It’s easy and popular to have negative opinions about things on the internet, or to make broad generalizations like this one. But I feel out of touch with the internet this week.

I really enjoyed Star Trek: Into Darkness. I loved the Doctor Who series (season) finale, too. I had a fantastic weekend watching each twice.

For that matter, I quite liked Iron Man 3 and the season endings to both Community and How I Met Your Mother.

Sorry I can’t muster up the negativity this weekend seems to require.

Why do people keep thinking about Google “versus some other company?” Maybe because, as John Gruber reminds us, Google says one thing (“We should be building great things that don’t exist”) but mostly does another: improving existing products and competing against them.

The number of times self-pity has helped me: zero.

Space Oddity (by Chris Hadfield)

Chris Hadfield is one of the most amazing human beings ever, and this is an incredible Bowie cover. Probably the best Bowie cover ever.

Space Oddity… in space.

Even if it’s the only reason to use bitcoins, a payment system that does not involve fees or chargebacks is a big deal.

I think using such a system in a typical retail store would depend on either a smartphone app or a card supplied by a third party (which would mean fees again), but a “currency” that requires a smartphone doesn’t seem like a problem for most people. 

A few years ago, when mining bitcoins was well within the grasp of typical home computers, I mined a few. I didn’t really know what to do with them, but Bitcoin was new and nerdy and interesting. How many bitcoins did I mine? Where are those bitcoins now? I think maybe six, and I think probably gone forever.

The value of bitcoins was so low, and I understood them so poorly, that I’m fairly certain that when I lost interest, I simply deleted the mining software and my “wallet” and moved on.

One of the big differences between Bitcoin and many other currencies is its well-defined hard limit. There may be a limit to how much gold will ever exist (barring alchemy), but nobody’s sure exactly what that limit is, nor when we will reach, having mined and refined all possible gold. There is no limit whatsoever to how many dollars or euros may someday exist; more will be printed “as needed” in perpetuity. In contrast, there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins; after 2140, no more bitcoins will be created. Of course, 127 years from now is a long time, and just about anything could happen between now and then.

What’s most interesting to me is not that there will be no more than 21 million bitcoins in circulation, but that there will almost certainly be many less. My bitcoins are lost forever, and they’re certainly not the only ones.

Gold is never (or rarely) really destroyed or lost forever, though some percentage of it is used in non-monetary ways. Dollars or Euros are much more easily destroyable, but since they grow without limit, it doesn’t matter much. Bitcoins are often treated like it is infinitely usable forever, but just because bitcoins can be tracked doesn’t mean they can be used. 

After 2140, there will be 2.1 quadrillion satoshis (a satoshi is .00000001 bitcoin), but not all of them will be spendable. Despite all the technology involved in Bitcoin, we won’t actually be able to know how many are unusable; we’ll only know how many are unused. As a result, I suspect inflation and deflation are both still possible.

(via bookofjoe: What we do well)

I think I’m in the “Learn to do this better” area, trying to head north.

Hard to believe this seems like a “good” price. (at RaceTrac)