I really like the bendy train in the artistic rendering. What materials would allow for railroad car chassis and bodies which could bend and torque with the curve of the track like rubber? I think you would need lots of wheels or a relatively pointless flex-inducing system on each car to even get it to bend in this fashion.
Perhaps it just made for a pretty picture, and a completely impractical reality :)
Not quite a bendy train but the Toronto Rocket subway is quite a trip during sharp turns, as it has fully-open gangways, giving the appearance that the train is bending through curves.
Alternatively, maybe it has nothing to do with physics, the picture is computer rendered, and the artist found the first of these two alternatives a whole lot easier:
1. model a train that is straight, and then use some tool to bend the entire model to fit a curve.
2. define a curve, then align models of train engine and cars so that they follow the curve.
If the train is elastic, you'd recover that energy.
Going into a curve, kinetic energy from the speed of the train is turned into spring energy by bending the train. Leaving the curve, the spring energy becomes kinetic energy. The flexed train speeds up due to the spring force as the train unflexes.
I don't think this is correct as a general statement. Imagine if the walls were made of canvas fabric with appropriate amounts of slack, just as an example of a material that can easily bend.
You would need a cleverly designed frame, but
I'm sure there is something that would work. Perhaps many smaller segments joined together.
Canvas can bend more easily than rubber or steel, but deforming it still requires some energy. And while canvas would work for the walls, it wouldn’t work for the bogey, and anything rigid enough to work as a bogey would take lots of energy to bend.
To some extent you can say a regular multi-bogey train is undergoing deformation by changing the angular configuration between cars via the linkages. This could technically be extended to have the linkages have every few inches along the bogey instead of between 20-foot segments. We just need a way to transfer energy reliably between deformations and change in acceleration.
This is OT, but it was absolutely impossible to tap the tiny X on the "use our app" banner. It just opened the clipboard overlay no matter what I tried (Firefox Android) -- tap X, "Select All" button appears.
The first thing that caught my eye was the gap in the middle of the bridge. A rather rare sight in reality, so the presentation of such a rendering comes across as a form of lying.
I completely missed the curved train cars! Thanks for pointing it out.
"Seems to completely work around the reasons why Bitcoin etc. were interesting in the first place as a technology."
I respectfully disagree. The original goal of Bitcoin was to create a new financial system and instrument which ultimately enables people to pay for things.
And the conclusion was, at least for me, is that this doesn't require Pi Hole if your router software supports ad-blocking (OpenWRT, pfSense do), and that DNS-level blocking cannot replace wide-spectrum content type blocking such as in browser addons like uMatrix.
Any time it is at a pleasurable level, there is some amount of damage occurring. This isn't news.
Sometimes being human is such a bummer! I'd rather be deaf and have had happy ears when I was young than grow old and never "used" them, though. YMMV, a lot.
Thanks for feedback. I'll update it to make it more clear.
When I was reading on these terms, a single line description did not help much. A simple dictionary would've been kind of similar. Any specific suggestion, you would like to make?
I've been piloting this program and I've got to say it's been a convenient way to pay without draining my real bank account. IMO this is a killer product compared to everything else I've experienced with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency this far, it really bridges the gap.
Heck, I even used it to pay my back taxes to the IRS.
>IMO this is a killer product compared to everything else I've experienced with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency this far, it really bridges the gap.
So it solves the usability problem of cryptocurrency by... working like a regular bank, more or less? And mostly getting rid of the actual blockchain to use off-chain transactions while having the convenience of the centralized Visa system?
This might be the killer product for cryptocurrency, but in a more literal sense. It shows that the market seems to inexorably converge towards the good old solutions, and the cryptocurrency ecosystem slowly (and rather inefficiently) reinvents the modern banking system.
I wonder when Coinbase will start doing fractional-reserve banking with they off-chain "cryptocurrency" accounts.
This is no more "cryptocurrency technology" than if I set up a script to sell some of my Bitcoins to replenish my bank account when its balance reaches a certain value.
Cryptocurrency is both a monetary system and a payment system. You don't lose all of the benefits of cryptocurrency if the payment layer is scaled up with centralized solutions.
It's a bunch of "hodler" whales who, if the currency is successful enough, will become the next "old guys with nukes".
If most people use bitcoin off-chain then it means that it's the cryptocurrency exchange cartel who gets to decide what is and isn't bitcoin. Who cares if the node in your basement disagrees if all the exchanges have forked away and nobody can trade with you.
The whole "it's just code" shtick is really shortsighted. It's never only just code, it's a complex consensus. Look at all the drama around segwit/bitcoin cash for instance.
So in this case rather than just pay cash it's paying cash with a little bit extra for coinbase? Is there any genuine value to justify this extra cost?
Everyone charges a fee. This is just a different provider. The proposition is that conversions are seamless so you don't have to worry about manually cashing out assets for payment and you can stay invested until the time of sale.
Agreed, the sort interface in go is one of the worst parts, and doesn't translate to any other language I'm familiar with. The article was mildly entertaining but by the end left much to be desired.
Shoulda just gone with python, rust, c, crystal lang.. anything else for sorting!
Perhaps it just made for a pretty picture, and a completely impractical reality :)
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