> Signal is designed to keep your messages safe in transit which it does quite well.

Its actually quite horrible at that. There is no way to view, double check, or directly share public keys. They are always delivered OTA and always with 100% trust and authority given the the centralized phone carriers. They even automatically accept key rollovers.

That means you have zero secure way to send encrypted messages using signal. For government or law enforcement, the messages are always clear text whenever they want. For casual non-government attackers, they will try to access your phone because they cannot tap the carriers, and signal doesnt defend local attacks.

Signal, as an app for secure comms, is essentially useless.

> An entire nation state with a $20 trillion GDP and the world's largest military.

Thats not how "backing" works. Backing is when you promise something wont lose value by offering to exchange it for some other asset in a fixed amount.

You arent promised any fraction of the US's "GDP" or any of its military might to buttress the value of the dollar. In fact military spending depletes the value of the dollar and certainly doesnt offer any guarantees to maintain its value.

There are no guarantees that the dollar will hold any specific trade value. In fact, the government actually guarantees that the dollar will lose value, with a loose goal of losing 2% of its value per year, but a recent reality of losing more than 10% year over year.

So to be fair, the dollar is very much backed by nothing at all, loses its value faster than nearly any other asset, and is directly burdened by the cost of the US military.

> I love how /. likes to label me a troll. There is nothing troll about my post, neither in intent nor wording. In fact, there are several clever references and I thought it was a good comment. But whatever ./. Never change.

Slashdot is full of really old techies, like geriatric. It gave up on attracting new people decades ago. (for example, its written in perl) Basically, this place is social media for the first internet bubble.

While in the early days those people may have held a few new ideas (linux, open source stuff, web, technology), by now they are firmly entrenched and wish the world would stop changing. For example they mostly arent too happy with the rise of javascript and python.

They pile in hard to attack bitcoin in particular. I'm not sure what it is about bitcoin that they find so scary, but its probably the anarchic decentralized nature of it.

Most slashdotters are leftists and believers in the big government narrative (min wage, high taxes, AGW, regulation, NN, etc)

So, if you want to talk about stacking sats, this isnt really the best place to do it unless you like having a very hostile peanut gallery.

> Encryption isn't forever. What might be nearly uncrackable now won't be in 20 years.

RSA was invented in the 70's, and in wide use by the 90's.

Elliptic curve cryptography was invented in the 80's, and in wide use by the early 2000's.

3DES was standardized in 1995, and saw widespread use early

AES was standardized on in 2001

All of these are unbreakable today, even 3des which only has some theoretical weaknesses which might one day be exploitable for some limited use cases.

20 years is certainly not long enough to break all modern encryption, not by half.

And, its still entirely possible these algorithms will stand the test of time far longer.

Quantum cryptanalysis is not known for certain to be implementable, and may not be.

Without that, there is no mathematical basis yet know to invalidate RSA or ECC. And as far as we known AES has no meaningful weaknesses.

> Javascript/ECMAScript, Typescript, Angular (template and class library), HTML, the browser DOM, Node.js, CSS, HTTP, REST, JSON (really a subset of JS), RxJS, express, Elasticsearch or SQL.

In short, you need to know javascript and sql.

Maybe a tiny bit of bash here and there.

Its not a bad idea, and not really that complicated.

At night, there is not enough demand for energy, so the grid has to scale down generation somehow. In general, power plants not good nor efficient at doing so, and this requirement affects the profitability of power plants. Sitting idle, they can break down or freeze over, and not be available when needed.

You also have some power which is highly variable, such as wind power, and it can overproduce when power is not needed. Right now its given crazy preference due to green priority, but in a more efficient and fair market overgeneration from wind should push down spot price instead; not force reliable generators to shut down and vent.

Some kinds of plants do really inefficient things, like venting gasses unburnt. But there is no way to operate a grid without them, unless you accept regular total grid outages. There is also no good way to store power, its very much use it or lose it.

So there is a very specific problem, and also an obvious answer: If there was a way to sell the energy at night, at a lower price, to a customer who is very price sensitive, but willing to buy nearly unlimited quantities of power when its cheap, that would give you an ideal power sink for excess capacity.

This ideal consumer of power would step in when prices are reduced because of overcapacity, and step out just as quickly when prices rise, being very willing to nearly completely shut down when prices are high. This ideal customer makes the grid much more stable, and much more efficient to operate. In effect; it gives the power grid a way to convert excess power into an economic good instead of waste.

Bitcoin miners are exactly what the grid needs, on multiple levels.

This sounds incredibly stupid; are they anthropomorphizing the internet to be some kind of alternative meatspace?

"Launching a cyber attack" isnt something that specifically targets a nation state, nor something that specifically comes from one, nor does it in particular cost anything, nor does it specifically have any kind of specific defense or even offense. Well designed infrastructure just isnt vulnerable to attack, period.

Pretty much everything connected to the internet is subject to constant attack, not necessarily from any fault other than its own flaws.

Their money would be better spent eliminating flaws, such as anything built on or with microsoft windows, rather than trying to do a pointless and meaningless "counter attack".

You seem to be reaching a little. FWIW, most btc transactions are not done on L1, so the vast majority we can never see. Realistically, there are likely more btc transactions than swift in a sober analysis. L1 transactions are final settlement, each of which could represent thousands of transactions.

> except transaction cost for ACH is about 0.

For individual consumers yes, but if you want to be setup to receive ACH at scale, you are going to be paying some basis points.

Nothing is free.

From an engineering POV, bitcoin is no different than scaling ACH or swift, other than the final settlement platform being decentralized.

Some CC transactions are for bitcoin.

Remember; bitcoin is a settlement network, more like ACH or swift.

Comparing SWIFT vs bitcoin is apple to apples.

But CC is not comparable; first off CC networks can actually move bitcoin; so obviously its a higher level payment network and not a settlement network.

Thats why you have to pay for your credit card purchases again later, with a real settlement payment; the original CC transactions were not final.

There is a reason nobody bothers with that.

Making the joins explicit means you code doesnt break if the table is restructured.

You want the joins to be explicit to also inform the person reading the code 10 years later of what is happening, and for it not to be magic.

Magic join syntax would be the first thing I disabled, it is was a standard feature of any db.

> Their "security concerns" are ignorant bullshit.

Except they are not. Most fax machines are not running ms windows, so the chances of intercept come down to the phone company being compromised or someone directly tapping phone lines.

Whereas most email is read on MS windows machines, most of which are backdoor-ed most of the time, and usually by multiple parties.

Pretty much a night-and-day security difference in favor of the fax. Of course, email can be of much higher security levels, but you would require to get all parties setup with GPG and linux first, which isnt common yet.

If their government wants to ban faxes but not lose security, they would do well to ban windows and macs first.

Or they declare bankruptcy and you are left empty handed.

> Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Agreed? Agreed.

Not agreed. The earth is clearly cooling despite the high co2. Its time to re-examine your premises.

There is a strong movement to increase CO2, if we can, perhaps as high as 1200ppm. It wont be able to stop global cooling, but it has other benefits.

The company single-handedly responsible for normalizing the idea that electronics can catch diseases, and for enabling terrorism to attack infrastructure is now moving to get involved in voting?

How about hell no?

> he will also have to get 51% of the bitcoin computers to use that special case on their computers.

Exactly; when it comes to things like thing, there is no court in the world with the power to levy such a judgement.

Even attempting to do so would be laughable.