It has an intrinsic value that can easily be explained. You absolutely need it for many uses (electronics, medical devices, jewelry in practice, ...).
So there is always gonna be a buyer at a non-zero price.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, has a few things going for it (fixed monetary policy, decentralization, permissionless, ...) but I am not sure about the intrinsic value. The only thing that I can think of is its network effect and derived amazing hash power that secures it. You can't recreate that easily in a new cryptocurrency.
I'd wager the intrinsic value of gold has little to do with its valuation, since the vast majority of it is used for banking and jewelry. Contrast that with metal from the platinum group, like palladium, which are heavily use for things like catalytic filters.
From an industrial point of view, gold is just fancy copper.
Gold is useful for less tangible purpose because it's accepted, and it's accepted because it's useful. BTC is similar in that respect.
Unlike the guy replying to you I think BTC has nothing going for it in practice when compared to gold. Gold has value because every government and market agreed on it. It's regulated and safely stored.
BTC is theoretically decentralized. In practice it goes through wallets and exchanges which get robbed all the time. It can't be used for any transaction because it's expensive so it's no replacement to currency. Even buying gold physically is cheaper than buying BTC (transaction costs). It's even less private than gold. I can walk into a shop, pay cash for gold and there will be no record of the transaction. With BTC the government just tracked crooks who moved BTC through the dark web and through private currencies. It leaves a huge, traceable digital trail.
Finally, BTC isn't regulated. That means a lot of the transactions are internal wallet to wallet transfers meant to "pump" the market. That's legal for BTC. So the idea that it's value is "objective" is BS.
The only people who would go into BTC in these conditions are crooks and useful idiots.
BTC was a smart idea that just doesn't work in reality. Right now it's running on the fumes of people who "believe" in it since it keeps bouncing back up. Faith based monetary systems run the world, but unlike BTC we have government to support them when we lose faith.
Equities are investment vehicles. If you choose to trade them, that's your decision - but you will lose, on average. 95% of day traders lose money [1]. Zero-sum financial instruments like futures and options and cryptocurrencies are trading vehicles. These are not the same.
Both are trading vehicles and are treated the same by traders [1] similar to the VIX. Hedge funds, asset management companies and institutions spend their time and their clients money trading, not investing [2]. For groups like these, trading is where the money is.
The VIX is a synthetic index whose value is derived from the implied volatility of the S&P 500 index options (computed from the premium of around-the-money options on the SPX cash index a certain amount of time ahead), without fundamentals, tradeable only via futures contracts and ETFs that own those futures.
It's a second derivative tradeable only via third derivative.
This is very very zero-sum.
The overwhelming majority of these actively managed funds fail to beat the returns of the S&P 500. [1]
In fact over 15 years 92% of actively managed large-cap funds trail the returns of the S&P 500.
A lot of semi educated traders frankly don't care. They follow crowd psychology based idioms with risk management. Cryptos are just a more volatile asset class to profit on.
I'm not sure if "ironic" is the right word here, but that as a direct effect of climate change, coal power plants had to shut down and cars couldn't be manufactured is certainly an interesting twist.
But also, shipping by barge uses lots less energy than shipping by rail, and far less than shipping by truck. So overall, it's probably positive feedback.
Some cynic should really do a web site that just follows up on all miracle cures that flash by the feeds.
Let's say take the top viral cure each week, and follow up how it's developing each anniversary. It could actually be really interesting, if done well.
Reading option one made me quite anxious. Having to backport a virtually infinite number of bugfixes and support for new hardware features from over 12 years of constant development sounds like a perfect way to burn out developers. I'm glad they went for the clearly more sustainable option of adopting the old data to their new client infrastructure.
It will mean people will find loads of things that won't be the same though.
Take balance. I'd be willing to bet they've done loads of bug fixes on unintended consequences of spells. So the Frostbolt of the new system might actually do a different amount of damage and slow than the Frostbolt of 1.12, once the data's been transformed.
So all the classes will probably be slightly different to how they were in 1.12 and combos that worked back then might no longer work now. Some classes might now be OP that weren't and vice-versa. Monsters that were weak might suddenly become strong, and monsters that were hard might suddenly become really easy.
Not that I'm saying it's the wrong solution, I think it's realistically the best one available to them. But it will probably result in a different gameplay experience rather than, say, just updating the visuals. How different won't be clear till later.
Don't think so. From what the article says, the majority of game defining data will remain the same, albeit modified to fit the new schema. Frostbolt will still be the same power, etc. The changes are to the global game infrastructure and how it interprets these data, so there will be some stuff that used to work that likely won't work now (eg wall walking) and things that were possible (speed hacking, water walking) that won't be possible now.
My gym actually has a few machines were the weights regularly get stuck like this. I never considered this to be a danger. Thanks a lot for sharing that. I'll pay more attention to that in the future.
I'm not on the Yoga team but work with them quite closely. There are no active plans for adding CSS Grid support mostly because the spec is kind of awkward with the ASCII-art style definitions that are very reliant on CSS as the source language. Personally, I've been warming up to the idea of using CSS Grid for UIs more and more lately after reading this post on Mozilla Hacks[0], but we haven't had many requests for adding it otherwise.
