Hostage Negotiator: Career Review - One Player Bliss

Boardgames Shut Up and Sit Down
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It must be, cause I almost never saw anybody wearing one in over 15 years in the UK.

Black or blue, or tartan, though, plenty. Even I had a black one (but way thicker than that, I am a Spaniard, after all).

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Now, that would fit in a Terry Pratchett novel. Definitely.

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(The video has been re-uploaded with “Talk Sport” changed to “One Player Bliss”, so I’ve changed the thread title.)

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Just for reference - because Van Ryder Games have got involved in NFTs I won’t be running this. This is my personal policy not that of the forum mods.

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Thanks for the heads up, that’s grounds for a boycott in my eyes as well, and I’m pretty keen on their products.

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What’s the deal with NFTs? I’m always completely baffled whenever they come up.

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People using block-chain to create “digital originals” like now someone owns the “original” of a certain meme or a music album or something. I don’t know it is for people who have zero fucks for the climate and a lot of fuck you money and the expletives tell you what I think about it all.

To quote my partner’s answer to the question: “Whats terrible about NFTs, honey?” “Everything. It’s complicated. Crypto isn’t even secure. Energy usage is a catastrophe. They should buy an expensive vanity domain instead.”

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Short version: cryptocurrency hasn’t found a use case in twenty years except ransomware and fraud, and it uses criminal amounts of power to do it. Should be banned worldwide. NFTs would be just the usual speculative bubble scam with no underlying asset, except because they use cryptocurrency they’re worse. More than you ever wanted to know at Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain – Blockchain and cryptocurrency news and analysis by David Gerard (David is a mate and former co-worker).

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Wait, is this true? I always thought the one defining benefit of cryptocurrency is that it’s inherently secure, due to how the underlying blockchain technology hashes and stores the ledger of transactions. If that isn’t even the case, it makes the whole crypto thing both funnier and sadder.

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It has security by way of blockchain (to, say things like “Yes, that bitcoin belongs to that wallet”), but it has a failing by way of “anyone holding the private key controls the entire wallet”. It doesn’t matter how you come to know the private key, just as long as you have it.

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Some specific problems separate from the ecocide and monstrous slowness (bitcoin manages 7 transactions per second worldwide):

  • there’s no reversibility. If you send the wrong amount of money or send it to the wrong account or get your credentials stolen or whatever, you’re entirely dependent on the goodwill of the counterparty to make it right.
  • if >50% of the mining pool is controlled by one entity, they can decide which transactions go through and which don’t, with no appeal. This has been the case for the last ten years or so.
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Can you expound on that? Why would having more than 50% give you control over the rest?

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Because it’s “decentralised” - the pool votes on whether to approve a transaction.

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Ahhhhh democracy at its finest :,)

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The cryptography is always only as safe as the systems it is used in, see @RogerBW’s statements.

My partner says: there are enough examples of someone subverting the backends of people running the systems getting away with money.

One more point against crypto: It is not as anonymous as people think. It is hard to trace but some funds could be recovered from recent attacks.

If you want anonymous money, use cash. I don’t know why people don’t like cash anymore. Especially for smaller amounts I prefer it over paying everything with a credit card. And I feel it is absolutely fine to want to not be traced for every step of the way. Wanting to be anonymous does not make anyone a bad person. We all have things to hide, if only our emotional state. Nobody needs to know I ate a gallon of ice cream last night (I didn’t. Just an example, it was just a pint… no still a lie. You’ll never know because I paid cash.)

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But we do have the surveillance video from the grocery store!

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I am not sure if there are camera’s at the grocery shop but the local ice cream place doesn’t have any and they are cash only anyway :slight_smile:

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Curses! Foiled again!

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I livestream my ice cream binges. Own it! :kissing_heart:

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Even more horrors around the economic impact of bitcoin and other associated cryptos.

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