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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • In-spite of its potential for liberation and independence.

    When it shows that potential, maybe more people will get on board. Until then there are a host of problems that make a ton of people not want to touch it including but not limited to:

    1. Capitalists and scammers are already exploiting it the way they do with traditional currencies, except in sometimes new creative ways because of either the lack of regulations or because the technology inherently makes it impossible to trace.

    2. I don’t see the involvement of predatory capitalists or financial institutions changing in a fully crypto world either, because people are always going to need financial services like loans and insurance on their savings and the financial institutions will always have the imbalance of power.

    3. The currencies mostly benefit people with a ton of capital to handle consensus, which further entrenches the power imbalance found in (1) and (2).

    4. Insane amounts of resources are needed to reach consensus in a way that is not good at all for the environment, whether that be electricity, computer hardware, or whatever other resource. Sure we already use a lot of power to make our society run. But crypto is asking for more ON TOP of that, compounding the issues. Saying the financial industry already uses a lot of power is not a good argument when I don’t think anyone is reasonably convinced that they’re going away even after crypto were to take over, and now you’re adding an insane power or pollution requirement to run the world’s currency system.

    5. Relying solely on crypto leaves people destitute if their wallets got hacked, unless they decide to utilize traditional banking with insurance (hint: people like stability and a lot of people will choose to do this over having their life savings wiped out).

    6. Chucklefucks are using the technology to commodify and break the best part of the digital world which is the ability to have bit for bit reproducible copies of information.

    I’m serious. Fix all of that and you absolutely would get people on board. Not even kidding. Crypto would be taken seriously. But I have yet to hear compelling solutions by cryptobros.





  • The conventional view on infinity would say they’re actually the same size of infinity assuming the 1 and the 100 belong to the same set.

    You’re right that one function grows faster but infinity itself is no different regardless of what you multiply them by. The infinities both have same set size and would encompass the same concept of infinity regardless of what they’re multiplied by. The set size of infinity is denoted by the order of aleph (ℵ) it belongs to. If both 1 and 100 are natural numbers then they belong to the set of countable infinity, which is called aleph-zero (ℵ₀). If both 1 and 100 are reals, then the size of their infinities are uncountably infinite, which means they belong to aleph-one (ℵ₁).

    That said, you can definitely have different definitions of infinity that are unconventional as long as they fit whatever axioms you come up with. But since most math is grounded in set theory, that’s where this particular convention stems from.

    Anyways, given your example it would really depend on whether time was a factor. If the question was “would you rather have 1 • x or 100 • x dollars where x approaches infinity every second?” well the answer is obvious, because we’re describing something that has a growth rate. If the question was “You have infinity dollars. Do you prefer 1 • ∞ or 100 • ∞?” it really wouldn’t matter because you have infinity dollars. They’re the same infinity. In other words you could withdraw as much money as you wanted and always have infinity. They are equally as limitless.

    Now I can foresee a counter-argument where maybe you meant 1 • ∞ vs 100 • ∞ to mean that you can only withdraw in ones or hundred dollar bills, but that’s a synthetic constraint you’ve put on it from a banking perspective. You’ve created a new notation and have defined it separately from the conventional meaning of infinity in mathematics. And in reality that is maybe more of a physics question about the amount of dollar bills that can physically exist that is practical, and a philosophical question about the convenience of 1 vs 100 dollar bills, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the size of infinity mathematically. Without an artificial constraint you could just as easily take out your infinite money in denominations of 20, 50, 1000, a million, and still have the same infinite amount of dollars left over.



  • Sloogs@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoScience Memes@mander.xyzHe did though.
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    7 months ago

    Oh absolutely. I agree. I don’t think anyone’s disputing that something about it needs to change. Even given that things cost money to run, for profit journals that can basically act as gatekeepers means there’s also going to be excessive price gouging and profiteering and that needs to change.


  • Sloogs@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoScience Memes@mander.xyzHe did though.
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    7 months ago

    Surely there has to be a cost to the infrastructure of publishing and curation though. And possibly all the work of setting up and organizing the peer review process. So they probably charge the institutions or authors submitting the paper instead of their readers. But perhaps we should treat scientific journals as a public good, like libraries, or at least have a publicly funded option. Or have universities and institutions fund it for the public good.