Just so that you know, I have made quite a major sidebar update.
Google+ links to my profile were removed because on 2nd April it will be stopped. I tried to use it for a while in 2015 before going back to Facebook. I couldn't make proper use of the Circles. In my newsfeed there are more photographs and less memes than on Facebook, so I suppose it's turned into some kind of Instagram for me. People will remember those times when Google+ profile was necessary to comment on YouTube. Exactly for these types of occasions when a service is going down I make these Fragments of * Philosophy. Instead of writing longer articles, I write shorter posts on Facebook in Czech, so this blog isn't getting much. Also most of the time it's enough just to update an existing post instead of writing new one. At some point it'll be beneficial to convert this blog to a simple static website that would load on almost anything. The Web can exist without bloat, there's no need to go back to Gopher, just kick out all the JavaScript libraries and replace ads with simple GIFs. Then maybe I wouldn't need to decrapify it with 122 868 network and 121 397 cosmetic filter rules in uBlock Origin. Google's now trying to break these kind of Chrome extensions so more people see their ads. But they won't build their Fiber in Prague so there's some bandwidth to spare for them. Remember, we're still on CETIN/O2 copper wires with 32 Mbps maximum effective download. There's UPC fibre with advertised 400 Mbps down, but it's horrendously expensive with probably even more horrendous aggregation (1 Gbps link partitioned over 6 apartments makes only 167 Mbps guaranteed for each) and they even don't give a public IPv4 address. I envy those with a true symmetric gigabit connection. Also there's no point in Huawei building their backdoored 5G network if people exhaust their few GB of cellular data in a few minutes on 4G, having their speed slowed down to dial-up levels, and that if the operator is benevolent. I got 32 kbps. Orange in Slovakia gives 128 kbps. It's a cartel in there.
SoundCloud account was retired because I have ran out of time limit while finally getting my ass off to upload the FL section of Just Beginnings Being Beginnings, so I had to remove some old Soredemo songs. You'll have to use BandCamp or ModArchive for these now. I have only 320 kbps MP3s, so they cannot be uploaded on BandCamp without shameful transcoding, even if to SoundBlaster Pro quality WAVs (8-bit 22050 Hz stereo), as BandCamp insists on lossless uploads. While I still have the .flp, I have since lost the samples and soundfonts I have used, so I can't reexport to a lossless format without it sounding somewhat different. I may try to resurrect some of these, but that'd be for another album, like Beginnings Revisited. On the other side, the OpenMPT section is a different story. I can upload them to Modarchive and export a new FLAC whenever I want, so I can upload it to BandCamp too. Also since OpenMPT is free and open source, I can even sell the music made with it, because I have ever used only a pirated version of FL. Nevetheless to do so "legally" requires a živnostenský list in Czechia, which is something like a Trade Certificate. This also brings many other obligations and some taxation, so grey market best market. For this reason I've not yet bothered to set up PayPal payments on BandCamp, so you have to enter 0, hope the traffic is under 100 downloads per month, and instead fully optionally and voluntarily send me some cryptocurrency supported by my blockchain.info wallet I made 5 years ago exactly for this purpose.
That brings me to those extra crypto wallets I added. Back in 2014 the only relevant altcoin was Litecoin (maybe Dogecoin but that one died as quickly as the meme) and blockchain.info supported only Bitcoin. Since then, support for Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Stellar was added. The wallet addresses for these other ones were somewhat hidden, I had to open the "request" dialog. No donation came ever to the Bitcoin one since the time it was created and the address put around various places. Only since I started mining CryptoTab something started to pour in. Therefore maybe no one uses Bitcoin for mere donations now and I should try some altcoins instead. Probably I should look more into Monero as this one is way more anonymous and is currently the most profitable to mine on CPUs, which were considered obsolete for mining with those ASIC-able algorithms some time ago. My old GTX 660 isn't supported, neither by CryptoBrowser nor BetterHash, so I have to use NiceHash Miner Legacy. But in my laptop, there's a MX150 that is supported, so while mining on laptops isn't a good idea due to the cooling, this one Acer Aspire 5 has ultrabook parts in a more traditional 15.6" form factor and copper heatpipes can be seen from the vents under, so if placed correctly to allow heat to travel upwards, it should be fine. In fact, I'm getting around 700 H/s on i7-5820K and around 400 H/s on i7-8550U+MX150 in CryptoBrowser. They say it mines Monero really, but don't know which kind of CryptoNight it's using because the hashrate is too high for what I'm getting on NiceHash in V8. Also for the GPU side, X16R used for Ravencoin seems to be the most profitable somehow. Both CryptoNight and X16R are designed to be ASIC-resistant. Cryptonight relies on fast 2 MB of cache needed for each thread, which is too expensive to provide for many of them, but is readily available in any modern CPU. Certainly not those 2008 Meltdown-resistant Atoms without L3 cache and measly 512k of L2. I have 2 of those. Guess by not having something, the system turns out to be more secure. Take notes, Intel. X16R alters 16 different algorithms including CryptoNight based on the hash of the previous block, which sounds quite silly but it works, because it requires either programmability or 16 different sections for each subalgorithm. Nevertheless, as RISC-V is shaping up and ARM is going places, leaving power-hungry MIPS and unsuccessful PowerPC forgotten in time, there can be viable and mainly reusable mining clusters based on these, like people build with Raspberry Pis, especially coupled with FPGAs, which GPUs are essentially becoming. There's still a concern with the power draw and too expensive electricity. Offgrid mining from renewable resources is the way to go and should be invested in more. You can profitably mine ongrid only if you happen to get a "promotional" electricity tariff or actually get paid to consume the surplus during the "duck belly" from all the solar power plants, or as in China's case, export and import restrictions. Many governments and banks are investing in crypto, occasionally banning, taxing, or discouraging them to have as much as possible for themselves and as little as possible for the cizizens. USA typically instead of blocking access to Silk Road, they just made a raid and seized around 114 kBTC. At least these raids don't affect that many people, unlike blocking sites with content not in line with the propaganda. Turkey can never join EU if Erdogan keeps blocking stuff. But in USA there are blockings not caused by having a different opinion than the government, but by sharing copyrighted or producing patented material. It goes against what we were taught as kids, that is to share, especially when making a copy of a file is that easy. It curbs communication, making people more hikikomori, and limits technological progress. I actually condone when Chinese break some intellectual property and manufacture a decent ripoff, because that means there's a competition. But I still condemn the Great Chinese Firewall, the Tiamannen massacre, the Falun Gong pursuit, the way Tibet and Hong Kong are being treated etc. No side, be it USA or China (formerly USSR), is holy infallible great utopia. Both government methods have flaws. And that's where cryptoanarchism should step in.
Google+ links to my profile were removed because on 2nd April it will be stopped. I tried to use it for a while in 2015 before going back to Facebook. I couldn't make proper use of the Circles. In my newsfeed there are more photographs and less memes than on Facebook, so I suppose it's turned into some kind of Instagram for me. People will remember those times when Google+ profile was necessary to comment on YouTube. Exactly for these types of occasions when a service is going down I make these Fragments of * Philosophy. Instead of writing longer articles, I write shorter posts on Facebook in Czech, so this blog isn't getting much. Also most of the time it's enough just to update an existing post instead of writing new one. At some point it'll be beneficial to convert this blog to a simple static website that would load on almost anything. The Web can exist without bloat, there's no need to go back to Gopher, just kick out all the JavaScript libraries and replace ads with simple GIFs. Then maybe I wouldn't need to decrapify it with 122 868 network and 121 397 cosmetic filter rules in uBlock Origin. Google's now trying to break these kind of Chrome extensions so more people see their ads. But they won't build their Fiber in Prague so there's some bandwidth to spare for them. Remember, we're still on CETIN/O2 copper wires with 32 Mbps maximum effective download. There's UPC fibre with advertised 400 Mbps down, but it's horrendously expensive with probably even more horrendous aggregation (1 Gbps link partitioned over 6 apartments makes only 167 Mbps guaranteed for each) and they even don't give a public IPv4 address. I envy those with a true symmetric gigabit connection. Also there's no point in Huawei building their backdoored 5G network if people exhaust their few GB of cellular data in a few minutes on 4G, having their speed slowed down to dial-up levels, and that if the operator is benevolent. I got 32 kbps. Orange in Slovakia gives 128 kbps. It's a cartel in there.
SoundCloud account was retired because I have ran out of time limit while finally getting my ass off to upload the FL section of Just Beginnings Being Beginnings, so I had to remove some old Soredemo songs. You'll have to use BandCamp or ModArchive for these now. I have only 320 kbps MP3s, so they cannot be uploaded on BandCamp without shameful transcoding, even if to SoundBlaster Pro quality WAVs (8-bit 22050 Hz stereo), as BandCamp insists on lossless uploads. While I still have the .flp, I have since lost the samples and soundfonts I have used, so I can't reexport to a lossless format without it sounding somewhat different. I may try to resurrect some of these, but that'd be for another album, like Beginnings Revisited. On the other side, the OpenMPT section is a different story. I can upload them to Modarchive and export a new FLAC whenever I want, so I can upload it to BandCamp too. Also since OpenMPT is free and open source, I can even sell the music made with it, because I have ever used only a pirated version of FL. Nevetheless to do so "legally" requires a živnostenský list in Czechia, which is something like a Trade Certificate. This also brings many other obligations and some taxation, so grey market best market. For this reason I've not yet bothered to set up PayPal payments on BandCamp, so you have to enter 0, hope the traffic is under 100 downloads per month, and instead fully optionally and voluntarily send me some cryptocurrency supported by my blockchain.info wallet I made 5 years ago exactly for this purpose.
That brings me to those extra crypto wallets I added. Back in 2014 the only relevant altcoin was Litecoin (maybe Dogecoin but that one died as quickly as the meme) and blockchain.info supported only Bitcoin. Since then, support for Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Stellar was added. The wallet addresses for these other ones were somewhat hidden, I had to open the "request" dialog. No donation came ever to the Bitcoin one since the time it was created and the address put around various places. Only since I started mining CryptoTab something started to pour in. Therefore maybe no one uses Bitcoin for mere donations now and I should try some altcoins instead. Probably I should look more into Monero as this one is way more anonymous and is currently the most profitable to mine on CPUs, which were considered obsolete for mining with those ASIC-able algorithms some time ago. My old GTX 660 isn't supported, neither by CryptoBrowser nor BetterHash, so I have to use NiceHash Miner Legacy. But in my laptop, there's a MX150 that is supported, so while mining on laptops isn't a good idea due to the cooling, this one Acer Aspire 5 has ultrabook parts in a more traditional 15.6" form factor and copper heatpipes can be seen from the vents under, so if placed correctly to allow heat to travel upwards, it should be fine. In fact, I'm getting around 700 H/s on i7-5820K and around 400 H/s on i7-8550U+MX150 in CryptoBrowser. They say it mines Monero really, but don't know which kind of CryptoNight it's using because the hashrate is too high for what I'm getting on NiceHash in V8. Also for the GPU side, X16R used for Ravencoin seems to be the most profitable somehow. Both CryptoNight and X16R are designed to be ASIC-resistant. Cryptonight relies on fast 2 MB of cache needed for each thread, which is too expensive to provide for many of them, but is readily available in any modern CPU. Certainly not those 2008 Meltdown-resistant Atoms without L3 cache and measly 512k of L2. I have 2 of those. Guess by not having something, the system turns out to be more secure. Take notes, Intel. X16R alters 16 different algorithms including CryptoNight based on the hash of the previous block, which sounds quite silly but it works, because it requires either programmability or 16 different sections for each subalgorithm. Nevertheless, as RISC-V is shaping up and ARM is going places, leaving power-hungry MIPS and unsuccessful PowerPC forgotten in time, there can be viable and mainly reusable mining clusters based on these, like people build with Raspberry Pis, especially coupled with FPGAs, which GPUs are essentially becoming. There's still a concern with the power draw and too expensive electricity. Offgrid mining from renewable resources is the way to go and should be invested in more. You can profitably mine ongrid only if you happen to get a "promotional" electricity tariff or actually get paid to consume the surplus during the "duck belly" from all the solar power plants, or as in China's case, export and import restrictions. Many governments and banks are investing in crypto, occasionally banning, taxing, or discouraging them to have as much as possible for themselves and as little as possible for the cizizens. USA typically instead of blocking access to Silk Road, they just made a raid and seized around 114 kBTC. At least these raids don't affect that many people, unlike blocking sites with content not in line with the propaganda. Turkey can never join EU if Erdogan keeps blocking stuff. But in USA there are blockings not caused by having a different opinion than the government, but by sharing copyrighted or producing patented material. It goes against what we were taught as kids, that is to share, especially when making a copy of a file is that easy. It curbs communication, making people more hikikomori, and limits technological progress. I actually condone when Chinese break some intellectual property and manufacture a decent ripoff, because that means there's a competition. But I still condemn the Great Chinese Firewall, the Tiamannen massacre, the Falun Gong pursuit, the way Tibet and Hong Kong are being treated etc. No side, be it USA or China (formerly USSR), is holy infallible great utopia. Both government methods have flaws. And that's where cryptoanarchism should step in.
