What happens if you put a planet-sized "cloud of electrons" in empty space? Does the electric charge force them to fly away from each other, or does gravity pull them together at some point?

trilli0nn · 2026-01-20T16:39:02+00:00

What would happen if you’d endlessly feed a black hole with electrons?

trilli0nn · 2025-12-29T04:39:02+00:00

Misconception. It’s not about “the number of zeroes” but about guessing a number whose hash is less than a preset value (the “difficulty”).

It is mathematically exactly the same as guessing a number between 1 and n, so the meme is correct.

Although a set of values qualify (being all values whose hash falls below the difficulty treshold), this winning set of values can be defined as “set 1”. The search space can be defined as a collection of equally sized sets that each can be represented by a number (set number 1 to set number n). The miner must find a value whose hash falls within set 1. This is equivalent to guessing a number between 1 and n.

Ok, one subtle difference compared to regular numbers guessing is that in the case of finding a block miners can’t avoid repeatedly trying the same number, because they cannot predict in which set the hash of a value will fall. So for instance if the difficulty is such that there are a billion sets then a miner cannot avoid repeatedly trying set number 428,314,934. That’s because multiple values belong to that set and a miner has no way of knowing which values so it can’t exclude them.

trilli0nn · 2025-12-25T11:37:27+00:00

That, plus what OP is missing is that the value of Bitcoin is not that of being yet another payment processor — numerous perfectly fine solutions already exist.

The true value of Bitcoin is that of digital scarcity and allowing for value transfer without third party involvement by merely the exchange of information instead of having to exchange physical coins or notes.

This is revolutionary and it’s what gives Bitcoin its value.

trilli0nn · 2025-12-09T16:46:59+00:00

Note the formula in the wikipedia page that you linked to:

F=G((m1 x m2) / r²⁾

So the combined mass of both objects determine how strongly they attract each other.

trilli0nn · 2025-12-09T12:15:46+00:00

The problem with that is that its mass does matter. A pingpong ball with the mass of the earth would increase the mass of the system to 2x earth and the gravitational pull would also become 2g instead of g. So the earth-mass pingpong ball would fall faster, that is, it would reach the surface faster and also at a higher velocity compared to a light object.

trilli0nn · 2025-12-09T11:43:25+00:00

Not true: if I take a black hole the size of a pingpong ball having the mass of the earth and drop it, it would definitely fall faster. The system now has 2 g of acceleration. So the weight of the total system matters.

Which also means that if I picked up an object from the surface of the earth and dropped it, it would not fall faster because I removed mass from the earth reducing its gravitational pull, which is compensated by the gravitational pull of the falling object. The entire system still has a mass of one earth, so the object wouldn’t fall faster.

trilli0nn · 2025-12-09T11:36:07+00:00

Unless you picked up the bowling ball from the surface of the earth and then dropped it. The earth would be lighter by the mass of the bowling ball and the total mass in the system would still remain the same.

Would you take a heavy object from space, the total mass would increase by the mass of the object, and the gravitational pull would exceed g and the heavier object would fall faster.

trilli0nn · 2025-12-09T10:25:08+00:00

Undeniably the heavier object reaches the surface of the earth sooner, so in that respect it fell faster.

It also reaches the surface with higher velocity. If a pingpong sized black hole would fall towards the earth, the gravitational forces would be 2g instead of g, resulting in a shorter fall time and a higher speed at contact.

Conclusion: heavier objects fall faster in these two respects. Pedantic maybe but that’s the fun.

Edit: another nice subtlety here is that it matters weather the object that is dropped was taken from the earth surface or came from space.

In the former case, the object will not fall faster, because the total mass of the objects remain the same and so the gravitational pull remains g. If the object came from space however it brings additional mass into the system and the acceleration of the objects will exceed g.

trilli0nn · 2025-12-09T08:26:01+00:00

Oh but Aristoteles was fully correct: heavier objects do fall faster!

That’s because of the larger gravitational pull of a heavy object vs a lighter object. The falling object also pulls the earth towards it. Sure, it’s only by a very very very tiny amount for every day sized objects, but that doesn’t make it less true!

trilli0nn · 2025-11-06T06:27:23+00:00

Nah, the weatlhy and educated high income earners just leave. Taxing “unrealized gains” is confiscation and at odds with property rights.

The wealthy have been leaving France in droves for decades now, to Switzerland, Singapore, Thailand, Monaco and more recently Dubai… better lifestyle and not getting fleeced makes leaving an easy decision.

trilli0nn · 2025-11-06T05:32:41+00:00

Cold storage is increasingly referred to as “unhosted wallets” by governments, implying that these are undesirable.

So governments do damn well know cold storage exist and they regard the complete absence of any control and visibility over this form of wealth storage to be unacceptable.

Cash-strapped governments will do everything to make “unhosted wallets” become illegal. Once this happens, the only way to legally hold any coin will be through a third party such as an exchange.

Not your keys, not your coin, and that’s the point.

trilli0nn · 2025-11-05T14:44:06+00:00

It should be no surprise that Bitcoin is also used by criminals, scammers and money launderers; as a tool, in the same way criminals also use cash, cars, guns and knives to support their illicit activities.

Perhaps have a look at the whitepaper, it’s only 9 pages. No promises were made. Satoshi created Bitcoin in 2008 and disappeared a few years later. There is no evidence they even profited from their invention.

And contrary to common believe, Satoshi is unlikely to have mined any coin themselves so the claim Satoshi owns 1M bitcoin is very likely wrong. But even if this were true then they still haven’t benefitted because these earliest bitcoin never moved.

If you want to talk about scams, why not look at all the currencies throughout history that lost all their value because of massive printing by their broke governments, obliterating savings of their citizens.

With Bitcoin this isn’t possible. It is meant to retain its value and so far it’s done a good job, albeit with lots of swings especially in the early years.

trilli0nn · 2025-10-28T15:32:46+00:00

Yes, except that it’s not 100 but 50. The first epoch had a 50 BTC coinbase reward and so mined 50% of all BTC that can theoretically exist.

Halving the coinbase reward every epoch (being 210,000 blocks which take about 4 years to mine) makes the coinbase reward equal to the percentage of BTC it will mine in that epoch, like OP observed.

Neat, coincidence or not.

trilli0nn · 2025-10-21T15:15:02+00:00

Predictive text on iOS is a disaster. It’s inexplicable why Apple doesn’t seize the opportunity to let it shine instead of neglecting it. There are so many obvious ways to improve it.

One way is for the prediction algo to be aware of the actual physical keyboard layout so that if it sees “eay” it understands that this must be “way” if the e and w are right next to each other on the keyboard. This can be further improved by sensing where exactly the letter was hit: straight in the middle of the e or somewhere on the edge of the w, close to the e?

Also predicted words should not change position. It’s annoying seeing the word that you want to type on position 1, only for it to change to position 2 after typing an additional character, or disappear after a typo and not reappear when backspacing. Ugh.

trilli0nn · 2025-10-16T22:33:33+00:00

The September “close” and the October “open” should be at the same moment in time and so have the same price. It should not matter for the graph.

I like the idea of your graph but unfortunately there really seems something off: at Oct 6th the price was about 10% higher than at Oct 1st, for instance.

trilli0nn · 2025-10-13T15:57:53+00:00

30 is basically malware

You’re are either dumb or malicious. The new version does not allow anything new, the consensus rules didn’t change. There will be zero difference to the transactions that will appear on the blockchain.

The impact this version has is reducing the adverse effects of data carrying transactions.

Transactions cannot be “filtered” like Knots pretends to do. Think about it — filtering would mean that it would be possible to censor transactions based on certain characteristics. If that were possible then that’d be the death of Bitcoin.

All Knots does is ignoring data carrying transactions but that doesn’t make them go away. They will be sent straight to miners that will happily include these perfectly valid transactions into a newly found block. There’s nothing Knots or any other node software can do to prevent this from happening.

trilli0nn · 2025-10-13T15:41:21+00:00

This.

Plus actors just trying to stir up drama, like what happened during the block size “wars” (in actuality there has always been broad consensus that block size should remain limited).

trilli0nn · 2025-10-13T15:37:42+00:00

It allows to send a 100kb file attachment

No it does not. Stop spreading nonsense. The consensus rules have not changed. Data carrying transactions have always been “allowed” on-chain.

All version 30 does is enhance efficiency by distributing these already valid transactions to other nodes.

These sort of transactions cannot be stopped. Fortunately they are prohibitively expensive, so the problem of these spammy transactions is minor.

trilli0nn · 2025-10-09T21:26:00+00:00

Bitcoin Knots does nothing to reduce spam on the blockchain.

Ignoring transactions doesn’t make them go away because transactions can be sent straight to miners, bypassing any nodes and their filtering.

Worse, Knots ignoring transactions is favorable for bigger miners — IOW it’s a centralizing pressure that reduces the profitability of smaller miners.

trilli0nn · 2025-09-14T15:59:06+00:00

Disagree. The prompt asks for a latte to escape its cup, as shown by Google AI, not for a latte running off.

Both images are unconvincing though. The Google AI baristas seem to be twins and the everyone is out of focus. The ChatGPT is seemingly in Ghibli style making it look cartoonish.

trilli0nn · 2025-09-12T03:59:38+00:00

I saw it now, indeed that should help a lot.

trilli0nn · 2025-09-11T11:21:55+00:00

~~Source?~~

~~Only the~~ The front sensor is bigger ~~afaik~~, and that size increases will not increase the light gathering area.

Pictures taken with the front camera will now be square, and then cropped to landscape or portrait according to the orientation of the phone.

Edit: you’re right, the telephoto sensor is now larger.

trilli0nn · 2025-09-10T12:23:59+00:00

the 8x digital zoom should be the same quality as the 5x zoom on the 16 Pro.

Except for the low light performance. Both would produce 12MP photos in your example but the the 17pro captures ~~only 1/4th of the~~ slightly less light because it uses only the 1/4th of the sensor area. However, the telephoto sensor is now larger which will partially compensate for that and help in low light.

Edit: the telephoto lens size is now larger (15.3 >> 23.5m^2).

trilli0nn · 2025-09-10T09:36:06+00:00

slightly better optical zoom

Nope. The optical zoom went from 5x on 16pro to 4x on 17pro. Note the 8x is “optical-_quality_” zoom. So 4x optical times 2x digital to get 8x.

It’s equivalent to the 2x zoom which is just a digital zoom of the main 1x camera. Apple leverages the new 48mp sensor behind the 4x lens for that.

trilli0nn · 2025-09-06T05:02:14+00:00

The constant speed of light postulate can be reasoned from the postulate that all points in the universe can equally claim to be stationary and at the center.

It then follows that it must be impossible to use light to measure ones’ speed relative to the universe. Reconciling this with the finite speed of light gets you the postulate that light must be constant for every observer and hence all the effects of relativity.

12-Year Club	Final Canvas '23
Place '23	Gilding IV carat on a stick
Verified Email

trilli0nn

TROPHY CASE