to excite! for $5 million, and excite! turned them down?

this will be nothing at all like that

it's the most realistic one.

Thanks to two things: 1: that there is no use case story for bitcoin except "moon," and 2: that it has been from the very start highly centralized in the only way that matters - distribution - Bitcoin will likely reach an exchange-manipulated $100,000 at some point close to it's final retreat into permanent status as a lesson in bad economics.

Despite the messaging that certain types of crypto advocates have been trying to use for years to confuse the public, cryptocurrency is not synonymous with digital currency. Central bank-issued digital currency is just regular currency minus the printed paper.

It is explicitly centralized and traceable and its advocates do not pretend otherwise, unlike cryptocurrency which is propped up on a lot of decentralization hype that is wishful at best and deceitful at worst, and specifically in the case of Bitcoin - a veneer of pretend anonymity.

There are already several companies who do this commercially, using hundreds of ordinary-looking nodes scattered throughout the network to figure out where transactions are initially broadcast from using statistical analysis and timing attacks. Also, a lot of insiders know each other and aren't always careful who they brag/complain to or sleep with.

> it's all make-believe anyway

Even if you have a system to determine it, it is still entirely make-believe.

A "system" serves solely to increase and sustain the total energetic commitment to that belief, rendering its signal correspondingly more expensive to revert to noise.

A massive stone pyramid is much more of a commitment to a set of social values represented by that monument, than is a speech given about those values.

But the speech, being infinitely lighter, can be carried everywhere, by anyone, and thus grows in strength with greater distance traveled, while even the largest monuments soon sink below the horizon.

All forms of money strike a tradeoff somewhere between these two semiotic extremes.

Money is just one domain specific form of it.

Bitcoin folklorists have identified Adam Back with the Nakamoto character for at least 7 or 8 years, but he's only one of several people connected to it through similarly circumstantial associations.

If Nakamoto is still around, Bitcoin is in serious danger of being unambiguously exposed as a de facto centralized currency, due to his disproportionate degree of influence over future design decisions and his enormous personal holdings of coin, which are generally assumed "frozen" and thus a constraint on all users' exposure to liquidity. If that fig leaf were to fall Bitcoin's carefully curated illusion of decentralization would be seriously, if not fatally compromised.

a message of domination is the actual rationale motivating support for this. the rallying cry of authoritarians is merely to appeal to superior force, no matter how this appeal is disguised. the appeal to existing force is a quintessentially small-c conservative posture. it's a heuristic that simplifies so much expensive and frustrating contemplation.

...a demonstrably fatal, contagious and frequently asymptomatic airborne virus with little hard data available to assess its total threat potential would be it.

This lockdown amounts to a long overdue pandemic fire drill for the planet, and the amortized costs will be well spent when the next one comes along.

I think you're on to something here - someone should inform these world class neurological experts about operant conditioning, confounding effects and negative reinforcement, topics they surely overlooked despite being covered in every intro to psychology textbook on the planet.

I actually think it's taken too long to get this message out, and the professional rage wranglers have been given far too much of a head start in corralling the emerging currents of frustration and uncertainty into a cohesive repression narrative.

It's already reached the point that wearing masks = admission of fear and weakness, rather than a temporary bandaid to throttle back the spread to manageable levels. There's no going back from here, the ambiguous cover of preparedness will collapse into a clean line between masked oppresson vs muh freedom face. The messaging will then be forced to abandon public mask and PPE guidelines as hopelessly unenforcable, very prematurely, It's unfortunate.

> the real reason they don't want to use them is because they have to pay to get scores and they figure it'll be cheaper to just develop their own test.

This is exactly what it is. Optics presently discourage attacking the he College Board testing monopoly head on, unlike the way UC has cut off Elsevier to force a change to the journal racket. So UC has the resources to replace these tests with their own and cut off the CB from a huge revenue source. Now if they'd only do this with the GRE as well...

> nobody involved in this stuff passed basic economics.

that's OK, because you see Paul Krugman once made an oversimplified soundbite comparison between fax machines to the internet, and since he won a Nobel in economic this proves the entire discipline is a joke and can be ignored in favor of austrian Ponzi school potemkin decentralization whitepaper HODLbuggery. "Some hucksters* made money, therefore you are wrong, and envious. QED." /s

* on that subject, the lawsuit of Michael Terpin, crypto huckster extraordinaire, to claw back his supposed millions in crypto lost to a gaggle of teenagers, takes the price for the most immutably ironic /. story this year.

If this is the same Fortress Investment Group, which I believe it is, then patent trolling is a comparatively benign line of business for them.

They are also the ones trying to buy the claims, at a huge discount to market*, of people who had bitcoin in Mt. Gox when it collapsed.

Anyone betting on that dumpster fire coming back to life is either insane or operating on assumptions that depend on corruption to succeed.

*a term with a remarkably flexible interpretation in kleptocurrency land

You can rent them to smallish companies who want a remote work solution that is simple and closely mimics their existing desktop infrastructure, with minimal license ambiguity. Typically something like a middling-sized windows domain with a terminal server, DCs, exchange server, maybe an application server or two. This is straightforward to cost out in a predictable way with a few VMs and easy to isolate its virtual network layer from other clients on the same physical box.

A lot of companies, especially small ones in niche verticals, cannot go completely SaaS as their workflows often depend, critically, on one or two domain-specific applications which will likely never get moved off of a 20 year old byzantine coral reef of FoxPro, VBA and Outlook addins, - let alone turned into SaaS -and without going remote desktop this grounds the whole environment in a tangled maze of VPNs and BYOD problems with all sorts of tricky attack surface issues. Wrapping the whole hairball up into a single terminal server cluster is often the only realistic way to move these companies on to a remote work-capable platform.