1\ Do any other Bitcoiners like the book "The Once & Future King" by T. H. White?

It's one of my favorites and I've been revisiting it recently, thinking about cryptocurrency, political representation, & blockchains. 2\ It opens with Merlyn teaching a young King Arthur (Wart) about different forms of government, the fallacy of "might makes right", all through a series of adventuresome allegories.

Disney's "The Sword in the Stone", is a cute (if imperfect) adaptation of this part of the book.

\1 I continue to struggle with @ParityTech's software design decisions. My #Parity node keeps dropping peers. The advice I get is "upgrade to the latest unstable version". Parity is even configured to auto-update itself by default. Why do I have to run at the edge just to work? 2\ Parity is either (a) consumer software or (b) bad software.

It's (sometimes) OK when consumer software forces you to upgrade b/c, as a consumer, you're dumb & insecure. Business (or prosumer) software achieves a higher level of security & control by sacrificing ease of use.

1\ A thought experiment: The year is 2277. You're the bartender at a spaceport in a faraway Earth colony on a planet orbiting α-Centauri: a distance of ~4 light years. Guy walks into your bar, slams down a credit chit, and asks for a drink.

How do you know his money is any good? 2\ If the credit chit were guaranteed by a bank or a blockchain or something local to α-Centauri it'd be easy, just like it is here on Earth in 2018.

But say this guy is fresh-thawed after his long journey from Earth aboard a lighthugger. What kind of wealth could he even have?

1\ Have you heard this reasoning? "#Ethereum is better than #Bitcoin because it can do more." => "The EVM is Turing-complete and Bitcoin Script isn't, so Ethereum is a better cryptocurrency." => "Bitcoin's creators were too early/stupid/blind to make Bitcoin Turing-complete." 2\ This is a blatant misunderstanding! To a non-technical person, Turing-completeness and being able to compute anything is *obviously* better. But programmers know that Turing-completeness is Pandora's box: you don't know what it contains and you can't close it once opened...

1\ Physicists have a word "crank": a person who doesn't know physics but persists in promulgating their personal theory. Cranks pop in all fields of physics but especially in certain areas: quantum mechanics, field theories, relativity, cosmology, &c. 2\ Why these subjects? B/c they are abstract & esoteric. It's hard to crank in Newtonian mechanics because your bogus theory is easily disproved by direct human experience. It's easier to crank in quantum b/c few outside the tribe of physics really understand quantum mechanics.