The Giant Beastcast: Episode 135

Lonely Jeff in VR? Now that's a VR future I'd pay for

Rebel Galaxy is 80% off in the Steam sale (4e)

Thank you GBE for another year of wonderful podcasts. Beastcast is what makes every friday *feel* like friday. Abby was a great addition and Dan is still a very strange human being.

Much love from Tampere, Finland!

I actually forgot it was Friday.

Since @alex kind of butchered the bitcoin story, here's what it was actually about.

Basically a dude wanted to pay in bitcoin, but the transaction fees were basically 80% more on top of his purchase, and confirming the transaction would take 2 hours. When the bartender offered to cancel the transaction and just let him pay with cash/credit, the patron informed him that bitcoin doesn't allow you to reverse transactions. So the whole thing was a mess.

I also want to give a general idea of what bitcoin is. Now, I know I'm going to get part of this wrong or inaccurate, but this is just the GENERAL IDEA behind bitcoin. The first thing you need to know is that it's based on cryptography in computers, which mostly relies on the fact that it's really hard to mathematically determine which large numbers are prime (meaning they can't be divided evenly by other numbers). But once you find the prime number, it's incredibly fast to verify that it's prime. So prime numbers are used as the "secret information" for most computer security systems. It's a bit more complex than that, but that's the very basic gist.

So a "bitcoin" is effectively just one of those "really large prime numbers." When you "mine" for a bitcoin, you're looking for one of those numbers. At this point, all of the "easy" ones have been found, and finding each next one requires much more computing power than the previous. Despite their current very high value, the amount of electricity needed to calculate the next bitcoin you find is such that you actually really can't make money as a normal person living in a first world country mining for bitcoins. Most bitcoin mining is done either by ignorant people who don't realize that, or by people who are speculating that the price will keep going up enough to justify the current costs in the future, people who are in third world countries where electricity is much cheaper, and people who are literally just stealing electricity.

The other big part of bitcoin is what people call "the blockchain." What the blockchain basically is is a ledger that has a history of every transaction ever made. These transactions are verified by using a cryptographic process, and it's crowd sourced in a non-centralized way, kind of like bittorrent. So when you're "mining" for bitcoins, you're also verifying other people's transactions. The crowd-sourcing part means that a transaction is verified when 51% of the people mining agree that the transaction went through.

Anyway, let me stop there because I know I already got some parts not quite accurate and if I keep going it's just going to get worse, but that's a big picture general idea behind bitcoin.

In summary: a bitcoin is basically just a secret number that only you know. It has value because only a limited number of them exist and people say it has value, which is no different than how dollars, or diamonds, or gold works. Mining them right now isn't really worth it, and it's really difficult to actually use them to buy anything. But if you buy them, it seems like their value is going to keep going up in the long term, at least for now, so it might be worth it to buy a small number of them as a high risk, high yield investment as part of a larger investment strategy that also includes a lot of other, safer investments.

But keep in mind that they're basically a digital pyramid scheme, where early investors are the ones who make the most money and they can only keep making money by convincing other people, who will all make less money than them, to get on board.

Achieved with CryCash

If anyone is looking for more Ethan Hawke sci-fi films check out Predestination (2014) and Daybreakers (2009).

Thanks for a fun year folks. A lot of stepping on each other this episode making it hard to listen to, but it is what it is. Have a wonderful break!

Jeff, I'm with you when it comes to Star Wars. I enjoyed the original movies, but I don't have the crazy love that has exploded in pop culture since Disney bought it. I'm sure I'll see Last Jedi eventually once it hits Netfl-... err, well, I'll see it someday.

Superhero movies use to be my jam, but I have fallen off hard on those. There's just so damn many!

@doombot13: I don't think Star War as it pertains to pop culture is a recent (new trilogy) phenomenon. It's been wildly popular for decades, and with each new generation thanks to the prequels and the animated stuff.

Having said that, while I enjoy the movies, I have almost zero connection to them anymore. There was a time when I was very much "into" Star Wars, so I wouldn't compare myself to Bakalar, but the prequels, for whatever reason, just instilled in me this feeling that the whole thing is goofy as shit. I've enjoyed the new movies for what I feel like they are: fun, enjoyable movies, but I have almost zero connection to the lore.

It's only a pyramid scheme in so far as the current ever-escalating prices rely largely on speculation and encouraging new people to _invest_, rather than actual usefulness. If (and that's a huge if - I find it extremely unlikely) Bitcoin manages to stabilise AND become a viable means of exchange, early users will continue to gain as the value will inherently rise due to it being used, rather than people making questionable investments or being duped into doing so.

Still, the situations where it provides advantages (to a purchaser) over existing payment methods are rather niche, so I don't see it getting mass adoption for any reason other hype which will eventually dissipate.

Not entirely true. With the right hardware (ASIC), it's certainly possible to make a profit, but it's risky. Last I looked, it would take about a year for a $5000 device to make $7000 in profit, allowing for typical electricity costs. You're basically gambling that Bitcoin price increases to offset the mining difficulty increases (which it should unless the price is based on hype, but see above), and that the price doesn't collapse before you cover your hardware costs (which given Bitcoin's history and how bubble-like it currently appears is _far_ from a safe thing to assume).

Edit: Case in point - Bitcoin (and other currencies are similar) is down 30% (to USD) over the last 24 hours.

Talking about how "hard" english is to learn it's kinda easy compared to Latin based languages. This is coming from a native Dutch speaker who is trying to learn French ATM. I am gonna go even father and say the success of English in the "Lingua franca" (thanks MGSV ) war is won by English. Just because how easy it is to learn by non native speakers.

@stordoff: @ildon: I feel like I finally understand bitcoins, thanks!

yeah- i'm more or less right there with you. i read a lot of the expanded universe stuff when i was younger, and had an affection for design of the spacecraft, costumes, etc. prequels were bad, but i'm giving these new ones the benefit of the doubt going in.

buuut something about this new one just isn't resonating with me- not even in the slightest. and to be clear- it's not a matter of "they're destroying my youth!" to the contrary- burn it all to the ground for all i care. i just didn't find the film particularly moving.

i love star wars and have since i was in 2nd grade (over 20 years ago). I love the originals, love the prequels and love the new trilogy. I've played games, watched the cartoon shows, read tons of the old EU, read a lot of the new comics and new books. The resurgence of it has been incredible and I love it is on the rise again. TLJ was great and I'm excited to see it again. The new trilogy feels very much like Star Wars to me.

I think what has happened with it is a lot of rose-colored nostalgia and people not understanding real star wars from their reality of star wars. Star wars was ALWAYS corny, cheesy, silly, fun, and full of mystery. We didn't know anything about Boba or Palpatine in the originals and didn't need to. We saw them, we loved them. The modern 'era' wants everything explained and filled in immediately and leave no room for the mystery.

And unrelated note on AC: Origins. Game is incredible and my game of the year (and yes I've played BOTW).

@ildon: @stordoff: How does the "prime-ness" of the number get validated? Certainly the miners goes through the entire computation to make sure a number doesn't have a non-unity divisor, but how does everyone else verify this? It's easy to just compute it but this will take resources and I can't imagine the calculation taking place at every transaction. Is there a "central bank" of bitcoin that goes and say, "yep, this is a real bitcoin", and where does that process happen during the transaction chain?

In other words, is there such a thing as a forged bitcoin like forged currency or fake gold/diamond?

"The game knows that this is fucked and you are going into it knowing this is fucked. So knowing that it is fucked and having Bennett Foddy repeatedly say to you 'yo, this is fucked,' like, is...it kinda unfucks it for me.

I respect a game that unfucks itself like that." - Alex Navarro

@mus: Where did you get that picture of Alex for your icon?

@elevator: Mining Bitcoin isn't really about finding primes - the primes are just used in the keys that, essentially, access each Bitcoin. It's relatively easy to generate these, and they come as pairs - one public address, and one private that you must control in order to do anything with those coins. You _can_ try to guess these keys to access Bitcoins that aren't your own, but the numbers are so large that'd you'd be looking for tens of thousands of years, if not many times longer, on average.

The way mining works is that you are looking for a _random_, not necessarily prime, number that when hashed together with the previous block (a block is essentially just a set of transactions) and the most recent transactions produces a result smaller than a set value, i.e.:

sha256(previous block + current transactions + random nonce) < set value

The reason that mining takes such a long time is that you have to try _quintillions_ of values to find one that works. However, once that value is known and shared with the rest of the network, it's trivial to verify - you only need to try that single value and see if it works.

This is the reason that Bitcoins cannot be forged (unless you control enough of the network to "agree" that a false transaction is valid, but that's not really feasible). Bitcoins are created by including a "reward" transaction in the above calculation that pays the miner a preset amount. Because any other miner can instantly verify if the result is correct, they will ignore any potential blocks that try to introduce false transactions - if you tried to pay yourself a higher number of Bitcoins, the value you compute and the value everyone else computes would be different.

Lol Jeff. I never liked Star Wars much either. It's not an issue to dislike popular stuff.

WhatsApp and Signal are my go-to messaging systems. Cross platform and secure (signal more so). I find it dumb (although smart business decision) that apple locks a messaging system behind a particular hardware and antithetical to the point a communications system.

The Fifth Element has not held up well :(

Tried to make this exact point to my friend that said that TLJ was a good film but a bad Star Wars film. To me the original Star Wars was never about this big lore filled universe with every facet of every character detailed in various forms of media.

He seemingly couldn't handle the fact that Rey could be a powerful character without a detailed explanation of her exact lineage and all the various training she's had.

Ugh, yeah, the takes in general have been kind of exhausting, but the "we need MORE lore" argument is maybe the most exhausting to me. The last thing I wanted was some convoluted mess that finds yet another way to intricately connect these new characters to each other and the characters before them. I swear, if some people had their way there would be 8 total characters in the universe and they would all be related.

Very happy to hear about the return of the Christmas/New Year's RP podcast. (Though bummed that Abby won't be around! She'd be great on it!) They've been my favorite Beastcasts of the year two years running.

"Why are there 2 O's?"

- Vincent Caravella's Dan Ryckert impression regarding H2O

Jeff Bakalar does a good James Cordon

"goin' hard on Peeps"

The new movie is not good, the new movie is not bad. It's just mediocre. It tried to do a lot of new things, which I appreciate, and it's direction and acting is wayyyyy above whatever the prequels were, but the writing has a lot of issues. Almost none of the characters achieve anything at all, and right when it was getting interesting and reaching a climax, it has an extra 30 minutes tacked on to it that just makes the film nosedive completely.

"Is it called boiling if it's in the oven?"

That's totally something Dan would say.

Considering how closely related English and Dutch are, you might not be a very good example. Coming from a non-Germanic (or even non-European) language, learning English isn't especially easy.

It's certainly fair to say that English has a simpler grammar than many European languages, but the worldwide success of English probably has a lot more to do with the British Empire and post-WW2 American economic dominance than the objective qualities of the language.

Either my speakers are failing or the mix gets real weird during this podcast.

My favorite podcast The Giant Blockchain.

My Bakalar is augmented.

@soulcake said:

Going between the Germanic/Romance languages is _relatively_ easy because the basic structures are similar and have shared roots. It doesn't mean it's as easy for a speaker of, say, a Japonic language.

Its use as a global lingua comes more from the expanse of the British Empire (23% of the world's population) and the influence of American culture, rather than it being especially easy to learn.

Apple has no real visionary anymore with the loss of Steve Jobs. And they seem to have really increased planned obsolescence. I almost bought an Ipad pro($1200) when it was fairly new but I wanted the smaller version and they don't list anywhere that it has downgraded hardware to the point that it more closely matches the Air 2, which is older and half the price. I stumbled across this info looking up some stuff on tech websites and immediately returned it.

Abby has an almost system wars level of reverence for Apple products. She really bought into the brand huh.

People are giving way more detail than necessary on this bitcoin stuff. Here's the short, non-technical explanation of why bitcoins need to be "mined":

Controlled scarcity is an important part of us all accepting that a currency has value (i.e. the answer to "why can't we just print more money" to fix budget deficits). To get a "new" bitcoin, you need run really performance intensive computations, which is purely the bitcoin creators' method for artificially enforcing the scarcity of the currency.

Are we going to get an Austin led holiday special this year? Man, I really hope so!

@spacemanspiff00: yeah it is kind of sad, everything about that company is so messy now. At least they are FINALLY talking about putting out a new proper/modular Mac Pro again after about a century or so. It feels like 2 steps and 1 step back, with every step forward they make an arbitrary decision that hurts huge amounts of their customers. It sucks, I recall when Apple made both consumer and pro-grade hardware/software and now they just seemingly make stuff for this nebulous "Apple fan" and slightly crazier "Apple fan" peoples. Meh.

(I say this as I am trying to save up money for an iPhone X)

For as much crap as the crew gives Dan for his loyalty to brands, Abby sure was crazy defensive about Apple in this one. I prefer Android but I don't bear any ill will towards Apple users but like she was actively trying to shame Vinny for even thinking about switching.

Guys you can't steal Dan's bit. Y'all are going to have to learn the basics of cryptocurrency so he can ask you what it is.

As someone who has done the majority of his travelling by himself here are some few tips for new solo travellers. I am by no means some super backpacker or anything. Just a regular guy who gets the regular amount of vacation you do in north america.

1. Go where you want to go. So much of solo travel is romantized and full of cliches. My number one rule is there is nowhere that "you have to go!" If you want to travel and aren't sure where to go, think about what you like and don't let the internet or friends or others decide for you. Because that's how you end up on a bus tour in Europe when what you really wanted to do was go to Japan for example.

2. Plan, plan plan. The internet makes it so much easier now. When you're a solo traveller its all up to you. And as Vinny said tell people where you're going, where you're staying etc. Don't keep all your money in one spot. Don't keep all your credit cards in your wallet. If you're a solo woman traveller (or even a man I suppose) it doesn't hurt to buy things like a door stopper that you can put on your door at night to stop hotel employees who have keys from getting in. (this does happen). Same if you're using airbnb.

3. So many people come back and gush about their solo travels and how it was like this amazing experience and how they had such a wonderful time discovering new cultures etc..etc. blah blah. Some times you'll visit a place, will like it and that will be that. Other times you won't. Don't stress about it. Not every trip has to be this great life changing epic. Sometimes you just go to a cool city and see interesting things and eat and new restaurants.

4. Listen to yourself. For example if you're not feeling like joining the rest of your hostel mates in a booze tour around town, don't go. The benefit of solo travel is you get to make all the decisions. This goes back to point #3. Some days you may be tired, or whatever. Don't beat yourself up about it. You'll have a better time overall if you feel good rather than if you feel stressed because you got to see x,y and z.

@ape_dosmil: Remember how she told everyone now that she got her mac to run games she doesn't want anyone to tell her to build a pc because she hates them. She really likes her macs which is fine I suppose.

'The Terminator' is better than 'Terminator 2'. 'Terminator 2' also ruined the franchise.

I'm depressed as fuck so really I act like I'm retired already

Abby channeling Dan a bit this episode, not to mention her views on Cheeto's...

Now, please stand for the Danland national anthem

*camera turns to center field, where a solitary shower sits flanked by two flags bearing the image of King President Ryckert*

*shower curtain whips open*

I LIKE TO

party with my peeps

cruise and creep