jcousins

I scrolled through my long dead plus profile before I nuked it a few weeks ago. The main thing I noticed is that I posted a broad spectrum of things there from all the hobbies and interests in my life. When I moved to twitter my profile became almost two dimensional - mostly about two topics of interest and nothing in between. Lots of quips and no longform posts. Although I do like being able to curate my feed and my own posts down to a very limited set of topics, I also miss the way I could discover new things on Plus and, long before that, Stumbleupon. It was easier to break out of my echo chamber. I don't have a modern day tool to fill that role (would love to hear some options if anyone has suggestions)

If you did mine in 2009 you mined a block yourself, so it would have been 50btc.

I'm always glad to read of another person getting multiple benefits from low/ish carb eating. I live with chronic pain from a spinal infection and also happen to have disordered eating issues. Low carb was _an_ answer to both of those problems. It's not magic, I won't hail it as the one solution to myriad problems but my inflammatory markers, blood sugar markers (reversed t2d), weight (lost 200lbs) and ability to live with a modicum of normality (was bed bound) don't lie.

For anyone that likes complex problem solving and wants to start down the low carb road, I cannot recommend Ivor Cummins'[1] and Dr. Jeff Gerber's[2] work on diabetes and cholesterol enough.

[1] https://twitter.com/FatEmperor

[2] https://twitter.com/JeffryGerberMD

I will desperately miss the clean inbox paradigm when Inbox goes. I am struggling to go back to the old way of managing my email with no done button and poorly configured categories. I feel like I have to do it now or I won't adjust in time for Inbox being sunsetted early next year.

I find the style patronising to the point of irritation. Overly edited, repeatedly cutting to the hosts instead of letting the subject just damn well speak and letting the listeners damn well think for themselves. Maybe I am overly critical but I listen to a wide spectrum of podcast content and their style really gets my back up to the point I gave up listening recently.

People who didn't watch him still don't watch him

I'm not sure. I think this might be the type of advertising that money can't buy. It puts him and his enterprise, even if temporarily, in front of a wide range of people who would otherwise never waste a single cycle on his content.

Good ol' Mrs Watanabe![1]

[1]https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mrs-watanabe.asp

I had mood issues with one meal a day regime, I managed to resolve it with Tryptophan supplementation (an amino acid known to act as an antidepressant, avoid if taking SSRIs) for two months and upping my cruciferous vegetable intake significantly (half a kilo a day). This was after reading The Diet Cure by Dr. Julia Ross. I have since stopped taking the Tryptophan and mood remains stable.

Congratulations on what you have achieved. I have had very similar experiences going from 450lbs+ to 250lbs and counting as a disordered eater. The low carb change had a marked impact on my willpower, among a plethora of benefits, but introducing long term and intermittent fasting took it to another level where I was finally comfortable stating that I am in control after 20 years of battling disordered eating. I am thrilled to read of others getting the same results.

I have many fond memories of Stumbling back in the day, made some genuine connections with a few Stumblers, more so than I ever did with Friendster etc.

The only other social media service that resulted in similar genuine connections with other like-minded folks was MySpace music. I've not found that x-factor - serendipity, I suppose, with a platform since.

Epicenter podcast with the founders for those interested: https://epicenter.tv/episode/216/

I was bamboozled by that comment. Out of the frying pan....

Or you can request a block OTC trade with any of the major exchanges and they'll bite your arm off for your business. Zero slippage.

There was a guy who scripted himself a huge number of the facebook giveaway airdrop. I have vague recollections of his hoard being invalidated via a hard fork or some other method!

It was 6000 in the original airdrop, and after that there was an airdrop against bitcoin addresses in a proportional fashion (only if you chose to claim them, if i am recalling correctly.)

Similar on the bitcoin blockchain - https://www.realitykeys.com/

All settled in dollars AFAIK.

At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, low carb eating and intermittent fasting have changed my life. The way it puts you in touch with yourself and naturally regulates your mood and caloric intake is almost magical. It takes some time and tweaking to get to that point but if a person can be consistent about it for six months, it then becomes a natural way of eating/living. The knowledge on why it works is all out there now for us to absorb, it's just a matter of having the confidence to take control of our own health rather than relying on doctors that wouldn't recognize a research paper if it hit them across the head!

If you invested 1BTC in the ethereum presale in 2014 (about $600 at the time) and kept that ether, you now have the equivalent of $1M in ether.

Has that much value really been created?

Putting aside the contributors and developers I think people invested based on one theme - chasing gains. The technology sounded great, I imagine people spent some time learning about an area of computing they really had no understanding of but the technology was probably far from the main reason they chose to invest. I doubt that the economics came into the decision making process at all.

Back in 2014 it made sense to divest a small proportion from bitcoin if you made significant gains. Fresh, crypto-wealthy people with little to no investing experience (or even basic wealth management) tended to look to new cryptocurrency projects rather than fiat vehicles for divestment. Say what you will about that line of thinking, but it paid off for anyone that held onto their presale ether. At the time there were many new similar projects running presales. Some of those are now at a loss based on bitcoin's value, others are breaking even or failed and ethereum has gone parabolic.

The going rate if you participated near the beginning of the ethereum presale was 2000ETH/BTC which was ~$600 at the time. This was an easy gamble for anyone with double digit bitcoins and the foresight to invest conservatively. One bitcoin invested in the ethereum presale is now worth nearly $1M.

Does it make sense invest in this space now as an independent investor? Definitely not. The signal to noise ratio is god awful, the economics don't make sense (to me, at least), the sharks are circling and it is going to take a long time for the technology to catch up with the hype.

When we see crashes of epic proportions I believe it is going to bring heavy-handed regulation and many are going to lose everything. People will be looking for blood and they will look to projects like ethereum for their pound of flesh.

Entities owning those new tokens would rush to the exit, sending the new token towards zero would be my guess.

The largest Bitcoin payment processor for retail is Bitpay, I've used them on a few websites. They enable shops to accept Bitcoin with a locked in exchange rate, shielding them from the volatility and the need to even hold and manage cryptocurrency. They charge a 1% settlement fee, which I believe is competitive compared to traditional payment processors.

Hard to say what proportion of transactions are retail driven, but Bitpay did write about their progress towards a $1B annual payment volume milestone recently[1] which is a drop in the ocean compared to the multi-billion dollar daily trade volumes on exchanges.

[1] https://blog.bitpay.com/bitpay-growth-2017/

Another one showed up from DJ Khaled the other day.

I am reminded of that adage (maybe a quote?) from past stock mania: when the shoeshine boys are talking stocks it's time to sell. Is this peak ICO?

I was eating a typical western high carbohydrate, moderate protein, low fat diet with a modest caloric deficit. Lots of starchy veg, breads, rice and pasta.

I migrated gradually (six months) to a very low carb diet including abstinence from all forms of artificial sweetener. 9g/122g/100g carbs/fat/protein. On the plate that's lots of saturated fat, moderate protein from meat and dairy (largely unprocessed) and huge volumes of green vegetables (but they are simply a vehicle for fat and micronutrients.) I will experiment with abstinence from dairy in the future.

I keep my eating to a six hour window, two meals. The artificial sweetener ban is due to the insulin response they can provoke, which goes directly against my goal - to significantly improve my insulin sensitivity. I hope that is specific enough!

I reversed diabetes with diet alone by doing my own research[1], taking charge of my health. I lost 180lbs in the process. No exercise (disabled). Very much a work in progress.

I'm not rejecting the importance of exercise for health - I follow the general principal of eating to get healthy, exercising to get fit - but I think we skip over the absolute tragedy that is the Standard American Diet at our peril.

Recovering from the consuequences of three/four generations of preaching the lipid hypothesis[2], as fast as we damn well can, is the ultimate way to defy depression, disease and early death.

[1] http://www.thefatemperor.com/blog/2015/9/5/fat-emperor-produ...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_hypothesis

I vaguely recalled seeing these in practice somewhere before - it was ntopng netflow visualisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntopng#/media/File:Ntopng.png

From what I have seen and read, they aren't solving problems that haven't already been solved, merely attempting to improve the security and efficiency of a solution. One example they have touted is their work with Maersk on tracking shipping containers and their contents in a tamper-proof fashion as well as providing a way to interact with that data. Will any of this really result in greater efficiency, interoperability and savings? Time will tell.

With hindsight would you take the same path with your career and funds? I find myself at this crossroad right now, both financially and professionally, so found your article useful - thank you.

I've been investing in this space since 2012. "Investing" in the loosest sense of the term, because I was simply looking for ways to grow my bitcoin stash. It started out as a naive attempt at diversification. In reality, I had no clue what I was doing, lost a lot of bitcoin to scam investments, made some bitcoin on fruitful investments. I became diligent and conservative with my bitcoin over time and ethereum happened to be one of the investments I made in 2014. I look at my ethereum presale investment as dumb luck.

Long before the term ICO was coined (no pun intended), there were multiple markets for bitcoin securities dating back to 2012 - possibly earlier. I am referring to business ventures here, not clones of the bitcoin repo with a modified PoW mechanism or similar. There were many scams for every one legitimate venture. Many legitimate ventures eventually mutated into scams. Investors that started out as bitcoin maximalists were often crying to the SEC for help getting their bitcoin back. Some of those ventures run to this day.

The market was chump change back then. Tens of millions maybe. With ERC20 and ICO mania, we have front row seats for failure on a grand scale. The exuberance is terrifying to me given what I experienced years ago with bitcoin securities. For that reason I stopped making investments in May and started doing some real diversification. For many investors, ICOs will be their first taste of "a fool and his money are soon parted." For many projects who have conducted an offering, ICOs will be their first taste of what it's like when the SEC come knockin'.

I'm quite sure there will be some success stories a few years down the line, but they will be accompanied by a plethora of scams and all the media attention that comes with bad news. I think this form of funding is a vague peek into the future of project funding. Ethereum is not necessarily the specific answer, and the ICO framework will have to burn to the ground a few times before it evolves into something useful.

They conducted an ERC20 token sale on the Ethereum network. It sold out in seconds. The tokens (BAT - Basic Attention Token) are to be used to buy advertising in the "attention economy." The premise is really interesting, but the dynamics of the Ethereum token sale space are borderline insanity at the moment, and will continue to be until most of the fools are parted with their ether either by a company that fails or turns into a scam.