at9

Found whille browsing https://www.improbable.com/

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01875/full

Like so many booms, the few who are lucky and/or fleet of foot (even if wearing heels) will make fortunes. The majority of punters will lose. The even greater majority of those who stood on the sidelines will neither win nor lose, though they might be caught in the fallout. Yes, there's the opportunity cost of NOT doing something. If I'd put £1000 into Bitcoin a few years ago and cashed out recently I'd have done very nicely thankyou. £1000 is a sum I can afford to lose though I'd rather not. As it is, I've made more modest returns on that £1000 in stockmarket based investments.

If you've got a decent sized investment portfolio you can afford some gambling money, the amount depending on your temperament. I'm not a very "hands on" investor. I'm not in the business of tracking the markets day by day, let alone hour by hour. It might make me a lot of money but I'd find it an excrutiatingly dull and unproductive thing to do. So I'm not investing in crypto currencies.

The people I worry about are those with limited resources who put a large fraction of their very limited savings into a high risk financial product. Especially those people who have little understanding of risk. Of course somebody in desperate circumstances might consider betting their last $$ on Bitcoin, roulette or the horses but that's real last ditch tactics.

The January 2018 issue of Scientific American has a set of articles about blockchain, cryptocurrencies etc. Well worth reading for anyone with an interest in the subject.

The single most important thing I've got from those articles is that these technologies are in their infancy, there's a lot of people with a stake in some part of the process (not just bitcoin) and they won't go away in a hurry. Exactly how they will affect our futures is of course unknown and unknowable. I expect a bumpy ride, with many failures and possibly some great successes. Rather like the dotcom boom almost 20 years ago.

If there's such a thing as an official conversion UK8=EU42. Some manufacturers have different opinions. Even then it's often hard to be sure what size you're really getting. I've tried UK9 shoes from Aldo which were more like UK7.

There is something approaching a flood of articles in non-specialist publications about Bitcoin. Another:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/03/bitcoin-investors-hoping-billions-sack-fools-gold

One of the themes of these articles is that Bitcoin is currently mainly used for speculation rather than commercial transactions. I know there is a huge amount of speculation in fiat currencies ($$, ££ etc) but we all use them every day as a genuine medium of exchange.

Another article worth reading:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129553-700-bitcoin-how-its-core-technology-will-change-the-world/

Martin Lewis is one of the most respected financial commnentators in the UK. His blog post on Bitcoin is worth reading:

https://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2017/11/30/invest-bitcoin-four-things-need-know/

These and many others suggest that it's right to walk heel first:

http://www.whowhatwear.co.uk/how-to-walk-in-heels

https://www.wikihow.com/Walk-in-High-Heels

http://www.foreveramber.co.uk/2015/05/how-to-walk-in-high-heels-without-pain-and-without-falling-over.html

2 bits of wisdom:

Past performance is no guide to future returns.

Don't wager more than you can afford to lose.

At the moment it rather looks like others are being greedy. And there's very public encouragement for others to be greedy too, judging by the adverts in the press and elsewhere.

Actually fiat currencies also have a problem with underlying value. They are no more than a promise by the state. If that goes wrong, as it has done quite a few times, then you end up with hyperinflation.

I'm not opposed to crypto currencies in principle. They may turn out to be a good thing, or at least some of them might be. I don't think that Bitcoin will be one of the ones that survives, for the reasons I stated in my last post.

Another major problem in using Bitcoin is that its use doesn't scale very well. The blockchain is only updated every 10 minutes which makes it pretty useless for a lot of day to day transactions. There's also the worry that you can spend the same bitcoin twice within that 10 minutes and only one recipient will get paid.

Recently on the Tube (London Underground railways) I've seen advertisments for cryto currency trading. There are strong warnings in small print about it being high risk etc. If it's being advertised like that it feels like something nasty will happen. No doubt a few will win handsomely. Most will lose.

The blockchain may well be a very good basis for a currency. It also has application to conventional banking. But I doubt that Bitcoin, with its energy hungry mining and lack of scalability, will become the main crypto currency of the future.

When a quantum computer (or an advance in number theory) allows large products of primes to be factorised in a practical time then the whole of internet security comes crashing down. Every time you go to a https webpage there's an RSA key exchange using the properties of large prime numbers. Crack that and there's no such thing as a secure online transaction.

Very few women (or men) could wear this outfit well in an everyday environment. It's very much for the right sort of club or special occasion.

8 hours ago, kneehighs said:

This is the best point I've seen so far in this thread and a great argument against BTC. 

Yet, it can be argued that electricity is an infinite resource, especially when drawn from renewable resources.  Plus, the market demand will ultimately determine sustainability over time.  If the demand exists, people will find a way to make it work.

Not strictly infinite, though solar (PV and/or thermal) resource is potentially so large as to make it seem so.

The market will indeed determine the future of bitcoin and other cryto currencies. 20:20 hindsight is a wonderful tool for assessing the past. If you had invested in bitcoin a little while ago you would have won handsomely. However it is pretty useless for forecasting the future. If you buy bitcoin now it's not a guaranteed win, it's an outright bet with utterly unknown and unknowable odds.

I'm not sure if bitcoin amounts to a zero sum game. In other words if I win £1000 then others elsewhere must lose £1000.

Whether you pro or anti bitcoin, one thing cannot be denied: they are an ecological horror story. The energy cost of mining bitcoin is high.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/the-ridiculous-amount-of-energy-it-takes-to-run-bitcoin

There are possible fixes for this but the energy cost of mining needs to come down for bitcoin to play a major role as a currency. I think that Etherium has fixed this problem so it might be that in the medium term bitcoin will be an "also ran" in crypto currencies. Much as bebo and others lost to facebook and many early online retailers lost out to Amazon.

Fiat currencies have energy costs too. In minting coins, printing notes, distributing credit cards etc but I think these are relatively small compared to face value. Though when the scrap value of pennies (US or UK) became higher than the face value the composition was changed from bronze to plated steel.

I use Irfanview for all simple picture editing. It's free, quick and easy to use.

http://www.irfanview.com/

If I simply want to reduce the size of a picture file there are plenty of "right click" tools for Windows. Example: https://www.digitalred.com/support/windows/image-resizing/

When editing images don't confuse the number of pixels with file size. You can have a lot of pixels but small files if you use a lot of JPEG compression. This usually gives better quality than reducing the number of pixels and using less JPEG compression.

I don't know about equivalent tools for Linux and Mac.

1 hour ago, Shyheels said:

I agree that new tech can be a great thing. And to the list of companies that didn’t see big changes coming, and react, one can also add Kodak.

But companies such as Apple - great innovators - have also had their turkeys. And generally when they were trying to creat so,unions in search of problems, and to my mind, at present anyway, Bitcoin and blockchain seem to be just that.

That's the nature of innovation. Some win, the majority lose. Who wanted Edison and Swan's crude electric light bulbs when we had perfectly good gas lighting? c1900 it wasn't obvious that the internal combustion engine would dominate for over 100 years as both steam and electric vehicles were successful back then. Amazon shook up the retail world and succeeded. Plenty of others failed in the dotcom boom/bust. Sometimes even titans lose. Let's add Nokia to Kodak. Who knows if Apple will be a "has been" company in 2037.

When we look back from 2037 I have no idea whether Bitcoin and its ilk will survive. The blockchain concept will probably endure but perhaps in ways we can barely envisage now. When Vint Cerf invented TCP/IP could he, in his wildest dreams, have predicted the WWW and its huge growth? The roots of hyperlinking are many and varied. Including Vannevar Bush's ideas in the 1940s. Took the genius of one man to invent the WWW, originally to solve a problem of sharing information at CERN. In 1993 I doubt if even Sir Tim Berners-Lee could have envisaged what his invention would do in less than 10 years.

Innovation is a crazy business. Some ideas make it big time, most fail. Some get resurrected, electric cars for example. Most are forgotten except by specialist historians.

From what I've heard about wearing latex socks (never done it so this is secondhand) is that they fill up with sweat and can get very unpleasant. They also wear through very quickly.

While latex clothing is now worn in public by loads of celebs it still has a strong aura of fetish about it.

I don't see the point of ultra  short latex socks. If you really want them why not just get some longer ones and cut them down. HHP isn't meant to be a fetish forum so this might be better asked in the relevant part of Fetlife. I won't link from here as it wouldn't be appropiate but from looking at your posts I think it's likely you're a FL member already.

I'm not claiming this is a lovely shoe but Sanita are a major maker of clogs both for the workplace and leisure. This has a strap: http://www.sanita.com/Sanita-Stride/

I wear Sanita clogs much of the time, usually these: http://www.sanita.com/mens-karl-pu-black/

Can even just about claim they have a heel as it's about 2" from the back of my foot to the ground.

7 hours ago, meganiwish said:

All currency is a token of a share in wealth.  Have no wealth, you have a share in nothing.  The numbers mean nothing.  A share of nothing, no matter how big a share, is nothing.  Money can't be a commodity because it has no physical existence.  A large part of the World's problems comes from supposed economic experts not understanding the implications of Third Grade arithmetic.

Megan, I think you've rather limited the functions of money here. Yes, it can be a token of wealth but another function is a means of exchange and keeping track of transactions. Every time we buy something we're using money (as cash, card, tally stick, bitcoin etc) as a means of exchange and effecting a transaction. It's more convenient than bartering my good for yours. You can see this in a simplified form in local currencies (LETS).

When I referred to commodity money I was using the generally accepted definition of using something of instrinsic worth to represent money. Such as gold, silver etc. Anything that is widely accepted as being of instrinsic worth can be used as commodity money. Whether it be gold, conch shells or whatever. Treating money as a commodity is a whole different question. It has a physical existence of some kind, whether it be gold, dollar bills, a mark on a tally stick or some electrons in a particular place on a silicon chip. Or more generally it can also exist as information (the distinction between bits and atoms) which can be transmitted and received.

Problems arise when money becomes the object of the exercise rather than it being a means to an end. The love of money may not be the root of ALL evil but it accounts for a fair amount. The problems get even bigger when people start trading in debts, derivatives and more complex financial instruments. Many of these things have legitimate uses (I no longer wish to lend money to Mr X to buy his house so I sell the debt to Mrs Y, possibly at a discount, and can then go out and buy an expensive holiday) but taken too far it ends up as the 2008 crash.

Thanks. That's more extreme than what I saw and has open toes. What I saw had closed toes, they were impressively high but very much not fetish.

Link to Pierre's shoes: http://extremehighheels.net/en/extreme-high-heels-boots-and-shoes/111-high-heel-chunky-heel-clogs-italia-p.html

Hands up those who bought an Apple Newton? Definitely not me. I was probably in the early majority to get online (1995/6) and late majority for a smartphone (2013) and still use that same 4 year old phone as I've not yet found a good reason to replace it.

As with a fair bit of social science research, Rogers makes a rather big deal of a subject that's intuitively obvious. Though perhaps it wasn't so obvious back in 1962 when he did his original work. Not sure he covers how scarcity and cost can slow down adoption. I can remember when just getting a landline phone installed in the UK could be expensive and often involve waiting for the GPO to pull its finger out.

As for economics, I'm sure there's some value in it but I struggle to find it. Just remember that if you place 1000 economists end to end it's doubtful if they would reach a conclusion. It's not known as "the dismal science" for nothing.

Definitely higher than the Miumiu clogs linked by Charlotte.

I can't see any clogs on the extremehighheels website but perhaps I'm not looking hard enough. Pierre, can you please link to the model you have ordered?

If clogs fit well they can be easy to walk in despite the heel height and lack of strap. Even without a strap your weight keeps you in them and stops them slipping off. Until you walk backwards when it's all too easy to walk out of them. The woman I saw looked entirely at ease in hers.