Chappelle is cool

 I watched the last release from Dave Chappelle ... and it was cool. Perhaps it wasn't ground-breaking. But it was cool - and yet people will still get on their high horses about it. In this case, the (I would presume) small minority of Karens in the trans community continue their agenda to attempt to bring down Chappelle due to a few jokes at their expense. Notably the 'team TERF' statement mid-way through his set. But, what they never fail to mention, is how he actively nurtured a trans comedian and gave her a chance many never would. He strived to improve her stand up and, when he was vilified after his first Netflix special, she defended him at her expense. Perhaps the retaliation from her community didn't drive her to suicide ... but it didn't help.

 

 

 

 

From all I've seen of Chappelle he uses his pain and frustration for good and to spread love. Your scape goat is not him. Go find yourself another martyr or, perhaps, learn to forgive and love instead. Even Bill Maher is on the side of rational thought ... which doesn't hurt one bit.

I win

My mind regales back to an experience back in my youth where I was in a position to play a formerly hearing, but presently deaf, opponent at checkers - who was not even a native English speaker. And yet, he would attempt to communicate to us in English, despite it neither being native, nor within the realm of his hearing.

 

 

For, despite the onset of years, he was still a formidable opponent and would let out a blood-curdling and hearing-unbridled 'I win!' upon actually winning. And we couldn't do anything but accept our loss and reset the board while somehow winning from having experienced something so life-affirming - and at such a young age.

 It was a magical time. He may have passed on since then ... but I still remember.

Bitcoin is a scam

Ah cryptocurrency, how young you are. I am waiting for the day when I can travel to any country and not have to be extorted each time I need to buy something in your native currency, and so, bitcoin was born (perhaps.) 

 

It started its life under the shroud of secrecy, what with the need to use Tor and various other steps just to simply purchase any of its currency. And yet, even with a bitcoin's receipt it remained ethereal because all you gained was merely an encryption key to the coin - from a traceability standpoint (at least) it was very hard to determine the true ownership / transaction of a bitcoin - which was music to the ears of the underworld.

 

much wow

Maybe I'm jumping ahead a little. Perhaps I need to explain the basics of what makes a bitcoin. At its most basic, each coin has a ledger (or blockchain) of all the transactions which have occurred since first being created. As the number of times it's transacted increase, the complexity of the bitcoin increase as well. The ownership of said bitcoin is dictated by the ability to encrypt its next transaction which is handled by an encryption key. And, as an added layer of complexity, each bitcoin needs to go through a thorough a vetting process to validate its authenticity after each transaction.

- or in even-more layman's -

 

Bitcoin is an encrypted currency which becomes increasingly more complicated to validate as it's bought and sold

 

And herein lies the problem. Now, before you simply write me off as some kind of naysayer, hear me out. Even if you set aside the money laundering, human trafficking, drug dealing, murdering, illegal firearms and such, the one fundamental problem is in its complexity - or the effort required to authenticate each bitcoin. And this is where bitcoin miners come into play (think gold prospectors.) To offset the exponential amount of processing required to authenticate the latest transaction bitcoin (or perhaps investors) have turned to throwing out fractions of a coin to anyone willing to throw a few CPU cycles their way to alleviate the exponentially growing effort required. Bitcoin (as a whole) is already at the stage of being compared to multiple countries when it comes to how much energy is required to validate the next transaction. The fact that it's floating around $50,000 (!) per coin as we speak has afforded many entrepreneurs the opportunity to create bitcoin mining farms which has only proved to exacerbate the energy usage for this virtual currency - even if you may be able to buy a Tesla in the near future.

Unless something is fundamentally changed with the way bitcoin works I don't see the currency surviving. It is already at the stage of requiring multiple country's-worth of energy to validate its transactions - how long until it requires a worlds'-worth of energy? Perhaps with the advent of quantum computing this can be alleviated - but, fundamentally, don't you think bitcoin has to be doing something wrong?

Ask yourself: how can this be our future currency?