Very cool - thanks for sharing. Will it be released for iOS?

Watch a ship sail off to sea

Without being in the sky, it is impossible to see the curvature of the Earth. However, you can always see a demonstration of this if you visit a harbor or any place with a wide-open view of the water.

If you are able to watch a ship sail off to sea, watch its mast and flag as it fades off into the distance. You will notice that, in fact, it does not "fade off into the distance" at all; instead, you will see its mast and flag appear to slowly sink. The ship sailed beyond the point at which you would see it. Just to be sure, bring a pair of binoculars with you so that you can see even farther off into the distance.

It's as if you're watching it go over to the other side of a hill. This phenomenon can only be explained by a sphere-shaped planet.

Yes, I recommend trying Beat Saber! Its a good workout too.

You gain influence over the government in two ways: you create blocks of voters too big ignore (you need enough people who essentially become virtually single issue voters that can essentially jeopardize a politician's career) or you pay for influence (lobbyists, super pacs, political donations). Since crypto emphasizes decentralization and anonymity, its going to be hard to organize something, so the second option is definitely more likely, except that in that case someone has to do the "paying" - and since you don't have a base to organize easily, its probably going to be more dependent on a single/handful of rich crypto holders to organize something like that.

I know you posted this a while back, but just remember the word "correction" for a moment, so when this happens next time you won't wonder why. So what is a correction? Well its when a market reverses a direction after a period of overvaluation. Now you yourself noted that the market, for essentially a year straight, had a meteoric upward trend. My question to you is, do you think than a asset, especially one that isn't tied to anything (meaning its purely speculative), can go up and up forever (meaning there are always buyers) without eventually some percentage of those coin holders saying to themselves "geez, I wonder if this will go up literally forever, maybe I should sell?)? Its not shocking that there was a correction, what would in fact be shocking is if it went up forever, regularly marked by huge percentage points jumps, and there were never selloffs.

For a long time they really didn't need to take it very seriously - there wasn't enough money involved in it that it really mattered to them (from their perspective, who cares if a couple of "nerds" trade a fake currency back and forth between themselves). But now, as both the number of people and the amount of money involved as increased, they've decided that its getting too big to ignore and they need to take it seriously. But there is both good and bad to "seriously" - in some cases, it could mean that they see it as a threat to their own financial systems so they want to ban it, in other cases, they might try to create protective legislation which either A) could help or B)could misunderstand the fundamental idea of a decentralized currency and hurt it. So honestly, its a bit of a mixed bag at this point.

For you to get rich you need to eventually sell - keep that in mind for a moment.

What makes anyone rich in any speculative market is a timing issue; you bought when the thing was worth X and a little bit later its worth Y, and so you sell and make the percent change between the two. Well if you assume that everyone bought when you did, then yes, its desirable that no one else should ever sell so that the thing's value goes up and you can make your money. But the problem is, there are people who bought before you, not at X (when you did), but at W, V, and T values. For them to make money, it doesn't need to go as far as Y (like it does for you), it only needs to go to your level, and BOOM, they can sell. Now that sucks for you, but put yourself in the shoes of the person who buys at Y one day (when you finally want to sell). You'll be doing to them the same thing that's been happening to you all this time. That's the only way a speculative market really works at the end of the day.

Price stability will only occur in any crypto as long 1) the volume of trading continues to increase and 2)the number of coin holders continues to increase, while no one person (or persons) holding too much of the total reserve.

I'm simplifying, but volume is important so that there are enough buyers and sellers at all times that no truly outrageous proposal for buying or selling (paying too much or too little) will be executed, since a person knows that they can always find a "reasonable" deal since there are an abundance of buyers and sellers. Low volume markets suffer from a lack of people to turn to if you want to transact: you can be held hostage by unfair offers.

The reason the number of coin holders matter (and the percents that those coin holders have) is that you never want any market to be too dependent on too few people, who can disproportionately control the price. Its why most national currencies are stable - they are distributed enough throughout the "network" that even the super rich don't control enough of the entire pool to radically effect the price.

There's always this vague assertion that people should go "do something valuable", or that people should contribute to the evolution of society/technology in some way by getting the right job or being some brilliant entrepreneur, but both of these charges assume so much and are so undefinable that they're really almost meaningless to issue. I mean, what are the truly "valuable" things? Growing crops? Building homes? Obviously, even if we wanted to, we can't all do those things - it only takes so many people to fulfill those needs. What then are the great future contributions to society/technology? Even if those things could be narrowly defined, I'm guessing that really only less than 1% of people could meaningfully contribute towards them anyways - unless I'm missing something and everyone is secretly just one step away from being a brilliant scientist.

So the rest of us fill the time working for whatever people are willing to pay for. If the most efficient way to do that is working in factory building car parts, or creating digital illustrations for a book, or selling smartphone contracts, or making youtube videos, or holding onto an asset that later someone else will want for more money - who can say which one of these things ranks the best  as far as "meaning" goes, since, beyond the truly basic (food and shelter) and beyond the truly transformative, what, at the end of the day, really is meaningful?

Bill Gates is obviously a very intelligent man, however, like anyone who is successful, its easy for him to speak about subjects with the presumption of expertise (and for others to believe his opinion has weight) when really he's no more of an expert in this area than anyone else who has a passing familiarity with crypto. Its like when a doctor speaks about the stock market and other people think that his opinions are inherently noteworthy because of his perceived intelligence - they fail to realize that specialized knowledge in one field, which may itself be an indicator of great intelligence, means nothing when it comes to another field which requires just as much specialization to understand. So that said, Bill Gates can say whatever he wants about crypto, but as someone who is not active in the space, I could honestly care less what he's thoughts on the subject are.

I don't have an answer, but HODL probably isn't a great strategy, not just for dealing with whales, but in general. The question is - can you imagine a maximum conceivable price for Bitcoin? If you can (if we are assuming that the price can't fundamentally go up forever), then eventually a HODL strategy will invariably screw you. The next question would be, can you imagine when this conceivably high price might come? Obviously no one can. I mean, for all we know, it might have already happened. The point is, HODL needs to be couched with careful analysis.

They could definitely kill it. In most cases, I don't believe it would be in the form of "outlawing" crypto, or anything that overtly dramatic, instead it would be something like banning/closing exchanges, or banning banks from receiving fiat from exchanges. They might do this kind of thing to prevent capital flight during a crisis, if that capital flight took the form of people bailing in mass on their countries' currency (think Venezuela if the people had more agency). Regardless of why they did it, this would effectively collapse the price, especially if enough major governments did so.

The idea that bitcoin could somehow eliminate unemployment is literally insane.

I think you misread their intent a little bit. For any wildly speculative investment (I mean, lets be honest, as great as bitcoin is, its prone to very dramatic moves - both positive and negative) its important to couch to investors that "Hey, this isn't a sure bet. You need to be emotionally prepared that you could lose big time." This is especially true for people who really haven't done their homework and don't know anything about crypto, but have simply heard "wow, bitcoin is going up like crazy". The basic idea when investing in anything, I think, is that a person should be emotionally/financially prepared that yes, they could lose everything, and not to invest in a way that, if any particular investment went south, it woulnd't ruin you.

I think this would be burden for most charities, as now they've be forced to hold an asset with wildly fluctuating values, and now they've been made into a bit of speculator in a fairly (by most standards) complicated market. Moreover, they'd have to report on a donation like this, which could also be fairly complicated. Honestly its better to just exchange bitcoin into fiat then get to charity if that's what you're trying to do.

I think this is pure insanity. There are about 16.95 million bitcoin in circulation right now (there will be more by 2022, but lets just take that number). If bitcoin's price hit 250,000, the total value of all bitcoin would be 4,237,500,000 (4.2 trillion). Now consider that Japan, the number 3 economy in the world, has a GDP of about 5 trillion - that GDP represents EVERYTHING that they make (127 million people + some of the largest businesses in the world). So if someone thinks that an asset, tied to NOTHING, will rival in 4 years the 3rd largest economy in the world simply based on... what? FOMO? than I think that person is wrong. I'm not saying that its price won't rise, I'm not saying that bitcoin doesn't have value or purpose, but this kind of thinking is guaranteeing disappointment.

Governments generally like to regulate and controls things so that they can redirect resources to their own self perpetuating interests. This isn't conspiratorial; it happens because at the head of each bureaucracy are people who have a job, like their job, and want to justify continuing their job. They need to find reasons to keep their budget and to expand it, which means they need to find problems to solve so that they can show their constituents that they're doing "something".

That said, crypto represents a bit of a problem for them doesn't it? Its hard to trace, which makes it hard to track and hard to tax. It allows for peer-to-peer transactions, which means there is no role for them in the facilitating of that transaction, no bureaucrat who needs to approve it. They can't print it, which means they can't control it. Since they don't get anything from it, it doesn't immediately expand their power or justify their existence. So how can they relate to it in a way that justifies their role? Well, it makes a great "problem" that they can solve, since they can say its the currency of crime. They can say that, whenever it crashes its because it wasn't regulated by them. I think that its infinitely more likely they'll try to punish it then help it, since they don't gain anything from helping it.

It always saddens me to see someone speak outside of their realm of knowledge in an authoritative manner. Bill Gate's estimation of crypto is no more meaningful than that of the guy at the grocery store, or the manager of a bank, or that of a dentist - its not to say that they can't have valid opinions about things - its just that being generally intelligent, or being successful in a single field (or even several fields), doesn't necessarily mean that one has any special credibility outside of their realm of expertise. What I'm trying to say is, I don't really care too much about Bill Gate's opinion on the military tactics, I don't care about his opinion on advancements in aviation, and I don't care about his opinion on crypto, not because I think he's dumb (he's obviously not), its just his success in Microsoft and personal computers doesn't automatically confer him valuable insights into other fields (or, we should say, more valuable of an opinion than any other person).

On the subject of whether or not crypto has led to the deaths of people - that same argument could be applied just as ignorantly as to cash, since, afterall, haven't drug cartels (which have committed horrible crimes) been using cash as a medium? Now the counter to this will be that a feature of crypto's nature is its anonymity, but again - a cash transaction is not immediately tracked nor reported to any authority. Consider this: whether I give a homeless man $10 or $5000, does anyone else know unless I tell them? Of course not. If anything, the fact that to transform crypto into any kind of fiat (which is what these parties need) often requires an exchange, in a certain sense, there may be more identifiers, since its rather hard to mask an exchange's deposit to a bank.

I agree with the fundamental point - Bitcoin is the legacy brand and will always be around, and part of its success is that it is, as far as the wider public goes, what people think of when they think "cryptocurrency". That said, in my mind ETH's relationship to ICOs creates a situation where owning it is often a prerequisite to involving oneself with the most explosive thing happening in the cryptosphere right now (and in the foreseeable future), which means that it will continue to have an immediate reason for it to be purchased. I think this means that ETH has a more logical reason for ultimately being the more dominant coin. This doesn't mean that it'll happen, or that Bitcoin will somehow fade away entirely even if it does, its just that I think there are arguably more reasons why ETH should be appraised as more valuable than bitcoin.