lupine

Consider the Papa Stour sword dance. It gets folklorists very excited. https://www.shetlandfolkfestival.com/archive/2014/local/papa-stour-sword-dancers-seniors

> Blocks are created at a finite rate, and have a finite capacity. Bitcoin is full. No, I'm saying that bitcoin's transaction processing is at capacity. So transaction fees are high and it takes longer than expected to make payments.

+1 for Lerwick Dental Practice, they're amazing. Just pay-as-you-go on the NHS, unless your teeth are made of polystyrene or something.

https://www.thegreenage.co.uk/tech/infrared-heating-panels/https://www.theecostore.co.uk/eco-store/buy-infrared-heating-panels/ These sound incredible... what's the catch?

It's not a con, but it *is* a failure. I was messing with it in 2010 or so, and what it's ended up as is something of a laugh. How to explain? Well, you have building blocks - keys ("accounts"), transactions ("payments") and blocks ("ledger pages", sort of). A transaction moves bitcoins from one account to another. They're cryptographically signed by the losing key. These signatures can only be *generated* by someone with knowledge of the private component of the key, but can be *verified* by anyone with the public component (which is everyone). So, anyone can verify whether a particular transaction is valid, but only the spender can create one. Blocks are a collection of transactions, put together by a miner. Transactions are meaningless until they end up in a block, Each block contains a reference to a previous block (hence "blockchain"), along with a "proof of work", which is a signature of the contents of the block (including that reference to the previous block) that costs a lot of electricity to generate, and is basically free to verify. The difficulty of the proof of work is governed by rules that try to keep the rate of generation to an average of one per 7 minutes or so. Miners get two incentives for trying to create these blocks - transaction fees, and a built-in reward of newly minted bitcoins per block. This decreases over time to ensure that 21 million bitcoins is the limit. This creates competition between miners to generate blocks. It's a decentralized system, so two miners may both create valid blocks at roughly the same time. The blockchain becomes a blocktree at this point - and your transaction may appear in only one of the branches. When this happens, all clients have a rule that the *longest* chain of blocks wins. More blocks are generated, with miners choosing to base their new block on top of one branch or another, until one branch gets long enough that all miners are on it. It turns back into a blockchain at that point, and anything in the abandoned branch is treated as though it never happened. While it's a tree, there's uncertainty about what has actually happened. Did your transaction happen or not? Literally, nobody knows. So a general rule of thumb is that the block containing your transaction should have another 9 blocks added onto it before you can be sure it's happened. Over an hour. Longer, if you're paranoid. This makes using them for run-of-the-mill payments awkward, but it's about OK for online shopping. Very popular with drug dealers, historically. So why has it failed? Blocks are created at a finite rate, and have a finite capacity. Bitcoin is full. As a result, transaction fees have soared. You might spend £30 worth of bitcoin in transaction fees while buying £10 worth of pizza.Claimed solutions to this have failed to gain adoption ("bitcoin cash") or are simply theoretical ("lightning"). The consequence of this is that you're now hard pressed to actually buy real goods and services using bitcoin. Vendors can't absorb the transaction fees, buyers are unwilling to pay them, liquidity is affected and the long transaction confirmation time makes payments for many things impractical anyway. You can buy other cryptocurrencies with it, but even drug dealers are moving to alternatives. What's left is mostly speculation and legacy trade, and it *still* fills up bitcoin. Oh, and it's worth noting that bitcoins are taxable in the same manner as any other capital gain. When you sell them for pounds, you need to stick it on your self-assessment form and pay tax on it. They *do* make tax evasion a little easier in some respects, but no less immoral.

It's such a nice red box! I got 2x https://www.firewoodcentre.co.uk/kiln-dried-logs/72-nets-firewood/delivered. They're supposed to charge £60 extra for delivery but it seems they forgot to for me. Not cheap, but definitely cheaper than electric heating. And since I'm in the middle of a power cut right now (hooray UPSes), I think I can strongly prefer wood for availability reasons too! A neighbour seems to be of the "collect wood all year" mentality, but I'm not sure I have the patience for it.

I've been buying 8kg nets from the local shop for too long. Just placed a bulk order for 1 1/2 tonnes from the UK mainland, which works out at about a third of the price, but I was wondering where you all get your firewood from normally? There's an old red post box in Lerwick centre that's stuffed full of logs, I don't know if that's an advert or a private store! Seems I'm burning peat until the delivery gets here. It smells great, but I can hear environmentalists screaming every time I throw another piece on the fire

Any luck Dmeadows? I've a spare bedroom in my tiny house, but we're living in it and a month might be a bit full-on! If you can string several offers of a week's duration together, I'd happily be a part of that... as long as you walk the dog from time to time

Hi, Yes - we've been here for six months now. Still very happy with the move! We've got a cat from Sumburgh, a dog from Spain, and great neighbours! JanW, I'd say just take the plunge - it's gorgeous up here, even in winter. There's been some great hailstorms the past few days . Look us up if you do make it, we can attempt to decipher the locals together . We're now looking to the next couple of years of our lives up here, getting ready to start producing children and all the rest of it. Shetland seems like a great place to be young. voe.social is just a convenient way for me to upload photos. Best ignored, I'm terrible at it . Impressed by the stalking skills though! *learns how to subscribe to posts to not miss replies* /Nick

This week. Yesssssssssss.

We're still not there! Mortgages take such a long time :/. Hopefully, we'll be in by the start of May. Exactly one carload of stuff is coming with us. There are direct-ish flights to Manchester from September, I don't know whereabouts you are right now, but maybe that helps ^^.

Looks like this is still happening? https://en-gb.facebook.com/shetlandrollerskating/- anyone know if they're up to bouting yet, or if it's turned into more of a social skating thing? My last bout was against Glasgow some years back, I'd love to get involved again.

Yes! Fibre (or the lack of it, rather) ruled out quite a few nice houses, but the place we've settled on has better internet than back home in Yorkshire . Had to go into town today and work, it was off all day *grumble grumble*. No Facebook for me. I wouldn't say I'm on the paranoid side, but others might .

Hi all, My partner and I came up to Shetland last Easter, and again this February. We've had an offer on a house on the Shetland mainland accepted, and it's fair to say we're pretty excited about it! All things going well, we should be here in April or May. I'm bringing my job with me - software stuff, work from home, all very 21st century. Obviously, the first thing I do with a new place is find a forum for it . Looking forward to getting to know some of you!