Is the Mozilla Foundation still a politically active sideshow? That is what made me switch, I could put up with the performance gap - I couldn't put up with their plugin moderation and activities in the whole "combating disinformation" sphere.
> Crypto has become a very polarizing topic with people...
Certain people. I was involved from the beginning, and most of the OGs just shrug at the present day noise - the convert zeal being long exhausted by all the complaints about how PoW makes Mother Gaia cry. The people who have a crazy level of investment are the tech journalists that took very public positions badmouthing bitcoin. That is probably also true of anyone else who can't resist calculating how much their mistake cost them when they compared bitcoin to beanie babies at $150.
> ...which certainly needs to happen for it to have a future too, but governments...
Firing first in a duel, global economy style - that is why the foot dragging has been so protracted.
It's not quite the beginning but I bought Bitcoin anonymously using cash from Mt Gox in the rally up to $15 before it crashed back down to $5, and then ignored my wallet until it added many zeroes before I sold.
I still think that, as a concept, it's dumb as shit, even thought it was profitable for me. I just got lucky.
Huh, everything about what you said seems off to me.
How did you anonymously fund your account at Mt Gox? Because I only remember them taking bank wires. I don't remember them ever having any kind of payment provider that would have accepted anything like pre-paid Visa cards, and in any case: by the time btc was at $15 - there was only one money transmitter (that wasn't a bank) allowing btc related transactions. I know this because I was debanked by two banks and had my paypal account suspended around that time.
How did you come to learn about bitcoin, this "dumb as shit" concept? Buying drugs on Silk Road? Because most of the early people came to it from reading the white paper after seeing it posted on the cipherpunk mailing list, or on a board discussing Austrian-economics/anarcho-capitalism... for those people it was a political act - not an investment (as you seem to view it).
> How did you anonymously fund your account at Mt Gox? Because I only remember them taking bank wires.
Here in Japan you can make domestic wires anonymously using cash at an ATM (since it's such a cash-based society), and since Mt Gox was based in Japan you could fund your account with a domestic wire transfer
> How did you come to learn about bitcoin, this "dumb as shit" concept
Probably on IRC? I can't recall. It was still early enough that I got like 0.001 btc from one of those "btc faucets". It was fun when it was just this distributed tech demo, before people took it so seriously. The technology is cool.
What's dumb as shit is the idea of basing the future of finance on it.
Well you definitely have a very abnormal way of coming to it. I've encountered people who came to it for the pure love of technology - but they usually gravitate towards one of the shitcoins because they actually harbor a bit of greed and feel they "missed the boat".
> What's dumb as shit is the idea of basing the future of finance on it.
As I said, I burned through my convert zeal a long time ago... but your situation does have me curious. Do you have any formal experience with the backends making up the global financial system? Because I do, and it blows my mind that anyone trusts it at all. The US has, in recent years, proven itself to be such an awful steward of the global reserve currency that it is at the point now where multiple militarily weak states are openly discussing replacing the petrodollar with something else. A few years ago that would have resulted in a coincidental horrific end for them, but after the naked weaponization of the international financial system against Iran and then Russia... well the end is very near. All that is to say that it is now clear that everyone now knows a fiat currency controlled by a single interest makes a poor global reserve. Combine that with the likely future in which software agents need to directly handle money in order to pay their own bills... and meatspace money won't work, because humans are thieves with access to fraudulent chargebacks. What alternative could there be besides a crypto currency? I'm not saying it will be bitcoin, because there have already been several fedcoin lead balloons floated, but bitcoin has thrived in an incredibly non-permissive environment (economic, technological and political) for a long time now.
> I still think that, as a concept, it's dumb as shit, even thought it was profitable for me. I just got lucky.
What, specifically, do you find dumb as shit? I don't want to come across as confrontational here, but it's difficult to gauge how much a person knows about blockchain, its uses, current pitfalls, and the technology's mission. And these conversations usually end up in one of two ways for me depending upon how much the person on the other end actually knows. Either they know next to nothing besides how to buy and sell it, in which case, the conversation almost always tends to lean into pointless vitriol; or they actually know a lot about the current crypto industry, see it for all its weaknesses and none of the potential, and are willing to have a civil conversation.
Frankly, like the other user, I'm in the boat of thinking that our current financial system is in desperate need of some kind of overhaul. Blockchain/crypto could be a part of that overhaul, but doesn't necessarily have to be. But it's clear to me that something needs to change.
Anyway, I'm just always curious about other people's thoughts. I'd say the majority of people I talk to on this topic though just jump straight to abusing the person that's pro-blockchain-as-a-concept without having substantial reason for disliking it besides:
1) it's a huge waste of the world's non-renewable energy resources, which is not necessarily true, it's mostly only true for blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum PoW, there are blockchains that require substantially fewer resources to be a player on the chain.
2) That crypto prices fluctuate too much when cashing back out to fiat. This argument seems short-sighted, because in a possibly ideal situation you would never need to liquidate to a fiat. In an possible future (for blockchain) you would be able to pay for your morning coffee at a PoS terminal using your crypto wallet directly and there's possibly a government system that lays out the purchasing power of a coin. I use the word "possibly" a lot here to point out that there are probably competing theories on ideal implementations of crypto as a general and worldwide currency.
3) That the transactions per second (TPS) that a blockchain can handle aren't comparable to systems like VISA. That seems true, for now. Blockchain is still very much in the early stages of development, culturally and technologically. Keep in mind, fiat currencies have been around for nearly a millennia. A technical solution to replace an ancient system needs engineering time and public adoption.
If you have other reasons for thinking blockchain/cryptocurrency is dumb as shit, I'm very interested. And genuinely, I'm not being sardonic or anything else when I say that.
It has been a long time since I last debated this stuff, so it is funny to see the same talking points from 10 years ago.
1) PoW is the only way that is actually decentralized. If you want decentralized power over the currency - PoS will never work on a long time horizon, because you'd need some way of representing stake that is just impossible. As far as the whole "waste" complaint: relative to what? I've never seen a comparative study that included the entirety of the existing financial system. The academic papers I have seen complaining about bitcoin were full of comically bad errors: using geolocation to try and pin mining operations to nearest power plants, estimating hashes per watt based on FPGA or first gen ASIC miners, etc.
2) Bitcoin volatility has been going down every year, which makes sense given wider participation. Volatility is obviously different from price.
3) Bitcoin has had the capability for offchain transactions a long time now - using smart contracts with onchain settlement, so this really isn't a real concern any longer.
> 1) PoW is the only way that is actually decentralized. If you want decentralized power over the currency - PoS will never work on a long time horizon
There are proof systems that are not truly Proof of Work and are also not Proof of Stake. But sure, you're not wrong that proof of stake is not truly decentralized. Anyway, suffice to say I was not talking about Proof of Stake.
But you do bring up some thoughts that I've had previously, with regards to the energy waste in comparison to exactly what. Thanks for reminding me of it.
> There are proof systems that are not truly Proof of Work and are also not Proof of Stake.
Got any examples in mind? Because the only stuff that I can think of besides the two are convoluted Rube Goldberg methods of concealing what is actually PoS. Take any one of the goofy token based protein folding style coins as an example. Unless you are thinking of some kind of premined fedcoin, which is closer to a giftcard than a cryptocurrency.
I'll refrain from talking too much about it, as I'm actually somewhat associated with the project, so take that as a disclaimer. But the first example that comes to mind is Chia's Proof of Space (and Time) which requires some amount of initial computationally expensive work to be performed to create what is essentially your hashes on disk, and then your farm (their verbiage for "mine") can be ran off of external hard drives connected to a Raspberry Pi.
Anyway, I'll forgive you for maybe not knowing about it, as it's a much smaller and newer project than the likes of Bitcoin or Ethereum. It's a nice project to point out though, as you don't need to be a whale to be a player and sign blocks. I just run about 24 terabytes of plotted out space on spare drives that I had laying around that I rotated out of my Plex server. I still get a win every now and again, but my cost to get going was extremely minimal.
There's a lot of FUD spread around about Chia chewing through SSDs for the initial work portion, which is maybe somewhat true? I used a couple of SSDs to generate my plots that I now use for video game storage that are perfectly healthy, so my advice to people spreading that FUD would be to use higher quality SSDs that are rated for high TBW (terabytes-written.)
Ah, yeah I'm familiar with it - a PoW scheme, where the work is memory cell wear. I feel for anyone who missed the incredibly short period of time where bitcoin gpu mining pools were anything but distributed space heaters... but I don't see a future in trying to chase that dragon. At least it isn't a mindless hardfork cash grab, or an unintentional joke like that time that communist redditors came out with a coin that would randomly delete balances at rest.
... and this is why it is disconcerting that anyone else has any amount of influence in your life under a democracy. Half of everyone has a below average IQ, and many of those on the other side of the curve are just awful.
Smart people are the ones who made nukes and all this tech. Definitely people worth being suspicious of for sure. Don’t kid yourself thinking that intelligence is some magical panacea that makes people moral.
I'd take malice over stupidity - because at least it can be anticipated. If you were being charged with a crime you didn't commit, would you prefer that half the jury believe in ghosts and flying saucers - or a smaller fraction just be plotting on you?
According to who? Are you intentionally demonstrating how silly pro-Ukrainian propaganda is? Russia made the objectives very clear from the beginning: demilitarization and denazification. I don't think anyone aware of that could come away thinking "Yeah, so obviously they expect to accomplish that in a few weeks."
> According to who? Are you intentionally demonstrating how silly pro-Ukrainian propaganda is? Russia made the objectives very clear from the beginning: demilitarization and denazification. I don't think anyone aware of that could come away thinking "Yeah, so obviously they expect to accomplish that in a few weeks."
Considering that two Russian state run news outlets RIA and Sputnik automatically posted a victory article less then a week into the war and then quickly deleted it, I dare say they expected this war to not take very long.
Delusion on whose part? That was an explicitly stated objective. It has been a long known and well documented fact that Ukraine has an abundance of neo-nazis, a magnitude like nowhere else. So much so that the ADL had to run interference with the goofiest defense: "All those pictures of captured Ukrainian soldiers with swastikas? Ironic race-hate... they're just trolling guyz!"
> The objective has been genocide and this is what has been happening in some places.
Can you define genocide? Can you pinpoint a difference between Russian and Ukrainian? Considering that it was historically one country for centuries, Ukraine exists only for the last 30 years.
How comes that Russia wants to "genocide" Ukrainians, but most of the refugees from the war fled to Russia and live happily here?
You are either a troll or a Russian which believes the propaganda.
In any case you kind sir seem to be full of shit. :)
You are spewing the kind of lies that are typical of Russian propaganda. It might work on some people but I don't think that it will work here. Too much cleverness in one place.
BTW, I can't reply to the other two comments, I guess the authors banned me.
But my grand-grandparents are from Ukraine. Am I Russian or Ukrainian? I guess there are hundreds of thousands of people like me fighting on Russian side (as I said, we were one country for centuries). This is more a civil war, nothing like a genocide. Here many people consider it a civil war for sure. In Ukraine also, but they have no voice.
Also, if it is a genocide, why "bloodthirsty" Russians haven't killed all population of Crimea since 2014 - it would be so much easier. On the contrary, nobody was killed in Crimea.
It's a weird genocide. But only a "Russian troll" would understand.
I asked you to defined what is genocide and how you can call what's going on in Ukraine a "genocide".
You failed to reply to either question. Because it's clearly not a genocide. Even UN acknowledged that.
So, instead you're repeating propaganda lines you've read yesterday in WaPo or Bloomberg or BBC, in order to deflect the direct question. And call me "brainwashed".
> I asked you to defined what is genocide and how you can call what's going on in Ukraine a "genocide". [...] Because it's clearly not a genocide. Even UN acknowledged that.
No, it didn't. The most recent on the issue of genocide from the UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine:
“The Commission is also concerned about allegations of genocide in Ukraine. For instance, some of the rhetoric transmitted in Russian state and other media may constitute incitement to genocide. The Commission is continuing its investigations on such issues.”
I would also love for you to bring to market a price competitive replacement screen that is somehow backdoored. I don't know why you think that would be profitable at all, but I welcome the price pressure.
If you are backdooring the hardware, then the idea would be that the data would be worth it to you. Seems like it would make it easier to compete on price, since the value dynamic is skewed
You think it would be profitable to source a spec similar screen, market it, backdoor it, exfiltrate in a detection evasive manner what started out as a 3.5MB wide data stream... and build out the infrastructure to receive hundreds of thousands of backchannel connections? Really?
This has been a solved problem for a very long time. The nice thing about GPS satellites is that you know where they should be, and where they shouldn't, so long as your RTC is properly set and you've got a compass.
You are forgetting about the phased nulling. Military GPS has been including jammer detection in the firmware for a long time. I remember my handheld unit constantly annoying me anytime the IED jammer (which was waaaay more than 1 watt of rf) went active... 2005ish - it would simply mask the signal coming from that direction and continue to provide positioning data.
Add in coding gain over 1 second (a code 10 million chips long), and that gives you an extra 70dB. Now it's getting hard to jam.
Downside: This only works if your movement over the 1 second period is predictable, to a small part of a wavelength. If you're moving unpredictably, you'll have to give up a few db's of coding gain.
Continuing that analogy, in the case where a sky facing directional antenna is being used: the pilot is crouched under a sewer grate, shining a light at the soles of your feet, as you stare up into the night sky. If you are pumping enough power to overcome a directional antenna, than you are more in the realm of a directed energy weapon - which requires an insane amount of power (see inverse-square law).
> ...but cannot afford to pay them a living wage then that business should close.
There is actually a solution for that not involving burdensome regulation: capitalism. Crap business models get outcompeted.
> They're just exploiting workers...
Slavery is illegal, so these poor coffee slaves have bigger fish to fry.
> There was a time, not very long ago...
Before the US offshored all its heavy industry and proudly declared itself a "service based economy".
> ...even someone in an entry level position, still absolutely deserves a living wage for their time.
lol. There do exist people so useless that their labor doesn't even rate minimum wage. Now the bottom rungs of the ladder are gone for them, and they can't even get on the job training. The military figured this out a long time ago, which is what brought about the creation of IQ tests. Anyone below 80ish couldn't be trusted to do anything without constant direction.
> There do exist people so useless that their labor doesn't even rate minimum wage.
People who can't do a job should be replaced with someone who can. If a company still has to hire a warm body to do that job, those employees are automatically not useless. Every person who puts in 40 hours, no matter what their purpose, is entitled to a living wage. That doesn't make all labor equal. Highly skilled workers will always demand more money than what they'd need to live comfortably. With lower skilled jobs companies pay much less for labor, but in either case businesses still have to compensate employees for their time. Our time is very finite and extremely valuable. Honestly, our current 40 hour work week is demanding too much as it is. However useless you think someone's job is, if their company could get by without someone doing that work they probably would, but as long as somebody is doing the job and putting in the hours that employee deserves a living wage.
> If a company still has to hire a warm body to do that job, those employees are automatically not useless.
If a company doesn't hire that warm body to breakdown cardboard boxes or drag around dust mops, then it is useless. Remember the donut hole welfare talking point in the 90s? That is what this is.
> Every person who puts in 40 hours, no matter what their purpose, is entitled to a living wage.
Says you, about an arrangement that doesn't involve you. You should be careful what you wish for, because you could easily get exactly what you are demanding - and be very unhappy for it. Here is how that could happen: massive coordinated campaign to shift the consensus position for an acceptable standard of living, with a catchy hook - "You'll own nothing, and be happy"; resulting in people eating bugs, sleeping in concrete tube "pods", getting paid a dollar an hour, and dying alone.
> Says you, about an arrangement that doesn't involve you.
This is something that was also said by the judge in the 1907 Australian Harvester Decision which set a set a ‘living’ or ‘family’ wage.
It was ruled to allow an unskilled labourer to support a wife and three children, to feed, house, and clothe them.
This became the basis of the national minimum wage system in Australia that persists to this day, that a minimum wage should allow a 40 hour work week to feed, clothe and house a worker and reasonable immediate dependants.
> resulting in people eating bugs, sleeping in concrete tube "pods", getting paid a dollar an hour, and dying alone.
Well, here we are in Australia, 115+ years on and this is still yet to happen.
Any ideas on when your predicted outcomes will kick in?
>>> ...shift the consensus position for an acceptable standard of living...
>> Well, here we are in Australia, 115+ years on and this is still yet to happen.
> ...recently have COVID concentration camps?
I pointed to a shifting consensus position, he denied it, I pointed to an outrageous example of the warping of normalcy in his own backyard. That clear it up for you?
And the answer remains the same: a redefinition of what constitutes the standard of living is far more likely than "economic collapse"... it is already happening.
You're right about the importance of how we define a living wage, but it's ultimately workers that set that standard, as they are doing now, by fighting for it. You seem to recognize that it would be undesirable for workers to be forced to live uncomfortably, while at the same time suggesting that they shouldn't unionize to fight against that same outcome.
I can't take "forced to eat bugs/sleep in pods" seriously, but so far the only people trying to make sure I can't own things are the companies who insist on pushing everything into the cloud and/or encumbering it with DRM. I'm all for fighting that too.
> ...ultimately workers that set that standard, as they are doing now, by fighting for it.
Until it becomes a union shop, then it is the union organizers setting the standard - sitting between those in a position to pay and those seeking pay. These union bosses are surely paragons of incorruptibility with the workers' best interest driving their actions.
> I can't take "forced to eat bugs/sleep in pods" seriously...
Then you haven't been paying attention for the last 30 years. These are things that have been seriously discussed in the opinion molding class quite publicly for a long time now. Remember the push for "rewilding"? That didn't go away, it just got rebadged as "15-minute cities". The WEF now openly promotes a "Great Reset" where-in everything is effectively rented. Businesses that have been trying to get people to eat their bug food have complained about packaging requirements, as nobody wants their accurately labeled products. Not to worry though, "climate change" driven legislation seems to be attacking all the alternative sources of protein. These aren't conspiracy theories, it is a plain reading of publicly available documents put out by these people for years.
> ..the news isn't going to claim that without evidence.
You are joking, right? Or maybe your definition for "evidence" includes circular references, because that is what you get when "the news" is functionally captured but the government/uniparty.
