Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for November 06, 2023

Makes sense that you would see a unicorn in a bar. Unicorns only hang out with people who don’t get laid.

Cryptocurrency. Easy to understand, you send money to strangers, they tell you that you bought nothing and they thank you. IT is a lot more fun when you cash out! I’ve done it! There is a FEE to cash out, they is a fee to convert to $, there is a fee to send that $ to your bank. My butt still hurts!

I guess it beats the stereotypical pink elephant.

I’m thinking of Ray Milland in Lost Weekend.

I’ll have “One For My Unicorn, and One For the Road”.

When the unicorn figures it out, he can explain it all to Sam Bankman-Fraud.

Finally my lucky night ,this one looks like a goer.

There are limits to magic. But if you believe in cryptocurrency clap your hands and Tinkerbell will get well. And as long as people keep clapping you can use it.

It’s no more magical than regular currency, except it’s only the private sector involved.

So … when you find yourself talking to some stranger with a martini about your wish-granting abilities … it’s time to go home?

…Technology is no different than magic…

Or why rainbows come out of his butt

I can scan and print money with my home computer, and the result is just as real as crypto. All I need to do is find a sucker who’ll believe any BS I tell him about how I created it.

You want to know how cryptocurrency works? Here’s how. You do work for some faceless organization and they pay you. However, instead of paying you with money backed by the government of the country where you live, they pay you with credits that THEY say are worth something. There are a limited number of places where you can spend these credits directly, otherwise you have to sell them to someone else for that government-backed money for whatever someone is willing to pay you for them. which is fine as long as people are willing to pay for them. Meanwhile, the work you have to do to get more coins gets harder and harder and costs you more and more of that government money, so that you will eventually reach a point where it costs you more to earn the cryptocurrency than you will get from selling it. Especially if the market suddenly collapses.

Unicorn – is that someone being miserly at halloween? Or bad jokes about further education?

I had cryptocurrency explained to me, and could not believe that some people actually bought it.

Here ya go: penny-arcade comic/2014/03/03/ what-how-why

Crypto currency? … just google Ponzi .

Go home to Phoebe, you!

Simple. It doesn’t.

Crypto currency is simple. It’s stored on the blockchain.

Here’s how crypto currency works: criminals want to launder money, so they setup a greater fool system, then they get fools to purchase the virtual currency, which provides a way to extract real currency from the money laundering system.

https://www.gocomics.COM/phoebe-and-her-unicorn/2023/11/06

What I like is the flip side of the sign on the door that says “Go Away”

Cryptocurrency only makes sense if you have something to hide. The world has plenty of currencies backed by governments. These existing currencies do not require the electrical output equivalent of a midsize South American country just to keep operating.

It’s only time to go home if the barkeep also is seeing the unicorn.

Jock was walking on his favorite beach in Queensland when he spotted some shiny metal sticking up out of the sand. On inspection, it turned out to be an old oil lamp. He picked it up and brushed it off, and in doing so he released the genie who’d been trapped inside.

“Hi, there”, said the genie. “I’m an ancient genie who’s been trapped for way too long in that tiny little lamp, and I want to thank you properly for freeing me. May I grant you a wish?”

“Um, isn’t that supposed to be THREE wishes?”, asked Jock.

“Come on, dude, don’t be greedy. I was just an apprentice genie in the first place. That’s how they trapped me so easily in this crummy little lamp. Smash the crap out it if you would, by the way. God, I hate that thing! Anyway, all I’ve got in me is one wish. What’ll it be?”

Jock paused a bit in thot. “Well”, he finally said, “I’ve always gotten on real well with me mate Bob. He’s m’brother, y’know, but he up and took off for America nearly a decade ago and now he lives near Hollywood. Wanted to break into acting and all, but it hasn’t been going well and he can’t afford to fly back and visit. I myself am terrified of flying, so I guess what I’d like most is a big long highway from here in Brisbane up to Los Angeles so I can drive my Holden up there to surprise him.”

“Are you deaf, man? Didn’t you hear me say that I was only an APPRENTICE genie? Do you know how much work a highway all the way across the Pacific Ocean would involve? It would be a challenge for the greatest genies of all time! Now get real and ask me for something reasonable.”

“Oh, OK. Sorry. Umm, how about if you can let me understand women?”

“So, would that be a 4-lane or 6-lane?”

Love the sign on the door: Go Away

Now, don’t get started on NFTS. (non-fungible tokens) That is spending money for nothing.

Oh, that’s easy!

They don’t.

Next question?

I have an idea for a meta-gameshow where contestants try to explain cricket to a random passerby.

And it’s back to that boring, worn out topic

It can be explained quite simply. If you think a unicorn is real and convince a bunch of other people it’s real, it’s real. Until everybody comes to their senses.

FAMOUS WARNER BROTHERS CARTOON

A miniature elephant(about the size of the palm of your hand) walks across the bar and starts drinking out of a drunk’s glass.

Without batting an eye,the drunk says—“You’re late”.

Usually, I want to know about anything new, but I can’t bring myself to even try to understand crypto currency.

Cryptocurrency is easy to understand. it’s just electronic money whose value floats in a marketplace like any other form of currency.

The issues? one, ownership is recorded by 3rd parties managing the currency (think of some privatized version of the Federal Reserve) across multiple platforms to (hopefully) maintain security.

Two, access to the currency for direct purchase/sale must go through 3rd parties, not always the parties running the actual currency. These are exchanges – think of them as a privatized NYSE for commodity sales (instead of selling oil, gold and/or frozen concentrated orange juice, they sell shares of currency). Thus there is little oversight and control.

Three, it’s highly volatile with little control over it. It is exactly what you get when you have a supposedly free market with little to no information in the hands of the wouldbe buyers – most users aren’t actually part of a marketplace but just gambling without knowing the odds or even why. People are in it for various other reasons (hiding transactions from others is a main one) that drive the price/value. And it’s easy to have players skew for whatever reason.

Love the sign on the door – “Go Away”. Actually a good time to leave the bar : 1. the unicorn can’t grant every wish, and 2. it’s a figment of the drinker’s imagination, anyway …

One of my wise colleagues acquainted me with a saying: "In a world full of unicorns, be a Bad – A$$!! … ;)

Just don’t ask it for a little head — that turned out badly in another joke

Crypto currency is quite simple. You make up a fancy-cute name for your product, get people who don’t have a clue to invest their college fund, retirement account and the farm Grandpa left them. You draw lots of fancy graphs with rising lines going left to right and publish them in an e-newsletter you send out to other crypto kings. Then the second some rube says, “Where’s my crypto?”, you empty the bank accounts into a Bimini account and flee to Andorra.

What are they serving at that bar?

How can you say cryptocurrency is a pyramid scheme when people who bought crypto early made so much money off people who bought it later?

So many more interesting things to wish for.

Unicorn!

And this explains crypto very well!!