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City officials in Suzhou, China, tried using facial recognition to shame people who wore PJs in public.

China spent the crucial first days of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak arresting people who posted about it online and threatening journalists Another first hand report from a citizen in Wuhan (hit the cc symbol during the video to understand) Wuhan has over 11,000,000 in population. Wuhan, China high speed trains have been stopped. Imagine the potential this has to "derail" the world economy at its weakest moment.

Scary!

Wow... that might be the world's biggest cheeseburger ever!

Ummm... for all the vegetation in space? LOL Here are some better ideas that higher ups have proposed. 😉

Blink twice to select an object? How do you cut and paste? 😉 Reboot = cross-eyed?

I will have to think about this one. Thanks for passing along the idea.

@James Thomas Rook Jr. great! Now I won't be able to get that movie out of my head while biting into the new Faux Pork.

End-to-end encryption renders most of Cloudflare's advanced features useless. To use them, the session between you and Cloudflare is secured, the session between Cloudflare and the website is secured, but Cloudflare essentially becomes a man-in-the-middle and decrypts the data for inspection.

Oh it isn't just Lebanon who are is desperate for USD. It's the entire world. Hong Kong is China's main way of getting USD since Hong Kong is an important area of trading with USD. The repo markets are going absolutely insane with the Fed selling mortgage backed securities and buying treasuries from banks: US banks need cash as well. It's a lot closer to home than some would suspect. It's most likely at your own bank.

The most advanced money ever..... Banks can't print more of it....

The Los Angeles Angels MLB Baseball ATM Machine La Brea Tar Pits naan bread Lentil dal PIN Number Sahara desert Ahi tuna queso cheese pasta noodles panini sandwich VMA Awards pizza pie LCD Display SAT Test grownup adult panda bear chala bread Rio Grande River Shrimp Scampi Raw cookie dough Pita Bread Cheese quesadilla

As it turns out, the ubiquitous wireless technology’s name has nothing to do with being blue or tooth-like in appearance and has everything to do with medieval Scandinavia. Harald Bluetooth was the Viking king of Denmark between 958 and 970. King Harald was famous for uniting parts of Denmark and Norway into one nation and converting the Danes to Christianity. So, what does a turn-of-the-last-millennium Viking king have to do with wireless communication? He was a uniter! So his name was given to the wireless link that unites and connects so many devices together. The Bluetooth logo is also a combination of “H” and “B” , the initials of Harald Bluetooth written in the ancient letters (runes) used by vikings (picture below)

I was able to install my own new bulbs for $25. 🙂 awesome price compared to modern cadillacs.

Yang is taking the country by storm and the politicians are very worried about him...

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Is he running just so that Elizabeth Warren won't get the ticket and charge him 2% of his net worth (not net income) .... It's probably cheaper for him to run for President and try to keep her from winning than to pay her tax.

IN PRISON...You spend the majority of your time in an 8x10 cell. AT WORK....You spend most of your time in a 6x8 cubicle. IN PRISON...You get three meals a day. AT WORK....You only get a break for 1 meal and you have to payfor it. IN PRISON...You get time off for good behaviour. AT WORK....You get rewarded for good behaviour with more work. IN PRISON...A guard locks and unlocks all the doors for you. AT WORK....You must carry around a security card and unlock andopen all the doors yourself. IN PRISON...You can watch TV and play games. AT WORK....You get fired for watching TV and playing games. IN PRISON...You get your own toilet. AT WORK....You have to share. IN PRISON...They allow your family and friends to visit. AT WORK....You cannot even speak to your family and friends. IN PRISON...All expenses are paid by taxpayers with no workrequired. AT WORK....You get to pay all the expenses to go to work andthen they deduct taxes from your salary to pay for prisoners. IN PRISON...You spend most of your life looking through barsfrom the inside wanting to get out. AT WORK....You spend most of your time wanting to get outand go inside bars. IN PRISON...There are wardens who are often sadistic. AT WORK....They are called supervisors.When I finally left my last place of work, it was just likebeing released from prison, as I was free to do whateverI wanted to.

After bitcoin becomes too expensive for the average person to deal with it in whole bitcoins (already the case for some people), we will begin dealing, speaking, and thinking in smaller units like millibitcoin and microbitcoin, but the most elemental bitcoin unit is the satoshi. How many satoshis are there (or at maximum)? This many: 2,100,000,000,000,000 Which is found by multiplying the maximum 21 million bitcoin by the number of satoshis per bitcoin, which is 100 million. How do you pronounce that huge number? Like this: "Two quadrillion one hundred trillion." How many satoshis are available to us now (have been mined)? Well, we've mined about 15 million bitcoin out of the 21 million maximum. Times 100 million that comes out to: 1,500,000,000,000,000 or, "One quadrillion five hundred trillion." How many satoshis is that for each human being alive today? Taking a 7-billion approximation, that comes out to: 214,285 satoshis per human being. In a total bitcoin-takeover scenario, where bitcoin truly moons and comes out to a price of, say, $3 million per coin and goes into worldwide use, each satoshi would have to be worth about 3-cents. Thus, even in a total-bitcoin-victory scenario, it seems that there are enough satoshis in the world to run commerce at even the smallest level.

Steven Mnuchin explains why nearly $1.5 trillion worth of $100 bills reportedly disappeared Almost $1.5 trillion of the world's cash, with U.S. $100 bills making up a great deal of it, is reportedly unaccounted for. So what happened to the money? "Literally, a lot of these $100 bills are sitting in bank vaults all over the world," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told FOX Business' Lou Dobbs during an interview on Tuesday. Mnuchin pointed to the negative interest rates causing people to turn to American dollars as a solid investment. "The dollar is the reserve currency of the world, and everybody wants to hold dollars," Mnuchin said on "Lou Dobbs Tonight." "And the reason why they want to hold dollars is because the U.S. is a safe place to have your money, to invest and to hold your assets." Mnuchin said it's interesting that, in a increasingly digital world, "the demand for U.S. currency continues to go up." "There's a lot of Benjamins all over the world," Mnuchin said. There are more $100 bills – also known as C-notes – in circulation than $1 bills, according to data from the Federal Reserve, which found there are more $100s than any other denomination of U.S. currency. The number of outstanding bills featuring a picture of Benjamin Franklin has about doubled since the start of the recession. In 2018, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago illustrated a correlation between low interest rates and high currency demand, though it also noted outside factors could help explain swelling demand. The bank estimates that 80 percent of all $100 bills last year were actually in circulation in foreign countries. It explained that residents in other countries, particularly those with unstable financial systems, often use the notes as a safe haven. FOX Business' Brittany De Lea contributed to this report.

For Bitcoin’s scaling solution, 2019 has gone by in a flash—of innovation. It’s been a year of non-stop development for the Lightning Network—a super-fast payments layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain that allows users to send and receive bitcoin quickly and cheaply. “We got our first neutrino mobile wallet, first conference, first instant fiat-to-Lightning channel swaps, and first major exchange integration. Huge milestones,” said Ryan Gentry, lead analyst at crypto investment firm MultiCoin Capital. Meanwhile, Samson Mow, chief strategy officer at Canadian blockchain services provider Blockstream, is excited by progress in multi-path payments, which enable larger sums to be transferred. It’s easy to forget how far Lightning has come as it makes strides towards mainstream adoption, and that it’s not yet mature. So let’s take a step back and take in just what it’s accomplished in the last year. A Lightning start At its core, the Lightning Network is a decentralized system for instant and high-volume bitcoin micropayments—with payments as low as 1 satoshi (worth $0.0001) instantly recorded on the network. It's regarded by many Bitcoin fans as vital in enabling Bitcoin to scale in order to support millions of payments and users per day. Launched in 2018, the Lightning Network consists of channels that allow users to move money between each other without needing to use the Bitcoin blockchain to verify the transaction. Instead, there’s a quick verification of funds from the buyer and the request from the seller, so the transaction can happen, but the actual settlement takes place later. “For the Lightning Network, 2019 was a year where the developers made a lot of progress getting the base layer rock solid,” said Blockstream’s Mow. In the first six months of 2019, Lightning doubled its node count and capacity, making the network more robust. By September, the number of nodes on the network had hit 10,000. New tools, utility and UX innovations went live. Bugswere found and fixed; people lost their bitcoin on the network, and found it again. Passing the Torch Last week, Blockstream announced that a fix is very near for one of the biggest problems facing Lightning: sending larger payments across the network. Tests to make so-called multi-path payments interoperable are now complete, Mow told Decrypt. “Multi-path payments allow for multiple channels to be used together in concert,” he explained. This will allow payments to be split into smaller chunks so that large amounts of bitcoin can be sent both quickly and cheaply. Channel capacity becomes less relevant, and routing options multiply. In March, the Lightning Torch went around the world. During the process the torch—a symbolic payment of $100 in bitcoin—was passed from one person to another (including Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman,) with each recipient adding 10,000 satoshis before passing it on. While the experiment was hailed as a big success, it pushed the boundaries of bitcoin payments, and the Network hit liquidity problems within its channels, highlighting the challenges posed by larger payments. That’s why for Mow, the progress made with multi-path is “the most significant development” of the year for Lightning. Lightning goes mobile The Bitcoin blockchain clocks in at 250 gigabytes—and it keeps on growing. That’s beyond most phones—even the HTC Exodus 1s “blockchain phone” needs to be plugged in and upgraded with a microSD card to run its much-vaunted full Bitcoin node. Taking the Bitcoin blockchain on the go isn’t an option, so you need a wallet or an app on your phone that checks Bitcoin transactions. Enter the Neutrino light client, or LND, which provides access to a very basic version of the Bitcoin blockchain, but can fetch a relevant block when data needs to be checked, keeping data usage to a minimum. This year, Tel Aviv-based bitcoin wallet and payment services provider Breezwas the first to introduce a Neutrino-based client for its app, for both Androidand iOS. “We want Bitcoin to be adopted by the masses, but we don’t want to lose the core Bitcoin values of being a decentralized platform [that’s] censorship resistant,” Breez co-founder Roy Sheinfeld told Decrypt. “The fact that we were able to bring Lightning to mobile without compromising privacy or security, using Neutrino, is the big advance, for me.” Other Lightning clients are adopting Neutrino, including wallets Zap and Nayuta. And sending bitcoin tips on Twitter also got easier as tippin.me, a platform that enables micropayments in bitcoin via the Lightning Network, launched a mobile version in September. Lightning fast fiat to Bitcoin conversion A year ago, Lightning users had to take their fiat to an exchange, go through all the hassle of know-your-customer (KYC), deposit their bitcoin into an on-chain wallet, and then transfer it to an off-chain Lightning wallet. The process of changing fiat directly into bitcoin on Lightning has come on in leaps and bounds over the past year. Services like Olympus from wallet-developer Zap, Sparkswap and Escher, have created a rapid on-ramp to the Lightning Network, so that users can buy BTC with fiat and have it deposited directly into their Lightning channels. In August, department store Pricerite started accepting bitcoin at its new concept store at the popular MegaBox shopping centre in Hong’s Kong’s Kowloon Bay area. It converts crypto payments into Hong Kong Dollars in real time at its cash registers. With Lightning, that’s now possible in a matter of seconds, according to Pricerite. Lightning Service Providers To use Lightning, users have to open a payment channel with a counterparty node. But how to choose from the thousands that are out there? Some have better connections, others have superior channel liquidity. To provide for simplified channel management, this year, developers at Lightning Labs turbocharged Autopilot, a helpful aid to getting started on Lightning. It uses heuristics to help new users choose a node, and is built into the protocol. Another way to easily connect to the network is through plug-and-play Lightning Service Providers (LSPs,) which have come to the fore this year. LSP’s such as Breez, LightningTo.Me, LNBIG.com, and Bitrefill's Thor provide services such as customization options, immediate liquidity, robust connections with other LSPs for effective routing options, even rebalancing payment options with other LSPs to ensure payments move freely. Lightning’s Submarine Swaps get out and about It’s been a big year for Submarine Swaps, which make it much easier to jump between the Bitcoin blockchain and payment channels. They allow Lightning users to transfer funds between a payment channel and their on-chain wallet without having to close and re-open the channel. In 2019, Submarine Swaps were integrated directly into several mobile Lightning clients, making it much easier to do things like top up a payment channel in order to make purchases. This year, Lightning Labs also released Lightning Loop: a service to perform Submarine Swaps that’s ready right out of the box. It allows users to receive bitcoin in increasing quantities without having to close and reopen new payment channels. Submarine Swaps can now be made both on-chain (with the Munn wallet, for instance) and off chain with Breez, which lets users top up their Lightning payment channels from an on-chain wallet. Building Lightning Watchtowers This year saw the introduction of so-called Watchtowers—third-party nodes to which a user delegates the responsibility of monitoring their channel activity. The Lightning protocol has a built-in mechanism to punish anyone who tries to cheat their counterparty by publishing an out-of-date channel state. But, until this year, there was no recourse if the cheated party was offline, or if their client was not monitoring their channel activity. Watchtowers ensure that users’ channels, and the network as a whole, are safer. Since they only receive transaction data in case of an actual attempt to cheat, the added security comes at a low cost in privacy. New tools and plugins make it easier to get to Lappland Lapps, the decentralized apps of the Lighting Network, are proliferating. There’s an impressive list here and here, but two popular new ones include Paywall.Link, which gives content creators a direct-to-Lightning paywall so they can get paid for blogs and other content, and Sats 4 Likes, which allows users to buy followers or likes in return for satoshis on Lightning. These days, it’s even possible to order pizza via Lightning, with the Fold web app. With new tools and plugins, lapps are getting easier to create, too: this year, a seven-year-old (and his dad) built a zombie hunting game that takes bitcoin Lightning payments. We want to obfuscate complexity, and make it a seamless experience, like with the Internet. Roy Sheinfeld In February, a new code release from Blockstream gave developers an interface and plugins that makes it even easier to build their own features into Blockstream’s open source c-lightning software. “For Blockstream’s c-lightning, 2019 was the Year of Plugins, where Rusty Russell and team made everything modular and customizable,” said Mow. The upgrade also introduced innovations such as monitoring tools, which run alongside a node to check if it’s alive and kicking. There’s also a “probing” plugin that pings random Lightning nodes on the network, to judge their reaction and establish the health of the network. The list is a work in progress. Fold and Casa incentivize Lightning Companies working with the Lightning Network are increasingly incentivising users, in order to ensure network security and entice new users on board. Through Lightning, Fold enables spending bitcoin and offers cashback rewards, in bitcoin, to shoppers who use its mobile app at Amazon, Starbucks, Uber and more. Hardware manufacturer Casa released its second generation Bitcoin and Lightning node in October. The Casa Node 2 is simple to set up, requires no specialist knowledge and offers users rewards by validating the blockchain themselves, thus increasing its decentralization and security. In the same month, Casa also released a companion app, Sats App, which enables users to send and receive bitcoin; it also rewards users for network-boosting actions such as connecting the app to their own node, proving that it’s active. Ever more user friendly Lightning Lightning's UX has been questionable in the past, but it’s made significant progress in the last year. Protocols like lnurl, introduced in January, help to simplify Lightning’s UX; Inurl streamlines the process of communication between Lightning wallets and third-party services in common situations, such as employing channel services. For example, users can now withdraw funds from a lapp by simply clicking on a link or scanning a QR code, rather than have to manually create a Lightning invoice as before. The protocol is rapidly being adopted by clients and lapps, so things are bound to get even easier. And even busier, no doubt. Progress this year has been astounding and developers such as Sheinfeld, show no signs of letting up. “We want to obfuscate complexity, and make it a seamless experience, like with the Internet." Ultimately, he said, "we want to change the world."

First of all, the fundamentals of Bitcoin are excellent and the revolution it is leading continues to advance month after month, block after block. The number of Bitcoins that can be put into circulation is known to all. Thus, in 2030, the maximum supply for Bitcoin will always be 21 million. The demand for Bitcoin will increase in the coming years and with 8.6 billion people on Earth, the scarcity of Bitcoin will cause a sharp increase in its price. 8,600,000,000 population on Earth 21,000,000 bitcoin

Fundstrat's Tom Lee says bitcoin could be poised for a huge breakout. With CNBC's Brian Sullivan and the Fast Money traders, Pete Najarian, Brian Kelly, Dan Nathan and Tim Seymour.