think hard work is enough. In the first place, there's no objective measure of hard work. What someone might consider mind-bending another can do with ease. I think timing has a lot to do with it. If you recently invented an 8-track player that will never wear out, costs $2, and can play 500 songs, guess what? You're over a generation too late. You have to be in the right place at the right time, have a team of like minded people all dedicated to the same goal, and enough money to survive your first few crisis, or else nobody will ever hear of you.

Well that depends, doesn't it? If I "influence" somebody's decision-making process 100% of the time, is that not indistinguishable from "control?"

Karen seems nice. I've ordered one but it won't be here until Monday according to the tracking.