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Comment not just the most charitable view (Score 1) 119

it's the most realistic one.

Thanks to two things: 1: that there is no use case story for bitcoin except "moon," and 2: that it has been from the very start highly centralized in the only way that matters - distribution - Bitcoin will likely reach an exchange-manipulated $100,000 at some point close to it's final retreat into permanent status as a lesson in bad economics.

Comment Re:Where did get this idea (Score 2) 108

The problem is that keys used today are weak - and the ones used in the past even weaker.

In 2030 it will be trivial for a nation state to forge an email sent in 2020 that matches today's DKIM, and for a bedroom hacker to do it for an email sent in 2010.

Encryption that we tend to use is good enough for now - but not for 20 years time. In the 2032 election when Donald Jr is dukeing it out with Ocasio-Cortez, it will be easy for Russia, China, Nigeria, or probably even 4chan, to fake some SKIM signed emails from 2016 showing they actually planned to secretly take over the country in a Kang vs Kodos way.

Comment Re:Still no Babylon 5 (Score 1) 118

But was it protected? Did they have lights or ladders or people just outside the 4:3 safe part which were cropped out in post? I believe that was a key reason TNG couldn't be done widescreen (sure you can recreate widescreen CGI, but while the actual film may have been available 16:9, it wasn't filmed 16:9 safe.

Comment Digital currency != cryptocurrency (Score 1) 30

Despite the messaging that certain types of crypto advocates have been trying to use for years to confuse the public, cryptocurrency is not synonymous with digital currency. Central bank-issued digital currency is just regular currency minus the printed paper.

It is explicitly centralized and traceable and its advocates do not pretend otherwise, unlike cryptocurrency which is propped up on a lot of decentralization hype that is wishful at best and deceitful at worst, and specifically in the case of Bitcoin - a veneer of pretend anonymity.

Comment Re:With this amount of money (Score 1) 147

There are already several companies who do this commercially, using hundreds of ordinary-looking nodes scattered throughout the network to figure out where transactions are initially broadcast from using statistical analysis and timing attacks. Also, a lot of insiders know each other and aren't always careful who they brag/complain to or sleep with.

Comment Re: All money can be disappeared at will (Score 1) 82

> it's all make-believe anyway

Even if you have a system to determine it, it is still entirely make-believe.

A "system" serves solely to increase and sustain the total energetic commitment to that belief, rendering its signal correspondingly more expensive to revert to noise.

A massive stone pyramid is much more of a commitment to a set of social values represented by that monument, than is a speech given about those values.

But the speech, being infinitely lighter, can be carried everywhere, by anyone, and thus grows in strength with greater distance traveled, while even the largest monuments soon sink below the horizon.

All forms of money strike a tradeoff somewhere between these two semiotic extremes.

Comment Not "latest" candidate by a long shot (Score 1) 53

Bitcoin folklorists have identified Adam Back with the Nakamoto character for at least 7 or 8 years, but he's only one of several people connected to it through similarly circumstantial associations.

If Nakamoto is still around, Bitcoin is in serious danger of being unambiguously exposed as a de facto centralized currency, due to his disproportionate degree of influence over future design decisions and his enormous personal holdings of coin, which are generally assumed "frozen" and thus a constraint on all users' exposure to liquidity. If that fig leaf were to fall Bitcoin's carefully curated illusion of decentralization would be seriously, if not fatally compromised.

Comment "my censorship can beat up your censorship" (Score 1) 682

a message of domination is the actual rationale motivating support for this. the rallying cry of authoritarians is merely to appeal to superior force, no matter how this appeal is disguised. the appeal to existing force is a quintessentially small-c conservative posture. it's a heuristic that simplifies so much expensive and frustrating contemplation.

Twitter

Trump Threatens To Shut Social Media Companies After Twitter Fact Check (bloomberg.com) 682

President Donald Trump threatened to regulate or shutter social media companies -- a warning apparently aimed at Twitter after it began fact-checking his tweets. From a report: In a pair of tweets issued Wednesday morning from his iPhone, Trump said that social media sites are trying to silence conservative voices, and need to change course or face action. There is no evidence that Trump has the ability to shut down social media networks, which are run by publicly traded companies and used by billions of people all over the world.

Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen," he said Wednesday. In a second tweet, he added: "Just like we can't let large scale Mail-In Ballots take root in our Country." He didn't cite any platforms by name, but it was plainly a response after Twitter added a fact-check label to earlier Trump tweets that made unsubstantiated claims about mail-in voting. It's the first time Twitter has taken action on Trump's posts for being misleading.

Comment If there ever was a case for an overcorrection... (Score 1) 583

...a demonstrably fatal, contagious and frequently asymptomatic airborne virus with little hard data available to assess its total threat potential would be it.

This lockdown amounts to a long overdue pandemic fire drill for the planet, and the amortized costs will be well spent when the next one comes along.

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