Here's my question. Why do so many people think that being deliberately obtuse is a valid strategy in an argument? I had a guy last night challenge me to 'prove gravity' as if that was a real stumper rather than a damning admission that his brain is faulty.
Anyone who becomes obsessed with never being wrong will mount a jet engine to their goal posts before admitting defeat.
Also to "prove gravity", utilizing Karl Popper's philosophy of science it's impossible to scientifically prove anything 100%. That's because the process of science in relation to models is destructive. It seeks to disprove falsifiable models first and foremost, since if you seek to prove a model you can simply ignore the stuff that disproves it, and it's impossible to design an experiment for an un-falsifiable theory.
The metric by which science works is whether a model has withstood experimentation. Gravity has withstood experimentation on many fronts, from dropping things to the Cavendish experiment.
How do mirrors work? Like, how does your right hand become your left one.
Time to break out the Nobel Laureates to answer this question.
How does cryptocurrency work?
Bare with me.
A Hash is a one way algorithm. This is often used to store passwords in a database. If someone has the hash they can't use it to get the password, but it's easy for a computer to turn your password into a hash and compare that to the hashed password in the database. Hashes look like a random string of letters and numbers, and changing even one little thing in the input changes the entire hash. There are multiple hashing algorithms.
You have a public key and a private key. Only you have access to the private key, but everyone else in the world has access to the public key. You can use the private key to sign some information in a way that the public key can be used to verify it, but nobody else has enough information to reverse engineer a way to sign stuff you didn't sign. I won't get into how this works, or how we know this works but basically it's a lot of math. Like, a whole lot of math.
There also exists a ledger of financial transactions on a computers all over the world. When you make a transaction you send out a message to everyone holding onto the ledger with the transaction signed with your private key. The guys with the ledger verifies that you signed it, and adds it to the ledger, subtracting money from you, and giving it to the person you said you want to have it.
After a while there are enough transactions to form a "block" of transactions that aren't added to any more. At this point the ledger guys begin hashing that block of transactions with all the blocks that came before, adding some characters to the end of the current block. This chain of blocks is the block-chain. The goal is to get a hash with a bunch of zeroes at the front. Because hashes are one way, and adding/changing one character changes the entire hash, this is a trial and error procedure and takes a lot of computing power and time. This is mining. If you successfully mine a hash with those zeroes at the front, you get to add an entry to the ledger that lets you create some amount of the cryptocurrency out of thin air and give it to yourself. Everyone else with the block-chain then downloads that block with the random characters, verifies it works, and it's deemed official.
I know bitcoin at-least trusts the block-chain with the greatest amount of work, that means the greatest amount of properly formed hashes. Other criptos may do it differently.
The reason it's worth money is because people are willing to pay to have you sign a transaction that decreases the number in your wallet and increases the number in theirs. That's literally it. It's worth money because people are willing to pay for it.
What's the deal with airplane peanuts?
The pressurized and dry cabin dulls taste buds and changes the flavor of the food.
