Even with line numbers it's a hell of a lot easier once you get out of the 24 line X 80 character console window and into an editor you can scroll without needing the LIST command.
A transaction fee of what? To take a fee from a transaction there has to be a transaction to take a fee from, which needs some sort of "coin" that came from somewhere. Somebody has to create a money supply and distribute it somehow. When the network first comes into existence, nobody has any money, so where does it come into being from?
Mining is what generates the coins. And you need mining because otherwise you need some other issuing organism. Without decentralized mining you get a central issuer, and that's untrustworthy and possible to shut down.
It is subtle, but PoW mining itself doesn't generate coins. It isn't like someone is digging a hole in the ground and extracting gold.
PoW miners are rewarded for correctly validating transactions, with newly minted coins.
The whole proof of work thing is that you proved that you validated a transaction by expending energy, and the network pays you for that security service.
Miners then need to sell those coins on the open market in order to pay for their capex/opex, which creates the market.
The open question is that if you have a fixed supply of coins that eventually runs out, what will carry the miners?
It'll be increased fees or the network will switch to another solution.
I believe transactions are quite optional though? A miner could choose to mine empty blocks if they truly wanted, which transactions to include if any is up to them.
Correct, one can mine empty blocks, but in practice, dumb idea. Most people mine with a pool. The pool decides what goes into a block. Even at scale. The point is that it smoothes out the reward cycle. For ETH, we mined with a pool that dual mined ETH+ZIL, which increased our overall rewards.
Proof of work allows for what Keynes called "Bancor". BTC is succesful because unlike fiat central banks, the money supply isn't dictated by interest rates (and thus loans) but by the effort of participants. The price of BTC is almost irrelevant, BTC itself is a paradigm shift.
Regarding the fixed supply, it's only fixed because participants agree to the consensus algorithm that fixes it. Many cryptocurrencies have different tokenomics, such as ETH's rules under PoS. BTC miners could vote onchain for a hard fork to change the 21M cap - or another solution.
> I dunno, he's pretty consistent as a white nationalist.
> ... Fox News ...
Sure but can you link some white nationalist clips when he was the host of Crossfire [1] for 5 years?
Like he's just not principled. If he were to re-join Fox News and Fox were to pivot to being a competitor to BET [2] his comments would change immediately.
I may be misunderstanding but I don't think so. War forces people's hand in terms having to make progress. This is because during progress can be measured in number of body bags returning from the front and the reduction thereof.
Our modern world was born out of scientific advancements made during WW2. Could these same achievements have occurred in peace time? Obviously the answer is yes. However during war, everything becomes accelerated and things that normally would take a long time can happen very quickly.
I agree that paying for scientific progress with human lives is a bad thing.
Not just with human lives but with staggering amounts of economic growth. In a globalised system there's absolutely no way the stimulation of war pays for the destruction and disruption.
Yes; WWII was an economic disaster for huge swaths of the world. The US is pretty much the only industrialized country at the time where it wasn't a complete economic disaster, because it was separated by oceans from nearly all the fighting and destruction.
If there's a shootout in a town that ends up with most peoples' windows getting shot out, the one town glazier will make money off of this, even though it's a net-negative for the town as a whole.
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