We've been indoctrinated our whole lives to believe that "property" is somehow fair, rational, real, etc. Plenty of room for cognitive dissonance here.
> Rather than relying on a few giant platforms to police speech online, there could be widespread competition, in which anyone could design their own interfaces, filters, and additional services
To me this sounds something like "less walmart, more supply chains, warehouses, and storefronts." I agree in spirit, but it's the reverse of how capitalism usually works. The few giant platforms were built off the work of people who built their own interfaces, filters, and additional services. Why would we expect new/improved protocols (crypto or otherwise) to be any different?
This is a narrow view of science. If they're taking one or two courses on physical science, what are their other classes? Do they examine the hypotheses and evidence in economics, history, etc.? Or is their course load just 10% physical science and 90% indoctrination?
>you will not be able to verify centuries of scientific progress all on your own, from first principles. And this becomes even harder when you approach the softer parts of human knowledge such as economics
TBH most of economics is non-empirical ideology that's easy to debunk. More generally pseudo-science is rampant in "western science". That's another reason why this article is so ironic/islamophobic.
The author is critical of Islam, but that is hardly "islamophobic": at no point in the article does the author indicate any fear of Islam, which is what the "-phobic" construction means. "-phobic" does not mean "says negative things about" and especially does not mean "disagrees with", despite the way it's frequently used.
I frequent several datacenters in the Pacific Northwest; a couple of them are near the cheap power available in the central part of Washington State. We're on friendly terms with the staff and we talk about their other customers in general terms because it's nice to have a feel for who your neighbors are.
Two years ago the datacenter owners were contemplating whole new buildings. "We're going to run out of room next year, so we're planning another quarter million square feet down the road a bit." That expansion didn't happen. The space they opened up internally remains largely unused. One of the cages next to ours had a bunch of bitcoin mining racks, clearly at the DC's capacity for cooling . . . and they were unplugged because the customer hadn't paid their power bills. The DC wound up tossing the machines away after a few months. That parcel of land "down the road a bit" remains vacant.
I think the bitcoin "resource losses" go much, much deeper than an algorithmic tweak that would have been taken for granted a few months after introduction. [Okay, 25% is a good optimization, but it wouldn't have changed the basic game, nor the character of the companies involved]
