Surveillance, yes. By forcing you to maintain control of a physical token they can more easily associate you with the account.

Sony so mad at Cox for not cutting off someone’s Internet for downloading they’ll take it to the SCOTUS, but they won’t even use the frankly abusive laws they already have access to to just sue the end user? What is even going on?

Artisanal idiocy.

You’re probably right. He was the lib-left’s Best Boy a few years back, was gonna solve climate change and do cool science shit and whatever, but then I forget what exactly happened but he kinda swung the other direction.

Motivation probably doesn’t matter too much. It just highlights the systemic problem of allowing one person to have that much money-power.

Conservapedia is worse, remarkably.

Being backed by real things isn’t always great for a currency. A lot of the value in the economy is from the transformative effects of labor, not just rare metals.

207 billion is insane, but if this money was being moved around by the mass of people or their legitimate representatives rather than shareholders and VC investors gambling on the next big thing, that would stand a chance of laying to rest this kind of reckless waste.

Bitcoin particularly is a pyramid scheme, but peer-to-peer payments via block chains are useful anyway.

I got theories on what would make a better token than BTC, but key to any utility would be little or no deflationary pressure.

I’m guessing by fiat you mean government issued currency that is not backed by precious metals but by faith and credit of the issuing government.

They call it fiat because a government just declares how much of it there is.

Blockchain tokens are also fiat in this sense, it’s just that the protocol makes the declaration instead of a government.

The other notable difference is that I can buy things with USD or other government currencies. I can’t with blockchain tokens. I mean technically I can but they have to be converted first and the popular ones are mostly depictionary so you’re deeply disincentivized from using them as currency.

The value of USD comes from people taking it in exchange for goods and services, and the US government taking it as payment for taxes. The value of a Bitcoin comes from people giving you USD for it under the assumption that they can sell it for more USD later. Like a stock, but without the incidental fractional ownership of a corporation with actual capital.

It’s a cool concept though, and peer-to-peer digital payment is a good thing, but it cannot function as a store of value without a connection to the material world.

It’s not the logs or the data which they would be monitoring with an encrypted no-logs VPN. What they would be monitoring, presumably, would be the fact that you are using a VPN at all. That’s also what they would be trying to block. They might try to block it by interfering with access to certain ports or blocking certain IP addresses, but there would be limits. Even China can’t stop all VPN traffic to get around its firewalls.

Every time someone says “I can’t stand the gaslighting and abuse anymore. This time I’m leaving him.” it’s an opportunity for them to really follow through.

Sometimes we are held back more by the stories we tell ourselves than our actual capacities. And the solution is to stop telling ourselves what we can’t do, but telling ourselves that we can and even will change our situations.