Quantum Computing and Encryption

 Quantum computing is able to short-circuit asymmetric encryption, aka public key infrastructure (PKI). This is paired-key two-way encryption. It is the digital certificate based infrastructure that secures HTTPS communications, so all of the secure communications on the internet (credit card transactions, SSH, IPSec, etc.) is secured this way. This technique is very new, it's only been around since the 1970s, all of it is ultimately based on the RSA algorithm for two-way encryption. For this algorithm, encryption keys come in pairs. What one key encrypts, only the other key can decrypt.

Quantum can theoretically defeat PKI thousands of times faster than normal computers can. PKI provides the "keys" that hodlers are always talking about. Every hodler owns his "private" key that is revealed to no one else. The "key" is proof of ownership of a datablock on the chain. Quantum can steal the ownership keys for blockchain elements.

Quantum computing has no special advantage over symmetric encryption. This is single-key two-way encryption. It is a centuries-old standard that has many variants, but uses the same key to both encrypt and decrypt. One-time pads remain an essentially unbreakable version of symmetric encryption. Quantum computing cannot do symmetric decryption any faster than a normal computer.

Hashing is one-way encryption. It creates a signature string from the original data, but the string cannot be converted back to the original text. However, if the original text is changed, the hash changes as well, so hashing algorithms are used to verify the integrity of a message. Blockchain "chains" its database blocks together using hashes. Quantum computing cannot do anything at all to hashing algorithms. SHA-256 is a hash algorithm. 

The New "Investing" Economy

Up until the Industrial Revolution, we were a farming economy. 80% of the population were farmers.

With the Industrial Revolution, the percentage of farmers dropped to under 2%, while the percentage of people working in manufacturing rose to about 35%. But, due to technology, both farming output AND manufacturing output actually increased as a result.

Then the US became a service economy. Percentage of manufacturing jobs also dropped into single digits, while service jobs increased. But, again due to technology, farming AND manufacturing output again increased, so even though we had far fewer people in manufacturing, we were actually still growing our manufacturing output.

Today, 55% of Americans are already invested in the stock market (a sharp rise from the 32% who owned stock in 1989). Their average stock holding is $40,000. We know thirteen percent of Americans traded cryptocurrency in the past year. By comparison, 24% of Americans invested in stocks over the same time period. The US is now the world headquarters for Bitcoin miners. The US is among the world's top 10 in crypto holding and trading on a per capita basis, and profited more off of the 2021 Bitcoin boom than any other nation on earth. 

Due to the fact that crypto is a world-wide database without a geographic base, the US could conceivably become an "investing" economy, where most US citizens hodl cryptocurrency. We have the third largest population, along with one of the wealthiest per capita populations in the world, so we have the resources to corner the crypto market and let the rest of the world work for a living while we accumulate the wealth generated as it slowly transfers over into crypto.  

It could happen. 

Addendum:
This analysis apparently agrees with me:

"Instead of restricting bitcoin in a desperate attempt to forestall the inevitable, federal policymakers would do well to embrace the role of bitcoin as a geopolitically neutral reserve asset; work to ensure that the United States continues to lead the world in accumulating bitcoin-based wealth, jobs, and innovations; and ensure that Americans can continue to use bitcoin to protect themselves against government-driven inflation."

America's Civil War: What a LARP!

This "woke" soldier appears to look forward to martial law being implemented in America, so she can shoot anyone who disobeys her orders. 

Of course, when posted on conservative websites, the linked vido provoked a flurry of fiery, virtue-signaling comments in which gun owners claimed they would kill anyone who dares infringe on their freedoms! 

All of this, both sides, whether we speak of the "woke" soldier or her armed conservative opposition, are simply LARPing (Live Action Role-Playing). Everyone wants to be a hero, everyone imagines themselves in the role, pointing their weapon and squeezing the trigger in righteousness while they mow down hecatombs of the degenerate enemy.

Ain't. Gonna. Happen.

There will be no replay of the Civil War, there will be no re-enactment of the American Revolution. The "woke" won't shoot anyone, neither will America's conservative gun owners. Events have already demonstrated, in spades, that neither side has any real interest in doing any of this. Both sides just like to roleplay and virtue-signal. That's all.

You may disagree. So, let's look at the facts. In 1787, America was a very young country by any measure. The average age of Revolutionary War soldiers in the Continental Army was 18 to 19. The life expectancy for the average American white male was 38 years of age. 

 Todd Andrlik goes so far as to characterize the Founding Fathers much more accurately as the “founding teenagers… or twenty somethings.” And he’s quite right to do so...

Things weren't much different 70 years later. By 1860, the year  the Civil War started, The average age of all officers and men in the 23rd Pennsylvania was nineteen. The largest single age group was eighteen, followed by soldiers twenty-one and nineteen. Life expectancy had risen to 39 years of age.  

Unknown numbers of children served in the [Civil War] armies. Edward Black was nine years old when he entered an Indiana regiment. Among the youngest Confederate soldiers was Charles C. Hay, who joined an Alabama regiment at the age of eleven. John Mather Sloan of Texas lost a leg in battle at the age of thirteen.

The most famous of the dozens of young drummer boys was Johnny Clem of Newark, Ohio. He went to war at the age of ten. 

In contrast, the average median age of Americans in 2021 is 38 years old. For white Americans (the cohort most likely to own guns), median age is 44, modal age (the most common age) is 58. Life expectancy for all Americans is now 78. The citizens bragging about their willingness to engage in war on various social media forums are, on average, twice as old as the average soldiers in either the Revolution or the Civil War. The citizens who own guns are nearly three times as old as those soldiers. These old men shoot their mouths a lot more often than they shoot their guns. That isn't going to change.

War is a young man's game. Most armed conflicts in the world today take place where the average age is at least ten or more years younger than the average American. Mexico's drug war takes place in a country where the average age is 29. Average age in Yemen, where civil war rages, is 20. The average age in Afghanistan is 18. Africa's many countries and many small wars are being waged within general populations that average 19 years of age. 

War requires lots of young men with lots of testosterone and limited skin in the social fabric game: no children, no property, no businesses, so no sense of risk. There is no sizeable subpopulation in the United States that fits this description. Even the young people who would otherwise fit in this category would risk their federal welfare benefits if they engaged in serious violence. Old people don't throw Molotov cocktails because they can't run away fast enough. Their walkers get hung up on street debris. Precisely because everyone is invested in the current order - everyone on BOTH sides is - there will be no shooting war. We don't have enough hormone-filled young people to make it work.

Thus, 2021 America sees a lot of barking, but everyone is very careful to refrain from actually biting. 

Consider: Guns are more widely available now than at any time in American history, including the Revolutionary and Civil War. But, a huge percentage of the population actively refuse to buy guns. Those that do own them clearly aren't interested in using them. The most violent segment of the population, the communist Antifa and BLM movements, have pointedly NOT been using guns.

The "trained communists" are LARPing. The people who headed up BLM bought mansions for themselves and their families, not RPGs for their followers. They're just capitalists hiding behind communist slogans to reap wealth. Apart from Ashli Babbitt, cops are not shooting civilians, civilians are not shooting cops. We don't even have four dead in Ohio. We've got one dead in the January 6th Tourists Gone Wild incident.

And January 6th was a nothing-burger. There aren't any violent insurrections. When the radical underground was active in the late '60s and early '70s, it's members murdered police officers and blew up an average of a building a day for years. Yet, despite America's average age being 28 in 1970, and despite the incredible level of armed provocation inflicted by 1960's provocateurs, there was no armed revolution. 

Today's BLM and Antifa are absurd children by comparison. 2021 has no armed equivalent of even the 1960's Weather Underground, much less the militia of the American Revolution or the Civil War. No one is blowing up buildings on a daily basis, no troops are being deployed to put down any civil insurrections, because there aren't any civil insurrections. It isn't just the conservatives who won't use their guns. The communist LARPs aren't carrying guns either. They use firecrackers and rocks. It is easier to find information on making bombs now than it has been in the entire recorded history of the human race, but these jokers can't even make and use the level of explosives the Weather Underground routinely used in the 1960s and 70s.

The Tourists Gone Wild Jan 6 holiday featured exactly zero guns on the part of the tourists, and in the months that have passed since the event, none of America's conservative gun owners have banded together to break their unarmed comrades out of federal prisons. This despite the fact that we KNOW these jailed Jan 6 tourists are being treated worse than the average prisoner.

As for America's gun owners being a feisty force that needs to be reckoned with, that is manifestly untrue. China Joe and his 'ho are in the White House, no armed citizens even tried to stop them. The National Guard troops who were showcased for six months as their Potemkin guard had neither bullets nor firing pins in their weapons. It was just a bunch of National Guard troops LARPing for the cameras and the tourists. 

The government doesn't fear armed Americans. Why should they? Name me an American who COULD lead an armed rebellion. There isn't one. Nobody wants the job. If anyone did want the job, no one else would follow him.

All the guns are paperweights. No one is going to use them. Not one of us will. We don't want our homes razed, we don't want to get shot or go to jail, so none of us will do this. If anyone does, the rest of us will repudiate him as a home-grown terrorist. The NRA will denounce him. No one will lift a finger. The guns we all own are useless. 

We will not see American cities carpet-bombed by B-52s, there will be no drone strikes by US drones on US soil against US citizens, there will be no martial law, there will be no civil insurrection. The populations on both sides of this dog's breakfast are simply too biologically old to do anything so stupid.

All Americans with guns will quietly do what the soldiers tell us to do, while bow and scrape and say "thank you for your service." Any gun owner who does anything else will be disowned by the rest of America's gun owners. If you do anything else, you will be called another Ted Kaczyinski by the NRA. EVERYONE will consider you a home-grown terrorist.

So, no, none of the civilians in America are going to start shooting soldiers, cops or politicians in the face. You just aren't. You LARP like you will, but when it comes right down to brass tacks, you won't. If America's gun owners sat idly by while the Office of the President was stolen - and they did - then they aren't going to do anything in the future either. That's just how it is.

Similarly, wannabe communist LARPs engage in a lot of arson... and.... that's it. They just burn down poor black neighborhoods, i.e., people who can't fight back. Communist BLM may loot corporate stores, but they are careful not to burn them down. If the stores get burned down, the stores won't be restocked, so no one burns them down. Everyone's in it for the loot, no one wants to kill the goose that lays the loot. In 2021, the Maoists act like power comes out of the barrel of a bottle rocket, not a gun. No one wants a shooting war.

Armed conservatives will never live out their action-hero dreams, but neither will America's communists. That's why this woke soldier is so hilarious. There won't be any martial law and she'll never get to live her LARP dream either. No one in this country is interested in that level of violence. So it won't happen.

China Joe and the Communists ALREADY defeated the most heavily armed civilian population in the world. How do you think China Joe and his 'ho got into the White House? They got in by intimidating the most heavily armed civilian population in the world into sitting still and accepting it. 

And then China Joe got beat by a bunch of goatherders. Which means the goatherders are more powerful than the most heavily armed civilian population in the world. The goatherders got US weapons because the goat herders actually USE the weapons. Americans don't use their weapons. We just LARP about how we'll use them Real Soon Now (tm). But we won't, and both sides know we won't. 

Now, when confronted with these facts, there are essentially four ways to respond:

1. "Kellmeyer is right. Gun owners are LARPing just like mask proponents."
2. "Kellmeyer is wrong because he got the history wrong (historical reasons listed)"
3. "Kellmeyer got the history correct, but the (non-)use of guns isn't the issue, the real social issue is actually (issue listed)."
4. "The history is irrelevant, Kellmeyer is trying to goad us into using our guns, so we must be sure not to use them."  

I have pointed these facts out on several forums now, and have been accused of (4), i.e., being an FBI plant, trying to foment an armed uprising. That reaction demonstrates my point in spades. American gun owners are simply not going to use their weapons. They can't do it. They consider the idea impossible in every realistic sense, they just fantasize about it, knowing full well they will never actually carry out the fantasy. Their communist counterparts do the same. 

Conclusion: The LARPing will continue until morale improves.

Traditionis custodes

 The Pope, and quite frankly, large swaths of the Church, have finally had enough of the schismatic attitudes generated by the Latin Mass. The disciples of the TLM have spent the last few decades channeling their inner schismatics, imitating the madness of Marcel Lefebvre, and they got the response that justice required.

To be completely clear, I was a member of an FSSP TLM parish for five years, attending every Sunday. When I began there, I had high hopes that I would encounter a group of Catholics who were better-educated, better-formed, just better at being Catholic, than the great mass of Catholics at the Novus Ordo Mass. It is easy to find my blog posts from that period extolling the virtues of the Latin Mass and its community. 

But, over the course of those five years, I slowly realized there was a level of hatred and anger within the community that could only be described as demonic. When priests spout denigrations of an ecumenical council, the Pope and the post-conciliar Church in pseudo-anonymous podcasts or, worse, from the ambo during Mass, there are serious problems with the movement that forms such priests. When the people attending to those podcasts or assisting at those Masses cheer the priests on, there is schism.

I have personally watched my brother-in-law, a good man and a good priest, driven to theological insanity by the TLM. I have seen him drag several members of his family, including his own mother, into the madness. It was and is a train-wreck, it turned him and his family into a theological train-wreck. 

Marcel Lefebvre was a schismatic and a heretic, the movement he founded shared his spirituality of schism, heresy, madness. The FSSP attempt to reform the TLM movement failed. Lay members of TLM communities, whether FSSP or SSPX, continue to revere Lefebvre as a visionary instead of condemning him as the nutcase that he unquestionably was. With shocking conformity, TLM members continued to ape Martin Luther's insistence that the Church would soon reverse itself and see the "wisdom" of the schism he fomented. 

Blessed Pope Pius IX famously proclaimed, "I am Tradition!" Pope Francis occupies the chair that is tradition. Denigrating Pope Francis, as so many TLM communities take delight in doing, logically and ineluctably leads to sedevacantism, which is itself simply an assertion that the gates of Hell prevailed against Christ. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict both gave the TLM communities decades to correct themselves, decades to demonstrate their love of Christ and His Church by showing fraternal charity towards the council and the post-conciliar Church. But the TLM'rs let both of these Popes down.

Instead, it squandered every opportunity, choosing to pour out venom on anyone who did not share their particular theological idiosyncracies. No group within the Church can lay claim to the entire spirituality of the Church. Franciscans cannot engage in combat with Dominicans about whose spirituality is "better". That's not a Catholic attitude. Lefebvre's attachment to the TLM drove him to schism and heresy. The people who followed him demonstrated they could not escape that error. They insisted that their way alone was superior, that the whole Church must reform to their understanding of Catholicism or be dragged down to the depths of hell. They set themselves up as Pope and denigrated the Pope for not following their vision.

But it is the Pope who leads and directs, not Lefebvre, not the TLM community. It is the Pope who is Tradition. The Pope leads the Church and forms her. If the Pope says a spiritual practice is not conducive to spiritual growth, then we surrender that practice to his ruling. Popes have suppressed liturgical traditions before. Most famously, Pope Pius V suppressed numerous liturgical traditions immediately following Trent. Now, following Vatican II, the Pope has suppressed an additional liturgy. It is his right to do so, not ours, nor have we any right to murmur against the decision.

"Traditionalists" like to insist that monarchy is the best form of government. Well, TLM'rs, you live in a monarchy. The king has decreed. Suck it up, buttercup, and walk the talk. Quit imitating the followers of Korah and Luther. You have been given another opportunity to embrace the Catholic Faith, to follow Tradition, to thank the Pope for his wisdom. Take advantage of it. 

Why the Church is Losing Relevance

The Church is dying because it doesn't have a coherent answer to industrialization. Due to technology, NO ONE alive today suffers as much as EVERYONE did prior to 1800. We are ALL richer, we all live longer, we all suffer from fewer diseases, which have shorter durations.

Some diseases are entirely wiped out. There is no more smallpox, no rinderpest in cattle, almost no polio (only 1 case of wild polio virus (WPV) in Afghanistan, and 1 in Pakistan this year so far, map for last 12 months here). Guinea Worm is just about eradicated, inroads are being made against at least one dozen other endemic diseases.

The entire world used to live in abject poverty, now less than 10% of the world does. Natural disasters kill and injure only one-tenth as many people today as were killed or injured just 20 years ago.

We have the corporal works of mercy and the spiritual works of mercy, two sets, to deal with every kind of suffering there is. The spiritual works still apply, but the corporal works are increasingly irrelevant.

We are on the verge of totally wiping out famine. Same with concerns about potable water - I've seen at least four major pieces of tech in the last year (see here, here, here and here), that will literally dissolve that problem. We have so much clothing that we can't give it away. Shelter is next on the list of solutions, there aren't nearly as many sick and imprisoned to visit as there were, and we're cremating the dead. 

Literally half of the work of the Church is either already irrelevant or on the verge of being rendered irrelevant. Christ may have come to share our sufferings, but we don't share in that suffering nearly as much anymore. It's harder to identify with the crucified Christ now than it ever has been in history. 

For most of human history, mankind has been agricultural or hunter-gatherer. The man who wanted meat for supper had to kill the animal himself, watch the blood run out on the ground, see the suffering and death throes of the animal as it breathed its last. He would then skin, eviscerate, dismember and roast that recently living flesh. Everyone did this every week, week-in, week-out, for their whole life. 

They saw their friends and family members suffer and die in accidents, from illness, on deathbeds that were as common as the dirt the corpses were buried in.  But almost no one lives this way anymore. These experiences are almost entirely unknown to a plurality or perhaps even a majority of the global population. We preach Christ, and Him crucified, but most people simply have no way of connecting with that level of suffering because suffering, violence and death are no longer something we encounter every day.

Christianity was wildly successful in a subsistence-level, agricultural society, arguably better than any other philosophical or theological system the world has ever seen. As Julian the Apostate observed, the Church used the corporal works as a way to demonstrate charitable intent, and used the salving corporal works as a segue-way to the salvific spiritual works. But what happens when the corporal works of mercy are no longer necessary or relevant? 

For the last two centuries, the Church has tried and failed to adapt its message to a surplus-goods, industrial, high-technology society. So far, it has not developed  a compelling message for a world that is not suffering constant corporal want. Indeed, you would look in vain for a Church document that recognizes, in a detailed way, any of the successes listed above. 

The Pope and other Christian leaders continue to preach the necessary message that the poor must be cared for, without acknowledging that the number of poor has been steadily disappearing. Leaders speak of famine without acknowledging how uncommon it is. While we certainly still have poor to care for today, what happens in that near future when we... don't? What is the message then? The goalposts can only move so far before the message becomes a parody of itself. 

If you want to speak of a crisis in the Church, that is the crisis. 

The Unbearable Lightness of EVs

From Green Energy Reality Check: It's Not as Clean as You Think | Manhattan Institute (manhattan-institute.org):

 A lithium EV battery weighs about 1,000 pounds.(a) While there are dozens of variations, such a battery typically contains about 25 pounds of lithium, 30 pounds of cobalt, 60 pounds of nickel, 110 pounds of graphite, 90 pounds of copper,(b) about 400 pounds of steel, aluminum, and various plastic components.(c)

• Lithium brines typically contain less than 0.1% lithium, so that entails some 25,000 pounds of brines to get the 25 pounds of pure lithium.
• Cobalt ore grades average about 0.1%, thus nearly 30,000 pounds of ore.(e)
• Nickel ore grades average about 1%, thus about 6,000 pounds of ore.(f)
• Graphite ore is typically 10%, thus about 1,000 pounds per battery.(g)
• Copper at about 0.6% in the ore, thus about 25,000 pounds of ore per battery.(h)

 In total then, acquiring just these five elements to produce the 1,000-pound EV battery requires mining about 90,000 pounds of ore.

From Will the U.S. Mine for Rare Earth and Exotic Minerals? - American Thinker

• The U.S. has only one operating rare-earth mine – Mountain Pass – which lost over two years of production due to a 2016 bankruptcy. Mountain Pass sends their mined ore to China for processing due to high environmental compliance costs – including regulatory minefields and a byzantine quandary of local, state, and federal rules.

From Sustainable shipping: solutions for the future of shipping (solarimpulse.com)"

• Shipping materials will account for around 17% of global CO2 emissions in 2050.

It's almost like 'Environmentalism' was funded by the Chinese to encourage Western companies to ship production to China. Huh.... how odd....  So, how many strip mines does it take to make one Tesla? 

Define "Free Market"

For years, I have heard liberatarians, conservatives and liberals, people of every stripe, make various statements about "the free market." But none of them define what it is. Some of them seem to think various conditions make a market "un-free", but no one can seem to agree on what those conditions are, nor do any of the conditions they specify seem to make any sense.

For example, how is it NOT a "free market" when the government gets involved in the market? The government is just one more market player that can be duped, played, cajoled into taking or providing capital, just like any other market player. Every player in the market is free to do whatever they want to do. Every action has consequences - as long as you are willing to accept the possible consequences, then what's stopping your action? 

What people seem to want is not a "free market", but an "equitable market", where everyone has a good outcome. That's impossible. It cannot be done. As long as people vary in their abilities, there will be some people who are 3 or 4 standard deviations better at dealing with current market conditions than anyone else is. As those people apply their skills, they will inevitably create a monopoly in their industry simply because they are so much better at that industry than anyone else is. 

When the monopoly exists, players who are not as good at playing be current rules will try to change the rules, and they will use as their justification the idea that "the market is not free." If they successfully change the rules - shock! - the new rules favor their style of play instead of that of the old market leader. Then they become the monopolists and a new set of players try to change the rules to benefit themselves at the cost of the current leader. 

And that's the point. EVERY market is a free market. The USSR, Communist China, the US, corporate monopoly, oligarchy, mob rule, war, peace, chaos, quiet, pick-your-favorite environment, whoever is currently on top in that environment got there because they figured out how to turn the existing system to their advantage. Anyone is free to figure that out - it's just harder for some groups in some circumstances  to figure that out than it is for those same groups in other circumstances. Some circumstances favor one set of skills, some circumstances favor another set of skills. We go 'round and 'round in our perpetually, universally free market as everyone tries to game the rule set to their own advantage. 

But the economy is absolutely man-made, completely free, and all the actors in it can take whatever risks they want to amass whatever advantages they can. To say that one rule set is "free" while another rule set is "unfree" is simply to say that you personally find the first rule set advantageous while you don't find the second set advantageous. In that sense, "free market" is a phrase that has no meaning.

Payback is a Bitter Pill

China Joe Biden is a Chinese Communist Party shill, there's no question of that. The question is, has he opened the southern border in order to allow China to smuggle fentanyl into the States? Lots of people are now pointing out that this is at least a side effect, if not an intended outcome, of Biden's border policies. 

Now, I am not opposed to open borders because: 

1. our country was founded as an open borders country, 
2. Aquinas was fine with open borders, 
3. the Holy Father is fine with open borders,

But, even if none of that were true, the fact that China is importing a powerfully addicting illegal drug into the United States is unsurprising. If this were a movie, we would expect this to be the end of the reel, wherein after the protagonist suffers endless outrages, he wreaks havoc upon his tormentors. Given what we did to China, and in deference to America's favorite Hollywood ending, China owes us at least that courtesy. Sit back, grasshopper, and I will tell you the tale:

China had much to sell the West, but the West produced virtually nothing China needed or wanted. As British and American citizens consumed tea in great quantity but failed to produce anything the Chinese wanted, the threatening imbalance of trade between East and West became acute.

Both British and American companies solved the problem by illegally importing opium into the Chinese mainland. Chinese officials had long outlawed the drug because they recognized it as a poison. By the late 1700's, however, Britain had control of India’s poppy fields and her navy made it possible to smuggle tons of the stuff across the Chinese border and into Chinese harbors. American businessmen, having no access to Indian poppies, dealt themselves into the illegal drug trade by encouraging Turkish farmers to plant poppies so they, too, could grab part of the drug business.

China responded by confiscating and destroying the huge opium stocks in British warehouses on Chinese soil. Britain went to war to recover the cost of the lost opium, not once, but twice (1839-1842 and 1856-1860). The resulting British victories not only opened Chinese ports to the Western importation of opium, it also gave American citizen Warren Delano, FDR’s grandfather, the enormous wealth which FDR would use to such excellent effect in his own presidential election campaigns. In short, it is not too incorrect to say that FDR's presidency was made possible in part via drugged Chinese slaves.

That's correct: Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandfather imported opium into China despite the fact that China had outlawed opium. This illegal opium trade led directly to the Opium Wars that destroyed China as the centuries-long Asian superpower. It led directly to the burning of the Old Summer Palace, which still angers the Chinese, and to the subjugation of China for centuries by the West. The grandson of one of the major Chinese drug runners became the President that lorded it over them during WW II. 

China never forgot that.

Now, China seems to be returning the favor.

And we are left to whine that payback is a bitter pill. 

Should the Alamo Be Legitimized?

What I can't understand about Republicans and conservatives is, why you insist on making heroes out of a bunch of Democrat Protestant pro-slavery asshats?

That's what the Alamo was about - it was about a bunch of Democrats, a bunch of illegal alien immigrants - fighting to keep slavery alive in Texas. Why? Because that's what Democrats always do, and that's what they were doing at the Alamo, that's what they were doing in the entire fight for Texas independence. They were fighting for the right to be Democrat slaveholders, and everyone at the time knew it.

The prime cause, and the real objects of this war [the Texas Revolution], are not distinctly understood by a large portion of the honest, disinterested, and well-meaning citizens of the United States…. They have been induced to believe that the inhabitants of Texas were engaged in a legitimate contest for the maintenance of the sacred principles of Liberty, and the natural, inalienable Rights of Man: --whereas, the motives of its instigators, and their chief incentives to action, have been, from the commencement, of a directly opposite character and tendency…to wrest the large and valuable territory of Texas from the Mexican Republic, in order to re-establish the SYSTEM OF SLAVERY; to open a vast and profitable SLAVE-MARKET therein; and, ultimately, to annex it to the United States…. The Slaveholding Interest is now paramount in the Executive branch of our national government…. Benjamin Lundy, 1836

 John Quincy Adams testified in the House of Representatives (Dec 1835) that Lundy was absolutely correct:

And this is the nation with which, at the instigation of your Executive Government, you are now rushing into war into a war of conquest; commenced by aggression on your part and for the re-establishment of slavery, where it has been abolished, throughout the Mexican Republic. For your war will be with Mexico---with a Republic of twenty four States, and a population of eight or nine millions of souls.... 

And again I ask, what will be your cause in such a war! Aggression, conquest, and the re-establishment of slavery where it has been abolished. In that war, sir, the banner of freedom will be the banners of Mexico; and your banners, 1 blush to speak the word, will be the banners of slavery. 

Every abolitionist of the age said the same thing:

"It is impossible for any honest man to wish success to Texas. All who sympathize with that pseudo republic hate liberty and would dethrone God."

—abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator

In early 1836, the largest Texas force in the field, commanded by Colonel James Walker Fannin, was composed of over ninety percent of United States citizens. Even many of the Northerners in the US saw the danger Catholic freedom posed for the Protestant slave-holders. They saw Santa Ana's insistence on freeing slaves as a direct threat to Southern and Western slave-holding states. The existence of a free Catholic Texas was an incitement to slave revolts throughout the South. The Texans at the Alamo were not freedom fighters, they were slavery fighters, as Democrats always are. When you put a halo around the Alamo, you defend illegal immigration, you defend slavers, you defend the use of violence in the name of, in the support of, illegal immigration and slavery.

When you look at all the details, really study what the American Protestant Democrats at the Alamo and in the larger fight for Texas independence were doing, you soon realize they were the early 19th century version of BLM and Antifa. Why would conservatives defend this nonsense?

Why would anyone from the party of Lincoln want to legitimize Democrat asininity?

Protestants Claim Scripture is Heretical

 There has been a recent kerfluffle over a comment by a pastor, in which Reverend Warnock, a pastor who oversees MLK's church, said:

The meaning of Easter is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whether you are Christian or not, through a commitment to helping others we are able to save ourselves.

This comment has been condemned by Protestant commentators as heresy. Well, there's nothing heretical in Warnock's statement unless you're a Protestant, but Protestant theology has always been nonsense.

Take the first sentence, "The meaning of Easter is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ." Yes. Exactly right. The resurrection of Jesus is immanent, the meaning of the resurrection is transcendent. That is, the resurrection is a real thing that happened in the flesh, risen flesh that could be touched, it is closer to us than we are to ourselves, it is bound up within who we are, while the meaning of that resurrection is transcendent, it is higher than us, it draws us up beyond ourselves into the heart of the Trinity. Yes. Precisely correct.

Second sentence, "Whether you are a Christian or not," - yes, as Paul says in Romans 2 “They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.)" . That is, we all know what the law says, even when we don’t know the law. And, we all prove it by doing what’s in God’s law without even knowing it. And this knowledge and acting on this knowledge will "even defend them" on the Day of Judgement.

And the last part? "Through a commitment to helping others we are able to save ourselves." As Augustine of Hippo says "He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent." (St Augustine, Sermo 169, 13 (PL 38,923)). Paul pointed out that "We are God's co-workers" (1 Cor 3:9). God's work is our salvation, so our co-work is also our salvation. Paul talks about "working out my salvation in fear and trembling". (Phil 2:12) and even goes so far as to say "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church..." (Col 1:24). That is Paul asserts not only that Jesus' suffering actually LACKS something, he asserts that he, Paul, can make up what is lacking!

Jesus points out that we must do this through good works, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, etc. The people who do this are the people who are gathered together and saved on the last day.

Grace affects the whole person. The mind responds with faith, the body with works, both happen simultaneously. We are NOT saved through faith alone, as the Letter of James points out. Even the demons have faith in the resurrection, but that does not save them.

The good reverend just echoed Scripture and Saint Augustine.

People who object to what he said know neither Scripture nor the power of God.

What is Liturgy?

Many people today are familiar with ritual, but are not familiar with liturgy. Ritual is a set of actions done in accordance with social custom or normal protocol. For instance, Westerners ritually shake each others hands upon meeting, and ask the ritual question "How are you?" Liturgy is a special subset of ritual, it is a ritual done not for secular purposes, but for theological purposes. Why is liturgy necessary? Liturgy is necessary, in part, because Scripture is hard to understand:

He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. ~2 Peter 3:16

Liturgy is a call-response prayer in which the prayer leader proclaims a passage from sacred Scripture and the rest of the prayer group responds by proclaiming a matching response from another place in sacred Scripture. Upon hearing the Word of God, the participants move in conformance with that Word, standing, kneeling, sitting or genuflecting, in order to better understand the Word’s impact on themselves and the world.  The Scripture passages in both the call and the response are pre-selected to match the liturgical calendar, that is, the Scripture passages used in liturgy are meant to match the day and season of the year, or to match the sacrament that is being conferred within the liturgy.

As a result, liturgy always includes three elements, all of which are universally available to the liturgical Christians of that denomination: 

1. Daily Scriptural prayers at set times of the day (Liturgy of the Hours)
2. Actions and commemorations keyed to each year's calendar (Liturgical seasons and liturgical calendar)
3. Liturgical services proper (e.g., Sacrifice of the Mass aka the Divine Liturgy) 

The purpose of liturgy is two-fold. First, by its unrelenting emphasis on Scripture, it is meant to assist both the celebrant and the congregants gain an understanding of how God’s mind works, and what God wants of us. Second, it is meant to “wash the world in the Word”, liturgy is intended to use the grace of the Scriptures and the sacraments that it wraps within its embrace, to sanctify the whole world.

Both magic and liturgy involve ritual, but the reasons for the two kinds of ritual are very different. Early man felt himself surrounded by unseen, powerful forces. Like a stranger using a handshake to prevent violence, early man used ritual magic in order to attempt to control the unseen forces around him so that he will not come to harm. Pagans used the ritual of magic to control, or at least placate, the gods.

Early Christians saw the world quite differently. They knew there was only one God. They knew God could not change or be changed. For liturgical Christians, the purpose of the specialized ritual they call liturgy was not meant to change God, it was meant to help man understand God's intentions. Early Christians used liturgy to help adapt man to God's purpose. Christians viewed man as fallen, so they the need to wrap many of the most important activities of life inside of liturgical actions, so that their own actions would be correctly oriented towards God.

Liturgy is the opposite of magic. Magic is meant to control the gods, to get the gods to do what men want them to do. Liturgy is meant to change man, it is meant to help man do what God wants us to do. 

Liturgy, then, is to live Scripture, employing the whole person, both mind and body, wherein the whole person, both mind and body, responds to grace. Just as the individual grains combine to form the bread, the individual grapes combine to form the wine, so the individual Christians combine to act as One Body.

Now, some object to liturgy because it seems contrived to pray a set, stylized prayer at specific times during the day. Liturgy doesn't stop you praying when and where you want, but it allows you to consistently pray with other Christians.

Say, for instance, you had a friend. You wanted to spend some time in prayer with that friend. You would schedule a time and place to do this, correct? Well, all baptized Christians are brothers and sisters in Christ, so liturgy is a way of scheduling time to pray with your brothers and sisters when you have never - and will never - meet them.  

When you and your friend pray together at your scheduled time, you share your prayers with each other, right? You might pray quietly, but you might also want to pray out loud, so that you two could hear each other's prayers and each make the other's prayer part of your own prayer. 

Same with liturgy. Except the brothers and sisters are speaking different languages, all over the world. So, by agreeing on what Scripture passages you will pray ahead of time, it allows everyone to "hear" each others' prayers, even if these prayers are spoken in a different language thousands of miles away, even if they are not spoken at all.

So, liturgy is a way to pray with all the friends in Christ, past, present and future, whom you have not yet met. 

Making Software Companies Liable

It is long past time to start suing software companies for the security holes in their products. There is precedent. The automobile was invented in 1888, but the court system reacted to the new technology by essentially asserting the driver assumed all responsibility for safety, the auto manufacturer virtually none.  This attitude towards safety and security continued until 1965, when Ralph Nader released "Unsafe At Any Speed", exposing the dangers modern auto manufacturers knew were baked into their products, but deliberately ignored. At first, the response was dismissive. 

A TIME essay the following year portrayed Nader as a polemicist who was trying to paint auto accidents as solely the fault of the machines, with no account for driver error, and asserted that the book was “an arresting, though one-sided, lawyer’s brief that accuses Detroit of just about everything except starting the Vietnamese war.”

But, after a series of Congressional inquiries into auto safety, the courts soon sided with Nader's analysis and began holding auto manufacturers responsible for the people riding in their products. It took nearly a century for the auto industry to move from "new technology" wherein the user assumed all risk to "established industry" wherein the industry had to take responsibility for the safety of its products.

Modern software design and development arguably dates from the late 1960s and 70s, when mainframes began to infiltrate the business segment of American industry. In the succeeding fifty years, software has come to dominate almost every aspect of every industry. It is certainly time for this industry to take responsibility for the safety and security of its products. 

However, when we see remarks like this, it does not engender confidence that this has happened:

"Open-source developers say securing their code is a soul-withering waste of time (TechRepublic, Dec 9,2020) A survey of nearly 1,200 FOSS contributors found security to be low on developers' list of priorities....Moreover, responses indicated that many respondents had little interest in increasing time and effort on security. One respondent commented that they "find the enterprise of security a soul-withering chore and a subject best left for the lawyers and process freaks," while another said: "I find security an insufferably boring procedural hindrance.""

GitLab's "2019 Global Developer Report: DevSecOps" survey of over 4,000 software professionals agrees:

"Nearly half of security pros surveyed, 49%, said they struggle to get developers to make remediation of vulnerabilities a priority. Worse still, 68% of security professionals feel fewer than half of developers can spot security vulnerabilities later in the life cycle. Roughly half of security professionals said they most often found bugs after code is merged in a test environment.

At the same time, nearly 70% of developers said that while they are expected to write secure code, they get little guidance or help. One disgruntled programmer said, "It's a mess, no standardization, most of my work has never had a security scan." Another problem is it seems many companies don't take security seriously enough. Nearly 44% of those surveyed reported that they're not judged on their security vulnerabilities."

And then there is this gem from freelance developers:

Of the 18 who had to resubmit their code, 15 developers were part of the group that were never told the user registration system needed to store password securely, showing that developers don't inherently think about security when writing code....The other three were from the half that was told to use a secure method to store passwords, but who stored passwords in plaintext anyway....

Of the programmers who actually bothered to submit a password storage system that was encrypted, almost 75% of the solutions were deprecated. That is, the solutions used already-compromised ciphers. The "solutions" were broken before they shipped. Of the 75% who failed, nearly 20% used Base64, which isn't even an encryption algorithm.

The 2019 study showed that current developers aren't any better than unsupervised students.

It is perfectly obvious that companies aren't demanding appropriate security training, so no one is providing it. Why aren't companies demanding it? Because software companies cannot be sued for creating insecure code. As one technical article pointed out:

"There is no software liability and there is no standard of care or 'building code' for software, so as a result, there are security holes in your [products] that are allowing attackers to compromise you over and over."—Joshua Corman

The end-user license agreement (EULA)—a dense legalistic disclaimer that only 8% of people read, according to data collected in 2011—essentially states that people do not have to use the software, but if they do, the developer is not responsible for any damages. EULAs have been the primary way that software makers have escaped liability for vulnerabilities for the past three decades.  

This laxity on the part of software and hardware companies has produced a multi-billion dollar international crime industry in which: 

Only 3 cyber incidents out of 1000 see an arrest [much less a conviction]... By comparison, the clearance rate for property crimes was approximately 18% and for violent crimes 46%, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Uniform Crime Report (UCR) for 2016.

But the use of information technology is so ubiquitous that:

... the US Department of Treasury has designated cybersecurity incidents as one of the biggest threats to the stability of the entire US financial system....  

Third Way’s analysis estimates that the enforcement rate for reported incidents of the IC3 database is 0.3%. Taking into account that cybercrime victims often do not report cases, the effective enforcement rate estimate may be closer to 0.05%. [emphasis added]...  

The FBI reports that using the IC3 data to develop law enforcement referrals, it only secured nine convictions in 2016, down from nineteen cases the previous year.

Make no mistake: the cybercrime wave has been created by the poor coding practices at every software firm in the world. This has to end. For years, the IT industry has been urging everyone to wrap their products, data and business processes 'round with an IT blanket. But, when that same IT wrapper's poor design and lack of security began enabling the corruption or destruction of the products, data and business processes that were entrusted to them, the IT industry suddenly decided it is not responsible for the result. 

It is impossible to refer to members of the industry as "IT professionals" when those same people refuse to take responsibility for the security disasters their indifference has helped create. That isn't a professional attitude. It isn't even an adult attitude. It's time for IT to grow up.

If an organization is successfully hacked, someone in the IT supplier chain needs to be fined and/or jailed. Maybe it's the software company, maybe it's the integrators, maybe it's the developers, maybe the C-suite that runs the company, maybe the hardware people. Maybe all of them, or maybe just a selection. It doesn't matter. Someone or everyone in the chain needs to face consequences. Until IT people start facing serious consequences for their failure to care for the data and processes entrusted to them, they aren't going to change. We've waited fifty years. How much longer do we wait? 

UPDATE: Well, this ZDnet article on website password storage is rather chilling. This article describes how passwords SHOULD be stored, and this one gives more technical details.  

UPDATE II: It's 2022, and nothing has changed.

Physics and Innovation

 Physics doesn’t take a vacation because of innovation... the simple facts are these:

During the average commute, ANY car uses about 7 hp per minute, (or the equivalent) or 420 hp in an hour. Converted to watts, that is 313,320 watts or enough energy to power 5 houses for an entire day.

The average commute in an electric vehicle, like any other vehicle, uses the same power.

So... if 5% of the homes acquire an EV, it is like that city has added 25% more houses, only the power consumption as they charge overnight, (8 hours) triples the load on the grid to the equivalent of 75% more houses.

What grid can handle nearly doubling the load?

Who is going to pay for it?

Why China Won't Go To War

 China can't afford to go to war. War used to be a way to employ excess sons. China no longer has excess sons. Every man's death in war extinguishes an entire family line. Each death also hastens the aging of the population by removing decades of man-years per corpse from production.

In addition, invading the most likely flash-point, Taiwan, creates its own problems. The world is currently experiencing a massive chip shortage. The biggest fab labs in the world are in Taiwan. If China were to invade, the Taiwanese would almost certainly destroy the fab labs to keep them out of Chinese hands. China uses 61 percent of the world’s chips in products for both its domestic and export markets, importing around $310 billion worth in 2018. That is, China depends on chips just as much as everyone else does.

And each year the Chinese do NOT go to war, their whole population gets one year older, exacerbating their demographic problem, and making it less likely they will risk a high-casualty conflict.

We are a paper tiger due to the politically correct crowd infiltrating the military, but China's a paper tiger because it's demography doesn't really allow a full-scale, high-casualty war. 

It's a Mexican stand-off between an old man and a transsexual.

Biden's Senile Dementia

So, they are green-screening Biden now.

Watch these two videos and pay close attention to Biden's hands as they interact (or rather, as they don't interact) with the microphones at the bottom of the screen. One video is much more egregiously faked than the other is.

Apparently, the senile dementia has progressed to a point where they have him practicing they same lines in front of a green screen until he gets it right, then they photoshop in the adoring press.

Same interview, different angle, same problem:

Now, this is an obvious, high-school level mistake. The question then is, are his handlers truly this incompetent, or are Americans being deliberately baited by being presented with an obviously faked interview event? 

If the former, then Biden's senile dementia has progressed to such a point that he has to be made to continuously practice his answers in front of a green screen until one of the takes is good enough to publish, then the adoring press is green-screened in. Also, his handlers are grossly incompetent at their jobs.

If the latter, Biden may or may not be suffering from senile dementia, but he and/or the people handling him have decided - for whatever reason - to make it obvious that they are deliberately manipulating the world's perception of events. Is it more charitable to consider the people around him idiots or malevolent? 

And therein lies the problem: sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malevolence.

2020 Census and Illegal Immigrants

 From the Encyclopedia Britannica:

"Granting slaveholding states the right to count three-fifths of their population of enslaved individuals when it came to apportioning representatives to Congress meant that those states would thus be perpetually overrepresented in national politics. However, this same ratio was to be used to determine the federal tax contribution required of each state, thus increasing the direct federal tax burden of slaveholding states."

Replace the word "slaves" with "illegal immigrants" and the exact same argument is taking place right now with the 2020 Census. The abolitionists (the conservatives) don't want illegals counted, the pro-slavery (liberals) DO want them counted for purposes of representation.

But conservatives wouldn't have a problem with counting them (while liberals would) if it increased the federal tax burden on states with high numbers of illegals (sanctuary states).

How about we resolve it the same way the Founders did - count illegals as three-fifths of a person, and call it a day?

Oh, and if you're wondering why the Constitution doesn't mention how to handle illegal immigrants in the census counts, it is because there was no such thing as an illegal immigrant for the first century of this country's existence.  The Constitution does not list the ability to restrict immigration among the enumerated powers possessed by the federal government. Thus, technically, the power to restrict immigration is reserved to the states. There was no federal law restricting immigration until 1875's Page Act. That means it took almost a century for Congress to violate the Constitution, usurp states' rights and create an unconstitutional federal restriction on immigration. Congress had to wait until the Founding Fathers had all been dead several decades before they dared make this over-reach.

Addendum:

“When foreigners after looking about for some other Country in which they can obtain more happiness, give a preference to ours, it is a proof of attachment which ought to excite our confidence and affection.”   ~ Benjamin Franklin

"I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. when they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe."  ~Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, Paris Dec. 20. 1787.           

NB: The United States was 80% agricultural in 1789, today it is 80% urban.

USD vs. Gold vs. Cryptocurrencies

Is the US Dollar (USD), gold, or cryptocurrencies, really money? How are the three to be compared? According to the Austrian school, "fiat money [is] money that comprises things with a special legal qualification.” Further, since the Austrian school does not recognize things as having objective economic value, all money is "fiat money", even gold:

[i]f the objective exchange-value of money must always be linked with a pre-existing market exchange ratio between money and other economic goods (since otherwise individuals would not be in a position to estimate the value of the money), it follows that an object cannot be used as money unless, at the moment when its use as money begins, it already possesses an objective exchange-value based on some other use.

There are a lot of things which have "exchange-value based on some other use." Lumber, sand, gold, and, as we shall see, cryptocurrencies, can be used for things other than exchange-value. Gold, for instance, can be used in jewelry, industrial applications, etc. One way gold differentiates itself from most other things is by being an element on the periodic table, and therefore both essentially indestructible and essentially impossible to produce. It can be found (via mining), but not produced. Its quantity is limited: demand for its uses grows with population growth or increased utility, while supply does not necessarily grow commensurate with demand. 

How does this compare to cryptocurrencies and the USD? To understand how cryptocurrencies compare, we must first,  look at how the USD works, and at how cryptocurrency is constructed. Let's start with the USD. As Forbes points out:

we already HAVE a national digital currency. It’s fast, cheap and secure! It has no issue with regulators, and it’s accepted everywhere. Who knew? It’s called … the US dollar.... almost 90% of US dollars have no physical existence – they are purely digital. But this isn’t just for the USA; world-wide, only 8% of currency exists as physical cash!

How does gold compare to national fiat money (e.g., the USD) and modern cryptocurrency? Well, primarily because all national currencies have legal recognition by their various issuing governments,  all national currencies have "a special legal qualification." As national currencies like the USD occupy space on their respective government hard drives, these same national electronic currencies are wrapped up in various cryptographic wrappers. The cryptographic wrappers are extrinsic to the currency itself. None of the currencies have built-in encryption, rather, the encryption schemes used are added "after the fact", as it were. For national currencies, encryption is necessary for safe exchange, but encryption is not technically intrinsic to the currency itself. 

Encryption is necessary because neither national currencies nor cryptocurrencies have actual, physical existence.  Both exist either primarily, or entirely, inside of computers. Gold's "encryption" is, of course, it's physical existence. If you don't have it in your hands, then you don't own it, you can't use it. Gold cannot be copied. For physical printed cash, governments try to mimic gold's characteristics by making the paper bills and metal coins hard to copy. Physical cash must be held in your hands to use it. 

For the digital versions of currency, these physical characteristics are mimicked by accounting and encryption. Accounting tracks digital cash to make sure it does not get double-spent (i.e., the same dollar is not spent on two different products at the same time). Encryption of digital assets prevents their being usefully copied. Encryption also allows only the person with the decryption key to open the encryption wrapper and make use of the encrypted money, so only people with the decryption keys "have the cash in their hands", so to speak. 

Currently, neither cryptocurrencies nor gold have "a special legal qualification". But both do have alternate exchange-value uses. Gold has industrial and cosmetic uses. Cryptocurrencies have ledger uses. What does "ledger uses" mean? Let's take a look at how crypto is constructed. 

The technology is still in its infancy, but cryptocurrency has its own market niche of usefulness above and beyond the simple ability of being able to move across national boundaries with a minimum of fuss. That movement, of course, is the one use case everyone knows. Cryptocurrency is instantly accessible anywhere in the world where the Internet is available. Even better, it is possible to move a billion dollars to another person for less than $5 in transaction fees. That cannot be done with any other form of value store.

But cryptocurrency differs from gold, USD and other national currencies in several other major ways. First, the design. The diagram above is a generic undifferentiated framework common to all cryptocurrencies. It is presented just to give you an idea of how cryptos work, generally speaking.

However, the actual design of the individual blocks in each cryptocurrency's blockchain is unique, differentiating it from all other cryptocurrencies. Design differences might lay in the size of the data block, the number of coins that can be produced, the kind of data that can be stored in the data block, the time interval during which a new block is generated, the level of modularity associated with each block, etc., but the design of each crypto is unique to itself. Thus, there is only ever one Bitcoin, no one else can invent Bitcoin again. Other cryptos very similar to Bitcoin may be produced (e.g., Litecoin), but nothing else will be Bitcoin.

Unlike USD or national currencies, where encryption is added as an after-thought, encryption is built-in, a fundamental part of the design of every cryptocurrency. This makes cryptocurrencies inherently more secure than any national currency. One may object by saying that blockchains have been hacked and large quantities of cryptocurrencies stolen, and this is true, but these hacks are much less common in cryptocurrencies than they are in national currencies. Further, these hacks occur as a result of programming errors, not encryption errors. We will see why this distinction matters in a moment.

Unlike national currencies, most cryptocurrencies have a bounded upper limit as part of their design. That means only a certain number of "coins" can exist in bounded cryptocurrencies. Although crypto is obviously not an element on the periodic table, the inherent limit to the number of coins in every bounded cryptocurrency means it acts in a way similar to gold. Crypto of this kind can only be found, not created. Once the upper limit is reached, no more coins of that type can be found. Ever. Unlike national currencies, which governments usually inflate in order to reduce their own debts, bounded crypto cannot be inflated. Indeed, given the fact that people will, over time, lose their decryption keys or die without passing their decryption keys onto others, bounded crypto is relentlessly deflationary. Once max supply is reached, the supply will only drop. This is different than gold. Lost gold can theoretically be discovered again. Lost Bitcoins are gone forever. 

Like gold, and unlike national currencies, bitcoin is decentralized. While certain geographic areas may be rich in gold, or rich in cryptocurrency miners, for most cryptocurrencies, no single entity controls a typical cryptocurrency network. No one entity can decide to change the structure of the coin or the distribution of the coin. Whereas national governments (that is, powerful individuals and groups) use the force of national law to guarantee the integrity of their own government currencies, the laws of physics guarantee the stable characteristics, accessibility and integrity of gold, while the laws of mathematics guarantee the stable characteristics, accessibility and integrity of cryptocurrencies. Given the close interconnect between the laws of physics and math, the math of cryptocurrencies is as stable as the physics of gold. Just as someone could theoretically use the power of nuclear fusion to create more gold, someone could theoretically use the power of computers to break encryption, but given the physics and the math, neither endeavor is likely to occur in our lifetimes.  

But none of these are use cases. Does cryptocurrency have a use case, as gold does? The simplest answer: Yes. Examine the diagram above. The data section in every cryptocurrency block can hold not just transactions, but anything at all. For instance, the data section can hold other cryptocurrencies inside itself, It can hold not only data, but programs. Thus, a cryptocurrency can do something that no national currency, and no bar of gold, can do.

Say, for example, you need a new refrigerator. You can program your cryptocurrency to monitor the prices of refrigerators with certain characteristics, then automatically use itself to buy the optimal refrigerator when it reaches your optimal price, and automatically have that fridge delivered to your door. You can't program a thousand-dollar bill (or any national currency) nor even a bar of gold to do the same thing. Such a program is called a "smart contract".   

Smart contracts are part of DeFi (Decentralized Finance). A smart contract is an example of a Dapp (Decentralized Application). Different cryptocurrencies have different DeFi capabilities. Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, is very, very hard to program with DeFi, so nobody does it. But Ethereum, BinanceCoin and Polkadot, all second-generation currencies, are much better at it. Cardano, a third-generation currency, is even better still, and much easier to program. So, in addition to being able to transfer large sums quickly and cheaply, smart contracts specifically, and DeFi + Dapps in general, are additional use cases for cryptocurrencies.

But DeFi and Dapps are not all that can be done. Cryptocurrencies can act as immutable ledgers. Once data is written into a block, the hash prevents the data from being changed. Precisely because the data section can hold... well... data that cannot be changed, cryptocurrencies may be used as a pre-eminent way of tracking information that needs to be publicly available but also needs to be tamper-proof. So, information on chain-of-custody issues, such as car ownership and maintenance, land deeds, lien information on said land deeds, food transport, high school and college transcripts, proof of employment, etc., could be put on a block chain, available for tamper-proof public inspection. 

Even medical records could be encrypted, placed in a public blockchain, and therefore be available world-wide for use. Since these records would be encrypted, they would only able to be decrypted by the record owner. The advantage? If the owner of those records is away from home but needs medical care, the medical records are still instantly available to any medical facility in the world that has an internet connection. Instead of taking days or weeks to locate and transmit the appropriate information to the emergency medical provider, the data owner simply unlocks the medical information using the decryption keys and it is instantly available. 

So, revisit the smart contract for the refrigerator. You can program the currency to spend itself for the fridge, not only if it reaches the right price point, but also if it has the right production facility, the right transport history, and a good maintenance history. If you want to buy only American, the ledger capability allows the crypto to track the provenance of the goods, allowing everyone to guarantee that you are, really, buying all and only American. The currency itself will verify that every part of the supply-chain was American, not a bit of it foreign. Or, if you only want to buy ethically-sourced products, the crypto would guarantee that you got your wish by refusing to spend itself unless the entire supply chain for the product was ethically-sourced, according to the criteria you set. Try doing that with a fifty-dollar bill.  Or a bar of gold. 

In an age where timely access to information is worth money, the blockchain is an efficient way of seamlessly making stored information quickly available while simultaneously guaranteeing the integrity of the information. Crypto is not just a store of value that is almost universally and instantly available, it is also a contract instrument and an immutable data ledger. Gold has its uses, national currencies have theirs, but DeFi  + Dapps, that is, easy access to widely available, easily transportable, tamper-proof public records, is a very valuable use case. And that is why cryptocurrencies are booming.  

Now, are cryptocurrencies in a tulip-like bubble? Yes. There is no question that many of the blockchains that currently carry significant value are not well-designed and will therefore not survive. Thousands of companies are trying to figure out how to use blockchain right now, just as thousands of companies were trying to figure out how to use the internet back in the 1990s. Most of those groups will fail. But there will be some jewels, just as there were during the dot.com bubble. Remember, Amazon, Google and Netflix all started during that late 1990's bubble. If you invested in them then, you are a multi-millionaire today. If you invested in the bubblelicious losers, you stood a good chance of losing your shirt. 

The same thing is happening right now with blockchain. Some will be jewels that survive and thrive, but most will fail. For instance, Dogecoin has no inherent value, no developers adding value, and an infinitely growing supply. It's definitely a bubble blockchain. For all its notoriety, Bitcoin is almost identical to Dogecoin. While it is is superior to Dogecoin in that it has a capped, or bounded, supply, it is hard to develop on, so it has few developers. However, it has first mover advantage, which means most people buy into it, not because it is good, but because they have heard of it. This will not last.

Ethereum has a mediocre architecture, a fairly lousy fee structure, and no upper bound to the number of coins that can be created, but it has a lot of developers. Ethereum has first mover advantage in the DeFi/Dapps space. Those developers and that first mover advantage give it much more value than Bitcoin. Cardano has a much superior architecture, a superior fee structure, an upper bound to the number of coins and lots of developers, so it also has much more value than Bitcoin. When Defi/Dapp ability is added in August, its value will increase again. Other coins vary in their characteristics as well. If you want to invest, keep in mind that blockchain is definitely in a price-discovery bubble (and has been since it was invented), but it also definitely has a few blockchain gems. You have to do your due diligence and determine which blockchains have enough value to survive the bubble. Those are the ones that will drive value.