# Key Points from #hplusroadmap IRC Discussion

• The conversation highlighted the critical role of sleep in brain health, specifically discussing the glymphatic system—a waste clearance pathway in the central nervous system that primarily functions during sleep, with participants sharing University of Rochester Medical Center research on this "brain cleaning" mechanism.

• Bitcoin mining incentives were analyzed in depth, including how miners are motivated to include high-fee transactions not only for direct profit but also strategically to remove available transaction fees from competing miners.

• Participants criticized inappropriate applications of blockchain technology, particularly "Genecoin," which claimed to store genomic data in the blockchain despite the impracticality of storing gigabytes of data in this manner.

• A technical discussion about Python revealed that class variables with mutable objects (like lists) remain shared between instances unless explicitly copied, as objects don't get deep-copied during instantiation.

• The group showed interest in democratizing biotechnology through projects like the MiniPCR Kickstarter, which aims to make DNA analysis technology more accessible for biohackers and citizen scientists.

• Research on brain-computer interfaces was shared, specifically a paper on reconstructing speech from human auditory cortex activity published in PLOS Biology.

• The concept of "substrate-independence" in transhumanist thought was briefly discussed, with reference to Randal Koene's work on whole brain emulation and its definition in "More's Transhumanist Reader."