Well the point is with Bitcoin you don't have to trust RBC to not freeze and/or abscond with your $1B.
If somebody breaches your Canadian bank account you get your money back. If somebody steals your money from your bitcoin wallet you start all over again.
Canada’s banking industry avoided the Great Recession only because Canada did not have a housing market reset. Prices continued upward unabated, along with household debt which is now among the highest in the world. They kicked the can down the road, but didn’t avoid the issue permanently.
If a Canadian bank runs off with your money you have an actual entity to pursue in court. With Bitcoin you're pretty much SOL.
The CDIC insured limit is not money to be reimbursed by the bank, it's by the CDIC in case of bank failure. There are other avenues to take first to recover your funds.
Canadian banks are stable because our regulators do not allow them to assume as much risk as banks in other jurisdictions.
Want a mortgage at the current rate? Great you must qualify at 2% points higher.
Canada has some of the highest banking fees.
English has so many words that depend on context. Polish? An act or cleaning or a people..
Context matters...
I'm not too upset it's harder to qualify for a mortgage here because it saved us from getting hit even harder ten years ago.
I've been banking for about 15 years and never had much to complain about. Sometimes I get an NSF fee from TD, I just call them and they reverse it as a 'one-time courtesy.' I've lost count of how many times I've done that and they've never said no. My credit card has no yearly fee and I pay $15 a month for my chequing account with unlimited transactions and E-transfers. You can go cheaper but I use debit and e-Transfer a lot. That's the sum of my personal banking fees.
For my business account I use FirstOntario's eChequing account with no monthly fee. Only thing I ever pay on this account is a $1.50 e-Transfer fee when I pay myself or others. I did have to buy shares when I opened the account as it's a credit union but they were only $25. The shares have appreciated by $10 in the few years I've had the account so I'm not complaining.
Really not that bad for me. What's your situation?
1k transactions and even 1k * 1k transactions are so small relative to this amount that the GP’s point still stands. This is not a very useful way of storing the value.
You're not always able to do that with the traditional banking system. Scammers were able to steal millions from corporations using wire transfers, and they weren't able to reverse them.
Insurance in this example has two functions:
1. Protecting you from losses
2. Applying standards to Bitcoin exchanges etc to help prevent losses. A good example of this is fire insurance. An insurance company will require a potential customer to have fire alarms, use specific materials etc before they decide to cover that company's building.
Then the insurance is really cheap... Either the insurance companies systems stay secure and there are no losses, or the insurance company is breached, and they claim bankruptcy...
The border was controlled by corrupt Russian guards that would steal things of value. You could pass the border occasionally to visit family on the other side, but it was risky to take anything.
He put all his wealth into bitcoin, memorized his wallet seed words like his life depended on it, crossed the border with nothing, and then regenerated his wallet on the other side.
I thought that was pretty cool.
I.e. to use an exchange like binance or coinbase, I have to link my US ID. So if a government actor were after me, they could easily find out about my cold wallet by viewing my transactions, no?. I guess I could -not- divulge the seed words, but that's assuming I'm not being accosted/tortured either.
I would have to use a btc atm (none near me...), swap a visa gift card for btc (and take a ~10-20% haircut...) or find someone to trade cash for coins, which is its own issue.
If you have a billion dollars, you have very little incentive to work outside the system. The system will work for you.
To be fair, debit cards and wire transfers have a similar issue. However there are still ways to get your money back in some situations.
That's why the total "hash rate" (the computational effort spent by all the participating miners) is in direct relation to the perceived value of the currency.
Your coins have been transfered to Mr Evil in block number 6000.
Simply publish a transaction which pays your $1B in bitcoins to another address you control with a $200M transaction fee.
Any rational miner who sees this will decide to 'undo' Mr Evils transaction and all that occur after it by acting as if those transactions don't exist. They will mine your new transaction as part of a new block number 6000, and pocket the $200M for themselves. However, they will need to make sure their block number 6000 remains part of the chain.
By the time they've done this, block number 6001 and 6002 have been mined on top of Mr Evils transaction in block 6000. That means someone must mine block 6001 and 6002 again, at significant computatonal cost. To do that, the miner who mined the new block 6000 can incentivise others to work on top of their block by paying the 200M to themselves, but again with a big fee.
The above only works if all miners are rational, and have coded this strategy into their mining pools. Are there examples of this happening in practice? (There will be public evidence of it in the blockchain).
If you think that a bank transfer has less risk, you are not looking in all the right places :)
That's not flavor.
Image the following comment: "You better buy a good bike lock, else you're at risk of having it stolen by a black man."
A comment like the one above would spark near universal outrage at the commenter, and with good reason. It's racist, and the original comment here is the same. Unnecessarily racist.
As such, a more accurate comparison than "black man stealing a bike" would be to something like a "Nigerian scammer," which is an archetype I don't think most of us have a problem with. Other examples I never see complaints about: "Russian hacker," "American imperialist," etc.
This isn't really true on it's own, and besides, isn't even a good faith interpretation. In an America where rural Asian-ethnicity people are facing discrimination because of covid being called "Chinese Virus," I think it's bold to claim that the concept of China as a country and Chinese as a racial heritage are not conflated.
How is this not true? Genuinely curious.
> In an America where rural Asian-ethnicity people are facing discrimination because of covid being called "Chinese Virus…"
That's because of the specific context of who is saying "Chinese Virus," who their audience is, and why they're saying it.
This context is different. Nobody on Hacker News who encounters the phrase "Chinese hacker" is going to suddenly start discriminating against Chinese people, any more than we discriminate against Nigerians despite the fact that "Nigerian scammer" is a cliche in tech circles.
I'd delve deeper beyond my comment because there's a lot of reasons I'm not the greatest source, not the least of which I'm just some white american dude with a comically terrible grasp of ONE dialect/language of Chinese and a wikipedia sourced knowledge of Chinese history.
Here's my understanding: Chinese can refer to many things that have their origin in what we call Mainland China these days. Chinese Language. Chinese History. Chinese Food. Chinese territory. Chinese government. Chinese people (citizens). Chinese people (ethnicity). The word is super-descriptive in that way, because that region, for three thousand years, was "homogenous" in a convenient way for propagandists and the history writers throughout time.
But if you delve in, you can see that it's truly absurd to refer to anything as Chinese. Chinese language - well, sure, Mandarin, right? But only because the seat of government is in Beijing, and it just picked that flavor. Nearly every city in the borders of the PRC have their own distinct dialect, or straight up separate language. The written system was invented in the 1950s based off a historical system that didn't just write Chinese, it wrote Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and also every language in between (Guangzhounese aka Cantonese, Shanghainese, Japanese sub-languages, etc). Which is "Chinese writing?" Which language is "Chinese language?" And what about when the Huns were around? What about when the Mongolians ruled it all? Was that "Chinese?" (a PRC censor would say ABSOLUTELY NOT and probably say you were treasonous to the harmony of Chinese culture for even suggesting it).
Chinese food - different in every city.
Chinese government - which one, the Democratic one that is seated in Taiwan, or the Autocratic one seated in Beijing? Or the City State of Hong Kong? Or the dead kingdoms?
I'm trying to indicate here why trying to say "Chinese is a nationality, not race" is a silly thing to say when Chinese can mean so many things that so say it's "not" something is a hard thing to prove. On top of all this, walk up to your average American and say "Chinese" and these subtleties are completely lost - EVERYONE knows what you mean by Chinese, well, it's Orange Chicken and Communism! That's what the American education system teaches us, after all, or at least, what it taught me growing up in rural America.
Ask Chinese people, or Taiwanese people (which I have done), what it means to be a Chinese person, and you'll likely get a very careful separation of the concept of Chinese person from the PRC. Many Taiwanese people would consider themselves Chinese if they had the opportunity to ensure the distinction was being made that this didn't mean they were pro-Beijing, simply that their history and culture shared or was identical to many people that happened to be born in Beijing.
> Nobody on Hacker News who encounters the phrase "Chinese hacker" is going to suddenly start discriminating against Chinese people,
Yesterday there was a thread about the experience of Black programmers in tech and I got into some discussions there that have destroyed my ability to believe in a sentence like this. There are avowed racists on this site. I went through the history of one who danced the blade well enough to occasionally fire off comments about how African people are genetically predisposed to lower IQ, without getting flagged/banned. This is a website like any other, a good one with better rules and moderation, yes, but an internet breeding ground anyway.
The original point was Chinese are not a race they are a nationality.
You both are wrong.
Chinese are not a race. Chinese are not a nationality.
The Han Chinese are a nationality. China is made up of many nationalities.
The important story now is the government of China is forcing birth control on a minority population called the Uighurs.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia...
Save your outrage for something meanful. Real minority populations are being oppressed and your worried about your fellow Americans insulting them more by blocking ip ranges that China owns that military style hacking is coming from? If that's the case I would suggest you care more about trying to make yourself look a certain way (by putting other Americans in their place) than helping minority populations in great need. The next generation is watching, they will demand real action vs virtual signaling.
Deplatforming racists isn't censorship.
> Save your outrage for something meanful.
Big words coming from someone that didn't mention that Black Lives Matter even once in their comment, and also didn't do anything to bring more attention to North Korean concentration camps, and hasn't even provided a donation link to an African farming initiative. See where I'm going with this?
> Real minority populations are being oppressed
Like ethnically Chinese people in the USA, or really just Asian people in American in general that get lumped under a random Chinese umbrella, for example?
> they will demand real action vs virtual signaling.
What's your point? What is anybody on this website doing besides "virtue signalling?" We're talking. That involves our virtues being put on display. Despite what conservative detractors might think, saying "you're virtue signalling" doesn't automatically win a debate any more than calling someone an SJW does. Yup, I have virtues, yup, I'm telling you what they are. Yup, I like social justice. You don't?
Isn't deplatforming racist because it creates a segregated society. Do you really want to separate society based on race? Soon we'll have schools for racist only. People will complain they when they get higher marks.
You think you like the idea of social justice? What you are doing is social judgement. Bullying.. using your power over someone less powerful to make yourself feel better.
Many causes need attention. Ignoring them all and pretending to care when people are around doesn't help anyone. The next generation is going to call you fake.
Unsurprising.
"Free speech activists" inevitably show off their actual value system.
> Isn't deplatforming racist because it creates a segregated society.
Racism is a choice, race isn't. Racists segregate themselves from society by believing that some humans are subhuman. Can't exactly share a well with someone that believes you're an animal, can you? Certainly can't have them in a jury.
> Do you really want to separate society based on race?
Transparent strawman argument lobbed at me most times I engage an "all lives matter" type. Black lives matter = white lives don't matter, right?
> People will complain they when they get higher marks.
Why would racists get higher marks? As racists they disproportionately fail to correct for cognitive biases - they are therefore either stupid or have a mental disorder.
> You think you like the idea of social justice? What you are doing is social judgement.
The SJW bit was fairly obvious bait that you bit straight onto. Something wrong with shaming racists? Bullying the bully? And today I learned, asking a bully to leave, is apparently bullying.
> Many causes need attention.
Again, you fail to address why you are spending time commenting on this instead of solving world hunger. Why are you spending time virtue signalling at me? Don't you care about starving children?
> The next generation is going to call you fake.
No, because bigots are losing the culture war.
Is it a choice? Is it a choice when someone joins a gang when they are born into poverty?
Everyone is a product of their environment.
If you didn't believe in free will at all, why are you trying to convince me of anything?
'No, because bigots are losing the culture war'
Culture war.. everyone is winning their own mono-culture war. All of your facebook friends agree? Twitter echoing back similiar opinions. The software is working if you think you are winning something.
You will hear shut up grandpa move over. When you had your chance you just talked but made no real gain in the world. You won't understand.. why does real change matter? You will say we got everyone to bully racism underground. They will shake their head you fools you made racism worse and now it's more secretive and powerful.
> They will shake their head you fools you made racism worse and now it's more secretive and powerful.
Smacks of (((they))) control the Deep State.
Nothing real is being said here. Have a good weekend.
IMO, if one can't make the point that something shouldn't be said without inaccurately labeling it as racism, then one shouldn't make the point. The only thing they're accomplishing is watering down the negative connotations of racism.
Personally, given that the Chinese will likely dominate the world over the course of the next century, I'd be less worried about insults for ethical/antiracism reasons (they're going to be the ascendant ethnicity and culture soon, don't worry- they'll be fine!) and more worried about insulting them or the PRC for reasons of self-preservation.
Whiiiiich of course assume that that's homogeneous, which, obviously, it isn't. Just like "Western morals" aren't (I'm trying to be good faith in parsing that and I can't figure out what you mean by western morals).
So when you say "The Chinese will be the ascendant ethnicity and culture," do you mean the rural American scapegoat? Aka, chopsticks, epicanthic folds, and Simplified Chinese? I could see how that could be the meat and potatoes of the argument, because even if what that actually ends up meaning in reality is that though a separatist Democratic movement overthrows the CCP, the (future) USA populist government successfully redefines the Chinese Threat to include this completely different political structure to fall under the umbrella of "Chinese," which society has allowed to mean what I'm arguing we should prevent it to mean.
I can say where you're completely wrong - it's not mildly humorous to find me in this position. It's fucking hilarious. Of all political considerations on earth nothing heats my blood more than the evils of Xi Jinping and the tyrannical PRC regime. They are bullies, they violate human rights, and they should be overthrown. I have to balance this against my love of all the good things that Chinese culture brings to the table, just by nature of being a bunch of humans with a rich ancestral background forming their language, food, traditions, etc. And by Chinese I again refer to that concept vague even in any of the languages that adopted the Chinese writing system.
I’m all for avoiding nationalistic dog whistles when discussing things, but both China and Russia have rightfully earned their places as bad actors on the internet.
Add that to the fact that there are of course bad actors in countries including the US who happen to have proxies in other countries. Geolocating the IP address tells us nothing.
The largest botnets came from a variety of nationalities and are rarely Chinese. Conficker was allegedly from the Ukraine, and a Swede plead guilty. Alureon came from Estonia. Mariposa from spain.
Stop with the emotionally-charged flame baiting based on shallow data and anecdotal information.
We also shouldn't shout down people who are hit everyday by this as rascist or emotionally charged. It's completely logical for them to want to ban these groups. Instead we should educate on exactly what kind of a very dark and hellish place banning leads to.
If anyone living in China doesn't like that they have the power through the government to regulate that traffic.
People can decide in China too.
Geolocating the origination points of an exploit is extremely useful. Your point of other countries using proxies being the prime reason. The simple fact is if China and Russia wanted to limit the number of attacks originating from their IP blocks they could do so. Since they more or less allow it to continue they are a common source of malicious traffic, and geo blocking will significantly reduce the number of attempted exploits you experience.
The crime is hacking, and your attempts to “expose” Chinese hackers is more like an agenda to prejudice Chinese even if statistically many Chinese-originated traffic is attempting to hack you.
In the chance that the hacking is actually caused by American hackers routing their traffic through China, then what purpose does your Chinese assumption serve except to encourage others to profile and prejudice Chinese?
In a more realistic example of how your comments may incite racial prejudice for no good reason is that it is actually very likely the biggest botnets have Chinese victims (because they are poor, run Windows XP still, and generally have very poor internet security practices). Oh, and also they happen to have the most people on Earth, so statistically any given thing would be mostly Chinese.
So, unless you are absolutely certain that being Chinese makes you a criminal hacker I would recommend leaving race or nationality out of the discussion.
These are archetypes, i.e. popularly associated examples of particular actions. But I'm not sure if they're full-blown stereotypes, where they get over-applied to members of that group. People don't believe that all Chinese and Russians are hackers, that all Nigerians are email scammers, that all Mexicans are drug overlords, etc.
Stereotypes tend to be more insidious. Many people (in America) do believe that Blacks and Mexicans are criminals, that Chinese are great at math, etc., to the degree that it changes how they actually treat people. So I think these are much worse and shouldn't be equated.
That said, despite the above analysis, I can see how being Chinese you would still cringe when you see the phrase "Chinese hacker" being used casually. I'm an ethnic minority and have felt similarly in similar situations.
So if that is true then the viewpoint of blaming it on Chinese becomes nonsensical and also wrong. So given that there is reasonable doubt, is it right to attribute this "being a hacker" to having anything to do with being Chinese in any way?
"Black" refers to an ethnicity of a given group of people. Or their skin color, if you want things simple.
These are non-interchangeable terms, so by asking to switch them you are indicating they are interchangeable. You are doing this because you think it's important to keep people from blaming an individual based on group membership.
Yet, it remains that the CPC is something else beyond a person, a culture or a people. Defending it is irrational, but maybe people want to stand up for something important to them and think that defending everything's right to exist and speak its mind is more important than existence itself.
That being said, see my other replies on how the OP's assumptions may very likely be wrong, and attributing hackers to China has the same effect as calling the coronavirus "China virus" in that for all intents and purposes it has the effect of associating Chinese people with hackers in the same way that calling the coronavirus is an attempt to deflect blame to a particular group of people.
They just compromised a bunch of random computers in China and Russia, running an old copy of Windows XP, and built themselves a botnet.
What further evidence do you have, other than an IP address?
Example: https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2018/05/24/central-florida...
I'm more highlighting that both crypto and traditional banking are similar in the transfer mechanism than saying banks should be held liable.
The need to move such funds anonymously is usually due to illegal activities, money laundering, or at least tax evasion (evasion, not avoidance).
This leaves every average person at the very least, on the hook to pay for those taxes evaded, or lacking the services they would have provided.
If the need is due to criminality beyond tax evasion, every average person suffers the corrosive effect of that criminal activity (e.g., while I'm for most drug legalization, I can't begin to argue that organized criminal drug distribution is anything but a massive destructive tax on society - & in fact, a main point of legalization is to eliminate that corrosive costs of gangs).
So, the average person is definitely worse off with the existence of an ability to move & billions anonymously.
(edit: avoided/evaded)
I fall into that category.
Most people I know, and they aren't rich tax avoiders would also fall into that category.
Cryptocurrency liberates everyone in so many ways. And yes it liberates criminals as well. But hey are know how to dodge the system anyway.
Other than small-scale tax evasion or nefarious activities, what use cases are you advocating?
I also used to be pretty excited about the potential for crypto currencies, still think it may have some, but the security overhead, value volatility, & scalability issues have pretty much rendered it less useful than cash or (ugh) ACH-based services like Venmo, Google Pay, etc., ir just credit cards.
Also, you're not addressing losses of tax evasion - one tax evader failing to pay $1B in taxes means a million people need to pay an extra $1000 to make up for his crime. Not victimless.
Try sending $1B around the world to your Nigerian uncle and seeing what happens.
Nothing they can do to stop that.
I'm sad that I have to inform you that the emails you've been getting aren't actually real
2013 called and wants its arguments back
the escrow service would be one party of the multisignature transaction. no party can move the funds on their own. you are moving an arbiter to the point of transaction, instead of after a transaction doesn't go as planned.