Well, not quite dead.  In induced coma for now, but the Doctor promised to drop by and check from time to time:

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3tfwd1/mike_hearn_now_working_for_r3cv_blockchain/cx5wnwe

I have information from a highly informed source that The Doxing is none other than Leah McGrath.

I have noticed that, since racism became politically incorrect in the US and other countries, many racists have simply search-replaced "race" by the politically correct "ethnic group" in their vocabulary -- and then continued to think of "ethnic groups" exactly as they thought or "race" before.

Sorry, but the two terms have completely different meaning.  "Race" was assumed to be defined by biology, to be inherited, and to be immutable.  "Ethnic group" is defined by culture; it is learned, and can be changed at will (given sufficient resources, and unless society prevents it).   "Race" is now known to have no scientific basis.  "Ethnic groups" are (for good or bad) very real.


Stupid strawman.  I am not Marxist, and nowhere have I claimed that "everyone on earth is identical".  That is just what you have decided that Marxists say.

If anything, it is the racists who assume that all people of the same "race" are identical,  whenever they make sweeping statements about "Caucasians", "Asians", etc.  Just by putting people into five distinct buckets, they are implicitly stating that all the billion people assigned to the same bucket have something in common -- and that the bucket is hugely important when discussing those people, or dealing with them.  



Of course every fringe wants to be considered "mainstream".  One could easily find 104 university professors to sign a letter saying exactly the opposite -- including two thirds of the editorial board of some anti-racism academic journal.

You can also easily find 500 nuclear engineers to sign a declaration that nuclear power is totally safe.  Or 500 pyramid scam operators to back a claim that pyramid schemes are good for society.

(I may edit that article, if I get a round tuitt.  )

Replace "person" by "computer" in that "mainstream view" and maybe you will realize how silly it is.  Do you think that there a single number that measures how "intelligent" a computer is?  There are many numbers that measure various aspects of a computer -- clock speed, memory size, disk space and speed, screen size, peripherals, power consumption, etc. -- but not even all of them together will predict which of two computers will be better suited for a certain task in a certain context.  Very often, small differences in software will make a huge difference in that regard.


My apologies, I have checked and the notion that the "right" race came from the Caucasus did not originate in the 19th century, but from the 18th.

So, yes: the use of "Caucasian" shows that the "race" item in US census and other US is a relic of 18th century racial thinking.

Convergent evolution produces the same concrete results (legs, wings, horns, fishtails, streamlined shape, poison bite, etc.) with totally different genes and mechanisms.  Horizontal genetic transfer moves very similar genes between species, which may or may not produce similar results.  The chances of two similar genes evolving independently in two branches of the tree, when they are lacking in the common ancestor, is stupidly small -- much smaller than the chances of finding the private key of a funded bitcoin address by just guessing.  (There, now this post is on-topic!)


Please read again what I wrote, and stop inventing.  I was not referring to Brazil, where racial prejudices still exist (but with a different discourse).  

(But, since you mention it: Brazil abolished slavery in 1850. Maybe not effectively, but without major upheavals. Whereas, in the US, abolition was forced on half of the country in ~1860, by a bloody Civil War; and a hundred years later the losing side still resented it...)


Indeed; and, coincidentally, the Romans did not seem to have had prejudices about skin color. (That is not to say that they were egalitarian, even towards free Roman citizens).  In fact, for all I know, their success as empire-builders was due to their policy of assimilating the conquered peoples, giving them citizen rights and opportunity to ascend the power hierarchy, even to the highest levels.


Almost certainly not.  Skin color genes are not really recessive, and (as others have pointed out) recessive genes do not work the way you think.  (No shame in that, but you must read about it -- it is very basic genetics, that everybody should know.)

In Latin America, generally, that rule was never used -- not even by those "whites" who have prejudice against "blacks".  One can adequately explain that cultural difference by considering the significant differences in the histories of the two countries.  

The "one-drop" rule in the US, like the the (non)immigration rules of Japan, the chaste system of India, and many other similar binary barriers in many other places, almost certainly arose as a way to prevent the "leaking" of the lower class into the upper class's society through the children of mixed ancestry.


Yeah, sure.  Look at Switzerland, for example -- it collapsed in the Middle Ages and did not even realize it yet.  Or at China, which has never worked as a state because of its 20 major languages and uncountable dialects.

Louis Agassiz and Arthur Gobineau were two of many Europeans who were horrified by the miscigenation that they saw in Brazil in the early 19th century.  I think it was one of them who predicted that the country would collapse in a few decades because of that.
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That is the sort of horrible simplification that "scientific racists" must make to justify the concept of "race".  In those 100 000 years many things happened, such as the peopling of South Asia (Indonesia, Polynesia, etc.) by Neanderthans and other "early humans", then by Negrito-like people, then by "Asians" and "Caucasians" ---with countless mixings and migrations.  

(The term "Caucasian", by the way, is a relic from "scientific" racial classifications of the 19th century.)

Darwin's Origin of the Species impressed on the collective mind the idea that species evolve by branching out in tree-like fashion.  Unconsiously, scientists in several other disciplines assumed that their objects of study also evolved by splitting in tree-like fashion.  Disciplines where this mistake is endemic include linguistics, history of religions --- and "scientific racism".

However, the branching tree model is not totally accurate even for species.  Today we know several instances of "horizontal transmission" -- genes jumping between separate branches of the evolutionary tree.  (The tunicates, for example, are a group of species that is high up on the animal branch of the tree, indeed the last branch to split off before the vertebrates; but somehow it acquired genes that enable it to make cellulose -- a feature that is otherwise exclusive of plants.  It is believed that some common ancestor of the tunicates somehow incorporated a bit of algal DNA in its own genome.  There are known natural mechanisms that allow such jumping, and they have been adapted for genetic engineering.  Again, if such an accident happens only once in a million years, that may be sufficient to transfer a gene from one species to all individuals of a completely different species.)

While the branching-tree model is still mostly valid for species, with relatively few exceptions, it is poorly matched to languages, and totally wrong for "races" (or religions).  Human populations have continuously split, joined, and mixed through those 100 000 years.   Even in historic times Europe and Central Asia witnessed dozens of major genetic/population moves  (Indo-Europeans, Greek, Roman, Turks, Muslims, Mongols, "Barbarians").  Same in East Asia, Oceania, and the Amerias.  As I noted, even the "modern men" who took over Europe some 30'000 years ago interbred with the Neanderthals who had been there for twice as long or more.  

Maps of gene frequencies can be used to guess the migrations in broad terms, but they cannot be used to classify individuals into discrete races.  In each population (country, region, ethnic group), the frequency of any marker is almost never 0% or 100%


Well, genetic surveys of Brazilians with white skin who believed themselves to be pure "white" (and often had prejudice against "blacks") showed much larger propostion of African genes (40% if I well remember).  And that survey (like many in the early days of DNA analysis) only looked at mitochondria or the Y chromosome, that are inherited from father or mother respectively and thus are easier to analyze.  But, for the same reason, those analyses fail to measure the true level of mixture in the population.  (The myth of the "Seven Eves of Europe" is the sort of nonsense that people can get from badly interpreting such partial studies.)

The 5% that you quote as the US interbreeding, if correct, may reflect the percentage of "whites"  with "black" genes, and would be a consequence of the "one drop rule" that (until recently) pushed the children of mixed marriages into the "black" corral.   Surely the numbers are very different among the US "blacks".


First, there is no such thing as "white genes" and "black genes".  There are genes that produce the black skin pigment (an essential protection against sunlight), which are broken or inhibited in people with "white" skin.  There are other genes for eye color, hair color, hair wave, etc.  The frequency of those genes is very different among populations that have lived for millenia in relative isolation in northern Europe and Southern Africa (which can be explained by well-known environmental factors, as well as by random drift).  Hence, indeed, when individuals from those populations are brought together to the same place, the differences are visually striking.  But There are many more genes whose effects cannot be seen and do not significantly affect survival.  There are also many variants of the same gene whose effects are hard or impossible to see visually, and both populations have mixtures of the same variants.    

Some of your so-called "white" genes are indeed recessive (like blue eye color), but others are dominant, or have partial effect when two variants are present.  But a recessive variant of a gene is not "lost" when it gets paired with a dominant one: the children of two back-eyed persons may be blue-eyed.  Ditto for black or blond hair, curly or straight hair, etc..

The important point is that linkage between genes is limited and weak.  Therefore, when a "white" population mixes with a "black" one, the first generation children will have one copy of each kind for each gene, but after a couple of generations there will be all combinations -- WW, WB, and BB -- for each gene independently.   But the independence of gene mixing, by itself, would imply that racial classifications are meaningless, so "racial scientists" have conveniently developed a blind spot at that place in their minds.

As for that picture, it proves only that Americans have a high incidence of some peculiar genetic defect in their visual system, that renders them unable to perceive gradations of skin color and other "racial" traits.  A functioning non-American eye will see that the child at left has a mixture of skin color genes that results in a light brown skin, surely much lighter than the skin color of her African slave ancestor.   And you can be sure that she has close to a 50% mix of genes from her two parents, just like the child at right (apart from mitochondial genes and those in the X chromosomes, which they inherited from the mother alone).

Even among US "blacks", a non-American eye can see many shades of skin pigmentation.  In cultures that did not have African slavery for many centuries, or which for some reason never adopted the "one drop rule", skin color is perceived as a continuous variable that is either irrelevant, or does not trigger discrimination at some magic level.

As for anecdotal examples, one of my favorites is a finale of a 40 km Olympic marathon race that I watched many years ago, where the first three to finish were an Italian, a Japanese, and an African (forgot the country, sorry) -- all within a few meters from each other.  I take that as evidence that, even with regards to physical stamina -- where genetics could be expected to play an important role -- the differences between those three "races" were on the order of 1 part in 10'000.  

My point is that groups do not oppress/discriminate/fight other groups because of biological differences, or even cultural differences (religious, linguistic, dress, etc.).  The motivation is always economic or political.  Those differences are just convenient criteria that the upper group adopts to draw a sharp line between "us" and "them".   Biological differences, when they exist, are "better" for that purpose than cultural ones, because "they" may change their customs and religion, and quickly learn "our" language; but "they" cannot change their skin color, and their children will inherit it.  

That is also the reason why racists do not recognize gradations, or put all "mixed race" as a single separate race. Social discrimination is by necessity a binary thing: either "they" are allowed to attend medical school, own land, live in this neighborhood, hold political office, etc. -- or they aren't. There is no useful middle ground in discrimination, so when race is used as a basis for it, it has to be a discrete classification, not a continuum.


Real biologists do not use the term "race" because the concept is bullshit.  They use "sub-species", but, as you wrote, it applies to populations that are biologically able to interbreed, but have different gene frequencies because they have been kept separate by geography or other reasons (such as disjoint flowering times).  When the obstacle disappears, subspecies usually mix and the distinction disappears.

Indeed, natural evolution invented sex even before it invented legs or brains -- because it found that mixing genes is good for life in general.  By nature, individuals generally have a drive to pick prtners for "DNA mixing" outside their group, as long as the genetic differences are small enough to allow it.  Avoidance of other "races" is always a social imposition.

No human population has been isolated long enough to make cross-breeding impossible.  The Australian aborigines and the Andaman Negritos, who may be the extreme branches, have split out from the trunk less than 100'000 years ago.    Even the Neanderthals are now known to have interbred with "modern man" ("Cro-Magnons") in Europe and elsewhere.  

For as far back as we can tell, entire nations have migrated by thousands of kilometres in a few generations, because of war, climate changes, population pressure, hunting opportunities, etc..  Mountains, rivers, glaciers, deserts, even open oceans were never hard barriers to human movement. Humans are very mobile, so genetic flow between populations has never been zero.

Moreover, each gene spreads, mutates, and is selected for mostly independently of other genes; so there is no single gene, or even a gene combination, that could be used to distinguish the so-called "races".   A single individual who moves from one population to another will inject his genes into the latter's gene pool, and any of his genes can spread to the whole population, just by random genetic drift, over the span of a few centuries.  So, even if there are environmental or social factors that make dark skin (say) disadvantageous, that trait may quickly disappear, while other genes that came "in the same boat" with dark ski will persist and spread.

A sobering exercise, that underscores how silly the notion of "race" is, is to compute how many ancestors you had by the year 1000 CE.   Any one of your genes may or may not have been inherited from any one of those ancestors.  How can you tell that none of them were from "race X"?


Well, I have read a cubic meter of Scientific American and half a cubic meter of Science (which is the second most prestigious journal for biology, after Nature), mostly cover-to-cover; and some books on human genetics, like Cavalli-Sforza's.  I have dabbed in computational biology and even published a some minor things on that subject.  Yes, I think I can tell with sufficient authority what scientists think about the concept of "race".  


That is not a strong enough reason to explain why scientists reject the concept of race.  There have been many "scientists" and even real scientists in the past who have openly held racist views, and even got praise and money for that.  Around the 1930, Stanford was sort of a center for that sort of thing.  (I recall that in the 1980s, William Shockeley -- one of the inventors of the transistor -- was at Stanford, and was an outspoken believer in races.)

But, curiously, the belief in "race" seems to have been stronger among scientists from other fields than among geneticists.  Even before the genetic code was deciphered, geneticists could not ignore the complexity of actual gene distributions, that had little correlation with racial boundaries.  Now that we can read the genome, the absurdity of the concept is obvious even to non-geneticists.

Ancient astronomers assumed that the stars were located on a sphere centered on the Earth; so they though that the apparent groupings of stars on the sky were all important, especially those across the ecliptic that were "visited" by the Sun, Moon, and planets.  Astrologers built a complicated intellectual edifice on top of them. But once astronomers determined the true distances to the stars, and figured out the three-dimensional "geography" of the cosmos, they realized that constellations and star magnitudes were just meaningless illusions, and astrology was total bullshit.  

Well, the concept of "race" among biologists had a somewhat similar history...  

In the US it is no longer politically correct to "discriminate" on the basis of race, which is great.

Yet racism continues to be deeply rooted in the "standard American mindset", as betrayed by the "race" field in forms.  To most Americans, it seems mankind is still neatly divided into five "races", with no room for qualifications or even gradations. In particular, the children of "black" + "white" parents are still "black".  

Funny thing is that Americans do not seem to realize that such views themselves are racism.  To them, it is just common sense logic. To them, the "one drop rule" is not something to be questioned; it is the dictionary definition of the word "black".

No, sorry: "race" is not a scientific concept.  All the "scientific racism" theories that started in the 18th century and continue to this day are a big load of shit -- a conscious or unconscious attemmpt to justify colonialism, slavery, discrimination and persecution.  Darwin's Origin of the Species is totally misapplied.  Mankind is just one species; its populations have become separated only very recently in evolutionary terms, and genetic mixing is still strong -- even among social groups that try hard to remain genetically isolated.

Humans in isolation are not racist.  Children are not racist.  Many "savage" tribes, while strongly "nationalistic", are not racist, and often practice exogamic (inter-tribal) marriages as a rule.  Racial segregation is always a social phenomenon, imposed by society whenever two or more groups of people are competing for power or resources.  Biological differences, liek skin color, are then only a pretext -- a convenient label used by oppressors to keep the oppressed in teir place and deny them whatever is the real object of dispute,

One of the first messages I read from the internet in 1979 was from a Stanford prof (Les Earnest) who told a similar story.  He needed security clearance to so some consulting job for the military.  One field in the form was "race".  Partly for protest, partly because he had mixed ancestry, he wrote "mongrel" there.  Next thing he was summoned and grilled by two officers who wanted to know what kind of subversive/agressive attitude he meant to take by that.

The stress tests of recent months were not designed to block transactions, but only to create huge backlogs of unconfirmed transactions.  Ostensibly, their main goal was to stress the memory pools and other software that depended on them (such as statistics, businesses that accept 0-conf payments by checking the queues, etc.)  We can tell that because the fee F0 paid by the tester's transactions generally was the minimum fee, or slightly above the minimum.  Thus, most of the time, only transactions that paid F0 or less fees were affected.  Thansactions that paid slightly more than F0 went through as if the backlogs weren't there.

For that reason, the stress tests were not realistic previews of the "fee market".  In the latter, instead of competing with a stingy stress tester, you will be competing with other clients like you, who are using the same "smart" wallet that you use, many of them hoping to get their transactions ahead of yours in the queue.    

The stress tests were also not relaistic previews of malicious "spam attacks", when the attacker will be raising his fees so as to keep some fraction of the legitimate traffic (say,  50%) perpetually off the blockchain.

Not quite...

Coinbase's declarations are undermining the Blockstream takeover of bitcoin and their plan to render bitcoin unusable so that users are forced to move to off-chain solutions like the LN and Viacoin.

The community sentiment (miners, businesses, users, investors) is for increasing the block size limit. There are several proposals to do that, and prefernces vary; but BIP101 is the only proposal that has a complete and tested implementation, and is backed by the two most competent bitcoin developers out there.

The bankers do not care about bitcoin, with small or large blocks.  They have no need of another currency.  They already can move fiat money across borders much faster and more cheaply than they could move bitcoins.  They don't need a "distributed" ledger that is maintained by four anonymous Chinese mining pools, since they could build closed blochains that would be much faster and secure than bitcoin's -- but are still wondering whether they would be better than what they arelady have with standard distributed database technology.

BitcoinXT is not the same as BIP101. BitcoinXT is a software repository. BIP101 is a proposed way to rise the limit. If you don't like BitcoinXT, you could implement BIP101 yourself by patching BitcoinCore.  BitcoinXT will remove the BIP101 code, or replace by some other BIP, if the community were to reject BIP101.  BitcoinCore will eventually implement BIP101, or some other BIP, if the community maintains their support for it.

No matter how the block size war will end, there will be more changes to the protocol in the future: to fix bugs, to make it more efficient and secure, to keep up with the competition.  Blockstream itself has already a few planned changes.

Is this fable about Criptsy?
http://forums.prohashing.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=655&p=2477

Where have you been?  That has been the Number of the Beast since the First Halving (2012-11-28).

What is the right answer to this question?

OK, but my point is that smart wallets will not be able to cope with the variable fees.   Even if a client pays the fee recommended by the wallet, his transaction may be delayed as much as if he had paid the minimum fee -- and he will not get a refund.

There are several common sense reasons why no business on this side of the Galaxy sets its prices as the "fee market" is supposed to work.   I can believe that some of the Core devs do not have that common sense.  But others should see the problems.  It is obviosu that they just don't care: they want the network to become unusable.


Is there a BIP for it?  Is there code to test?

Excuse the cynicism, but I see that vague "proposal"  as a mere demagogical ruse:  it lets Adam pretend that he is a reasonable person, open to increasing the limit to 2 MB before saturation hits --- but in fact he has no intention at all of doing so.


I agree that the scalability problem will not be solved by merely lifting the block size limit.  Right now, there is no solution for that problem, not even a believable sketch of one.  

The Lightning Network, even if it was viable, would not be a solution to bitcoin's scaling problem.  It would be just a new payment network, that could use bitcoin and/or any other cryptocoin as the occasional settlement layer, but would be totally unlike bitcoin -- in its goals, premises, and design.  After going through a few transactions, the "virtual bitcoins" that LN clients will own and send will be quite remote from their supposed counterparts on the blockchain.  They will start to resemble more and more what libertarians and ancaps call "debt mony" (and normal people call just "money").   Saying that LN will let bitcoin to scale is like saying that paper checks allowed gold to scale.

An increase to 2 MB in Q1/2016 would be better than nothing, but it may accomodate another year of traffic increase, at best.

Raising the limit to 2 MB or to 20 MB would make no difference until 2017 (except that 20 MB would reduce the risk of a spam attack).  With 2 MB, the blocksize limit issue would return in late 2016.

A large block size limit does not create any significant risk.  When the block size limit was implemented, it was more than 100x the traffic at the time.  Not once in all these 6 years was there an attempt by a miner to harm the system by posting a full 1 MB block.  

As I pointed out, the onset of the fee market itself will immediately create a large extra internet load on the relay nodes, much larger and sudden than the extra load that would result from natural traffic growth beyond 1 MB.  But the Core devs do not seem to care.  (Not surprisingly, because their alleged concern about the load of those nodes was just a bogus excuse.)

But hey, my investment in bitcoin cannot lose value, no matter what happens.  Only investors who hold a positive amount of bitcoin should be concerned...  

This has been the stock answer of small-blockian core devs to the issue of usability under saturated conditions: "the wallet can be programmed to compute the right fee, and adjust it (with RBF) if needed."

Their faith in computers is moving, but the wallet cannot compute an answer if it does not have the necessary data.  What is the proper fee to get my transaction confirmed in less than 1 hour?  Well, it depends on the fees paid by the transactions that are already in the queue, and by the transactions that will be issued by other clients in the next hour.  Since the latter are running "smart wallets" too --  perhaps the exact same wallet that I am running -- the problem that the wallet has to solve is basically "choose a number that is very likely to be greater than the number that you are going to choose".

If the network is well below saturation, computing the fee is trivial. If you pay just the minimum fee, your transaction will get confirmed in the next few blocks.  A larger fee will have effect only if the backlog of unconfirmed transactions becomes greater than 1 MB. This condition may be caused by an extra-long delay since the previous block, or by the miners solving one or more empty blocks due to "SPV mining" and network delays.  As long as the network is not saturated, these backlogs are short-lived (lasting a couple hours at most) and have a predictable distribution of size, frequency, and durations; and many users will not mind the delays that they cause, so they will use minimum fees anyway. Therefore, if I need to have my transaction confirmed as soon as possible, I need to pay only a few times the minimum fee.  Those who believe in "smart wallets" seem to be thinking about this situation only.

However, if the network becomes saturated, the situation will be very different.  If the average demand T (transactions isssued per second) is greater than the effective capacity C of the network (2.4 tx/s), there will be a long-lasting and constantly increasing backlog.  If the daily average T close to C but still less than C, such persistent "traffic jams" will occur during the part of the day when the traffic is well above average.  In that case the backlog may last for half a day or more.  If the daily average T itself is greater than C, the traffic jam will last forever -- until enough users give up on bitcoin and the daily averaged T drops below C again.  

In both cases, while the current traffic T is greater than C, the backlog will continue growing at the rate T - C.  If and when T drops below C again, the backlog will still persist for a while, and will be cleared at the rate C - T.   In those situations, the frequency and duration of the traffic jams will be highly variable: a slightly larger demand during the peak hours may cause the jam to last several days longer than usual.  

In those conditions, choosing the right fee will be impossible.  As explained above, the "fee market" that is expected to develop when the network satiurates will be a running semi-blind auction for the N places at the front of the queue, where new bidders are coming in all the time, and those who are already in the hall may raise their bids unpredictably.  There cannot be an algorithm to compute the fee that will ensure service in X hours, for the same reason that there is no algorithm to pick a winning bid in an auction.  

But the small-blockian Core devs obviously do not understand that.

Not to mention that the "fee market" would be a radical change in the way that users are expected to interact with the system.  As bitcoin was designed, and has operated until recently, the user was supposed to prepare the transaction off-line, then connect to a few relay nodes (even just one), send then the transaction, and disconnect again from the network.  That will not be possible once the network gets saturated, or close to saturation.  The wallet will have to connect to several  relay nodes before assembling the transaction, in order to get information about the state of the queue.  Since nodes can have very different "spam filters", the wallet cannot trust just one node, but will have to check a few of them and merge the data it gets.  After sending the transaction, the wallet must remain connected to the network until the transaction is confirmed, periodically checking its progress in the queue and replacing it with a higher fee as needed.  The client will have to provide the wallet in avance with parameters for that process (the desired max delay X and the max fee F), and/or be ready to authorize further fee increases.  From the user's viewpoint,

The small-blockian Core devs do not seem to see this as a significant change.  Or even realize that the "fee market", from the client's perspective, will be the most radical change in the system since it was created.

So, Adam, where is the "fee market" BIP?

And they do not seem to be aware of the fact that the fee market will cause a large jump in the internet traffic load for the relay nodes. Once the "smart wallets" become the norm, each transaction will require at least one additional client-node access (to get the queue state), possibly several; and more accesses to monitor its progress.  So the fee market will certainly harm the nodes a lot more than a size limit increase would.

In fact, it seems that the small-blockian Core devs do not want to understand those problems. I have pointed them out several time to several of them, and they just ignored the problem.

Hence the theory that they want bitcoin to become unusable as a payment system, so that all users are forced to use off-chain solutions...

In my teens I had a chemistry lab at home. Started with a toy chemistry set, but augmented with many chemicals from oter sources.  Back then pharmacies still carried things like elemental iodine, potassium chlorate, potassium permanganate, ether, etc.; and the pharmacists would not mind selling them to a nerdish kid like me, no questions asked.  From other places I easily got caustic soda, lead, ethanol, acetone, hydrochloric acid, mercury, calcium carbide, ... 

Looking back, after reading tons of MSDSs and "toxicity" sections in Wikipedia, I discovered that I died several times over before I even started to shave.  Today, lead has become as dangerous as plutonium, one pint of acetone will turn by itself into ten pounds of cocaine, one whiff of 190-proof ethanol will send everybody in a mile radius to the hospital, ...  Sigh...

Outdoors of course...

Actually, copper-clad zinc pennies are better than all-copper ones.  If you try to melt one with a propane torch, well before the skin melts (m.p. 1357 C) the zinc will boil off (b.p. 907) and then burn with a bright flame and dense white smoke.   That's fun.

Steel euro cents?  That sounds quite boring.

He probably means: "If you bought bitcoins at $500 last week, I will think warmly of you while sipping this fancy wine that you paid for."