It’s basically a game. Let’s say I created a currency but I made a rule that you can only add a dollar to the pot if you scored a bullseye on a darts board. That’s all it really is. Except that the bullseye is the answer to an equation and the equation is created by a super high tech computer. It’s an arbitrary method of controlling how much money enters the economy

You are explaining it well, I just can’t understand how equation solving equals free money.

As far as we know absolutely no information could have been preserved from “before” the Big Bang to afterwards. Therefore there will never be a testable theory. We could hypothetically discover in the future the existence of additional universes and may then develop a theory of how ours occurred and if something existed before it. But we’ll likely never know even in that scenario whether our universe was the first or if it came into existence at the same time as those hypothetical additional universes.

For all intents and purposes nothing existed before the Big Bang including time.

The amount of points of contact on the ground make this a little bit more difficult.

When skiing, you always have at least two points on the ground for the most part. Your feet. But you also have stability rods that you can use which makes it four.

In snowboarding you are controlling one single point of contact. So your movements have to be countered by your body for stability instead of adding an extra leg.

It's the difference in balance and support.

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Your national bank will also create money out of nothing. It’s as simple as typing numbers into a computer. They don’t even need to bother printing it out. However if they suddenly added trillions of dollars then it would cause huge inflation issues in the economy, so they do it sparingly and responsibly. The difference with crypto is that the creators use the difficulty in solving the algorithm as a way to curb the production of their currency. If anybody was allowed to just add money to the currency then there would be runaway inflation. By making it deliberately very difficult to create it allows a slow and steady supply that doesn’t tank their economy.

It's a currency which is "printed" according to a mathematical problem. The more of it that gets printed, the harder it gets to print. In that regard it's an attempt to simulate gold mining, the way it gets more expensive the more you deplete the more accessible lodes. Crypto has no inherent value, apart from what people vest in it, unlike gold.

“Usually each $ is created by a computer solving an algorithm. You might have heard the term crypto mining which is basically where somebody creates a powerful computer than can solve these complex algorithms quickly and therefore create money quickly.”

This right here is what I can’t wrap my head around. How can solving complex math problems create “money”? No one has been able to sufficiently explain this to me

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So that makes monopoly money different than regular money? It's that monopoly money is really easy to reproduce, no one will stop you.

With government backed money the thing stopping you is the government. They arrest you if you try.

With gold the thing stopping you is the ability to dig out more.

With cryptocurrency the rules are enforced cryptographically through any number of different algorithms. That basically means that more or less anyone can create a bunch of rules for how their new currency can be used, traded, etc without needing to be a government.

The trick then is convincing other people that your idea is worth it as a currency.

The only theory consistent with the Big Bang is that there is no "before", as the word "before" refers to a point lower than X on the time axis, but time itself was only created with the Big Bang, so the axis came into existence "after" the Big Bang, hence there can't be a "before".

It's like asking "what lies to the North of the North Pole?"

As far as we can tell there was no "before" the big bang. The big bang was the event in which space and time (known as spacetime) came into existence. There was no before this, because time didn't exist as we understand it.

Crypto is a catch all term to describe all digital currencies. Most of our existing currency is digital anyway but the difference is that crypto is entirely digital, therefore no physical coins or notes exist. The word comes from the word ‘Encrypted’ as each $ of the currency is usually heavily encrypted in order to stop fraud. Usually each $ is created by a computer solving an algorithm. You might have heard the term crypto mining which is basically where somebody creates a powerful computer than can solve these complex algorithms quickly and therefore create money quickly. There’s a lot of talk about crypto at the moment as it’s a popular and controversial way to invest. The value of a given crypto currency fluctuates (usually) much more violently than regular currency’s which means large gains and large losses are possible in a short spate of time.

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One alternative that was popular what the steady state theory.

It assumed that the universe had always been more or less as it was now and would always be that way in the future.

This fell out of favor as we realized that the world and the stars above had not always been as they were now, and that things were changing over time.

There also were troubles with the fact that the night sky looked awfully black for a universe where stars were in every direction and had always been shining forever.

It has 2 meanings. The first is literal, meaning they don't really love it or like it but they could get used to it over time.

The current meaning is a sarcastic variation. When something is amazing that someone tries or sees for the first time, they can sarcastically say " I could get used to this."

Similar to saying "it's OK..." when you try or do something thing awesome.

In the West, artists bowing at the end of a performance began with opera in Italy during the 1820's. If the audience kept clapping after the curtain fell, it meant they really liked the show so the artists would come out and bow to show they felt honored by the praise. The custom soon caught on and artists all over Europe started bowing at the end of their show and it became a tradition.

People in some Asian countries do bow at meetings and other social events and there are rules to determine who bows first and even how low you should go; but in the West bowing wasn't as widespread: it was mostly used with royalty or at very formal settings, so the custom was mostly lost as the rules of etiquette evolved and became less "affected" over time.

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