• 6 Posts
  • 126 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2024

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  • And then how do you convert back to the dollar?

    Maybe they can withdraw it to their bank accounts and pay taxes as IT enterpreneurs. Exchanges don’t have access to tax records and have no ways of finding out if they are linked to certain companies. Those people can probably declare it fully open in the taxes that they work on Steam’s behalf for example, how exchange gonna find that out?

    There are countless payment processors and digital wallets, and new ones open regularly. You just don’t hear about them (esspecially in North America) because unregulated capitalism has allowed Visa, Mastercard and PayPal to monopolize the market.

    So the only problem is that we don’t hear about them? But we can use them? If that is the case, why don’t Steam and Itch abandon Visa and Mastercard and switch to something else entirely? In crypto, switching to another exchange is as easy as sending your crypto to an address. There are fixed withdraw fees. So you can send for example $100 billion worth of crypto for a fixed small fee (numbers for popular exchanges: $0.17-10 for BTC, $0.4-6 for ETH), no questions asked where you send and why.

    What stops that from happening again?

    The endgame of all this is that you don’t need to convert crypto to fiat at all. But it’s nowhere close so far.


  • What stops the company to maintain a team of people whose work is to register new wallets and accounts on exchanges all day every day? How exchange going to figure out that a certain person’s account is linked to the company? Even if they will hire detectives, what will they do if there is a whole team with rotating people? Also, exchanges don’t ask you to pay taxes or declare where you got money from, that happens after you take money from them to your fiat bank accounts. Also, you can go to another exchange. There are countless exchanges, more than 2, and new ones can open every day (a big difference compared to payment processors, where just 2 basically monopolized the market).






  • I personally think what they do for general audience is way too niche and it all starts to make sense when you massively decentralize and switch to crypto for everything regarding money. Now do we see a massive surge in big P2P decentralized systems for end-users? I don’t see it. There are few alternatives for some chat apps here and there and that’s it. So maybe it’s just too early. Prime time of this tech is yet to come. If someone builds a huge P2P cryptopowered platform level of Steam or YouTube that’s when you should expect to hear about all this stuff solving real problems.



  • I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that anything “rewarding” doesn’t necessarily affect dopamine chemistry the way we used to talk about regarding game mechanics. After all, I’m not an expert in neurobiology, it might very well be the case that “dopamine rush” is a meme that simply takes a vague intuition of “dopamine is related to feeling of reward in the brain” to the absolute just for the sake of convenience of rhetoric device. But in reality, those things are more nuanced than that. There are many other neurotransmitters, neuromediators and in general things involved in brain signalling like serotonine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, etc, many of which are involved together in any “rewarding game situation” and interact in complex ways. To try to put it in more simple terms, the way you killed a bunch of goblins, the music that was on background, the scenery and palette, and the chest you open that they were guarding, affects dozens upon dozens of neuromediators that all interplay together in complex ways and form your experience, the way you feel, and gamers usually just ignore all that, focus only on the chest part and say “dopamine”. While in reality even the chest part alone isn’t just dopamine, and reward circuitry also isn’t just dopamine alone, and experiencing it is different depending on what you experience before/after and in parallel, and so on. What I didn’t like about the article is that it’s not about this topic at all and barely mentions it, basically there is a single sentence on it, but it’s used for the sake of clickbait title.






  • Yeah, even though I hate the whole thing, I can’t deny it brings me joy to hear about “VPN use surge”, centralized sites dying in favor of shady clones, etc. I’d take total wild west any day over somewhat-free-but-very-polite-mild-and-centralized status quo of yesterday’s internet. The only problem is that there’s no guarantee people actually go that wild. They already did with VPNs, but regarding big site alternatives - I’m not so sure.


  • 💡 Lifehack: Unclog Your Sink with… Your Own Urine? Science Says Yes!

    If you’ve ever had a rough night and ended up vomiting in the sink (hey, it happens), you may have found yourself with a gross, clogged mess. But before you reach for the plunger—or worse, call a plumber—consider this weird but effective trick: pee in the sink.

    Yup, you read that right. According to fluidic chemistry enthusiasts and some Reddit plumbing veterans, urine can actually help break down and dislodge vomit clogs.


    🧪 The Science Behind It

    • Urea & Ammonia Action: Your urine contains urea, which breaks down into ammonia—a compound found in many household cleaners. When urine sits on the clog, the ammonia can start to denature the proteins in the vomit (like partially digested meat, dairy, or stomach mucus), helping to loosen the goop.
    • Temperature Matters: Fresh urine is close to body temperature (98.6°F), which is actually warmer than most tap water. This warmth helps soften fatty or gelatinous chunks that may have solidified in the drain.
    • pH Balancing: Vomit is highly acidic (thanks to stomach acid). Urine tends to be slightly acidic to neutral, and when mixed together, they may chemically neutralize some of the acidity, reducing corrosive buildup and helping dislodge bio-sludge stuck to pipe walls.
    • Flow Dynamics: A good strong stream of urine can generate a pulsed pressure wave, which some claim helps to dislodge partial clogs. (Think of it as “hydro-jetting on a budget.”)

    🛠️ How to Do It

    1. Remove your pants.
    2. Stand over the sink. (Yes, aim is important.)
    3. Let it flow.
    4. Brag to your friends about your eco-friendly DIY plumbing hack!