The reactors themselves were the ubiquitous GE boiling water design.  Of course all kinds of other design goes into building a plant complex...including arrangement and situation of backup power.  I thought I remembered one of the Japanese heavy industry corps (Mitsubishi or some such) playing a role here but don't recall the details.  I did read some article about various malfeasance in construction and it may well have been one of Palast's stories.

Anyway, the earthquake did not cause the disaster, and probably did not really even contribute to it.  I have zero doubt that a lot of stuff was faked including the seismic stuff, but that didn't lead to the disaster.  It could well have resulted in damage which would have made it difficult to re-start if it would not have blown sky high.  Daichi was the one which had meltdowns and spent fuel pool issues, but Daini down the coast also had some severe problems.  Daichi was so interesting that not much attention was paid to Daini.  Not sure if the problems there were seismic in nature or power related or both.  I've been meaning to follow up on that but we have yet to reach a point where decent information is available.

One of the more interesting things was that reactor #3 (the one which blew sky high) was burning 'MOX' fuel.  There is almost no reason to do so unless one wants an excuse to fuck around with plutonium, and almost no reason to fuck around  with plutonium unless one has a nuclear weapons program.  My theory is that there is really not much reason to have a domestic nuclear energy program at all unless it is in support of a nuclear weapons program.  As poor in resources as Japan is they may be an exception, but it is also the case that Japan (like Iran) would be fools not to have a nuclear weapons capability given the existential threats that they face.

I was watching like a hawk when the facilities started to go.  When reactor #1 went I could tell it was a hydrogen explosion.  When #3 went I could tell right away it was NOT a hydrogen explosion.  It is still unclear what exactly blew up but whatever it was left fuel rod assemblies scattered about.  Probably a fuel pool is my best guess, but it could also have been the reactor or a #4's pool(s).  I always argued that an explosion of a pool was the best thing that could happen as it would have resulted in relatively large fragments of nuclear waste rather than it all being atomized as smoke.  I (seemingly alone) wonder if it was not blown up on purpose.  I remember a mystery barge of U.S. origin dropping something off then hauling ass.  They said it was 'water'.

Ltc is silver its more volatile than bitcoin or gold

Justusranvier says that it is 'econ 101' that mining reward will fall to zero (and I say it's likely to dip below semi-regularly.)

If there is some other thing Justus is imaging which will incentivize entities to support Bitcoin, he didn't feel inclined to mention them and doesn't feel inclined to discuss them apparently.

Absent a more full explanation, I'd say things are just the opposite of 'incentives that make it a practical Store of Value', though I'd also say that it is not inconsistent with a pump-n-dump type of thing.


Actually, a sidechain backed by Bitcoin needs to have a functional Bitcoin in order to exercise peg operations (not to mention that it needs Bitcoin to remain trusted by the definition of 'backing'...at least unless it's trying to shoot the moon and supplant Bitcoin itself.)  To this extent every sidechain needs to support native Bitcoin even if it is not in and of itself profitable to do so.

I suggest that this mechanism of induced subsidization provides a more durable support framework than independent brute sha256 hashing and may even act to break up the mining pools which periodically grow to a size which causes discomfort associated with centralization.

 edit - back in 2011 I was calling sidechains 'child-chains'.  Had that label been chosen we could imagine children supporting their parent in the parent's old age...

ASIC are mostly made in China

It can be that different security and assurances are required for different uses.  You could probably afford to lose the price of a cup of coffee.  Eg imagine pettycoin on a sidechain.  It has sharded validation.  He thinks he can get to 100k TPS.  I really dont think you want that on the main chain because its weaker, and he cut down a lot of bitcoin features to get it.  But its useful.


You probably for now dont want any of those things on the main chain if and until someone can firewall them in the chain or prove very robustly that they work.

If bitcoin rejects such things, it maybe that innovation moves to alts.  That would be a sad day to me because I think it could be the end of bitcoin and even cryptocurrency period as a store of value anyway.


Adam

what you think the winklevii's motive is, or the rtf customers - that's opinion
How an ETF affects the price of an underlying asset - that's well understood.

Your post suggested that you didn't understand the latter, the search results I linked to explain it.

If lots of people buy the etf and its price goes up then the BTC price gets driven up through arb, so yes buying the ETF does affect BTC

I said a few things about that and so did Greg on reddit (how we expect to make money).


and


and



Before we closed the seed funding round there were people who wrote asking how to buy in (I think some of them were confused and thought it was a "hot" new alt-coin ICO they could get it on the "ground-level" of).  But also there were people who understood what a sidechain is.  We do have one bitcoiner (non VC, tho qualified investor) who is an investor, and a number of the investors own BTC also.  

What I said to people on twitter was "you dont need to buy into side-chains, you're already in, its called bitcoin"; well really we're invested in bitcoin & the value of stock representing a stake in our ability to profit as described above, but you get the point.

So for now I would buy more bitcoin  Also in the (mining) incentive section of the white paper there was a concept of a time-shifted fee.

Adam

That is a non-trivial "if"...

What is it exactly that prevents those potential COIN buyers from buying BTC directly, or SMBIT shares?   The fact that they are not traded on an exchange like NASDAQ?  Or some intrinsic property of the asset?

Note that COIN shares will uninsured against theft or loss, besides being backed only by a "stock" (BTCs) that itself has no backing assets.

The Fortress investment group bought a bunch of BTC in 2013.  Those BTC were the only red stain in their Q1/2014 report.  So Fortress promptly swapped those BTC for equity in the Pantera Fund's managing company (not shares of the fund itself).  If COIN existed in 2013, and Fortress had bought COIN instead of BTC, the result would probably have been pretty much the same.

What I mean is that COIN may not be much more attractive to large investors than BTC itself.  Large investors are not likely to be impressed by a 5-year logscale plot with a red straight line on it.  In case you have not been paying attention, to people outside the bitcoin community bitcoin does not look like the financial miracle that it seemed to be 13 months ago.

And it is a fact that no one who has some money to spare believes that bitcoin will be worth 3000 $ in 2015.  Otherwise they would rush to buy those coins that are now being offered for sale at 290 $/BTC, and no one is buying.

Indeed the paper had too much rhetoric and boldface for academic good taste.  But he points out flaws in some arguments that are commonly used to dismiss the risk of a 51% attack, e.g. that with cloud mining one could rent 51% of the power for 1 hour at much smaller cost than actually buying that much mining equipment.

I did not bother to read his proposed fix to the longest-chain rule because it seems to involve timestamping transactions, and I suspect that such thing is even harder to get right than achieving consensus about the chain.  I will wait until someone tells me that that section is worth reading.  

He calls it Bitcoinium in another thread. He's creating a unicorn to describe the indescribable rather than use common analogies. He uses a fictitious omnipotent AI to describe the unicorn and calls it "common sense." From there it's reifications all the way down.