Opinion: Cryptocurrencies are useless. Blockchain solutions are frequently much worse than the systems they replace. Here's why. //

In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it’s just not true. Yes, bitcoin eliminates certain trusted intermediaries that are inherent in other payment systems like credit cards. But you still have to trust bitcoin—and everything about it. //

By blockchain, I mean something very specific: the data structures and protocols that make up a public blockchain. These have three essential elements. The first is a distributed (as in multiple copies) but centralized (as in there’s only one) ledger, which is a way of recording what happened and in what order. This ledger is public, meaning that anyone can read it, and immutable, meaning that no one can change what happened in the past.

The second element is the consensus algorithm, which is a way to ensure all the copies of the ledger are the same. This is generally called mining; a critical part of the system is that anyone can participate. It is also distributed, meaning that you don’t have to trust any particular node in the consensus network. It can also be extremely expensive, both in data storage and in the energy required to maintain it. Bitcoin has the most expensive consensus algorithm the world has ever seen, by far.

Finally, the third element is the currency. This is some sort of digital token that has value and is publicly traded. Currency is a necessary element of a blockchain to align the incentives of everyone involved. Transactions involving these tokens are stored on the ledger. //

Most blockchain enthusiasts have a unnaturally narrow definition of trust. They’re fond of catchphrases like “in code we trust,” “in math we trust,” and “in crypto we trust.” This is trust as verification. But verification isn’t the same as trust. //

What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure.

When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there is no recourse. If your bitcoin exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If you forget your login credentials, you lose all of your money. If there’s a bug in the code of your smart contract, you lose all of your money. If someone successfully hacks the blockchain security, you lose all of your money. In many ways, trusting technology is harder than trusting people. Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don’t have the expertise to audit? //

Any blockchain system will have to coexist with other, more conventional systems. Modern banking, for example, is designed to be reversible. Bitcoin is not. That makes it hard to make the two compatible, and the result is often an insecurity. //

To the extent that people don’t use bitcoin, it’s because they don’t trust bitcoin. That has nothing to do with the cryptography or the protocols. In fact, a system where you can lose your life savings if you forget your key or download a piece of malware is not particularly trustworthy. No amount of explaining how SHA-256 works to prevent double-spending will fix that. //

A false trust in blockchain can itself be a security risk. The inefficiencies, especially in scaling, are probably not worth it. I have looked at many blockchain applications, and all of them could achieve the same security properties without using a blockchain—of course, then they wouldn’t have the cool name.

Honestly, cryptocurrencies are useless. They're only used by speculators looking for quick riches, people who don't like government-backed currencies, and criminals who want a black-market way to exchange money.

To answer the question of whether the blockchain is needed, ask yourself: Does the blockchain change the system of trust in any meaningful way, or just shift it around? Does it just try to replace trust with verification? Does it strengthen existing trust relationships, or try to go against them? How can trust be abused in the new system, and is this better or worse than the potential abuses in the old system? And lastly: What would your system look like if you didn’t use blockchain at all?

• The $1 trillion F-35 program has resulted in versions of the jet unable to fly supersonic for more than a brief period.
• The stresses of flying at supersonic speed threaten to erode a F-35's stealth coating and damage key antennas embedded in the tail of the aircraft.
• Instead of fixing the issue, the Pentagon has decided it is simply not important and restricted how long certain versions of the F-35 can fly at supersonic speeds.

"In order to limit global warming, we will need to install terawatts of solar panels," says Lennon. "This will require a lot of metal. Silver is a limited resource and as it becomes more and more scarce, its price will go up so the cost of producing solar modules will rise as well. Mining silver from lower quality ores also produces more emissions, making the problem worse. Copper is much more available as a resource, it’s cheaper and it’s also easier to recycle. The metal from copper-plated solar modules will be easier to recover from old modules and therefore may be more easily recycled in the future. This helps enormously from a sustainability perspective.”

The team's 25.54 percent topples the previous efficiency record for a commercial-sized silicon solar cell of 25.26 percent held by Chinese company Longi. Other silicon solar cells have pushed out beyond this in laboratory settings, but achieving such performance in a commercially-sized cell, using copper in place of silver no less, is a notable step forward for the industry.

Forcing our daughters to sign up for mandatory conscription in an environment where they may now be sent directly to the frontlines is an appalling breach of the oath by these Republicans.

If you didn’t read through the thread, I’ll summarize here: the Tesla owner was driving their Model S P85D on the highway, when the car begins to beep and warn that he needs to pull over immediately due to some power issue. Immediately after warning, all controls lock up, and the car comes to a halt, in the middle of a six-lane highway, leaving him no time to try and steer the car onto the shoulder, out of traffic.

The car will not budge from this point; it won’t go into neutral, the parking brake won’t release. It’s no longer a vehicle, it’s an immobile bit of sculpture blinking its hazard lights in the middle of the highway. //

Also, based on this tweet, it looks like the tow driver didn’t get the car rolling, either, and just pulled it up, with the rear wheels still locked, onto the bed: //

This particular incident involved a Tesla, but this is really an industry-wide problem with EVs. Every EV has some way to get the car into neutral, but based on the research I’ve done so far, all of the major EVs sold require the car to be at least partially functional to access the controls to get it into a tow or free-rolling mode, as these are usually accessed through the cars’ center-stack touch screen. //

All EVs should have a mechanical, unpowered, easily accessible emergency way to get the drivetrain disconnected from the wheels so the car can be moved if dead. I don’t necessarily think this is easy to engineer—if it was, I suspect at least a few EVs would have such a setup—but I do think it’s important. //

While we’re at it, we should mandate that all doors and trunks and whatever can be opened from the outside even if the main and 12V batteries die. Tesla Model 3s don’t have emergency releases for the rear doors, for example.

While we don’t yet enter cromulent into our dictionaries, it’s a perfectly cromulent candidate for future entry.

there was no violent rush. Rather, men in black opened up the doors and people strolled in, mingling, taking selfies, and generally appearing to pose no real threat. //

Then there’s the issue of the black-clad men who opened the doors in what looked like a very organized, planned-out fashion. As Tucker Carlson pointed out last night, it’s rather convenient that 500+ people have been arrested but that we don’t know who those men are. //

We know who random grandmas who took selfies are, but we are to believe the feds just have no idea who the men are who opened the doors? Why are they not dressed like everyone else? Why do they seem to know exactly where to go and what to do? Why are they not stopped by the people already in the Capitol, who I assume are USCP officers? When the doors are opened, the people walking in almost seem surprised and confused. There was clearly no grand plan here by insurrectionists. Rather, it certainly looks like those who opened the doors were separate from the protest. //

And while the narrative for a long time on the right was that these were Antifa operatives, that was always the wrong assumption, in my opinion. It always made much more sense that the men in black were federal agents, FBI or otherwise. Remember, this is the same FBI that essentially orchestrated the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping attempt. It’s the same FBI that had more agents at last week’s “Justice for January 6th” rally than there were actually protesters.

The popular the Amazing Fall Fun corn maze celebrates the 25th anniversary of Pokemon this fall with maze design that features some of the most popular characters of Pokemon.

The 20-acre corn maze is the largest in Indiana, according to Amazing Fall Fun. It is located at 3150 C.R. 43, just east of Waterloo.

Rapid initiation of nasal saline irrigation: hospitalizations in COVID-19 patients randomized to alkalinization or povidone-iodine compared to a national dataset

When I was a little boy, my parents and I took the ocean ferry out to Nantucket one blustery summer day. My father had me make a handwritten note with my address. We put it in an empty wine bottle, corked it good and tight, and walked back to the stern where the propellers were churning the saltwater with thunder.

"I remember James Cameron just looked at me and said, 'That one's hard'," Goyer tells BBC Culture in a video call. If the director of epics including Aliens, The Terminator, Titanic and Avatar tells you a project is difficult, it tends to give you pause for thought. //

There have been several attempts to bring Foundation to the screen, but the series of books was long held to be unfilmable because the saga weaves together so many plotlines and spans centuries. Indeed, the writing of it spanned half a century. But now the "unfilmable" has finally been filmed and this week an adaptation of Foundation starring Jared Harris and Lee Pace premieres on Apple TV+. //

So, when Goyer was told four years ago that the rights were once again in play, he took the night to think about it but his answer was never really in doubt. He pitched it to Apple TV+ as "a 1,000-year chess game between Hari Seldon and the Empire… All of the other characters are being utilised as pawns by one side or the other. But in chess, if a pawn makes it to the opposing side, it becomes a queen, and those shifting power dynamics can happen in our story." And part of the solution to the problems presented by the complexity and scale of the work is to tell the story via long-form television – the first season has 10 episodes – rather than to try to compress it into a movie or even a trilogy of movies, as previous attempts have done. //

But now, after four years of hard work there are 10 episodes of visually stunning, emotionally engaging, thought-provoking drama. They have already been made available to critics and are so richly layered that they bear an instant rewatch.

While we’re at it, we should mandate that all doors and trunks and whatever can be opened from the outside even if the main and 12V batteries die. Tesla Model 3s don’t have emergency releases for the rear doors, for example.

The trick is known as the "4-7-8 Method," and while its origins lay in ancient traditions of yoga, Weil says it's thoroughly scientifically vetted. The simple breathing technique works to calm stress by activating your parasympathetic nervous system, also known as "rest and digest mode." Here's all you have to do, according to Vogue:

Breathe in through your nose for a count of four seconds.

Hold your breath for seven seconds.

Exhale for eight seconds, making a "whoosh" sound through pursed lips.

Repeat up to four times.

The 4-7-8 method can be used to kill stress and calm your body any time of the day, not just at bedtime. And the more consistently you use the technique, the better it works. So give it a try and see if this might be the answer to your sleep challenges.

As you can see in the chart above, btrfs-raid1 differed pretty drastically from its conventional analogue. To understand how, let's think about a hypothetical collection of "mutt" drives of mismatched sizes. If we have one 8T disk, three 4T disks, and a 2T disk, it's difficult to make a useful conventional RAID array from them—for example, a RAID5 or RAID6 would need to treat them all as 2T disks (producing only 8T raw storage before parity).

However, btrfs-raid1 offers a very interesting premise. Since it doesn't actually marry disks together in pairs, it can use the entire collection of disks without waste. Any time a block is written to the btrfs-raid1, it's written identically to two separate disks—any two separate disks. Since there are no fixed pairings, btrfs-raid1 is free to simply fill all the disks at the same rough rate proportional to their free capacity. //

As any storage administrator worth their salt will tell you, RAID is primarily about uptime. Although it may keep your data safe, that's not its real job—the job of RAID is to minimize the number of instances in which you have to take the system down for extended periods of time to restore from proper backup.

Once you understand that fact, the way btrfs-raid handles hardware failure looks downright nuts. What happens if we yank a disk from our btrfs-raid1 array above? //

Btrfs' refusal to mount degraded, automatic mounting of stale disks, and lack of automatic stale disk repair/recovery do not add up to a sane way to manage a "redundant" storage system. //

Believe it or not, we've still only scratched the surface of btrfs problems. Similar problems and papercuts lurk in the way it manages snapshots, replication, compression, and more. Once we get through that, there's performance to talk about—which in many cases can be orders of magnitude slower than either ZFS or mdraid in reasonable, common real-world conditions and configurations.

Uranium was discovered just over 200 years ago in 1789, and today, it’s among the world’s most important energy minerals.

Throughout history, several events have left their imprints on global uranium production, from the invention of nuclear energy to the stockpiling of weapons during the Cold War.

The above infographic visualizes over 70 years of uranium production by country using data from the Nuclear Energy Agency.

The first commercial nuclear power plant came online in 1956. Before that, uranium production was mainly dedicated to satisfying military requirements.

In the 1940s, most of the world’s uranium came from the Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo. During this time, Shinkolobwe and Canada’s Eldorado Mine also supplied uranium for the Manhattan Project and the world’s first atomic bomb. //

Kazakhstan has been the world’s leading uranium producer since 2009. In 2019, Kazakhstan mined more uranium than Canada, Australia, and Namibia combined, making up 42% of global production. It’s also worth noting that Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Ukraine—four countries that were formerly part of the USSR—made it into the top 10 list.

Canada was the world’s second-largest producer of uranium despite production cuts at the country’s biggest uranium mines. Australia ranked third with just three uranium-producing mines including Olympic Dam, the world’s largest known uranium deposit.

One thing is for sure. The Iron Dome is definitely good at protecting Israel, but it’s even better at getting evil to expose itself.