I still have my list of animes that I made in 2014.... I didn't finish it

I do this with movies I "plan on" watching. I currently have two different Post It notes with movies to watch. Yeah, right.

This is actually a good way to combat procrastination. Just put the distraction into a "procrastination folder" and you get a little bit of that good feeling from procrastinating because you know you'll be focusing on the distraction later. But the good news is that once the thing you're procrastinating on goes away and you go back to the folder, you won't want to open maybe 60% of whatever you put in there.

You’re probably bored though?

Happy cake day!

Happy cake day

How people spend hours making perfectly curated lists.

Yes!!!

THIS

The same but with Porn

Oh man i had a fucking existential crisis recently, when i started thinking about how my thoughts just popped into my head and i actually have no control of what i think.
Like i don't decide to think something, i just do. How the fuck do brains even work.

Do i even have free will? Am i just a biological machine running calculations based on previews experience?

Not to get too crazy, but man this shit weirds me out whenever i think of it.

Some people don't have an internal dialogue but think through visualising words (there are also probably other ways too, I haven't researched it much), and some people can't visualise stuff (I can't visualise stuff)

The lack of visualization is called aphantasia

It blew me away to learn that, no, we do not all have the same inner thoughts. A lot of us do, but some people think in complete sentences, some in broken sentences, some a mixture, some visualize and some do not. There’s a portion of the population that is unable to visualize things. So, if I say, ‘Hey, remember that beautiful 25lb salmon we caught up the Portland Canal last summer?’ And I have a picture of that salmon in my mind, there are people who will have no picture. When you extrapolate that out, it’s sucks - there goes reading, memories, imagining scenarios, fantasy, getting creative inspiration for a lot of art.

I had to explain thinking to my 4 year old a few months ago. I asked him how many sides a square had, but wanted him to answer WITHOUT counting aloud. He didn’t understand how that was possible. “I don’t know how to think!”

So I told him to just talk to himself, but to not move his mouth and don’t talk.

Never thought I’d have to explain how to think.

Yeah, this fucks with my brain too. Especially how I "voice" my thoughts in my brain.

I feel like my thought voice has different volumes. I'll think something more distant, more silent, rather spontaneous, but voluntary thoughts feel louder, like they are in the front, closer. Sometimes I have more "silent" thoughts that I feel I have to acknowledge, even though I know I just had them so I think them again, "louder".

Also, sometimes my internal dialouge is formulated as if it was adressed to an audience.

It is soooo weird and I wonder if others think like that too.

When I figured out I could hear my voice in my head when I was young I was fucking blown away

I love this topic and concept. Anyway, I’ve thought a lot about this and have some conceptual understanding that may be interesting to you. I’m no professional and really am just going off personal experience and slight amounts of research.

One thing I find amazing is what you mentioned as split second decisions. Ok, so I’m going to go from my experience playing video games. Growing up I played a ton of Halo and Halo 2, and other games. I have told people in the past that when I started playing Halo 2 online, it was the first time I made conscious decisions. I also figured prior to that time, I was really just a habitual person and didn’t really implement creativity.

So thinking about this notion of actually making decisions versus basing our lives on habit. As a gamer, I like to use the term “muscle memory,” this is kind of the mindless thing you do when you reach for your phone and automatically click Reddit and start scrolling. This “muscle memory” or habit is your mind making a regular decision without any thought or decision based on your environment trying to obtain a new outcome. It’s just comfortable and normal.

Now I’m Halo, the point is to not get shot or to perform an objective. Ok, so I’m Halo, I have muscle memory, just a series of things I have done and do regularly based on situations. Nothing really planned, just reaction, but I also have decision making. This is where I try to predict an outcome based on the environment around me. Ok, so how is this done?

Predicting a situation or event requires the experience and a group of memories that allow me to determine in my head a statistical probability of an event occurring. I can say, “Ok, 95% of the time that guy will do this, I will do this to counter it.” Or I can say, “Ok, 80% of the time someone would do this in my situation, I’ll do this instead.” Now what I’ve done is differentiated a self assessment versus assessing my competition. How can I do this? Well, if you’ve put 3000 hours into doing something, you can make those decisions easier than with 100 hours. How can my brain remember?

Your brain is like this electrical system that requires some kind of input to generate memory and processing capability. In Halo 2, there are like 20 maps. I’ve played on each of those maps enough where I remember ever millimeter of the maps. I’ve seen people doing the same types of things many times on the maps. When I’m on the maps, my brain is actually capturing my current situation but using my past to make decisions. It is processing the thousands of hours and patterns I’ve seen. I’m actually looked at the screen like everyone else but my brain is processing the prediction that I made last time.

When I make a prediction about a scenario, by brain remembers the prediction and pattern, just like it remembers the scenario. I’ll explain this from a recent experience. I play Rocket League, I started on the switch then started using the computer. The graphics on the computer were different. I was playing the same game, but the graphics looked different. I couldn’t help but focus on all the new stuff with the graphics even though I usually thought about gameplay! My mind could not draw my memories and patterns when it was seeing something new!

Ok, so why is that. I believe your mind requires similar events to determine an understanding you may already have. This could be true for traveling internationally. For instance, let say you go to France. You are seeing things that are in the US but for some reason, you’re stimulated. You are not consumed by the everyday problems because your brain cannot think about those things since it’s adapting to a new environment. Why people like hiking? Why they like to travel? It’s because what you see changes what you can interpret.

Ok, so I’ve touched base on some things and I hope you enjoy my concepts. I have more to say about this topic as I have actually had manic and psychosis episodes in the past and have been diagnosed with bipolar and been hospitalized because my brain basically short circuited. I kind of obsessed with this concept for 10 years trying to understand why my brain wouldn’t function properly so yeah, there’s that. Anyway, cheers!

It's not that we process things in a split second, it's that we perceive it as a split second based on the amount of information processed. Dogs see things ahead of time relative to us because their brains process information faster. So a moment you are experiencing as "now" has already been experienced as "now" to a dog. By a millisecond but still.

Time is relative. It can move faster or slower relatively. Time can move faster to you than to me. Time goes slower the faster you move, so if you're on a spaceship going close to light speed time will move slower for you relatively to me if I'm back on earth. 10 seconds for you could be 100 years for me. But both of us would experience time the same. If you looked out the window you'd see earth moving in hyper speed. And if I looked into your window I'd see you moving in slow motion.

So your brain thinks through electrical and chemical reactions. So naturally if we slow down time the atoms in your body and physical laws will slow down as well so your thoughts will be slowed down because it will take the electrical signals longer to travel, and the chemicals will take longer to interact with each other.

So there isn't a real "time" or pace of time, it's just how fast you can process things happening and for your brain to make you experience that as a second. And fast and slow is ofc relative the same way up and down is relative. There isn't a real up. Up can only exist relatively to something.

A dog ran in front of my car today. I was able to slam on the brakes and stop in time, but the whole way home I was thinking about it. I didn’t consciously think “hey, there’s a dog, let’s stop” it just happened on its own, like it short circuited and only later I realized what happened. On top of that I’m a new driver and got my license less than a year ago. It was surreal.

Does everyone have the same sort of inner thoughts?

Some people apparently don't have them at all, they only "visualize", while others are having literal conversations in their head.

Consciousness is something that everyone knows but no one can satisfactorily define

I like to think that it all stems from “feelings”, intrinsic moments such as pulling away your hand from something that is hot. You don’t necessarily think “ow that’s hot, I should pull away” you just act on it. I like to think that this is the same way animals “think”, through impulses and feelings. The only difference being that we’ve developed symbols for these feelings and can therefore ruminate (which has made us exponentially complex beings).

An easy way to explore this is to take a symbol you understand, for example the stars above, and look at them without thinking “stars”. Instead, clearly see the stars in the sky and understand that they are stars. It’ll feel interesting and it might even be hard at first, similar to meditating and clearing your mind (it’s quite difficult at first). But the more you practice, the more you can achieve this way of “thinking without words”. I like to think that reaching this state of mind, along with exploring it often, shares insight to what it is to be alive and how blessed we are to have words and a deeper understanding of the world around us.

Dude I study cognitive neuroscience and it even freaks me out/confuses the shit out of me

Dude I spend a solid amount of time thinking about this. I was catching lighting bugs with my son the other day and we couldn't get any. So we gave up and were sitting down and one flew over my head and I flung my arm up and caught it perfectly mid conversation. Like how the fuck did I do that? In less than one second I calculated exactly where to put my hand, above my head in a space I couldn't see at the time, and caught something. It's so mind blowingly insane how fast we can do shit like that.

I also shoot slingshots a lot and do something called intuition shooting, where you basically just pull the slingshot up and shoot at your target without aiming and I'd say I'm 90% accurate out to 25 yards. How? By the time my body starts to move to take a shot, I've already determined how that piece of ammo will fly, how hard I'm going to pull the band, what angle my arms, head, hands, feet and legs will be at etc. I'm sure a lot of it is just muscle memory, which is still crazy to think about.

Here's a brief summary from the 2 cognitive science courses I took in uni.

No one really knows for sure.

I think about something similar from time to time. Is my red the same red you see? Do I experience the world the same way everyone else does? How many thoughts a minute go through other people's minds? Why do I notice things in my surroundsings that other people don't, and vice versa?

​

I got a kind-of answer on the first one about 2 years back. When I found out I'm mildly colorblind. So no, my red isn't the same as the red people without colorblindness see. My younger brother has it even worse. He's terrible at cooking meat, because with hamburgers for instance, he can barely tell the difference between raw red meat and brown cooked meat. Putting a large piece of uncooked and cooked next to each other is fine for him, but if there's still a part in the center that's still raw he won't be able to see it. It's almost the same shade of what he calls brown to him.

Do animals have internal dialogue?

some people dont even have that

100% agree with this. Sorry for the cheap CV related award - I don’t have income these days but wanted to give you something.

This is my new obsession. I love math and started out there, but if I could do my life over I would study and study cognitive science and learn everything I could about it.

You gave me a brain orgasm

Read blink

I usually have a song or a melody or a snippet of a song running through my thoughts. Sometimes I notice it, sometimes it's in the background until something triggers it to the forefront, but it's there. And its a rare thing for me to think in words. I think in images.

I'm a little late and haven't read the replies, so hopefully no one has linked these. But, no, not everyone has an inner dialogue.

It's pretty hard to comprehend. I know I wish mine would shut the fuck up.

Dialogue as in language? no, at least not in a way we’d understand.

I had oral surgery not too long ago, they put me on nitrous oxide, and I experienced a moment of this kind of perceived clarity where I just though “Wow... This is existence.” But for a few minutes, that was the last dialogue in my mind. My thoughts were thoughts and memories, but it went something like me picturing my mother, and feeling calmness and love, instead of me picturing my mother and feeling those emotions and making an internal commentary.

I feel like that’s the way animals think. they have distinct memories and know person from person, but instead of attaching dialogue to each memory or person, it’s just purely emotion. When my cat sees me he associates me with petting and sleeping and food, and (i hope) it makes him happy and calm. I don’t think he thinks “meow meow” (“i love him” in cat, if you were wondering), I think that his thoughts are simply translated into raw emotion. That’s just my theory

We can't understand it. We are using our brain to understand our brain, it's too complex for us to understand it. We can understand less complex things though.

“Sometimes my mind blows my mind”

I go through projects, repairs, mechanical things to kickstart rem. I will try different approaches and go through the whole project. I never get to half of them so when it gets closer to go time I call it back up and go through it again. In my mind it helps to be prepared. The reality is that it can be pretty overwhelming and depressing sometimes. Mostly because I don't have the time or money to fix something. wether it's my own problem or for friends and family sometimes I can't block it out and it becomes distracting and draining.

Stuff I can picture quite clearly, people stay blurry most of the time...I think

Fantastic post op

Can def people hear themsels think

And further of conversation, language itself has been created by us, but even a baby who doesn't understand our standard definitions and language can do this, so maybe internal 'concepts dialogue' may be posible in many different ways even in other thinking beings like dolphins

Also how weird and broken it is sometimes like most times you can make split second decisions but sometimes you think you have one extra stick of string cheese and you are super confused for a solid 3 min

Read Blink by Malcom Gladwell

You know how every thought you have is in English? I’ve always wondered how that works with people that are born deaf.

I think quicker than I speak, It’s weird though bc I’ll see something, recognize it, think something (Typically funny) as inner dialogue, and laugh to myself, then I’ll say it aloud. Its like repeating and laughing at your own joke? Weird.

I always wonder this about animals. Like can my dog be sitting there just like consciously thinking about something? Wondering why his food bowl isn't full yet? I always ask my fiance these questions and she doesn't get where I'm coming from

Socrates and Plato would be proud of you 👍

Read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman... the book is exactly what makes your head ache... a fascinating read...

I bought a copy of the imaginary by Jean Paul Sartre because I had your same thought. I try not to think about it anymore, that book just confused me even more.

Theres a really cool vsauce video on youtube about making decisions and how your subconscious makes the decision before you do. Not directly related but if that kind of stuff interests you, this might too!

If you're into that the books Carl Jung wrote are for you, mind blowing to read about the unconscious mind and how bizzare and miraculous the mind really is. For me it was realizing how much of the mind just lays dormant while our waking consciousness is basically a small boat shining a spotlight onto a dark sea. Along with realizing that we have shockingly less control over the forces in our mind than I ever thought was the case, kind of frightening actually

So there’s a lot of different things mentioned here, but i’ll focus on one. Thoughts.

Imagine your brain is a spider-web like map of electrical circuits connecting nerve cells. Each nerve cells, or group of nerve cells, represent an idea. Let’s use « bird » for exemple. Let’s also say that you grew up with a parrot, therefor when you think of « bird », « parrots » comes up quickly. This is because every time you make a connection between two ideas, the link (connection) between them strengthens. This is why trying to not think about something is impossible (because you are telling your brain to look for cues that you will think about x thing, triggering all ideas which are strongly connected to x)

I heavily recommend Thinking Fast and Slow, by Dr. Julia Shaw (an absolute goddess of psychology)

Okay so like I went to school for psychology and not once did ANYone EVER TELL ME that some people literally can’t visualize stuff. Maybe I missed that class but I feel like this should be a WAY more emphasized topic in the study of ya know... psychology. I want a refund!!!!

I read this neat book called Homo Deus about the future of humanity, and the author said that they think consciousness is a "byproduct" of decision-making combined with emotional capacity, or something similar to that. Thought it was pretty neat, that's my view of it.

Have you read Blink by Malcom Gladwell? Great book that talks about this thought process

Maybe the reason for this is because our brains are actually in two parts, and each is responsible for different things. Some thoughts could be coming from a part of your brain that you aren’t consciously aware of, but that is still working to figure things out and help you understand the world.

If for whatever reason you sever the connection between the two halves (lobes?) of the brain, they can start to disagree, and that’s super crazy. Look it up!

You should listen/read "Behave" by Robert Sapolsky. It's one of Bill Gates's recommendations from a few years back. "He starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy."

Have you ever tried meditation? Think and breathe and let your thoughts go. Think about your thoughts as they occur?

Julian Jaynes wrote a book that might be up ur sidewalk. Think it was called "The Bicameral Mind". Dope ass book Edit: "The Origin of Consciousness and The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

If you want to understand all about this, which in my opinion is beyond fascinating, you should check out Dr. Joe Dispenza’s YouTube Channel

Similarly, David Chalmers' Hard Problem of Consciousness might be an interesting read for you. It asks why we are able to experience and sense things, and why we are not autonomous like robots, but rather present and mindful in a very individual way.

Some people don't have inner thoughts and internal dialogue! https://www.iflscience.com/brain/people-are-weirded-out-to-discover-that-some-people-dont-have-an-internal-monologue/

Fellow neuroscientist here. Thought is crazy! I spend all day thinking about thinking and it’s totally mind-blowing (pun-intended) how massively complex that computer is

There are a lot of replies so far and it may have been mentioned but Blink by Malcom Gladwell is a great book that talks about this split second thinking.

The human mind or consciousness actually exists outside the physical universe. Aristotle was probably the first to realize this when he said the mind isn’t anything until it is thinking something and what it is is the thing it is thinking. Not materially...but formally.

Meditate

Try acid lol

Do you ever have those sort of...”pre-thoughts?” Like i’ll think of something before thinking of it.

Wow thanks for the existential crisis

What gets me is the lack of purchase between felt qualias and the actual outcomes-- when we weigh options and they sort of richochet around, and somehow something comes ahead-- etc. etc. Watching becomings like this can get really detailed and freak me out.

My inner dialogue makes me sad.

EDIT: I am blown away hearing that people can’t visualise things! So crazy how we all process information differently

This! I can’t comprehend that people ‘think’ differently. I kind of hear my voice in my head but don’t ?? Along with visuals but constantly narrated.

I think about this too much! I work with a lot of deaf individuals and I constantly think as a hearing person what my internal dialogue “sounds like” compared to them.

If you think about it

As we age and our minds develop I think we begin to use instinct in our thoughts it isn’t necessarily that we aren’t thinking about it but the fact is we don’t realize what we are thinking because are mind is so massive

As a teacher, sometimes I think about how many thoughts I have in a second or few seconds. I have to predict things correctly, say things in the correct order, watch the entire room of movement, make my face look certain ways, all at the same time. Everyday. Crazy.

I was watching the flowers episode of, "Moving Art," on Netflix recently. It made me wonder, how did all these molecules miraculously assemble themselves? How did they figure out what works, and what doesn't? Was there thought involved?

this Question...

This will blow your mind then.

When you do anything right now, you aren’t thinking and deciding, just reacting based on something you previously decided. If you want to think and decide what to do about an event, that can only be a future event that might happen, and then you set in your mind what you will do about that event, if it does happen.

This is what worry and anxiety are all about, just planning for possibilities...

How come you can control the accent, pattern, emotion of your inner dialogue but you can't control volume?

Eat some mushrooms

I’ve mean noticing this a lot more ever since I started meditating recently. The amount of things i cycle through is insane.

Internal dialogue is not my default state. I have to concentrate and force myself to internally monologue/dialogue.

It feels so unnatural. Like staring at a wall and talking to it

The decisions you make is nothing but a combination of binaries, think of something like eating an apple follows with if you want cut and eat it or just eat it as is, wheather you wanna wash it first or not and many more complex binary decisions is behind eating an apple. It also divides in different branches. Everytime you make a decision electrical signal flows through neurons from your brain to the cells of the part with which the following actions are to be done. So while you make your one decision many electrical signals passes back and forth between the various neurons to make the action more and more clear. And every time your brain does an action it makes a connection between the cells involved to do the same action in more efficient and easier way in future.

at least y'all have thoughts, my minds permanently silent.

I often wonder what the internal dialogue of deaf people is like.

Hitler has Infernal dialogues, The must have Been mad

damn now my mind is spinning

Consciousness is pretty crazy when you realize that life is a combination of systems with a very high chance of occurring, and somehow, through evolution, these systems have changed and developed to create consciousness.

Cargo space?

Well here’s a doozy for you think about:

You’re not your thoughts — you’re the observer of thought, that is why marketing is so effective since you can’t really predict what you’re going to think, but another person can, because they know what you will observe and by directing your perception they can manipulate you into thinking things that you believe you thought of yourself when really someone is just holding the hand to your brain to some type of product/belief.

I’m mostly confused by blockchain.

All these computers are trying to lockpick open a box with more locked boxes inside it.

So think of a locked chest inside a locked chest, which is inside another locked chest, etc. Each layer is currency you can "own" by unlocking it. After they unlock a layer, they keep digging into the next layer for more.

In this example if you unlocked layer 72, you would then keep that unlocked check labeled 72 as proof. You don't get the contents of the chest, you get the chest itself as currency. Other people can continue to work on layer 71.

There's also a network so the computers can verify nobody is cheating. Kind of like sharing a checkbook with lots of different people. If 1,000 people agree on a single statement, it's likely to be true.

The idea is that anything can be money. Bitcoin is like using the answers to complicated math problems as money.

Imagine if everytime you revved your car it solved sudoku puzzles which you could then trade for meth...

Imagine the internal ledger at a bank. It stores all the transactions between its customers in a centralized database. This data is used to show you how much money is in your account, and the historical transactions are all available for you to see.

In order for this to work, the bank needs to be trustworthy.

Bitcoin is very similar; there is a ledger for transactions, but instead of a secret internal database, it's all publicly available data. The ledger is called a "blockchain" -- the technology that makes it possible to ensure that the transactions on the ledger can be both trusted and accurate.

The blockchain is literally just a chain of "blocks" -- where each block is a mini-ledger of thousands of transactions.

So how can a public ledger be trustworthy? Mathematical puzzles!

The last block in the chain presents a mathematical puzzle that requires a lot of computational power to solve. Everyone who is trying to "mine" or earn bitcoin is keeping a mini-ledger of recent bitcoin transactions, hoping that their mini-ledger will become the next block in the blockchain.

These "miners" are also racing each other, hoping to be the first to find the solution to the current puzzle. It requires a lot of processing power, and a little bit of luck. The first to solve the puzzle wins! And as proof they solved the puzzle, they present the solution for everyone. This is called "proof of work." And that earns them newly-minted bitcoin!

Once the block is verified as the winner, the new block (the mini-ledger) is added to the blockchain; the "glue" between the blocks is the puzzle/solution set. And once the new block is added, it contains a new puzzle to be solved!

The whole process repeats as more and more blocks are added to the chain. And the cool thing is, you can easily start from the first block and quickly verify the integrity of the chain all the way to the end.

While someone could "forge" a list of transactions in their block, and solve the puzzle, this will be shot down in the verification stage -- the network will be angry that the winning ledger doesn't match their own records. Without consensus about the new ledger, the block is rejected.

Because the reward for winning is so high, it's better for a bad actor to simply accept the reward and play by the rules instead trying to throw out enough computational power to try to trick the network. Which is practically impossible, by the way.

That is how you can get a public ledger that can be trusted by everyone who uses it, without trusting a bank or government. You just trust consensus and math!

You know how money is really just numbers in a computer and we all agree that the banks take care of that accounting for us? Instead of the banks we let the miners computers take care of the accounting. And we pay them for the accounting by giving them some bitcoin.

I didn’t understand it either until somebody explained it to me like this: on the Internet you can copy a digital file, a photograph, a song, a movie and you can make as many copies as you want. You can manipulate it anyway you want.

Someone figured out how to make a digital thing that can never be copied. You can own it and only you can own it. He made it a currency and only 21 million will ever be made. Because it’s unique and tamperproof, it is attractive and valuable to a community of owners.

The more people I’ve become interested in bitcoin the more it becomes legitimized.

watch the video on YT by 3blue1brown

I'm doing a little bit of research on Bitcoin and Blockchain, but am no means an expert on the topic. This is a gross oversimplification of how it works, but I think it gives a good illustration.

Bitcoin is a virtual currency that offers verifiabilty without a centralized entity. For example when you buy something like a pack of gum with a credit card, this is known as a transaction. It goes to the credit card company and back to the store. The store that you bought the pack of gum from knows that the transaction is valid because it trusts the credit card company. Without trust commerce as we know it can't exist.

In Bitcoin, there is no central authority verifying transactions.

The question is then how do we establish trust?

Bitcoin operates on a technology called Blockchain to achieve trust.

You can think of Blockchain like a train. Every train car called a block, has a cargo of transactions in it, and whats called a proof. The proof in essence is a number that is created by taking the last train car's cargo, and putting it into a very hard math function. This way, each train car is connected to the last by the proof. This is how you achieve verifiablilty because you can't modify any of the previous train car's transactions without messing up the proof. In order to modify one of the cars, you'll have to modify the entire train, which is extremely difficult and time consuming.

You can also think of the train as having two versions. The first version is what is globally accepted by the community, and the second is what each person uses locally. Each person only modifies its local copy, but eventually, these local changes are propagated to the global version called the ledger. The global ledger can be thought of as just an idea of what the community accepts as being correct, and isn't stored in any one place. Think of Fahrenheit 451 where there are no physical copies of books. If a majority of the community has memorized the whole Harry Potter series, what we say about what's in the books is what's true for everyone.

How does this all relate to Bitcoin?

Well all new transactions need to added to a Block (train car), but each transaction can only be added once to the train, otherwise you run into a problem called double spending. If i have $20, I can't buy $40 worth of items.

This is where mining comes in. Mining is the process of doing extremely complex math equations to try and generate the proof, at least in Bitcoin. In other crypocurrencies, there are other methods. Think of a math test where the first person to turn it in that's 100% correct gets an A, and everyone else fails. One of the questions I saw earlier was what is all of this work for and what is it used for? For Bitcoin it goes nowhere. The work has no purpose other than to generate the proof and to make sure that it's hard enough to mine a Block so that the currency value doesn't get inflated. How do you reduce inflation? You keep increasing the difficulty of the proof equation.

The work of everyone in the classroom is wasted. This is one of the major criticisms of Bitcoin, due to the enormous waste of electrical power for no tangible benefit.

This person gets the reward of the Block, or a certain portion of the cargo in the train car as a reward, this is a "bitcoin". Everyone now has to try to mine the next Block with a new set of transactions. Unlike a classroom, there is no teacher who knows the answers, and can check the work. For Blockchain, the classroom checks the work.

A student might not know what the right answer is, but it knows when its wrong. It uses another formula for checking. If the question is what is the capital of Pennsylvania and I answer 5, then it's obvious that my answer is wrong whether or not I knew what the correct answer was.

The answer is accepted as 100% correct when over 50% of the classroom says that it is. This can lead to a problem where greater than 50% of the classroom are bad actors and say that a particular solution is correct when it's actually fake.

The main deterrent against this behavior is the difficulty that it requires over 50% of the classroom needs to work together in being bad actors, and that once a classroom is taken over, the value of any currency that it may have generated is now void.

This brings us to the next topic, how is the worth of a bitcoin generated?

There is none. Unlike a government issued currency, there is no inherent value in this currency because there is no centralized authority enforcing it's value. You can think of concurrency as stocks that aren't tied to anything. The value it's given is the value given to it by the community. The difficulty of the proof equation makes it so that the currency isn't generated too fast, and Bitcoin has a hard limit on the total number of coins that can be mined to further limit inflation and to create a limited supply with hopefully, large demand.

I know that this is by no means a comprehensive explanation, but I hope this helps some people better understand how Bitcoin works.

Bitcoin is a prime example that anything can be of value as long as a large group of people that have skills or goods they're willing to perform or trade for said value. All currency no matter where it's from works this way.

I was gonna invest in it a couple of years ago when the hype started to build. But shit man I researched it for days and even asked some questions on the BitCoin subreddit and still didn't understand that shit. Especially once BitCoin wallets and such became an issue before I could even get into a position of buying any.

​

I'm sure if they're worth half million dollars in 15 years time my future self will hate 2017 me (and current me) for being too dumb to go with it.

I have the same problem with money.

first of all, there's this thing called asymmetrical encryption. you create a public and private key pair. you share your public key, and people can encrypt stuff with it but not decrypt. only the private key can decrypt it.

and also, it has a signature feature, so using your private key, you can sign some stuff, and people can verify it with your public key, without seeing your private key.

Bitcoin uses this. addresses are some kind of public keys, and have private keys. its database is shared among a lot of computers. but it's not possible to change or remove any transactions, balances etc. because of the cryptography.

let's say, you have some bitcoins. when sending it to somebody else, you create a transaction including sender, receiver and amount. then you sign it with your private key, so everybody knows it's actually you who created the transaction. and then you have a valid transaction, ready to broadcast. it's not sent to the other party yet, because nobody knows about your transaction. you send it to the computers running bitcoin and they add it to their temporary database, and tell other computers they know. signed messages aren't possible to be changed so others cannot change your transaction, because your signature then would be invalid.

but because it can be slow for it to reach all computers, there can be conflicts, causing double-spending or forks. someone sends Bitcoin to two different addresses at the same time, but broadcasts them to different nodes (computers running Bitcoin). which transaction will the other nodes consider valid? for this reason, they're not confirmed immediately. there are miners.

miners pick transactions from this temporary database/pool, and create a "block" containing these, previous block hash, timestamp etc. btw, hash is like an "identifier", you take the hash of something, and no matter the size or contents, depending on algorithm get maybe 16, 32 chars long, (usually) unique text. it's not possible to reverse this process so only way to guess a hash is by brute forcing.

miners calculate the hash of that block. if it starts with some number of zeroes, it is a valid block. if not, they add some random stuff and try it again until it does. billions of tries every second.

miner then submits the valid block to other nodes, and they save it to their database. that includes transactions as well. transactions included in the block are confirmed now and cannot be reversed. if somebody was to remove a transaction from a block, the hash would completely change and be an invalid block, and not get accepted by nodes.

the amount of zeroes is defined by the difficulty, if miners increased and are finding blocks too easily difficulty increases and vice versa. it's currently something like 16 zeroes and it's super hard to mine a block by yourself. but because there's millions of hardware mining together, it can be mined in approximately every 10 minutes

you cannot remove a block because the newer blocks depend on it. you might remove the last block from your Bitcoin database, but millions of other nodes will have a copy of it already. if you choose to go with your own modified database, it won't be accepted by other nodes.

why does it have a worth? because people determine its price. what determines a 100 dollar bill's value other than the numbers written on it?

miners get rewards because it's defined in the Bitcoin software, and it's limited. Bitcoin cannot have inflation, blocks etc. and nobody other than you can control your wallet, thanks to mathematics.

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It's what you call a quarter after you bite it

It’s Monopoly money. Online, but still Monopoly money.

It's basically data that's somehow used as a form of currency. But how and why is beyond me. lol

It’s kind of like a really expensive theoretical pizza. It’s how I describe it to my parents. You can buy as little or as much as you want. When the pizza is popular it’s gets more expensive.... it’s more in depth but that’s a start

Also 3blue1brown

Think of it as an excel sheet distributed across 1000's of pc's. If I want to send 1000exel points from my cell a1 to yours at c7 then I delete 1000 from my cell and add 1000 to yours. Through the excel updating algorithm, our transaction is included in the next excel sheet update and all those people hosting the excel sheet have agreed it was legit and no duping occurred... or double spending. If we wanted to cheat, we'd have to control 51% of the nodes hosting the sheet to trick the network into believing we're not duping.

Even with an ELI5 I don't get it lol

Yep.

Outgame money

International money

I wanted to get into bitcoin so I could maybe buy some controlled chemicals for research purposes only... I fell at the first hurdle and couldn't even understand the bitcoin wallet.

I recently saw an explanation here on Reddit that said something about a car that pumps out solved Sudoku puzzles? I'm pretty sure that's terribly wrong but the analogy was really good if somebody else remembers it.

I use it and I still dont really get it!

Let me try and explain it the best way I can explain: In my head, there are two parts to bitcoin, the network or the blockchain (I’m sure you’ve heard of that term somewhere) & then the security / mining.

Try to imagine the network like a giant game of scrabbles where everyone is keeping a tab on every word everyone is putting on the board. This way the everyone keeps a tab on everybody else and it’s nigh impossible to cheat. It’s pretty much exactly the same thing in Bitcoin where every system on the network keeps a ledger that has the list of every single transaction EVER DONE! So for someone to cheat, they would have to go to every single system and change the entry on the books which is next to impossible.

Now – what stops someone from changing the files on every other system. After all, we’ve all worked on shared files at some point and how do you verify who has the correct file. That’s where the security of the system comes into picture.

The ledger that I was talking about earlier (where everyone keeps a copy of every single transaction every taken), there’s one entry on it every 10 minutes or so which has the list of all the transactions that happened since the last time things were written in the book. So of course, every single entry is different – and that’s what makes the fodder for the mathematical puzzle to be solved. That’s why no one can solve the puzzles before hand because the puzzles are the actual entries into the ledger.

Now to understand the puzzle, think of it like a pool table with thousands of balls, all arranged randomly. Every single entry is a single ball at a certain location. There’s no way you can determine what the next arrangement of the table is going to look like. Your task is to take the cue ball and hit it at a certain angle with some speed which would result in the final layout of the pool table to resemble exactly the random order that you were given. Sounds very difficult and there’s not way to reverse engineer the solution. The only way to solve it is to shoot every random shot possible and try and see which would give you the desired result. That would require you to, at times, try millions upon millions of shots to get the final answer. This is what the computers are doing when they say they are mining. They are just randomly trying different combinations to see which of them fits the final solution.

However, to verify the solution, all you have to do is to write down the starting point, angle and force at which you hit the que ball to get the final result. Anybody else can easily verify the final answer once they have it. And then, that answer becomes one of the balls on the next pool table to be solved in the next ten minutes.

Now this row of pool tables being created once every 10 minutes extending all the way back a decade is your ledger. Every single transaction every made is on that pool table. For someone to check if someone is lying about their money / transaction, all you gotta do is go back to that date & time and see the entry. And for someone to change that entry in the past, they’ll not only have to solve that pool table and come up with a solution, but they’ll have to solve every table since then AND do it before someone adds a new table to the chain. So, there’s a constant competition to put the new table with the solution in the list and EVERYONE is trying to solve that problem at once. Of course you can’t have a competition without the people competing, and that competition is what is keeping someone from changing the previous entries. THAT is the security bit – you CAN’T CHEAT EVERYONE at the SAME TIME.

So the people solving these problems become the security of the network. And thus they get rewarded every time they solve a problem with the system creating new money for every solution and awarding it to the person who solved it first. Then, that ALSO goes into the ledger, which means that that also becomes part of the next problem to be solved.

In this way, the money in the system CAN’T just be created – there’s a lot of hard work to create value.

I hope this gives to a little idea of what bitcoin is…

Pardon the formatting - mobile user!

So basically, computer money go BRRRR!

It's a two bit con.

It's basically internet money. It can be bought and sold or gained with some shit I don't understand. It's untraceable, and it's basically like every other currency, it's value changes throughout time and it is used to buy and sell things.

Bro, FIAT is so last century. Bro.

Somebody invented an imaginary currency and convinced a lot of stupid people to give him real money for it by telling them it was worth a lot. Crazily enough though, if enough people actually buy into this 'bitcoin is valuable' nonsense, it could become accepted as real currency someday soon. But right now most places don't accept math problems as a form of payment. The problem I have with it is this: the value of currency is the work we put into it. So if I buy something for $100, I'm trading 3 hours of hard work for a Nintendo game or whatever it may be. You don't put anything into bitcoin. So there's no value in it. Computers do everything. As far as I know, You can't put in extra time or work harder to earn it faster, all you can do to earn more is to put in more of your real money. And somewhere on the other side someone is taking this real money and making off like a king.

On a different note, perhaps I could interest you in a passedonme buck? One passedonme buck is worth $1000 but the value DOUBLES every year. So get as many as you can while they're cheap!

I get how it works but... I don't get why people even used it as money to the extent that it got this popular...

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I mean, "hey GUYZ LOOK! COMPUTER MONEY!!1 " "Oh, okay, let's all buy $100,000 worth."

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I just don't get how that happened. Like, one dude invented it and then somehow people mined it then charged money for it and somehow the people who first bought it convinced OTHER PEOPLE to accept it for money... like whoah.

I know you already got like 500 replies, but I found this video really makes it click in my mind. For the rest of the day, anyway. Then I forget a lot of it.

But at least I know it isn't nonsense.

it’s like the stock market. the more people buy it, the higher the value goes. the more people sell it, the lower the value goes. it’s just supply and demand. it’s also untraceable, which is why it’s used on the deep web.

Digital Cash. Secure and fast,. No copy and paste

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