You know how people say: "I bought 3 bitcoins," "I invested in bitcoins," "I'm stacking satoshis," "I transferred bitcoins to my wallet," or "I mined bitcoins"? However, all of this is a misconception because no bitcoins or their fractions (satoshis) actually exist. The piggy bank is empty. The misconception stems from a post by an unknown programmer who claimed to have invented a payment system that transfers money. But all his invention does is maintain a decentralized database over a peer-to-peer network that shows which numbers belong to which addresses. People came to believe that this network and its underlying protocol, collectively known as Bitcoin, record an amount of money, namely these bitcoins (abbreviated as BTC), in the database. But that money is not there. For instance, people often claim they have bought digital money, even though nothing digital exists in proportion to the assigned numbers. A person whose address is assigned the number "50" cannot show fifty files, data structures, or software products. There are no digital "bitcoin objects" that can be mined, bought, owned, moved, or used. It is even more obvious that nothing physical exists. Despite media illustrations of metal coins stamped with the '₿' symbol and frequent claims that one is buying something comparable to collectibles or commodities, no fifty tangible units of any kind are stored or reserved for the person next to whose address stands "50." The most common misconception, however, is that people believe they have bought something akin to fiat currencies, e-money issued by companies like PayPal, tokens, or even stocks. Yet, all of the above are instruments of liability, where the holder derives a benefit upon the fulfillment of that liability. Stocks track a company's obligation to its shareholders. When companies decide to distribute profits, execute stock buybacks, or liquidate the business, they are legally required to make direct payments to shareholders. PayPal’s e-money and tokens, like casino chips, track the issuer's obligation to redeem them for a specified amount of fiat currency. Fiat currencies track the obligations of those who took out loans from commercial and central banks. Before repaying their loans, these debtors provide goods, services, and labor to holders of fiat currency, or, in the case of the state, the settlement of tax liabilities. If debtors default on their payments, banks seize their property, offering them at auctions to holders of fiat currency, providing them with a benefit in that way. That unknown programmer, through his invention, does not track anyone's liability whose realization would provide a benefit to the holders of Bitcoin addresses. Therefore, there are no bitcoins to be mined or bought. What people are actually doing is giving away electrical energy, money, goods, and services, and the Bitcoin network numerically tracks this act of gifting. Through a collective narrative and storytelling, this act is publicly misperceived as an investment or a purchase. Centralized exchanges reinforce this misconception most aggressively by displaying the "BTC" ticker and USD side-by-side on trading interfaces. This is a visual lie, where the interface assumes that "something" stands behind the letters "BTC," just as a liability stands behind "USD." Even critics participate in the misconception. For example, by speaking of an "overvalued currency," they assume its existence. They call the act of gifting "overvaluation," even though there is no digital, physical, or legal thing that the user has received and could value. You cannot say the price is too high when there is nothing to compare it to. Since there are only numbers in a database, the word "overvalued" makes no sense. You cannot overvalue the number 50; it is simply 50. In short, this entire misconception boils down to people gifting existing wealth to one another in the hope that tomorrow someone else will gift them more, all while convinced they are investing in the money of the future. It will all collapse when the public realizes that this money simply does not exist. submitted by /u/BinaryLyric [link] [Kommentare]

Short-form writing just got much more popular, with the low attention span of people with TikTok and YT shorts.

The complete Rape Gang Inquiry Report, published June 2026.

Park Gyeong-je started tending beehives almost five decades ago, making it his livelihood because he liked spending time in nature.

The Chesterton’s fence analogy says that you need to be careful to change things if you don’t understand why things are the way they are, because there may be good reasons you haven’t considered yet. This is broadly good advice in many different contexts, including programming where it can be easy to “fix” some weird code only to discover there was a reason for the weirdness later on when things break. This is Chesterson’s middle finger: # List all commit body content (but not the subject line) % git log --no-merges --format=format:'%b' | sed '/^$/d' | wc -l 295 That’s 295 lines of commit text over the last 13 years. In total. The commit subjects are usually just “fix page A” – even for huge changes – and are pointless. If I manually remove some dependabot, “revert commit”, and “fix typo” commit bodies it’s just 167 lines. That’s about one line a month. There is no other documentation. There are barely any comments in the code. This is Chesterson’s middle finger: “Yes, we did all these weird things and we’re not telling anyone why. Haha fuck you.” This is not the first time I’ve seen a less-than-useful commit log, but it is the first time I’m hired after everyone else left. There is no one to ask. In theory there was a three week handover period from the previous developer, but that was just as communicative as the commit log. Never have I sympathized more with Jack Bauer’s methods to extract information and I regret not employing some of them. There are unfinished refactors. There are left-overs from removed features. There are features that were added but never linked/used but are still in the code. There are features no one seems to be using. Overall it seems to suffer quite badly from Chesterton’s gap (“There isn’t a fence yet? Lets build fences!” without asking if a fence is actually needed). Everything is just a big fat middle finger. Writing well is hard. Writing something vaguely passable is not. By and large there are three questions to answer: “What are you changing?”, “why are you changing it?”, and “why is this a good solution?” Sometimes “Implement new feature X” is enough, although it’s rare there is nothing more to say – most of the time there is something to say about how/why it’s added as it is. If you’re fixing a bug, refactoring or changing things, or making some other substantial change then it’s very rare there isn’t at least a paragraph or two to comment on the “what’s changing, why change it, and why is this good?” questions. Writing this is not an optional extra; it’s part of the job. If you’re not doing it then you’re not doing your job as a software developer. It doesn’t need to be eloquent. It doesn’t need to be perfect English. It doesn’t need to be a comprehensive essay on the nature of reality. It’s okay to forget something (although better if you don’t). It just needs … something. Any half-way serious attempt will be infinitely better than nothing at all. If you do nothing at all then you’re just giving everyone after you the finger. Other Programming posts22 Feb 2021 Go is not an easy language 7 Jan 2019 Testing isn’t everything 16 Nov 2024 Against best practices 29 Nov 2020 Stupid light software 22 Mar 2019 Easy means easy to debug 10 Dec 2020 Bitmasks for nicer APIs 25 Nov 2020 An API is a user interface 25 Apr 2020 Storing files in .git 5 Dec 2019 Good comments read well and are to the point 4 Sep 2016 YAML: probably not so great after all 7 Oct 2019 On being the right size 7 Feb 2016 The downsides of JSON for config filesOther Workplace posts 18 Feb 2021 Downsides of working remotely

Is the GLM-5.2 hype real or benchmaxxed? We ran it head-to-head against Claude Opus, building a 3D platformer in raw WebGL from scratch.

Free TRON security platform: scan wallets for AML & phishing risks, audit TRC-20 approvals & smart contracts, decode transactions before you sign. Read-only, no registration.