End of Bitcoin predicted, news at 11 after the game

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 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).

I'm not talking about Russia. The G4 is lobbying for un Security Council reform including adding more permanent member seats including Germany. Russia opposes this and energy dependence weakens Germany.

The timing of this could not be worse. Germany should admit now that they made a mistake and suspend the shutdown until better replacements are implemented.

More gas from Russia sets them up for further dependence and manipulation, preventing them from more forcefully calling Russia to stop illegal annexation in Ukraine and Crimea or more vocally lobbying for permanent UN security council membership.

An energy independent Germany makes Europe stronger and the world safer.

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 ... fees can be larger, money often still needs to be exchanged from Crypto to local currency with all kinds of associated other costs, and so on. How about "digital gold", a hedge against inflation? It is not clear Bitcoin is really doing any better here, and assets and investments to hedge against inflation is a pretty huge market; Bitcoin has very limited appeal over all the other options available. So again, what are the magical tangible useful applications that make Bitcoin so very valuable? It's been a decade, but there still isn't anything to show ...

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.

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.

I'd propose a compromise. Apple can run their store however they want, and charge whatever premium they'd like, but in exchange for that, anyone can start their own app store for iOS with their own rules. All that's needed from Apple is that it not disable the ability of people to install a competing app store -- in other words, that it not disable competition.

If we can manage to have options of Chloroquine, Hydroxycloroquine, AZ, Zinc, and one other treatment then I pretty sure I can put together a full controlled trial of the various combinations and find at least one that comes back as helping with a statistically significant p=0.05. This assumes, of course, that one skips the slightly more subtle multiple-trials Bonferroni statistical corrections, but that would be easy to do (its subtle math, and who really knows that much about stats anyway). If we can manage successfully produce a wide-scale controlled trial with positive results (and with 5 options and all combinations thereof, odds are that we can), I would be unsurprised to find a large amount of anecdotal evidence in favour of it, especially if you add in a little subjective validation, and extra attention paid to these particular drugs.

While it is nice to see an article discussing real issues in mathematics, it is a little sensationalist in places. While formalized proofs amenable to computer proof checkers are definitely a good thing, it isn't really the case that math is going to fall apart or turn out to be wrong any time soon. For starters a surprisingly large amount of mathematics has actually been fully formalized to that level: check out metamath for example. Second, while complex theorems at the edge of current research may potentially have an issue (it was issues with some of his proofs in very abstract homotopy theory and motives that made Voevodsky a convert to computer formalizable proofs), the vast majority of math is used routinely enough by enough mathematicians (and verified by students as exercises) that errors are at this point vanishingly unlikely. Finally, if by some bizarre circumstance something did go wrong, the result would be a patching of axioms assumptions to make most of the mathematics we have true again -- at the end of the day math has to be useful; as Russell said in Introduction Mathematical Philosophy:

We want our numbers not merely to verify mathematical formulæ, but to apply in the right way to common objects. We want to have ten fingers and two eyes and one nose. A system in which âoe1â meant 100, and âoe2â meant 101, and so on, might be all right for pure mathematics, but would not suit daily life. We want âoe0â and âoenumberâ and âoesuccessorâ to have meanings which will give us the right allowance of fingers and eyes and noses. We have already some knowledge (though not sufficiently articulate or analytic) of what we mean by âoe1â and âoe2â and so on, and our use of numbers in arithmetic must conform to this knowledge.

The practical applications of mathematics to science and engineering have been so rich and so effective that any new "corrected" theory of mathematics that didn't recapitulate the same results would simply be ignored or rejected. We would instead modify axioms, or logic itself until we could regenerate much of the mathematics we have.