Free Republic

Not really. The race isn’t always to the swift nor is the battle always to the strong. Being stronger and faster increases the odds in your favor, but they’re still just that: odds. You can shave the dice to your advantage and yet still roll snake-eyes.

Yes, the dilution through interbreeding theory has merit, but it implies that the H. sapiens population was much, much bigger than that of the Neanderthals. Also, if I understand the DNA evidence correctly, it demonstrates that there was some interbreeding, but not enough for the entire Neanderthal population to be absorbed. So, it has merit, but not 100% clear.

The theory I find most compelling is the caloric deficit theory. A larger brain, larger muscles, and a more active metabolism (to maintain body heat while living on a freakin’ glacier) all require much more calorie input. A human functions best at 2000 Calories a day, and can survive indefinitely on as little as 400 to 600 (you spend most of your time sleeping but it can be done). Neanderthals, on the other hand, probably needed between 8,000 to 12,000 Calories per day just to keep from wasting away. One theory of European megafauna extinction was that the Neanderthals literally ate them all. It’s possible that the Neanderthals died from food shortage in light of the decline of the mammoth population. It’s also worth considering that this made Neanderthals extremely vulnerable to siege tactics; a band of humans could kill a Neanderthal village merely by harassing their hunting parties and chasing game away from their hunting grounds, and this would only take a few weeks at most. In theory.

Cowboy Bob is right. No, not in a moral sense, but in a pragmatic one. Neanderthals were smarter than humans — not only did they have bigger brains, but they left behind better technology (for example, they made flaked spear heads out of obsidian; those things are so sharp you can shave with them). They were much stronger than humans, and had much better night vision — their eyes were easily 50% larger than ours and spaced farther apart. In fact, the area of the brain that was most noticeably larger was the occipital lobe, which controls spatiotemporal perception. So, you have a hominid with the best spears in the world, musculature to throw them farther than anyone else, with pinpoint precision, on a moonless night. Oh, and they lived in glacier-covered Ice Age Europe, which humans couldn’t last a day in without freezing to death.

So, yes. Superior.

The theory is that humans exterminated them through simple persistence and sheer numbers. The changing climate helped the humans too, to an extent.

It’s also possible that the Neanderthals adopted a religion that considered it blasphemous to fight back against the humans, even as the humans were killing them. Sounds familiar.

Actually, Neanderthals has bigger brains than us. And they were slightly shorter. And their musculature was much denser than ours, which means they were much stronger, which means they were adapted for hunting, which means they probably moved incredibly quickly. Like someone mentioned above, they were better than humans at essentially everything. That’s why humans exterminated them. And it’s happening again.

“One big reason is its utility. There are no middlemen, no large transaction fees, and no limits on amounts sent to anywhere in the world. Transactions are fast, and secure for the most part.”

Transactions aren’t *that* fast. One can easily spend 20 minutes or more waiting for one’s transaction to be incorporated into a block and signed into the chain — and this is especially true for small transactions. This makes it cumbersome to use BTC for the single most common kind of transaction: small POS cash purchases.

Using physical BTC coins has been one proposed solution, but it’s a non-starter because it implies the existence of a single consolidated mint entrusted with producing said coins.

Using a brokerage house similar to VISA is a viable option, but introduces serious capacity concerns. Not to mention that such a brokerage house would indeed charge transaction fees (after all, transaction fees are *built into* the Bitcoin algorithm, to incentivize miners to include your transaction in their next block).

Anyway, these are perhaps minor nit-picks. What concerns me is when they’re coupled with this:

“This high utility value is a big reason to use Bitcoin and not leave it under a mattress speculating it’ll increase in value and make you rich.”

So, the high utility of BTC is tied to its convenience. That utility has to be greater than the opportunity cost of holding onto your BTC. If it’s not, then it’s irrational to spend your BTC; you lose more in the process of spending them (i.e. their potential future value) than you gain from the convenience of the transaction.

There is a positive feedback loop at play here. The more people choose to hoard, the less BTC infrastructure is developed. The less infrastructure is developed, the less convenient it is to use BTC. The less convenient it is to use BTC, the lower the utility of engaging in BTC commerce. The lower the utility of BTC commerce, the more people are likely to hoard.

Hmm. Based on a quick read of Gresham’s Law, I can definitely see the similarity. And, indeed, BTC’s economic properties are very much akin to a precious metal; Satoshi called the process of creating new Bitcoins “mining” for a very good reason. Certainly it’s true that mechanisms very similar to Gresham’s Law are at play here.

However, I would not characterize BTC as “good money”. Nor, for that matter, would I call gold or silver “good money”. As far as I’m concerned, there ain’t no such thing as “good money” except canned goods and ammunition; everything else is a negotiated proxy. :)

I’ve heard of Gresham’s Law, but am not especially familiar with its details or implementations. I’m a onetime distributed systems engineer, though, so I can tell when an enormous number of nodes, each operating with individual rationality on a perverse incentive structure, is headed toward a Byzantine collapse. :)

I look forward to your further insights.

I think CharlesWayneCT is exactly right. There's probably a flood of speculators towards BTC right now merely because they're guys who are bored with Gold's lackluster movement.

Actually, take a look at this chart of unique Bitcoin addresses in the last year. See the recent skyrocket? That's consistent with a ton of new players suddenly entering the market, creating massive demand.

It's also consistent with a small group of individuals creating a shitload of proxy accounts and using them to buy and sell amongst one another on Mt.Gox, thereby creating an artificial price pressure through sheer volume. Thanks to Bitcoin's alleged anonymity, it's impossible to differentiate genuine demand from good old-fashioned price manipulation.

Any thoughts on the recent price rise and crash?

Honestly? The rapid rise caught me quite by surprise. Silk Road was pretty much the place to spend Bitcoins; it was by far the biggest marketplace in which Bitcoin was the preferred currency, rather than just some nifty gimmick. I expected the fall of Silk Road to decimate the value of Bitcoin, as it put a massive dent in people's ability to do anything with their Bitcoin holdings.

The skyrocketing exchange rate for Bitcoin should not be mistaken for "value". People talk about the "value" of BTC relative to the USD or EUR, but the term "value" implies that there's something intrinsically virtuous about Bitcoins and that that something is growing. This, of course, is false. Money of any kind, remember, is a proxy for the barter system; I build you a website for $5000 and then buy a thousand $5 cheeseburgers with that paycheck only because it's more convenient than making a website in exchange for a thousand cheeseburgers directly. When I agree to that $5000 fee, that agreement is motivated by what I can buy with that fee, not on the fee itself; by itself, the fee is of course meaningless. And what can I buy with Bitcoin? Not a lot, unless I convert it to USD first.

Now, the more BTC is used as a speculation instrument, the less stable it is as a transaction medium, and therefore the less it's used for commerce. I'm not going to agree to build your website for any amount of BTC if I don't know what I'll be able to buy with my fee tomorrow. I'm serious; if you told me right now (with BTC ~$500) that you'd pay me 10 BTC to build you a website (i.e. a $5000 value as of 2:00PM EST 2009-11-20), I'd tell you to go sit on it, as would any other rational worker who's not in on it solely as a speculative instrument. As such, the very act of speculating ironically drives up Bitcoin's exchange rate while simultaneously driving down its value.

This does not bode well for Bitcoin's future. It strongly suggests an endgame where handfuls of individuals sit on very large stockpiles of BTC that they refuse to part with for anything short of astronomical sums, while the rest of us merely ignore them and continue using more established currencies with more predictable day-to-day trade-in values. These "Sirs" will steadily cash out, one by one, as they come to the same realization that they need to convert their BTC to USD in order to turn their theoretical wealth into actual Ferraris and mansions and yachts. They will mostly sell solely amongst one another; every time one of them decides to cash out, the ones who remain will agree to pay his insane prices because they'll each believe that they in turn will be able to ask for higher prices still when it's their turn. At some point you'll have basically one guy (or a group of guys) literally owning all the money in the world; he'll own all the BTC, expecting other people to give him goods and services in exchange for them at a rate of $1B per BTC. And we will all laugh at him, and he won't understand why he's still renting a small cockroach-infested apartment despite being obscenely "rich".

BTW, is the USD or EUR stable? Do I necessarily know that a $5000 paycheck today will enable me to buy a thousand cheeseburgers tomorrow? No, of course not; hyperinflation could hit so hard that I find myself having built an entire website yesterday and only get ten cheeseburgers for my effort (whereas I originally thought I'd do it for the equivalent of a thousand). However, it's extremely unlikely because of the ratio of USD usage in commerce versus speculation. The vast majority of individuals who hold USD right now, do so with the intent of using it to buy stuff at value in exchange for the labor or goods that they've already sold; they're not holding onto USD in the hopes of making USD scarce and therefore increasing their buying power as a side-effect of fluctuation in the transaction medium. The exact opposite is the case with BTC: most of the people who hold BTC right now are hoping that they can induce scarcity, which will allow them to trade it for much, much more labor or goods than they originally acquired it for. This means that, while the arguably biggest obstacle to good faith in the USD is the Federal Reserve, the biggest obstacle to good faith in BTC is every single fellow Bitcoin user. And that's why I'm staying far, far away from this game.

Where will they go? Is there a Death Star somewhere for bitcoins?

Sort of, yes.

For one thing, a bitcoin stored in a wallet whose key gets deleted or lost, is lost forever. It's not like gold in a shipwreck that can be salvaged by divers. Over time, as people occasionally lose wallet keys or die without telling anyone their passwords, bitcoins steadily get taken permanently out of circulation.

For another, any finite currency whose value is primarily speculative encourages hoarding. Bitcoins increase in value primarily because everybody wants to accumulate a giant stash of them. Nobody wants to *spend* those bitcoins because they'd rather sit on them waiting for them to get rarer and rarer, as they or other people buy them up. A bitcoin sitting in the wallet of someone who categorically refuses to buy anything with it is as good as destroyed.

I can’t help but wonder about the logistics of these nonconsensual footlicking incidents. A person’s mouth and a person’s foot are usually pretty far apart from one another, after all. (Erm, except in the metaphorical sense, which I know all too well.)

Coulda been worse.

And apparently, such incidents are not even all that unique.

Like!

That would be an excellent argument if it were based on reality in any way. Meanwhile, back in the real world, things like this happen: http://www.h-i-r.net/2008/03/mac-os-x-pwned-in-two-minutes-flat.html

I’m not going to argue about which OS is “better” than others. What I will tell you, though, is that Mac vulnerabilities are quite prolific. Look at the last three CanSecWest conferences; the majority of their Top Ten exploits are for the Mac and related Apple platforms.

Besides, a vulnerability doesn’t have to be in the OS in order to break into your box. If you’re running third-party software of any kind, you increase your vulnerability cross-section. If you’re running Adobe PDF Viewer, for example, you can pretty much kiss all your data goodbye.

Remember, I don’t have to root your box in order to make it do my bidding. A Mac is typically a single-user machine, so anything of value is associated with only one user account. Everything a hacker might want from your machine, he can get by compromising that account alone.

If you had any idea how many viruses and malware modules were on your Mac without your knowledge, you wouldn’t be gloating so hard.

Mac has no immune system. Zero. Every single virus to infect Mac OS X encounters zero resistance.

Answer me this: Have you ever installed any software onto your Mac?

If you answered yes, you have a virus. Congratulations. Gloat away over your perceived superiority over owning a Mac, while your identity gets stolen by Chinese hackers and you spend the wee hours of the morn scouring in futility for a Mac-based antivirus program to protect you.

I recall reading somewhere that the rule comes from a specific type of electronic equipment in a specific location on a specific model of plane. Here’s how I understand the story:

Once upon a time, consumer electronics were just barely at a point at which they were becoming portable enough to bring aboard a plane — portable TVs, for example. This was long before the FCC had regulations about electromagnetic emissions from such devices. Airplane pilots found that, on certain models of planes, if these devices were used by passengers who were seated in seats that ran near the plane’s communication equipment, there would be a slight buzzing effect audible in the conversations with control towers. As a precautionary measure, the FTA banned all electronics in all seats at all times, because of course that’s the reasonable response to such a circumstance.

Yes! Or “oversight”. It means both the process of carefully monitoring something, and the act of failing to notice something.

“The failure of the engine was due to an oversight by the technician.”

“The engine performed admirably thanks to the careful oversight of the technician.”

This led me, in junior high, to grossly misunderstand what a “Senate Oversight Committee” is supposed to do. (Or maybe not misunderstand at all.)

“a new atmosphere-ocean climate modeling study”

Garbage in, garbage out.

Good point. It’s not necessary for them to have died out, but merely only bred with females from the mitochondrial Eve line. Presumably this was one highly attractive lady! :)

How exactly do mitochondria pass from the father? There’s not enough room in a sperm cell to fit a mitochondrion. (Not that I don’t believe you; I’m just curious about the mechanism by which it happens.)