How internet mercenaries do battle for authoritarian governments
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There were books in the 1980's predicting such a cyberpunk future in years around now. 2019 would have sounded right in place in such stories. Cybersecurity consultants gone rogue, hiding out in Russia. Hackers turned into CIA assets, playing head games with ex-soldiers who opt to change their gender. Corporations and tin-pot governments hiring hackers to do surveillance. Eccentric billionaires seeking to jump-start space industry and the colonization of Mars. We are in the 1980's cyberpunk future. It's just that the names, time scales, and pay scales have changed.
Just get rid of a few details like RAM being a valuable pocketable item and revolvers with Xenon weaponlights being used by mercenaries, and Neuromancer holds up kinda ok.
You have to remember this was the 80's. Revolvers being more reliable was still a dying mainstream-ish viewpoint back then with police/mercenaries, arguably appropriate for a grizzled veteran character with very high marksmanship skills. Xenon was the best weapon-light technology widely available.
It's more that Gibson couldn't reasonably be expected to have forseen the tremendous strides LEDs and Li-ion batteries have taken since back then.
Even Hong Kong eventually found its Kowloon Walled City unnecessary. Humans prefer not to live so densely if they don't need to.
Futurists have done reasonable calculations showing we could have 100 billion on Earth alone, if we have fusion power.
It would have to take some kind of massive program making hundreds of millions of extra babies per year in test tubes and implanting them in surrogates (or machine surrogates, if technology allows). I could see pseudo-religious motivations for such a thing (allowing every possible child to exist), or secular motivations (needing a vastly more productive and space-faring population, or creating a new form of egalitarianism by inundating births with masses of randomly-but-equally birthed).
But that is social-science fiction on top of science fiction - the chances are slim.
Larry Niven predicted flash mobs. But instead of teleportaion, we had/have it through telecommunications technology.
It's cool that the Blade Runner name works for those things.
The hashrate is determined by the price of bitcoin, the price of electricity, and the price of ASICs.
That's the price of bitcoin, not the cost. Price is what you can sell it for, cost is what you can make it for. The cost is determined by the price of the inputs, which are electricity and ASICs.
So in this case, the price determines the cost, not the other way around. People will invest money into creating bitcoins until their cost of acquisition equals the price they can sell for, and this effort purely drives up the cost without generating any additional bitcoins.
What's up with Snowden? I find it very hard to believe that Russia doesn't know where he is.
One leading theory was he was being saved as a bargaining chip. But don't you think he would have been traded for sanctions relief early on? Presumably his value to the US diminishes over time.
Frankly I don't believe it at all. I think, Russia knows very well where he is. ;)
But as big as he is, a trade over sanctions will not happen, he's still too small of a fish. Maybe they'll trade him with a few Russian spies over time, but then Russia would lose some sort of street cred in those circles.