People who had any sense were saying crypto and NFT's were the obvious scam that they were back in the late 00's when the public first became aware of them. Figuring out in short time that the promise of getting rich quick via completely made up out of thin air, "digitial currency" that no one actually used for "currency" wasn't hard for anyone with at least a fragment of a brain and not easily duped.
Your comment is the comment preview for this video and ended with "easy to say with foresight" and I thought you were going to make some argument that at the beginning crypto started out great and I was getting riled lmfao. The people who created crypto were fine and had mostly good intentions but programmers are not financial advisors or economists. 😂😂😂 Anyway you unintentionally had me in the first half gg.
Yeah, in spring 2010 I knew someone who was a genuine sociopath/psychopath, and he was telling us how bitcoin was a pyramid scheme and we could get in on the ground floor. He was really excited about the fact that it was going to be a profitable scam.
The Space Pen was developed independently by Paul Fisher with his own money, and he sold them to both NASA and the Soviets. Regular pencils are bad in space because the graphite that breaks off can short out electronics, grease pencils are just a pain, and both have the issue of small debris when sharpening.
On behalf of engineers, I salute your commitment to the truth. We do all *kinds* of dumb things but rarely the sort of thing that makes so pithy a tale.
except that I'm old, and even in the 1960s (and I was even using older pencils from the 1950s) unless you're sharpening them, graphite pencils really don't shed bits. And a mechanical pencil is the answer to not having to sharpen the lead, and even in the 50s and 60s, very good mechanical pencils were on the market.
Love, love, love this podcast. One quick request: Any chance you can mention the date at the beginning of the shows? For those of us who have recently found this amazing show, knowing when the older episodes came out really helps put things in perspective.
Dan Olson is the best video essayist ever imo... probably helps that he's a legit film maker as well... but he really nails the format in a way that doesn't depend on flashy edits, crazy lighting, costume or speaking really, really fast. I mean, I love all the "breadtube" video essayists... but Dan makes actual art. They are the sort of videos that I can sit down and show my parents and they'll actually watch them with me.
Honestly, she was pretty damn annoying in this episode. Just constantly interrupting with inane and irrelevant blurbs that would jolt Robert's train of thought to a halt mid sentence. And like, almost every other sentence. I usually enjoy her as a guest, but this time she made it really unpleasant for me to listen to. It probably would have played a lot better if this was a normal episode about some goofy bastard, rather than a breakdown of a complicated and important topic intersecting economics, computer science, fraud, etc. /rant
I've met a few people that when I pointed out that the only eay they're making money with crypto is to fuck someone else over they've said "yeah, I know, that's fine." I just make a mental note to never hang out with that person. Of course, one of those people is a coworker who apparently drove oil tankers in Iraq for Blackwater, so I wasn't going to hang around her anyway.
Throwing this out there because it's a personal hill I die on: NASA did not spend millions on developing a space pen, it was developed by a private company and we bought them for retail (about $25 a pen, which still, expensive pen, but only a couple grand total, not millions, which is peanuts in space money). Pencils were also generally a hazard to bring up into space, since the wood is flammable and the graphite dust, broken tips, and wood shavings represent a hazard if they float into electronics.
@@MMuraseofSandvich NASA was unaware of high oxygen fire danger until Apollo I. Soviets never used it in their spacecrafts because they torched a guy during ground testing before they flew anyone.
21:10 This is something I've been saying all along that I haven't heard anyone else bring up: As long as people are saying "I'll sell you this for $X USD in bitcoin" then bitcoin will never be a real currency.
Tremendous episode. Even the techies will likely pick up a few insights -- very impressed, as usual, with the background research all of this must take to produce for the series.
So about the "Americans spending money to make a pen while the Russians used a pencil" thing. Pencils were problematic in zero gravity because the graphite chips, filings, etc. could get into devices and make them malfunction or even worse, start a fire in an enclosed oxygen-rich environment, something pens didn't have to worry about. I know it's completely irrelevant to the episode, but I thought people might be curious.
WHO STILL HAS A PUBLIC SPACE PROGRAM, RUSSIA OR AMERICA?!!! WE'RE PAYING RUSSIA TO FERRY OUR ASTRONAUTS TO SPACE, WHILE PAYING ELON MUSK AND JEFF BEZOS BILLIONS TO FAIL AT SHIT NASA DID IN THE 60S!!
As it turns out, there WAS reason NASA spent all that time and money developing a space pen. NASA generally has a better track record on using funding productively, compared to, say, the US military. Just in terms of sheer volume of money wasted.
@@Bluecho4To add insult to injury of this false story, NASA did not even need to fund the development of the pen. Fisher developed the pen on their own dime and then NASA bought the pens from them. I hate that myth is so wrong and yet constantly repeated.
@@markevans8206 - It is awful, but I think it appeals to people's vanity in a way - we love the idea of the know-nothing-know-it-all scientist who is wasting time and money on a problem we can all solve in our sleep... even though that would actually be a terrible reality to live in so we should probably be grateful that it's not the case.
Most informative thing on an interesting topic I've seen in a long time. That 2CI stuff was fascinating. And I guess the crypto discussion was good too
I like how this ep breaks form. Usually Robert talks complete paragraphs, but I guess he and Sofiya decided for a New Orleans jazz style dialog. Creates suspense and tension because I keep listening for points but as one comes, the talk veers into random chanting of Mt Gox mt gox... etc. Very fun.
41:35 I had heard that one often even since childhood, then heard a counter that graphite pencils pose a hazard with the shavings and dust obviously being loose, plus the graphite is conductive and can interfere with electronics or even cause a fire.
What sucks about the city kids who want to have a self sufficient compound is there are things they can do to be more self sufficient that's more in their range of ability. I grew up with a parents who had a small vegtable garden when we had the space for it. Were we self sufficient? No. Did we save money on not having to buy tomatoes? Yes. (Also everyone likes you when you have free veggies to give away to them)
There are even community gardens where people can share space, skills, etc. And the kind of food you can grow in a home or community garden without having a farmer's skills are also some of the hardest things to get an affordable supply of, and things where having the relatively small amount you can grow for yourself and your neighbors is actually meaningful. That involves collaborating with other people, usually in a horizontal instead of hierarchical way, though, so while the libertarians (in the original sense) are all for it, the Libertarians can't stand it.
@@M_M_ODonnell if you are lucky enough to have a space for a community garden. The city I live in, I don't know where you would even have space for a community garden since all the farmland is taken up by local ag unless the college set aside space for it and I know they wouldn't because they make money off of selling food that the ag students grow.
@@yourlocalnerd7788 Yeah, the space is a limiting factor in too many places (including my city). As something to work towards, though, "change cities so that more people who aren't swimming in money can get access to space (and time) to grow some fruit and veggies" might hold a bit more promise than "everyone should go live on their own land with satellite-swarm internet and a well for drinking and irrigation water (except for the walking labor supply who can choke in cities)."
@@yourlocalnerd7788 In a lot of cities, people are using rooftops on tenement buildings for example. They're sturdy enough to hold that much weight (most are built so you can put water towers on there, and that water is a _lot_ heavier than a few planters full of soil). And areas where everyone lives in little cheap houses often have more than enough space after some cleaning up.
@@snorpenbass4196pedestrianizing some streets would also add additional space, since cars and the infrastructure needed for them are VERY space inefficient.
I rennovated an entire house listening exclusively to BTB. Once I get my workshop finished I may have to make a knife for you in payment for all this entertainment.
You'd think, by these comments, that the pen thing was critical and leaned on erroneously to make a point when it was a just a super brief exchange that acknowledged that those details were unknown and more importantly, irrelevant.
It's like these techbros played an arcade plane-shooter, and think they understand planes. And instead of buying Flight Simulator for 60 bucks or whatever, they just buy an actual plane for millions, only to find out they understand nothing. Like it's clear that they get a nerdgasm out of the game, and let it carry them to the real thing, instead of researching the stuff they're gonna get into.
Listening chronologically, the knife collection/cannibal intro was the loose end I didn't know I needed closure for until it happened. Bravo to everyone involved. 😂
Hey another thing about Bitcoin 'mining' that you didn't mention/might not be aware of is that the computers around the world wasting all the energy aren't /just/ mining bitcoin, they are /competing/ to mine the bitcoin. Only one person/machine can create a bitcoin at a time, so the fastest person/computer to do all the calculations for one 'wins' and creates it. Any other computer working on doing the same calculations just wasted all their time and energy and get nothing for it. Which is why bigger and bigger setups keep being made, because unless you have the fastest setup you won't make anything.
Yes and no. There's a random aspect to it, theoretically you could use a Raspberry Pi and get very lucky. A bigger rig just means higher odds that you'll find the right answer first because you can try more answers than anyone else. And unfortunately because there's always going to be overlaps in search spaces you're about 2.05 times more likely to get there first if you double the number of hashes per second and ensure your own rig doesn't overlap ops with itself. That slight advantage to more power though is what everyone is after(4 times as powerful is 4.2× odds, 8 times as powerful is 8.6× odds, 16 times as powerful is 17.6× odds, and so on). Even a slight edge is a big deal when you're talking about bitcoins being worth thousands of dollars.
Nuclear power plants are extremely efficient and safe unless it was built with cheaper materials, poorly maintained, and or is managed by people who neither know nor care what they're doing. Governments can be viewed similarly. They're a human mechanism we can build. And when we build them poorly, they can kill millions. But, when built with intent and managed carefully by people who understand what its for, it allows a population to work together on serving the most basic needs of that population. Managed poorly, it's just another corporation, extracting resources. I think nuclear power is pretty cool, despite how dangerous a poorly made one can be. I feel similarly about governments. I don't hate all governments on principle, but it's a specific tool with a specific use and when properly implamented, can enable people to live better lives. The issue is when people come to understand the US government, they either look at it as "This is so broken, we should rip it down to the foundations and rebuild it" ( Hi constitutionalist folks! Our founding document was never meant to be a sacred text but hey go off ). Others say "This is so broken, everyone should abandon ship!" Ignoring everyone who cannot metaphorically swim and assuming there's enough life boats for everyone when there is not, by design. Others look at it and say "This is so broken, I'm going to get everything I can before someone fixes it!" And once one opportunist has made themselves even more wealthy than they already were, everyone else with that reflex wants their turn to get in there before the opportunity closes. Then there's the folks who go "This is broken, if I fuck it up more it'll blow up, and then someone new can start over!" Without care or consideration of the people who will die during that explosion. Within the sphere of folks who can recognize Shit Is Fucked All The Way Down To How The Nation Was Founded, Maybe We Shouldn't Be A Nation, there's a thousand ideas of what we should do instead and how to break down the old system... Often without regards to what the fallout would be for folks at the bottom of the pile. This is why Libertarian and Anarchist ideals never appealed to me. I understand the urge to throw it to the ground and not participate, to fucking run, to try and return to a base principal and try again... But all of those ideas ignore the purpose of government and governence; that the machine HAS a purpose, but can only succeed if carefully built to fit that purpose. Blowing it all up just means someone is gonna try again, and argue that it only didn't work last time because someone blew it up. And many will die during the crisis.
Yeah. I like the idea of an anarchist society (this isn't necessarily without a government, but preferably with a specific style designed to distribute power as evenly as possible). The main issue is that I don't know how to actually get there safely, so I'm currently mostly for improving this system until I see a good path forward.
When I was in school, we did a language trip to Spain. It was a learning trip, so I had my school stuff with me. Had to toss my compass, cause circles are dangerous in the sky.
I remember when I first heard about Bitcoin on one of the nerdy little forums I was on, and we clowned on it constantly for not knowing how currency or value actually works. At the time you could mine Bitcoin with spare cycles on your home PC like Seti@Home or Folding@Home but most of us didn't bother because it was obvious bullshit. By the time mainstream media was reporting on it you needed warehouses full of server-racks fitted with the then top-of-the-line GPU cards to mine it... I like to study history, and I was just reminded of how impressed everyone was way back when at the idea of computing power that *didn't* take up an entire building.
I mined a few coins in the early days on a lark. Sold it off when BTC was like $80 and recouped the cost of the computer itself. Had I held on it would have been worth the down payment on a house or whatever. The whole "untraceable" thing was obviously a shame at the time. Someone just needed to walk back the BC.
The space pen vs pencil thing is misleading cuz as soon as we invented a space pen the Russians started using it cuz graphite shavings got into circuits and caused problems in space and the upside down pen fixed that problem
I gotta be that guy and jump in here (41:35) That whole thing about NASA spending millions to develop a pen that could work in zeroG while the Russians just used a pencil. There's a very good reason you want to spend millions of $$$ to get a pen that can work in zeroG as opposed to a sensible sounding pencil, and that's zeroG itself. Pencils work by pressing lead graphite onto paper, and that's nice and basic down here on earth. But if you write with a pencil enough you know a few things we take for granted. You leave little trails of graphite dust on the paper that you blow away. You have to keep sharpening the pencil, which produces shrapnel. And often those pencil nibs snap off. Now, in earth gravity, they just fall to the ground and we forget about it. But in zeroG, you've now got fine graphite dust, splinters of wood and lead, and snapped pencil nibs floating around, getting into your eyes, and (more importantly why you would spend millions of a pen) getting into the instruments and electrics that are keeping you alive. Pencils in space can kill you.
If bitcoin was used how it was designed to be used and not the worst things wrong with the stock market and high end art market, it would have been a beautiful idea. However those people that are the worst parts of the stock market and high end art market took thus beautiful idea and shit all over it
NFTs are seperate from crypto, and were created by an artist with...honestly good intentions but little common sense. I strongly recommend looking into countries and businesses that have tried to adopt crypto as a currency and how that worked out (spoiler; it didn't) as well as Coffeezilla's breakdown of crypto scams to see how vulnerable the block chain really is (for example, how easy it is to change a smart contract right before launch so whales can cash out quick.) The US also classifies crypto as securities, not a currency, which is purely based on how crypto works and not anything to do with scammers... At the end of the day, programmers are not economists or financial advisors. The people who created Bitcoin and the platforms for other cryptocurrency had no fucking clue how to create a viable currency...just how to program what they WANTED to be a viable currency.
Meh. If it was used as it was suppose to, it would be deflationary and just be another lock in for early adopters and generational wealth. Also, it doesn’t solve the problem that supposedly inspired it, the 2008 economic collapse brought on by no documentation loans and housing speculation. Unless you think bitcoin magically prevents loans and speculation. It was obvious from day one it would be yet another speculative commodity, not a real currency. I just wish I was brazen enough to buy it early on anyways, but I was too chicken. I hate that any brokerages and banks will touch it at all.
One of the important thing to remember is that blockchains are *ledgers* - records of transactions. A bank, or any other company, could use an internal blockchain to record their incomings and outgoings, and it would be computationally-expensive but totally doable. It would also make it a lot harder to take that bank down by exploiting vulnerabilities in, say, *one* of their pieces of hardware or software. Karpelès committed fraud. That's what altering your financial records to deliberately misrepresent your company's value is - it's fraud.
I'm really enjoying this. Long ago, 2008? 2009? I was given 1/10th of a bitcoin. At least I think I was, it was worth $10 (bitcoin was at $100 at the time) and .... well, no one walked up to me on the street and handed me something and said, "Here's you're 1/10th of a bitcoin!". Nothing came in the mail. Nothing came in any way that's actually real. It was just someone on some internet discussion board (in fact I was on Reddit 'way back then for a short while so it was probably on there) and as far as I can tell Bitcoin is utterly imaginary.
Everyone seeing me learn Japanese being like "oh well if Sarah did it" meanwhile I spent 7 years in school for it (including 2 years living there) and about $50k learning it...🤦🏼♀️
Well there was one guy who was actually able to succesfully come up with a new economic system very succesfully, but his ideas are opposite to those of crypto.
Not sure how accurate this is but a program tried to explain the math behind the process of mining and why it takes exponential electricity. Apparently it's determing if something is a prime number using division so you start with "is 2 a prime number? Yes." Very little electricity one bit coin. Eventually though you get to "Is 124850375839502853900023471495813 a prime number?" and that is obviously a much harder thing to figure out especially if you're told to show your work using only division so a massive amount of electricity.
Graphite use in space is cool until your pencil tip breaks and that shit floats around until it lands somewhere and shorts to power/ground some vital piece of equipment
I’ve been a smart contract dev for 6 years. The industry gets old fast because of all the scammers, it’s bullshit. None of the founders have any experience in anything other than grifting, they don’t want to pay the devs despite pulling in billions… the tech is cool and the vision of the old cypherpunks is still alive, but we’ve essentially reinvented the same systems and hierarchies we were railing against, just shittier and with more steps. That being said, making BTB NFTs or tokens would be super easy and you could give them away and whatnot. ETH and POLY are both proof of stake now so it’s no longer using the power of multiple small countries (yes I know the downsides of PoS). Just a thought. Something trollish maybe.
Good old Satoshi would have been horrified by the current state of bitcoin. It was never supposed to have this crazy inflated value - that makes it both useless as a real currency and also drove the insane environmental impact. If the 'coin' had a relatively low value then creating new coins wouldn't be the focus - using the ones that exist is the main focus. Mining new coins was always assumed to just be something that would run in the background not consuming any real world resources at any measurable level. Because if you only get a small benefit from creating a new one then you'd never try to brute-force the creation of a new one because the economics doesn't make sense.
The Fisher Space Pen was both 1) Not developed by the US government and 2) Not extremely expensive also 3) Is far superior to pencils because pencils can catch fire, and in space, that is bad.
I'm glad someone is recognizing the terrible danger to National Security posed by pencil fires. Why do you think they tell you to bring two pencils to the SAT test? Statistically, there's a fair chance one will catch fire. Two might catch fire but in that case there's an unwritten rule that another test-taker will loan the burned-out test taker their 2nd pencil, after having put the fire out, of course.
Awww theyo got your knife after 15 tries? They got mom's swiss army knife the first time she tried to use it. Which was especially a shame because it was a graduation gift from her highschool.
I had 2 bitcoin I mined myself on my GPU when that was possible. It was also worth nothing back then, nothing I could get to Norway from Silk Road anyway, since my address is flagged to hell for previous customs issues, and I didn't believe in the hype. So I gave it away. Fuck.
Interesting episode and solid research that is well presented but holy sh!! Can that co-host just shut the hell up. I don’t know where Robert gets some of these people from and I don’t mind tangents but some of them have nothing to say and talk just to be heard …. Really detracts from the episode
Oh man this was not a good episode... Trashing on cryptocurrency is well and good and even I would say important, but this is pretty surface level and uninsightful. But I guess it's partially excusable because it originally came out around a month before Line Goes Up, and the topic has really been done to death since then. Or not death, because cryptocurrency still exists sadly
For the love of whatever you hold holy, can you please bookmark the place where you start talking about the actual topic? I enjoy your takes on these various people and schemes, but I don't like wasting more than ten minutes listening to you drivel about stupid stuff. Trust me, it's nowhere near as entertaining as you seem to think it is.
Bold of Robert and Sofiya to stick to their guns and post such a bad take two years later, after cryptocurrency has finally proven itself and so thoroughly and smoothly taken over the world's financial systems without any complications or downsides whatsoever!
It’s easy with hindsight to say crypto and NFTs were a bad idea, but it was also easy to say with foresight and through the middle too.
People who had any sense were saying crypto and NFT's were the obvious scam that they were back in the late 00's when the public first became aware of them. Figuring out in short time that the promise of getting rich quick via completely made up out of thin air, "digitial currency" that no one actually used for "currency" wasn't hard for anyone with at least a fragment of a brain and not easily duped.
Your comment is the comment preview for this video and ended with "easy to say with foresight" and I thought you were going to make some argument that at the beginning crypto started out great and I was getting riled lmfao. The people who created crypto were fine and had mostly good intentions but programmers are not financial advisors or economists. 😂😂😂 Anyway you unintentionally had me in the first half gg.
Yeah, in spring 2010 I knew someone who was a genuine sociopath/psychopath, and he was telling us how bitcoin was a pyramid scheme and we could get in on the ground floor. He was really excited about the fact that it was going to be a profitable scam.
_read first phrase_ :KEYBOARD WARRIOR ACTIVATE:
_read second phrase_ :snicker:
good job copying that tweet
The Space Pen was developed independently by Paul Fisher with his own money, and he sold them to both NASA and the Soviets. Regular pencils are bad in space because the graphite that breaks off can short out electronics, grease pencils are just a pain, and both have the issue of small debris when sharpening.
THANK YOU. I'm so ready for that story to go away.
I was not disappointed, I knew that the true story would be here. They can't have normal bread in space for the same reason.
@@hellbreakfast Give us this day, our daily crayon
On behalf of engineers, I salute your commitment to the truth.
We do all *kinds* of dumb things but rarely the sort of thing that makes so pithy a tale.
except that I'm old, and even in the 1960s (and I was even using older pencils from the 1950s) unless you're sharpening them, graphite pencils really don't shed bits. And a mechanical pencil is the answer to not having to sharpen the lead, and even in the 50s and 60s, very good mechanical pencils were on the market.
Love, love, love this podcast. One quick request: Any chance you can mention the date at the beginning of the shows? For those of us who have recently found this amazing show, knowing when the older episodes came out really helps put things in perspective.
I just noticed that you include the original air date in the description. Thank you!
@@Eschatonitelmao i only recently realized as well
Folding Idea essays are amazing on this stuff, great episode topic
Dan Olson is the best video essayist ever imo... probably helps that he's a legit film maker as well... but he really nails the format in a way that doesn't depend on flashy edits, crazy lighting, costume or speaking really, really fast. I mean, I love all the "breadtube" video essayists... but Dan makes actual art. They are the sort of videos that I can sit down and show my parents and they'll actually watch them with me.
in my head canon, that nft video single handedly brought down nfts
Can definitely recommend his stuff about the flat-earthers and why they're not harmless buffoons, very BTB vibe.
@@FTZPLTC BTB?
@@Tacom4ster - Behind The Bastards
Would love to see Dan Olson of Folding Ideas as a guest on one of the crypto eps. Or any eps, really.
Original Air Date: December 7, 2021 :)
@@nokkonokko - Fine, get Coffeezilla then.
This is the most "the guest host is stoned out of their fucking *mind*" episode I've seen yet lmfao
She is always. I have never seen Sofiya Alexandria sober lmao.
@@fredericksmith7942 ohhhh i just thought she was trying way to hard lol
I was wondering if she was drunk.
Honestly, she was pretty damn annoying in this episode. Just constantly interrupting with inane and irrelevant blurbs that would jolt Robert's train of thought to a halt mid sentence. And like, almost every other sentence.
I usually enjoy her as a guest, but this time she made it really unpleasant for me to listen to.
It probably would have played a lot better if this was a normal episode about some goofy bastard, rather than a breakdown of a complicated and important topic intersecting economics, computer science, fraud, etc.
/rant
I'm going to watch that line goes up video one more time after this. Phuckin banger. 😂
I've met a few people that when I pointed out that the only eay they're making money with crypto is to fuck someone else over they've said "yeah, I know, that's fine." I just make a mental note to never hang out with that person. Of course, one of those people is a coworker who apparently drove oil tankers in Iraq for Blackwater, so I wasn't going to hang around her anyway.
We need more knife content. This is my favorite knife podcast.
You know who else's favorite knife podcast this is...😏😉
Throwing this out there because it's a personal hill I die on: NASA did not spend millions on developing a space pen, it was developed by a private company and we bought them for retail (about $25 a pen, which still, expensive pen, but only a couple grand total, not millions, which is peanuts in space money). Pencils were also generally a hazard to bring up into space, since the wood is flammable and the graphite dust, broken tips, and wood shavings represent a hazard if they float into electronics.
See: Apollo I fire
I type up my comment, then come down here and find a great breakdown of my point. Nice!
@@MMuraseofSandvich NASA was unaware of high oxygen fire danger until Apollo I. Soviets never used it in their spacecrafts because they torched a guy during ground testing before they flew anyone.
@@harkonen1000000as with most things to do with space flight, the soviets beat us again
21:10 This is something I've been saying all along that I haven't heard anyone else bring up: As long as people are saying "I'll sell you this for $X USD in bitcoin" then bitcoin will never be a real currency.
Tremendous episode. Even the techies will likely pick up a few insights -- very impressed, as usual, with the background research all of this must take to produce for the series.
I hope you do a follow-up about the smoking crater where crypto used to be in 2021.
So about the "Americans spending money to make a pen while the Russians used a pencil" thing.
Pencils were problematic in zero gravity because the graphite chips, filings, etc. could get into devices and make them malfunction or even worse, start a fire in an enclosed oxygen-rich environment, something pens didn't have to worry about.
I know it's completely irrelevant to the episode, but I thought people might be curious.
WHO STILL HAS A PUBLIC SPACE PROGRAM, RUSSIA OR AMERICA?!!! WE'RE PAYING RUSSIA TO FERRY OUR ASTRONAUTS TO SPACE, WHILE PAYING ELON MUSK AND JEFF BEZOS BILLIONS TO FAIL AT SHIT NASA DID IN THE 60S!!
As it turns out, there WAS reason NASA spent all that time and money developing a space pen.
NASA generally has a better track record on using funding productively, compared to, say, the US military. Just in terms of sheer volume of money wasted.
@@Bluecho4To add insult to injury of this false story, NASA did not even need to fund the development of the pen. Fisher developed the pen on their own dime and then NASA bought the pens from them.
I hate that myth is so wrong and yet constantly repeated.
@@markevans8206 - It is awful, but I think it appeals to people's vanity in a way - we love the idea of the know-nothing-know-it-all scientist who is wasting time and money on a problem we can all solve in our sleep... even though that would actually be a terrible reality to live in so we should probably be grateful that it's not the case.
Most informative thing on an interesting topic I've seen in a long time. That 2CI stuff was fascinating. And I guess the crypto discussion was good too
I like how this ep breaks form. Usually Robert talks complete paragraphs, but I guess he and Sofiya decided for a New Orleans jazz style dialog.
Creates suspense and tension because I keep listening for points but as one comes, the talk veers into random chanting of Mt Gox mt gox... etc.
Very fun.
Thank you so much for covering a topic that I can never get enough of.
More to come!
@@BehindTheBastardsknow where I can get any Dilaudid?
lol you can bleep it all you want, Sophie, but you can't stop Robert from asking people to send him human meat
NOBODY send them any [ long censor beep ]
Human flesh
I am currently adding homemade knives to my care package of [long censor beep] for the cast of Behind the Bastards
Love how many of the comments are correcting the space pen story 😅
Listening to the intro while eating lunch, perfect pairing
The complete lack of enthusiasm following Robert yelling "cryptocurrency!!!!!" was very amusing XD
50:55 Found the FF IX fan. "I'm sharpening my knife, kupo"
41:35 I had heard that one often even since childhood, then heard a counter that graphite pencils pose a hazard with the shavings and dust obviously being loose, plus the graphite is conductive and can interfere with electronics or even cause a fire.
All of the TH-cam ads during this video were for Bitcoin. Go figure.
What sucks about the city kids who want to have a self sufficient compound is there are things they can do to be more self sufficient that's more in their range of ability. I grew up with a parents who had a small vegtable garden when we had the space for it. Were we self sufficient? No. Did we save money on not having to buy tomatoes? Yes. (Also everyone likes you when you have free veggies to give away to them)
There are even community gardens where people can share space, skills, etc. And the kind of food you can grow in a home or community garden without having a farmer's skills are also some of the hardest things to get an affordable supply of, and things where having the relatively small amount you can grow for yourself and your neighbors is actually meaningful.
That involves collaborating with other people, usually in a horizontal instead of hierarchical way, though, so while the libertarians (in the original sense) are all for it, the Libertarians can't stand it.
@@M_M_ODonnell if you are lucky enough to have a space for a community garden. The city I live in, I don't know where you would even have space for a community garden since all the farmland is taken up by local ag unless the college set aside space for it and I know they wouldn't because they make money off of selling food that the ag students grow.
@@yourlocalnerd7788 Yeah, the space is a limiting factor in too many places (including my city). As something to work towards, though, "change cities so that more people who aren't swimming in money can get access to space (and time) to grow some fruit and veggies" might hold a bit more promise than "everyone should go live on their own land with satellite-swarm internet and a well for drinking and irrigation water (except for the walking labor supply who can choke in cities)."
@@yourlocalnerd7788 In a lot of cities, people are using rooftops on tenement buildings for example. They're sturdy enough to hold that much weight (most are built so you can put water towers on there, and that water is a _lot_ heavier than a few planters full of soil). And areas where everyone lives in little cheap houses often have more than enough space after some cleaning up.
@@snorpenbass4196pedestrianizing some streets would also add additional space, since cars and the infrastructure needed for them are VERY space inefficient.
I rennovated an entire house listening exclusively to BTB. Once I get my workshop finished I may have to make a knife for you in payment for all this entertainment.
You'd think, by these comments, that the pen thing was critical and leaned on erroneously to make a point when it was a just a super brief exchange that acknowledged that those details were unknown and more importantly, irrelevant.
I hope you talk about just how easy it is to launder money with crypto
It's like these techbros played an arcade plane-shooter, and think they understand planes. And instead of buying Flight Simulator for 60 bucks or whatever, they just buy an actual plane for millions, only to find out they understand nothing. Like it's clear that they get a nerdgasm out of the game, and let it carry them to the real thing, instead of researching the stuff they're gonna get into.
The humor at the beginning of this podcast very much speaks my language. I also can see why its too much for most people.
There is a VERY good reason NASA doesn't use pencils. Pencils create graphite dust
"Can you be the Pope, and I'll be the Queen?"
This is the kind of erotic roleplay that listeners of the podcast show up for.
Robert had to work hard to stay on track on this one.
Right his guest sounded drunk
She certainly did not make it easy. Super annoying.
Listening chronologically, the knife collection/cannibal intro was the loose end I didn't know I needed closure for until it happened. Bravo to everyone involved. 😂
Hey another thing about Bitcoin 'mining' that you didn't mention/might not be aware of is that the computers around the world wasting all the energy aren't /just/ mining bitcoin, they are /competing/ to mine the bitcoin. Only one person/machine can create a bitcoin at a time, so the fastest person/computer to do all the calculations for one 'wins' and creates it. Any other computer working on doing the same calculations just wasted all their time and energy and get nothing for it. Which is why bigger and bigger setups keep being made, because unless you have the fastest setup you won't make anything.
Yes and no.
There's a random aspect to it, theoretically you could use a Raspberry Pi and get very lucky.
A bigger rig just means higher odds that you'll find the right answer first because you can try more answers than anyone else.
And unfortunately because there's always going to be overlaps in search spaces you're about 2.05 times more likely to get there first if you double the number of hashes per second and ensure your own rig doesn't overlap ops with itself. That slight advantage to more power though is what everyone is after(4 times as powerful is 4.2× odds, 8 times as powerful is 8.6× odds, 16 times as powerful is 17.6× odds, and so on). Even a slight edge is a big deal when you're talking about bitcoins being worth thousands of dollars.
Every time some nerd thinks 'oh this will be a great idea that will make the world a better place'.... it nearly always isn't.
Nuclear power plants are extremely efficient and safe unless it was built with cheaper materials, poorly maintained, and or is managed by people who neither know nor care what they're doing.
Governments can be viewed similarly. They're a human mechanism we can build. And when we build them poorly, they can kill millions. But, when built with intent and managed carefully by people who understand what its for, it allows a population to work together on serving the most basic needs of that population.
Managed poorly, it's just another corporation, extracting resources.
I think nuclear power is pretty cool, despite how dangerous a poorly made one can be. I feel similarly about governments. I don't hate all governments on principle, but it's a specific tool with a specific use and when properly implamented, can enable people to live better lives.
The issue is when people come to understand the US government, they either look at it as "This is so broken, we should rip it down to the foundations and rebuild it" ( Hi constitutionalist folks! Our founding document was never meant to be a sacred text but hey go off ). Others say "This is so broken, everyone should abandon ship!" Ignoring everyone who cannot metaphorically swim and assuming there's enough life boats for everyone when there is not, by design. Others look at it and say "This is so broken, I'm going to get everything I can before someone fixes it!" And once one opportunist has made themselves even more wealthy than they already were, everyone else with that reflex wants their turn to get in there before the opportunity closes. Then there's the folks who go "This is broken, if I fuck it up more it'll blow up, and then someone new can start over!" Without care or consideration of the people who will die during that explosion.
Within the sphere of folks who can recognize Shit Is Fucked All The Way Down To How The Nation Was Founded, Maybe We Shouldn't Be A Nation, there's a thousand ideas of what we should do instead and how to break down the old system... Often without regards to what the fallout would be for folks at the bottom of the pile.
This is why Libertarian and Anarchist ideals never appealed to me. I understand the urge to throw it to the ground and not participate, to fucking run, to try and return to a base principal and try again... But all of those ideas ignore the purpose of government and governence; that the machine HAS a purpose, but can only succeed if carefully built to fit that purpose.
Blowing it all up just means someone is gonna try again, and argue that it only didn't work last time because someone blew it up. And many will die during the crisis.
Yeah. I like the idea of an anarchist society (this isn't necessarily without a government, but preferably with a specific style designed to distribute power as evenly as possible).
The main issue is that I don't know how to actually get there safely, so I'm currently mostly for improving this system until I see a good path forward.
Mt Gox got named that because originally it was Magic The Gathering Online Xchange.
this is extensively explained and discussed in the episode.
I really hope David Gerard releases an updated _50ft Blockchain_ at some point with chapters on the NFT bubble and FTX
Wait that film is called "Pirate Radio" in the US?? GOD, America is bad at naming films. In the UK it's called *The Boat That Rocked*
Yea I noticed that too. It’s weird. I guess some dumbass produce thought Americans would be more interested if had the word pirate in the title.
When I was in school, we did a language trip to Spain. It was a learning trip, so I had my school stuff with me. Had to toss my compass, cause circles are dangerous in the sky.
I remember when I first heard about Bitcoin on one of the nerdy little forums I was on, and we clowned on it constantly for not knowing how currency or value actually works. At the time you could mine Bitcoin with spare cycles on your home PC like Seti@Home or Folding@Home but most of us didn't bother because it was obvious bullshit.
By the time mainstream media was reporting on it you needed warehouses full of server-racks fitted with the then top-of-the-line GPU cards to mine it... I like to study history, and I was just reminded of how impressed everyone was way back when at the idea of computing power that *didn't* take up an entire building.
I mined a few coins in the early days on a lark. Sold it off when BTC was like $80 and recouped the cost of the computer itself. Had I held on it would have been worth the down payment on a house or whatever. The whole "untraceable" thing was obviously a shame at the time. Someone just needed to walk back the BC.
im sorry but i hear mount gox and i imagine it spelled as gocks and i'm like wheresthat
The space pen vs pencil thing is misleading cuz as soon as we invented a space pen the Russians started using it cuz graphite shavings got into circuits and caused problems in space and the upside down pen fixed that problem
I gotta be that guy and jump in here (41:35)
That whole thing about NASA spending millions to develop a pen that could work in zeroG while the Russians just used a pencil.
There's a very good reason you want to spend millions of $$$ to get a pen that can work in zeroG as opposed to a sensible sounding pencil, and that's zeroG itself.
Pencils work by pressing lead graphite onto paper, and that's nice and basic down here on earth. But if you write with a pencil enough you know a few things we take for granted. You leave little trails of graphite dust on the paper that you blow away. You have to keep sharpening the pencil, which produces shrapnel. And often those pencil nibs snap off.
Now, in earth gravity, they just fall to the ground and we forget about it. But in zeroG, you've now got fine graphite dust, splinters of wood and lead, and snapped pencil nibs floating around, getting into your eyes, and (more importantly why you would spend millions of a pen) getting into the instruments and electrics that are keeping you alive.
Pencils in space can kill you.
"David Gerard Crypto Expert" Enough said gotta laugh my head off on that line.
I think blockchain ledger technology will have its uses -it already does for internal tech company records but not for this.
I get it as a data security technology. Tacking a currency onto it tho? LULZ. Fundamentally stupid.
If bitcoin was used how it was designed to be used and not the worst things wrong with the stock market and high end art market, it would have been a beautiful idea. However those people that are the worst parts of the stock market and high end art market took thus beautiful idea and shit all over it
NFTs are seperate from crypto, and were created by an artist with...honestly good intentions but little common sense. I strongly recommend looking into countries and businesses that have tried to adopt crypto as a currency and how that worked out (spoiler; it didn't) as well as Coffeezilla's breakdown of crypto scams to see how vulnerable the block chain really is (for example, how easy it is to change a smart contract right before launch so whales can cash out quick.) The US also classifies crypto as securities, not a currency, which is purely based on how crypto works and not anything to do with scammers...
At the end of the day, programmers are not economists or financial advisors. The people who created Bitcoin and the platforms for other cryptocurrency had no fucking clue how to create a viable currency...just how to program what they WANTED to be a viable currency.
Meh. If it was used as it was suppose to, it would be deflationary and just be another lock in for early adopters and generational wealth.
Also, it doesn’t solve the problem that supposedly inspired it, the 2008 economic collapse brought on by no documentation loans and housing speculation. Unless you think bitcoin magically prevents loans and speculation.
It was obvious from day one it would be yet another speculative commodity, not a real currency. I just wish I was brazen enough to buy it early on anyways, but I was too chicken.
I hate that any brokerages and banks will touch it at all.
One of the important thing to remember is that blockchains are *ledgers* - records of transactions. A bank, or any other company, could use an internal blockchain to record their incomings and outgoings, and it would be computationally-expensive but totally doable. It would also make it a lot harder to take that bank down by exploiting vulnerabilities in, say, *one* of their pieces of hardware or software.
Karpelès committed fraud. That's what altering your financial records to deliberately misrepresent your company's value is - it's fraud.
I'm really enjoying this. Long ago, 2008? 2009? I was given 1/10th of a bitcoin. At least I think I was, it was worth $10 (bitcoin was at $100 at the time) and .... well, no one walked up to me on the street and handed me something and said, "Here's you're 1/10th of a bitcoin!". Nothing came in the mail. Nothing came in any way that's actually real. It was just someone on some internet discussion board (in fact I was on Reddit 'way back then for a short while so it was probably on there) and as far as I can tell Bitcoin is utterly imaginary.
Sophie was really awake in this one, huh?
Everyone seeing me learn Japanese being like "oh well if Sarah did it" meanwhile I spent 7 years in school for it (including 2 years living there) and about $50k learning it...🤦🏼♀️
I have yet to hear a use case for crypto that can't be handled by an excel spreadsheet and cash.
"Loose knives" actually a pretty good name for a band
Love from aTrilogyMedia and Vaush fan!
Well there was one guy who was actually able to succesfully come up with a new economic system very succesfully, but his ideas are opposite to those of crypto.
Who?
Ah, of course Evans is well protected
Psilosybin is a trypamine, not a phenethyamine
'slice up his buttcheeck for some steak tar tar' is killing me AHAHAHAHA
yo bobby, anarchy all the way baby.
Sofiya answers the question, "what if Robert was a woman".
Alexandria is way overestimating how smart and wise tech bros are.
BTW ill buy the next one ffs. Just skint atm. x
Darvocet was taken off the market 14 years ago . Mama can’t have
This episode was %30 on topic and the rest was about knives and drugs. Great episode!
Did you guys ever check out the "Cryptoland" project and the CGI promo video they made?
Came for the crypto bastardry, stayed for the knife education
I just finished your book Robert. The end was great. So Glad you didnt kill of Roland.Fuckin awesome...!
I knew a guy who was on the forum when satoshi proposed bitcoin. No, they absolutely didn't think it would become big.
Not sure how accurate this is but a program tried to explain the math behind the process of mining and why it takes exponential electricity. Apparently it's determing if something is a prime number using division so you start with "is 2 a prime number? Yes." Very little electricity one bit coin. Eventually though you get to "Is 124850375839502853900023471495813 a prime number?" and that is obviously a much harder thing to figure out especially if you're told to show your work using only division so a massive amount of electricity.
*programmer
Graphite use in space is cool until your pencil tip breaks and that shit floats around until it lands somewhere and shorts to power/ground some vital piece of equipment
Another thing: Robert being refered to as "daddy" in either way shape or form won't ever be inaccurate at all. Because he is. 😂
A pencil doesn't work in space, cuz the graphite gets everywhere
I’ve been a smart contract dev for 6 years. The industry gets old fast because of all the scammers, it’s bullshit. None of the founders have any experience in anything other than grifting, they don’t want to pay the devs despite pulling in billions… the tech is cool and the vision of the old cypherpunks is still alive, but we’ve essentially reinvented the same systems and hierarchies we were railing against, just shittier and with more steps.
That being said, making BTB NFTs or tokens would be super easy and you could give them away and whatnot. ETH and POLY are both proof of stake now so it’s no longer using the power of multiple small countries (yes I know the downsides of PoS). Just a thought. Something trollish maybe.
M l e m
I wonder if Dunning-Kreuger gets people to try new things and imposter syndrome keeps people working to improve.
Lol ceo is an easy job 😂
Come for the bastard lesson, stay for the fake (?) conspiracies hatched by Robert and guests. 😂
Good old Satoshi would have been horrified by the current state of bitcoin. It was never supposed to have this crazy inflated value - that makes it both useless as a real currency and also drove the insane environmental impact. If the 'coin' had a relatively low value then creating new coins wouldn't be the focus - using the ones that exist is the main focus. Mining new coins was always assumed to just be something that would run in the background not consuming any real world resources at any measurable level. Because if you only get a small benefit from creating a new one then you'd never try to brute-force the creation of a new one because the economics doesn't make sense.
@44:16 Skill issue take five
The Fisher Space Pen was both
1) Not developed by the US government
and
2) Not extremely expensive
also
3) Is far superior to pencils because pencils can catch fire, and in space, that is bad.
I'm glad someone is recognizing the terrible danger to National Security posed by pencil fires. Why do you think they tell you to bring two pencils to the SAT test? Statistically, there's a fair chance one will catch fire. Two might catch fire but in that case there's an unwritten rule that another test-taker will loan the burned-out test taker their 2nd pencil, after having put the fire out, of course.
Anyone sellin in the comments? Lol
"Baby hurricane"? Naw, fam. That's an "Infant-nado".
Guest seems to have a TBI.
long pork butt bacon...
Awww theyo got your knife after 15 tries? They got mom's swiss army knife the first time she tried to use it. Which was especially a shame because it was a graduation gift from her highschool.
I had 2 bitcoin I mined myself on my GPU when that was possible. It was also worth nothing back then, nothing I could get to Norway from Silk Road anyway, since my address is flagged to hell for previous customs issues, and I didn't believe in the hype. So I gave it away. Fuck.
Interesting episode and solid research that is well presented but holy sh!! Can that co-host just shut the hell up. I don’t know where Robert gets some of these people from and I don’t mind tangents but some of them have nothing to say and talk just to be heard …. Really detracts from the episode
My favorite thing to hate staying strong since '12
please upload current episodes wtf
Trans women listening to this and hearing "Mount Gocks" are cackling like crazy
Oh man this was not a good episode... Trashing on cryptocurrency is well and good and even I would say important, but this is pretty surface level and uninsightful. But I guess it's partially excusable because it originally came out around a month before Line Goes Up, and the topic has really been done to death since then. Or not death, because cryptocurrency still exists sadly
Guest is p awful on this ep.
For the love of whatever you hold holy, can you please bookmark the place where you start talking about the actual topic? I enjoy your takes on these various people and schemes, but I don't like wasting more than ten minutes listening to you drivel about stupid stuff. Trust me, it's nowhere near as entertaining as you seem to think it is.
Came to the comments for the redacted part
Bold of Robert and Sofiya to stick to their guns and post such a bad take two years later, after cryptocurrency has finally proven itself and so thoroughly and smoothly taken over the world's financial systems without any complications or downsides whatsoever!
You need to throw one Australian in your pirate radio group. I can't explain why but I just know you need an Australian pirate.