Apparently he took out a "Flash Loan" and borrowed the tokens. Once he executed his trades to grab the money he bought up enough tokens to repay the loan and all was fine.
It seems it is totally normal for 18-year-olds to take out multi-million dollar loans with no collateral to back them in the crypto world? I feel like this points to a whole lot of other potential problems in the crypto/DeFi world.
You only need a something over 50% of the mining power -- as long as they can add new blocks with no Assange transactions at a faster pace than than the rest of the mining pool they can keep the longest chain Assange donation free. A 51% attack isn't just for double spending, and simply blocking particular transactions is the kind of thing you might be able to get tacit agreement for; and it does only have to be tacit if you are fine with a few transactions getting through every now and then (which also helps hide any collusion).
Hell, he is polling at less than half of Rick Lynn Perry, who is not the former Governor Rick Perry but a "senior desktop technician" currently contracted out by a staffing agency to work for Lockheed-Martin.
It solves the problem of "where do I go if Powers That Be decide to boot me off traditional wire transfer systems". Like has already happened in case of Julian Assange and his legal defense fund.
It swaps in some different powers that be. If Wikileaks published something that embarrassed people behind a bunch of the major miner consortiums and they decided to just not include any bitcoin transfers to Assange or Wikileaks in blocks they mined that could severely limit or completely stop such transfers, depending on how big a proportion of the mining pool they pissed off. And let's be clear, there are a very small number of mining consortiums that control a very large fraction of the total hashing power; this is a lot more possible than it may appear at first blush.
Hell, even the old school powers that be could put a severe crimp in things if they were sufficiently motivated. If such a power decided to lean on the mining consortiums they could likely get the result they want with either enough bribes or a big enough stick (and they would have both).
There is real innovation happening in the space, and as it all transforms from pure speculation into tangible, useful applications and assets, prices rise.
The biggest current (last couple of years) price rises have been in Bitcoin, which is over a decade old now. Since it has been around so long, but the price is still going up a lot, presumably that is happening because of "tangible useful applications". So what are those applications? As a currency it has stalled, not least due to price volatility. Despite occasional bursts of announcements of retailers accepting Bitcoin, the number of retailers actually accepting Bitcoin remains very small, and often quite niche. Bit coin is not taking over as a currency. How about Bitcoin as a means of fast, easy, cross border money transfer (remittances). In the early days of Bitcoin is was widely touted that Western Union was going to get crushed by Bitcoin. It turns out Western Union is doing just fine. And over the major money transfer corridors WU fees are often lower than Bitcoin. Other major remittance agencies are also doing just fine using traditional methods. If any service is getting squeezed out of the remittance industry it is crypto
Bitcoin is cheap: It's worthless as a currency!
Bitcoin is expensive: It's a bubble!
Bitcoin prices are volatile: It's useless as a currency, it's too volatile!
Bitcoin prices are stable: It's dead! Nobody is buying!
The first mistake is evaluating bitcoin by its "price". Assuming the key is that it is a currency the real question is the volume of actual transactions going on in bitcoin.
What is the amount of good purchased with bitcoin? It certainly isn't huge. How about remittances? Money transfer was one of the big use cases. It turns out that, despite a lot of hype and years to make a difference, bitcoin in particular and crypto-currencies in general, have made practically no dent in the remittances market. How about total volume of transactions? That's certainly higher, but how much of that is speculation trading based on the price of bitcoin? Hard to say, but surely we would see higher amounts of goods purchases and remittances if it really mattered.
So, instead of looking at prices, if we look at utility how is bitcoin doing? It's been a decade and it still hasn't had any significant uptake as currency -- not on any scale that justifies the hype anyway. Might it still be useful and gain traction in the future? Sure, it's possible. But the outlook isn't that great.
There are all sorts of restrictions to keep small players from taking money from the big players. They're always touted as tools to keep the ignorant safe, or to keep the market stable.
To be fair many of the rules and regulations did develop to make investors safer, or keep stability (just look at the fraud, shading messes and instability that has occurred on some of the crypto exchanges, especially in the early says, when there were few if any rules or regulations).
The problem comes from the fact that the big players have full time jobs and and billions of dollars to pick apart the rule book, split hairs, find loopholes, and dodge enforcement, so that, one way or another, the rules don't apply to them. The little guys, well they have actual jobs, no time, and little money, so they have to just follow the rules.
The other part of the lag in death figures is reporting lag -- it takes a while for death certificates to be filed, numbers to be collated at the county and then state level, and finally passed up to the CDC and other organisations tracking such things. In practice that can be anywhere from several days, to a couple of weeks and varies state to state. All up that probably adds another week of so to the lag, but with pretty high variance.
A 100mhz might not seem like much until you give that to 12 cores and 24 threads.
Well you're not, at 12 cores loaded you're thermally limited and tests show no difference to speak of at all. You get a slight boost to single threaded performance but overall this is the dullest upgrade in ages and creating a whole new XT line for it is silly. Should have just called it 3910X, 3810X and 3610X, at least then they'd get points for honesty.
Oddly enough I care less that China knows about my personal life than the United States. as China has no jurisdiction over me and what I say or feel. America while I am suppose to be protected by the first amendment, doesn't mean there are people with power who can actually make my life difficult.
Jurisdiction is not the only kind of power. China has repeatedly shown that they don't care if you're an American speaking out in America, if you're badmouthing China they will do what they can to make your life miserable. Of course they'll wrap their demands in weasel words and so will the corporate chain and your business partners but the real message is "STFU or we'll lose our business with China". Like any negotiations will be mysteriously stuck in a quagmire that'll equally mysteriously resolve itself once you're relieved of your position or the partnership is terminated.
Indeed but Taiwan is not exactly completely independent either. China can turn those screws if it needs to.
To be honest Taiwan's problem is that the had delusions of grandeur, in 1971 when they lost their seat on the UN Security Council they themselves strongly refused any division of China and the creation of an independent Taiwan. Instead they forced it into a vote of who was the "legitimate" owner of China's seat and long story short they lost. If they wanted independence back then, they probably would have gotten it. Their problem now is that China has flipped the script on them, because they were pouting over the loss of the mainland China they never cut their losses and got their independence so now China wants them to answer to Beijing.
They don't realistically have much political or public support in Taiwan though. China is pressuring every other nation to recognize China's claim to Taiwan if they want to have relations with China, but that only makes it a hostile territory they could occupy at great cost - and probably not without an actual shooting war with an army supplied by the US military. My guess is they're eyeing the situation in Hong Kong waiting for the right moment to say status quo is no longer an option, it's either independence or submission and we choose independence. They must see that there's no future in trying to appease China.
Write no, compile yes. He's pulling code from all the subsystem maintainers (lieutenants) to create the master branch. And they again are mostly pulling other people's patches. They're supposed to make sure it's clean and tested before it reaches Linus but that's not always what happens. If it breaks or he finds bad code it goes back down the chain of command again so they can fix their code again and resubmit.
In rocket science I'd say 10+ launches is well into established already. The Falcon Heavy got their military certification after just three launches. The SLS is still planning to launch crew on their second flight. I suspect your sig is very relevant here:
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
My guess is one faulty part or installation brought the mission down. This was not a violent failure, the rocket just lost engine power and stopped. Which means it's probably the QA department and not the design department that needs to get to work.
I think the most important thing I learned, though, isn't related to either of those fields, and isn't nearly as complicated as either. I've done plenty of dumb things. Most, probably nearly all, of my fuck-ups have been based on short-term thinking, doing what I feel like doing in the moment. (...) I hope to continue to teach my daughter (and myself) the value of delayed gratification, of doing things that are going to make you happy NEXT week, next year, or five years from now, as opposed to what we feel like doing right this moment.
Funny, I wish I had more of the first bit. Not my fuck-ups but the best times are those where I've been living in the moment and let go of all the rational, dull downers like that this junk food isn't good for me or that partying this hard will give me a hangover tomorrow or that this vacation is burning a hole in my wallet. Like I know that I'm overall fairly rational and got my shit in order, can't I get a break when I have a few excesses without that nagging party pooper in the back of my head. It's okay to have a plan for where you want to be five years from now but it's also important to accumulate happy memories on the way.
Bad employees also tend to think they're irreplaceable and they're as common as bad managers. The difference is that bad employees are the manager's problem, a bad manager is your problem. Unless you become the manager, then you see the other side of that equation. I don't mind taking on a tech lead position but if I went into middle management I'd probably end up strangling someone. I have the feeling I'd be one of those technically bright but horribly micromanaging bosses who'd rather be doing my underlings job than doing mine. Which would be mostly herding cats, running interference and communicating upwards, downwards and sideways in the hierarchy.
This place just isn't big enough for all of us. We've got to find a way off this planet.
