Insane? Yes. Unregulated, also yes. But if you remove the specific issues with bitcoin itself (like that it’s almost entirely used for speculation so far) and just look at the numbers you can see it’s not out of line for a brand new medium of exchange that starts trading at essentially zero but has the theoretical potential to be a major currency in world trade to have an almost unfathomable upside.
Depends how early, right? First days/months of bitcoin they were trading for fractions of a penny. What’s the ROI from $.0001 to $60,000? And in only 14yrs rather than 40.
I’ll have to check that out. I’ve enjoyed some of Vinge’s other work as well. The Peace War, Marooned in Realtime, and Rainbow’s End were all pretty great reads as I recall (been awhile).
I find them to be excessive as well, but since we have no power over wealthy people being conspicuous consumers the idea that they shouldn’t exist is unfortunately an unattainable ideal.
On the flipside, expensive toys like these often support R&D that eventually reaches more mass market production products.
People talked a lot of smack about the original Telsa Roadster (not getting into the politics of Elon here, what a mess), but the Roadster helped fund the Model S which funded the Model X, 3, and Y and ultimately forced every other vehicle manufacturer to get in the EV game.
When faced with situations out of my control I try to find the best path to beneficial outcomes.
It’s impressive that I missed the joke, read the explanation in thread here went back to the 3rd panel to see the “i” was missing but missed the 4th panel until reading that further downthread.
How the heck is this game free? It doesn’t even capture any data (on iOS) except identifies and they aren’t used to track players. Gonna give it a try.
Totally