bought it earlier, read it pretty quickly. It's good, there is some gold in there and a lot of practical advice. It does feel a little bit expensive though, some sections are a little thin and this is made worse by the use of multiple blank pages between sections which makes it feel like the authors have padded it out.
On the other hand I'm likely to refer back to this book a lot over the next few years, so in that light $80 doesn't feel that bad.
I think I'd have preferred a living resource / subscription model rather than a one off book though.
much of ideas behind bitcoin itself was to replace traditional financial system. and traditional financial system is not zero energy use industry. in fact it uses a lot of energy. rough comparison from 2017 - https://hackernoon.com/the-bitcoin-vs-visa-electricity-consu...
granted - having both traditional and crypto financial system at the same time is net negative, but we can't really switch one on and another off instantly.
I mean, you can drive a Bugatti Chiron 500km for the same amount of energy as a single bitcoin transaction. The cost of a single transaction using e.g. visa is utterly negligible in comparison.
Edit: Some truly depressing figures here [1] including this
> Number of U.S. households powered for 1 day by the electricity consumed for a single transaction: 16.54
the author is making a point about the comparison to a transaction on a visa network. transaction on a visa network cannot happen without the rest of the traditional financial industry. I think the closest blockchain tech to a visa network will be lighting network, which is still WIP.
EDIT: Lightning Network potentially will be able to process much-much more transactions per second than visa network with the same usage of underlying bitcoin blockchain. Essentially Lighting Network allows you to create easily scalable and distributed version of visa network.
more difficulty is better - more protected network is. where efficiency will come from is better mining hardware and introduction mass adoption of the lightning network.
I'm not javascript syntax, especially if you're being pedantic, but focusing on that is kind of missing the point, which is that it's tool friendly in the way string interpolation is not.
The oil is in the fruit of the tree not the trunk, they don't cut down the palms to extract the oil, they cut down the rainforest to make room for the palms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_oil
The process was created for and was used in this feature film production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBf9-_KyFJk That is my work, in combination with a VFX team. The original actor replacement process as implemented by the production team did not convince. I was a production analysis brought in, and created the extra embellishments to make the illusion convincing. The work was unique, I did some research and learned it was patent capable. Discussing with John Hughes, President of the Studio, he gave me the technology to pursue as I wished.
This is significantly higher quality than today's Deep Fakes, and as such it requires actual VFX artists, as well as a non-trivial expense. (Of course, that expense is less than any return from using the process - that's the whole point.)
Ah yes, feature film quality. For values of 'feature film' that approximately equal 'late-night comedy show where moving lips are overlaid on a still image'.
No, actual feature film VFX quality, which requires a VFX budget and is not created trivially. Any studio or production facility we negotiated vetted the process and understood it's viability. The process was used in dozens of VFX films, but as a one off technique, where the process could just as easily have been used to actor replace anyone. You see, that is somewhat the key the process, because it is successful regardless of who is being inserted into the media, it grants an amount of freedom, or casual attitude for the production artists who used to view actor replacement as a difficult, time consuming challenge.
On the other hand I'm likely to refer back to this book a lot over the next few years, so in that light $80 doesn't feel that bad.
I think I'd have preferred a living resource / subscription model rather than a one off book though.