Tag: #Believe

Winter in the Artic…

Even in our darkest hour, we must keep the Spirit Up and positive 🙂😉

Leave a trail…

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.

He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and his ideology was disseminated through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay “Nature”.

Following this work, he gave a speech entitled “The American Scholar” in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays “Self-Reliance”, “The Over-Soul”, “Circles”, “The Poet”, and “Experience.” Together with “Nature”, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson’s most fertile period.

Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world.

Emerson’s “nature” was more philosophical than naturalistic: “Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.”

Emerson is one of several figures who “took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.”

He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him.

“In all my lectures,” he wrote, “I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.” Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.

As a lecturer and orator, Emerson—nicknamed the Sage of Concord — became the leading voice of intellectual culture in the United States.

James Russell Lowell, editor of the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review, commented in his book My Study Windows (1871), that Emerson was not only the “most steadily attractive lecturer in America,” but also “one of the pioneers of the lecturing system.”

Herman Melville, who had met Emerson in 1849, originally thought he had “a defect in the region of the heart” and a “self-conceit so intensely intellectual that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name”, though he later admitted Emerson was “a great man”.

Theodore Parker, a minister and transcendentalist, noted Emerson’s ability to influence and inspire others: “the brilliant genius of Emerson rose in the winter nights, and hung over Boston, drawing the eyes of ingenuous young people to look up to that great new star, a beauty and a mystery, which charmed for the moment, while it gave also perennial inspiration, as it led them forward along new paths, and towards new hopes”.

Emerson’s work not only influenced his contemporaries, such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, but would continue to influence thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world down to the present.

Notable thinkers who recognize Emerson’s influence include Nietzsche and William James, Emerson’s godson. There is little disagreement that Emerson was the most influential writer of 19th-century America, though these days he is largely the concern of scholars.

Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and William James were all positive Emersonians, while Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James were Emersonians in denial—while they set themselves in opposition to the sage, there was no escaping his influence.

To T. S. Eliot, Emerson’s essays were an “encumbrance”. Waldo the Sage was eclipsed from 1914 until 1965, when he returned to shine, after surviving in the work of major American poets like Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane.

In his book The American Religion, Harold Bloom repeatedly refers to Emerson as “The prophet of the American Religion”, which in the context of the book refers to indigenously American religions such as Mormonism and Christian Science, which arose largely in Emerson’s lifetime, but also to mainline Protestant churches that Bloom says have become in the United States more gnostic than their European counterparts.

In The Western Canon, Bloom compares Emerson to Michel de Montaigne: “The only equivalent reading experience that I know is to reread endlessly in the notebooks and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American version of Montaigne.”

Several of Emerson’s poems were included in Bloom’s The Best Poems of the English Language, although he wrote that none of the poems are as outstanding as the best of Emerson’s essays, which Bloom listed as “Self-Reliance”, “Circles”, “Experience”, and “nearly all of Conduct of Life”.

In his belief that line lengths, rhythms, and phrases are determined by breath, Emerson’s poetry foreshadowed the theories of Charles Olson.

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Q & A

Hy there to all of you out there, white, black, yellow and avatar 😋🤣 people around the WordPress world !

Hope you are all well and safe in these troubled times we live on this beautiful planet of ours !

I come before you, to ask for your opinion and what you would like to see explained in my posts !?! Just let me know and I will try my best to accomodate your requests !

Thank you for your time !

Happy Children’s Day

Your Silence…

Silence is the absence of ambient audible  sound, the emission of sounds of such low intensity that they do not draw attention to themselves, or the state of having ceased to produce sounds; this latter sense can be extended to apply to the cessation or absence of any form of communication, whether through speech or other medium.

Sometimes speakers fall silent when they hesitate in searching for a word, or interrupt themselves before correcting themselves.

Discourse analysis shows that people use brief silences to mark the boundaries of prosodic units, in turn-taking, or as reactive tokens, e.g., as a sign of displeasure, disagreement, embarrassment, desire to think, confusion, and the like.

Relatively prolonged intervals of silence can be used in rituals; in some religious disciplines, people maintain silence for protracted periods, or even for the rest of their lives, as an ascetic means of spiritual transformation.

Joseph Jordania has suggested that in social animals (including humans), silence can be a sign of danger.

Many social animals produce seemingly haphazard sounds which are known as contact calls. These are a mixture of various sounds, accompanying the group’s everyday business (for example, foraging,  feeding), and they are used to maintain audio contact with the members of the group.

Some social animal species communicate the signal of potential danger by stopping contact calls and freezing, without the use of alarm calls, through silence.

Charles Darwin wrote about this in relation with wild horse and cattle. Jordania has further suggested that human humming  could have been a contact method that early humans used to avoid silence. According to his suggestion, humans find prolonged silence distressing (suggesting danger to them).

This may help explain why lone humans in relative sonic isolation feel a sense of comfort from humming, whistling, talking to themselves, or having the TV or radio on.

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Best Pool Rules

Best Pool Rules

In my opinion, more or less in order:

1)  Lowest fees

1a)  Shares transaction fees

1b)  Any pool that does NOT share transaction fees should be rejected from consideration (which, unfortunately, is most, if not all, Chinese based pools)

2)  Reasonable variance – You need to get paid often enough to be happy. This is a tough one.

Variance is the close cousin to “Luck”.

The luckier a pool is, the more blocks it finds relative to its hashing speed, and the less variance it will have.  But its not a real thing!  “Luck” could change any microsecond.
 “Luck” is just mathematical statistics – over a long enough time period, all pools will average out to 100% luck.

Luck Statistik for 14 Blocks

You need to understand Variance:

A big pool finds more blocks, but distributes the earnings out to more miners.  

A small pool is just the reverse:  it finds fewer blocks, but pays those earnings to fewer people. Over the long run, Rule #1, well, rules.

3)  Wind-up/Wind-down time – Most pools use some leveling algorithm.

4)  User Interface – That doesn’t matter much if you have a few miners.  If you have hundreds, the difference can be thousands of dollars a Year.

Notes:

A) In the long run #2 & #3 really don’t matter much.  Both pools show your hashing rate in minutes, payouts just lag on Kano compared to Slushpool, but would continue longer if you changed in the future

B) Bigger is not better.  Sure Antpool is #1 in size, in no small part to Bitmain using their own pool (no fees for them!).   Your profit will be determined mostly by rule #1 – lower fees mean more profit.

C) More, smaller, pools is healthier for the blockchain.  If you can live with the variance, support the pool with the longest average payout you are happy with.

D) For pools with long ramp up times that are relatively small, like Kano, you MIGHT suffer due to difficulty changes while you ramp up.

For smaller pools, make sure you understand what happens to your efforts (based on their scoring system) when a difficulty change occurs.

The Laws are Unjust

As we’ve seen over the many years that this rag has been written (and beyond) companies who are able to fund whole teams dedicated to data security have been wholly ineffective at storing that data safely.

With the passage of this new law EU officials are actively putting citizens in harm’s way by irresponsibly trying to force bitcoin users to collect and store each other’s data. This is if you believe that is the actual intention behind this move.

In reality, this move likely serves as a pure intimidation tactic to coerce people to use trusted third parties when transacting with bitcoin.

A heavy handed shove into easily controlled vectors. If too many users are in control of their own private keys, run their own nodes, and are up to date on best privacy practices when transacting it is much harder to stop bitcoin.

And make no mistake, these people want to stop bitcoin at all costs.

They do not want you to be free.

They are quickly losing their grasp of control on the populace and they are moving as quickly as possible to clamp down in an attempt to retain control.

You are not meant to have privacy in their eyes. You are inherently a criminal in their eyes. These people think you are disgusting cattle who needs to be led at every turn.

It does not have to be this way. You do not have to succumb to the madness of these people. All it takes are a few decisions.

Speak up!

Act!

Disobey!

There is a silent majority out there who knows this type of attempted control is inherently wrong.

It is anti-human!

It is evil!

This silent majority needs to begin developing the courage to speak up.

Call out the abject insanity of allowing unelected institutions like the Financial Action Task Force write freedom restricting guidelines that get adopted by governments like the EU.

Learn how to run your own node, how to produce your own private/public key pairs, and how to destroy chain analysis heuristics with privacy best practices.

Make the tyrant’s job as hard as possible!

Disobey!

Stand up and defend freedom in the Digital Age by actively defying their unjust laws.

“If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he obligated to do so.”

It is your duty as an individual to disobey these incredibly invasive and tyrannical “laws”.

If you don’t disobey your progeny may not have the opportunity to. The time to counter punch is right now. Get on it.

Source: https://tftc.io/

19 Million bitcoin in Circulation

Source: https://coinpayments.com/

Blockchain Spectrum

The Blockchain Spectrum

Now, even if someone does not have the drawbacks of decades-long experience and mental models with a specific asset class, it is still very hard to understand Bitcoin.

Why? Because Bitcoin is the intersection of many, many different fields.

To truly understand Bitcoin, there is no other way than being a polymath.

Even if one has made it as far to (a) realize Bitcoin is something completely new and solely using existing heuristics and mental models will not work and (b) with Bitcoin, more than anything else, we do not know what we do not know — understanding still requires a very broad set of competences.

The correct approach to understand when one starts going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole is therefore to assume one knows nothing and any experience and insight one has from previous aspects of life brings
very little to the table.

First principles thinking is required.
We can, however, try to define a little deeper what Bitcoin is. Below is listed some different ways of wrapping one’s head around Bitcoin.

Not an exhaustive list.

A living organism

Bitcoin is Free and Open Source software. It is not a piece of IP owned by a centralized joint-stock company that needs to optimize for the bottom line of the next quarter and is incapable of cannibalizing itself. Since the Bitcoin whitepaper was released and the
genesis block was mined, we have seen an explosion of experiments, ideas and creative geniuses get involved in Bitcoin and crypto as a whole. To think of Bitcoin as a living, technological organism that adjusts, develops and constantly changes to survive can be useful.

A religion

Money, as many have learned and realized in recent decade, is just a social
construction we are all part of. The value therefore comes from the amount of true believers.

Continuing this line of thinking, one could describe the religion as consisting of:

  • Prophet: Satoshi. No longer present. Impossible to ask questions.
  • Convictions: Decentralization.
  • Rituals: Running nodes. Mining. Hodling.
  • Holy scriptures: Bitcoin whitepaper. As with all holy scriptures, people interpret them in their own way.
  • Sacred objects: Genesis block, lowercase bitcoin
  • Sects: Different interpretations resulting in different factions/sects: small blockers, big blockers, etc.

An emerging economy

  • The consensus protocol can be thought of as the constitution
  • The society as the constituency (users on the demand-side; miners on the supply-side)
  • Core developers as the executive department who write the code and execute on the strategy, but amendments to the protocol (i.e., constitution) require approval from the constituency)
  • The native token is the internal currency
  • The investors underwrite the currency

Additionally, many one-liners and memes exist to describe Bitcoin. Not an exhaustive list.

  • Sound money
  • Digital gold
  • “An insurance policy against an Orwellian future”
  • “A tool for freeing humanity from oligarchs and tyrants, dressed up as a get-rich-quick scheme”
  • Censorship- judgment & seizure-resistant money
  • Peer to peer digital cash
  • Swiss Bank account in your pocket
  • Unstoppable and uncensorable hard money

Source: https://backed.ai/

Knowledge is…

Knowledge is Power !!!

WRONG !!!
Knowledge is Power …
When Applied !!!

Apollo BTC – A Bitcoin ASIC Miner and Desktop Class Computer running a Full Node

Introducing the FutureBit Apollo BTC

Six CPU Cores. 44 ASIC Cores. 1TB NVMe Based SSD Drive. Quiet. Less than 200 Watts of Power. Made in the USA. This is what the Future of Bitcoin looks like. 

FutureBit Apollo BTC is the world’s first vertically integrated platform bringing the full power of Bitcoin and it’s mining infrastructure in a small, quiet, easy to use desktop device designed for everyday people. 

We have iterated and learned much from our first Apollo product. We realized early on that we focused too much on the mining aspect, and not enough on the software, applications, and services that run Bitcoin. Too many of these services have moved to online centralized websites, and many users have given up on running the core software that powers Bitcoin. 

This must change, as Bitcoin will not continue to be the free, un-censorable, decentralized system it is today if only a few control the mining that powers it, and the nodes that control it. 

At the heart of the new Apollo BTC product is a revamped SBC (Single Board Computer), that is as powerful as any consumer grade desktop system and can run almost any Bitcoin Application natively on the device 24/7. Take it out of the Box, plug it in, power it on, and you are already running a full Bitcoin node without needing to do anything.

Install a wallet of your choice, use any hardware wallet, run BTCPayServer, run a block explorer, run a Lightning Node. All of this is possible with our six core ARM based CPU with 4GB of RAM, and a 1TB NVMe drive that can easily store a FULL non pruned Bitcoin Node. It can power through a Full Node Sync in under 48 hours, which is a record for a device of its class! This is almost an order of magnitude faster than any Raspberry Pi 4 based Node. 

On top of this we have taken our 6 years of experience building ASIC mining devices, and engineered the only American Made TeraHash range Bitcoin mining device that can be silent on your desk, mine Bitcoin in the background 24/7, and only use the power of one light bulb to do it. 

We did this with our optimized PCB design that has carefully placed all 44 hash cores underneath our custom cold-forged aluminum induction heatsink, which draws up to 200 Watts of heat away from the device with our new nearly silent 25mm fan. This results in the Apollo BTC in Turbo Mode being just as quiet as the Apollo LTC in Eco Mode!

Like our previous products, we are super proud that we can continue manufacturing the Apollo BTC in the USA, and are now the only USA based company that delivers Bitcoin ASIC products with a supply chain whole owned in the western hemisphere (no more reliance on Chinese based ASICS, and their willingness to only sell to large farms and the highest bidder). 

OPTIONS

Full Apollo Package: This is our Full Package option that comes with everything you need in the box. The Apollo BTC Unit with our latest controller built in, and our 200W Power supply with power cable. 

Full Apollo Package NO Power Supply: We are also offering the Full Package with no power supply for people that want the plug-n-play experience but have spare 12v ATX power supply. 

Standard: This option is ONLY the Apollo ASIC Miner, with no controller or power supply. Our new hashboard has a micro USB port, and can be used as a USB device. The Full Apollo Node can control multiple standard units through its USB ports. We wanted to give our customers an option to expand their hash power in a cost effective way. If you already have a Raspberry Pi, or Linux/Windows Desktop Computer and a power supply with two PCIE power ports you can also control our Standard unit in this way with our stand alone miner software (please note this setup will be for more advanced users, and the software will be command line based on launch). 

Standard + Power Supply: Same as our Standard unit above, but comes with our 200W Power supply. This is a plug and play solution if you already have a Full Apollo Package. Take it out of the box, plug in the power supply, plug in the micro USB cable to the back of your Full Apollo BTC and it will automatically recognize the second hashboard and start mining! 

  • Compact All-In-One Desktop Bitcoin System (4x6x4in) that mines Bitcoin and any SHA256 based crypto (Bitcoin Cash etc). 
  • Powerful 6 ARM Core CPU with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD (NOT included in the Standard or Standard + package). 
  • Comes Pre-Installed with a Bitcoin node, and you can install almost any Bitcoin Application
  • Very wide range of operation modes with preset ECO (quiet) mode, BALANCED, and TURBO mode. 
  • 2-3.8 TH/s of SHA256 performance per miner (+/- 5%)
  • 125 Watts in ECO mode, and 200 Watts in TURBO * +/- 10%
  • Can be used as a full Desktop computer with a monitor keyboard and mouse (not included), or through our Web UI
  • Connect almost any peripheral with our USB 3.0 ports, USB C port, HDMI, AC Wifi, and Bluetooth 
  • Clocks and Power is fully customizable by user with easy to use interface
  • Hashboard now monitors both voltage and power draw for accurate measurements*
  • Custom designed cold forged hexagonal pin heatsink with leading thermal performance for the quietest ASIC miner in operation!
  • 1k-5k RPM Quiet Dual Ball Bearing Fan with automatic thermal management with onboard temperature sensor
  • Controlled via local connection on a web browser similar to antminers. You can simply set it up via smartphone browser. No crazy driver installs, hard to use miner software or scripts needed.
  • Two Six Pin PCIE power connectors for wide-range of power draw
  • Custom Designed all Aluminum case
  • Ships with our own custom built 200W 94% efficient PSU and is ready to run out of the box! (Does NOT come with Standard package). 

 Requirements:

  • Router with an Ethernet cable for initial setup OR Monitor with keyboard and mouse
  • At least a 250 watt 12v power supply with two 6 Pin PCIE connector is required (unless you order our packages that come with our power supply). This is the same connector used by all modern GPUs. Please note even standard units NEED a power supply, they cant be powered through the USB port on the full package unit. 

As I am the owner of two of these beauties, that I have on my office as you saw in the photo above, I took the liberty to make Free-Publicity for the FutureBit Apollo Btc Miner.

Kudos to jstefanop

Source:

https://www.futurebit.io/

With 💚

Trilemma of International Finance

Trilemma of International Finance

The relative value of any two curren-
cies—the exchange rate—is determined
through their sale and purchase on the global foreign exchange market. If government policy interferes with this market by changing the relative supply or demand of currencies, the exchange rate is managed.

The trilemma of international finance, is a restriction on government policy that follows immediately from the interaction of exchange rates, monetary policy and international capital flows.

Trilemma of International Finance

The trilemma states that any country can have only two of the following:

  • (1) Unrestricted international capital markets.
  • (2) A managed exchange rate.
  • (3) An independent monetary policy.

If the government wants a managed exchange rate but does not want to interfere
with international capital flows, it must use
monetary policy to accommodate changes
in the demand for its currency in order to
stabilize the exchange rate.

In the extreme, this would take the form of a currency board arrangement, where the domestic currency is fully backed by a foreign currency (as in the case of Hong Kong).

In such a situation, monetary policy can no longer be used for domestic purposes (it is no longer independent).

If a country wishes to maintain control over monetary policy to reduce domestic unemployment or inflation, for example, it must limit trades of its currency in the international capital market (it no longer has free international capital markets).

A country that chooses to have both unrestricted inter-national capital flows and an independent monetary policy can no longer influence its exchange rate and, therefore, cannot have a managed exchange rate.

Pieters and Vivanco (2016), government
attempts to regulate the globally accessible
bitcoin markets are generally unsuccessful,
and, as shown in Pieters (2016), bitcoin exchange rates tend to reflect the
market, not official exchange rates.

Should the flows allowed by bitcoin become big enough, all countries will have, by default, unrestricted international capital markets.

Thus, with bitcoin, (1) unrestricted
international capital markets is chosen by
default.

Therefore, the only remaining policy choice is between (2) managed exchange rates or (3) independent monetary policy.

If the country chooses (1) and (2), it must use reactive monetary policy to achieve the managed exchange rate.

If the country chooses (1) and (3), it must have a floating exchange rate because it has no remaining tools with which to maintain a managed exchange rate.

Ali et al. (2014), the European Central
Bank (2015) and the Bank for International
Settlements (2015) all concur that cryptocur-
rencies may eventually undermine monetary policy.

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