sweasel.com

Well, that currency is no more fictitious than most of the other national currencies.

Did you see that? I just spelled fictitious and currencies without spellcheck!

and Alita Battle Angel is out on VUDU tonight, woohoo!

I got in a couple years ago.Portfolio sitting at 20.8k. Hoping this will allow me to retire in three years or less. (HODL) Hold on for dear life.

Sorry, but…this sort of stuff has severely-limited fascination-value for me, personally – about the same level of overall interest as watching squashed ants turn putrid and/or dried-up-and-blown-away on a cracked sidewalk. Comes from the decision I made long, long ago, to never get personally, directly involved in anything even modestly financial in alleged nature that I do not understand (and am totally-unable to find out just how it works, despite numerous attempts to determine exactly that, from people who are supposedly quite knowledgeable on the subject).

To wit: Despite a number of rather-thorough attempts to find out, I am – to date – unable to wrap my (admittedly-aging) brain usefully around the whole “BitCoin” thingy. I just don’t grasp just how a “purely-electronic currency” of any sort functions – much less, how anyone can “gain” from transactions involving same…

Anybody wanna take a shot at explaining how it allegedly “works”?…

People probably got bogged down trying to explain how they’re created, JS. Or how they’re verified. That’s interesting stuff (to me, anyway) but nonessential.

How it works is, there are only so many bitcoins. And each has an identifying number. The value goes down when somebody with a lot of them decides to cash them in. For the most part, though, it goes up – like every limited commodity.

Think of it like trading goods and services for diamonds, if diamonds were very slowly mined and each had an identifying number.

Value of my £50 this morning: £116.40.

My kid was mining bitcoins for years. Seemed sketchy to me, the stuff of Internet drug markets. He accumulated about 11 that way.

Fast forward to 2017, he sold two at the absolute peak of the market ($20K each) and made the downpayment on his new home.

So I’m in too, and I am HODL

Blockchain – it’s the new hot thing in what we used to call ‘Data Processing’, then I(formation) T(echnology), then whatever the hell we’re calling it now. Probably “on the cloud”. Which is insanity since YOUR data (music, photos, literature, personal) is being stored and kept by people YOU don’t know. And they didn’t gather it, YOU give it to them. If you’re okay with that, well trust me…you’re nuts.

Back to Bitcoin….
There’s no ‘accounts’ it’s all stored in the blockchain that moves from place to place. Millions of copies of it. Making it hard to ‘fudge’ because you have to get all the copies and ‘fudge’ each one to cheat once it’s on the chain.

So it’s a public record, millions of essentially identical copies as it were. But wait, there’s more!

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp

And it’s all I freakin heard about last year, but now the new shiny thing is DEVOPS.

Tech people are like 5 year olds.

Now get the hell off my lawn.

I admittedly know as little about Bitcoin as I do about floral taxonomy.

In fact, I am not even sure that I really even understand the difference between a Bitcoin and a Tulip.

Quite agree, Durnedyankee! ‘The cloud’ = somebody else’s computer.

Speaking of data processing

H. Ross Perot – RIP.

Stellar lumens sounds like something from Harry Potter. Which seems apropos for an invented currency backed by… blockchain magic!

Trust me, after this short video you will feel like you understand bitcoin and other cryptos.

https://youtu.be/bBC-nXj3Ng4