Da Comrade!!!

Hopefully these allegations will one day reach a court and your comrades can confront their accusers, state their defence, and then we'll see how it all plays out.

Who else is afraid of facing their accusers? People hiding in embassies....

If you mess with a countries governing institutions and get caught expect consequences. I am not suggesting giving anyone in any jurisdiction a pass here.

As for Russian hacking and your incredulity about how pervasive it is, do yourself a favor and read Muellers speaking indictment released months ago. Interesting reading, especially from a tech/geek perspective. The details of the allegations are highly detailed and highly specific and these people are not master hackers. https://www.documentcloud.org/...

So US were totally asking for it. Just like those Swedish women.

At some point the recent indictments will become unsealed and we will learn what actual grievances DOJ have with Assange. Though I am betting it has everything to do with Russian election meddling and his possible involvement with that, and nothing at all to do with damaging leaks like Manning materials.

Warms my heart to think that Chelsea Manning is free today to continue to live her life and Assange is where he is right now, stuck in self imposed prison under conditions that are in some circumstances far worse than many OECD prisions. Remember when he tweeted he would turn himself into the US if Manning is given clemancy? A lying, manipulative asshole through and through. And yet people continue to carry water for him.

That was before interfering with US election process was on the table. Maybe if Assange stuck with the original remit of providing a whistleblower safehaven instead of whatever the fuck he has been doing lately with Roger Stone et al, and limited himself to consensual sexual activity, he wouldn't be in self-imposed prison for 6+ years.

I don't believe this is correct.

The Specter attack doesn't let bad code map memory from other processes. It merely allows bad code to explore memory with the process it runs in. i.e. dodgy javascript mapping entire memory layout of the browser it is running in but strictly within the bounds of the same process. Still a pretty power attack

Maybe the OP meant unsharded. Not centralised.

A blockchain ledger in an entirely trustless network needs to be replicated on every participating node. This is a massive scalability issue. Imagine a sizable % of worlds economy running on any given crypto coin for 20+ years. The size of that ledger, the size of updates coming through every second would be staggering.

The traditional banking infrastructure is sharded. The ledger representing my personal bank account is not mixed in with ledgers of customers for a bank in other far flung countries. Alot of things need to evolve WRT crypto coins in order for them overcome/sidestep their present, by design, scaling issues, in this respect the OP is correct I believe.

The coin ecosystems currently is reminiscent of the wildcat banking era

Proponents of coins say this is a feature, not a bug.

Bitcoin is singled out because it is the oldest, most established, and if you naively believe that true value of all coins in circulation = spot price * number of coins, also the most valuable.

Sure other coins solve (or alleviate) some of the more glaring problems with bitcoin, yet other significant structural problems remain with the whole concept. One example: sometimes mediation is actually needed to resolve real disputes becasue we are afterall only human and bad actors are out there. The only way, by design, crypto coins do this is forking blockchains, a la The Dao and ETH/ETC split. Again proponents see this is a feature, not a bug.

Alot of wheel reinventing going on, done in ignorance of what has happened in the past WRT banking and finance. IT innovation in banking and finance is wild west stuff and an honest appraisal of things would be that noone knows what the fuck they are doing

I often pay the pizza man in Gold bullion. Though my preferred method of exchange is tulip bulbs.

Seems all reasonable and logical. Yet bitcoins utility as a currency of exchange of goods and services and severely limited. I'd sooner pay for a pizza with a 5kg rock I have to wheelbarrow around than a bitcoin transaction if the pizza man offered either currency of exchange (rocks vs bitcoins). block generation taking 10 mins, generally having to wait for a couple of blocks to be confident your block isn't going to be discarded due to a fork (the pizza mans problem), and no guarantee your txn will be accepted into the block unless it is sweetened with a fee (my problem)

for all practical purposes what is setting the price of bitcoin right now is substantially a) people wanted to park national currency and b) speculative investment into the believe that bitcoin price will continue to climb. Because of this, the OP's comments have substantial truth to them at least in context of bitcoin. Though recognise the same cannot be said for other currencies, fiat or not.

Google play movies and TV has had this tech since 2013. So more imitative then innovative.

About as insightful as the apper guy. Blockchain magic fixes everything. Also since when did the age of a company was a good predictor of an internal cowboy culture?

Further in the article it says:

So they book up 150m in revenue yearly. Their operating expenses are probably around 30m or so I;d guess so profit around 100m. Valuation is then x90 of profit. For what is essentially IRC/chat : a highly fungable service where the 5 million eyeballs pairs you have ($1800 per eyeball pair) are far from captured/entrenched and can flip to something else with minimal barrier. Sounds like a bad price to me.

Dammit, the guardian article is old too. So all that is one the table at this moment is comment from lawyer of accuser, who doesn't mince words. There is nothing I can find that contradicts this position.

I did check. All media outlets are reporting it as a rape investigation.

And here. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... we have this:

There is this tho which is really interesting. https://www.theguardian.com/me.... Content of this I agree strongly suggests there was no significant change in allegations leveled inspite of the R word being thrown around in the media over recent events so I need to retract my prior comments about this and revisit my thinking on this.

Thats a 6 1/2 year old article. Yes back then the allegations were sexual misconduct. My understanding is that allegations have now evolved to one allegation of rape.

Really it is hard to hell which narrative is the accurate one. Maybe one day he'll eventually make it to Ecuador live to a ripe old age and idly watch the world turn and we'll never be the wiser as to what alternative narrative was real. More likely at some point something will come to a head and he will end up in custody sometime in the near future. Being holed up in the embassy for 7 years, by his choice, I am sure he has contemplated these competing narratives and constantly reassessed their probability curves more times than everyone else on the planet combined and has consistently arrived at the position that the best place for himself is to stay within the embassy for now.