Matthew Miner's Basic-ish BlogMatthew Miner's Blog

Sometimes I might say something

The purpose of blockchains is to establish unchangeable records of digital assets without any trusted party. "Unchangeable" sounds good to prevent fraud, so some county recorders who seem to understand nothing about the law or technology, like Cook County's Karen Yarbrough, who thought blockchain made sense for government deed records, try to force blockchains onto physical property. But even on its face, this application of blockchains makes zero sense and only exists to appeal to the unwitti...

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Bitcoin is commonly known to those with more than a cursory knowledge of it to be a horribly inefficient product. Indeed, its very premise is to use large amounts of energy computing pointless math problems to prevent fraud without having a trusted agent verifying transactions. Yet, if you search about it's energy consumption compared to that of traditional banking, you'll just find tons of copy-and-pasted fluff pieces about how Bitcoin only uses half of much energy as traditional banking. Is this true? How can this be?

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One game gaining some popularity among the cryptocurrency craze is RollerCoin. Its players have been promoting it through its referral links, claiming that it is one of the funnest play-to-earn games. You can alleged earn money just playing for free. At first it seems like a simple little idle game, but the main content is actually playing little minigames. There's Match 3, Breakout, 2048, and other classic arcade games, and you have to play these games (or pay real money) to power up your com...

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