Police destroy Bitcoin miners with steamroller in Malaysia
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When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management
Also, their famous trade was not actually selling volatility through writing options, but sla convergence trade in government bonds (short the most liquid one, which trades at a premium, get long a very similar bond which has the same cashflows but does not benefit from being blessed with the "most liquid" status). The crypto equivalent here is probably being long stablecoins, though even the best stablecoins have orders of magnitude less backing than Treasuries.
It was actually pretty internally controversial when LTCM started selling options in the last year or two before its cratering. The core thesis of the firm was pure arbitrage, where the risk was inherently capped. When the more aggressive faction started pursuing "statistical arbitrages", positions that could lose money but tended not to when repeated long enough, the old-school vanguard from Salomon revolted. Ironically both the pure arbitrage and statistical arbitrage positions got crushed in 1998.
The trade is to buy the stablecoin at $0.96 and wait for a chance to sell it at $0.995. Your investment thesis is that someone else is selling at $0.96 not because the issuer is going bust, but because they need the funds for something else.
As one CRT trader said: "It's like picking up dimes in front of a bulldozer. You can make a lot of money, but you have to keep your eyes on the bulldozer."
https://books.google.ch/books?id=OV07tT2nsLoC&pg=PA140&lpg=P...
ftfy
Because sanctions are for their own good, right? Sanctions aren’t a threat, they are the punishment.
Other countries/companies shouldn’t do business with sanctioned countries, but obviously a sanctioned country can only benefit by breaking the sanctions.
It’s like being in prison in the USA: it’s natural - and in the prisoner’s best interest should they succeed - to try to run away.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/iran-uses-crypto-mining-l...
So I'd have to add a stipulation: it's for people in countries where people have access to surplus energy, but don't have access to better ways to export the energy.
I'm not.
In most developed countries, energy is one of the following:
- nationalized
- "privatized" (e.g. Russia, where the companies are partially govt-owned or the oligarchs are Putin cronies)
- privatized oligopoly
In any case, unless the government or the energy company wants to go into mining, the surplus can't just be transferred into mining.
So the question becomes, does the energy surplus actually translate into lower prices for consumers, and the consumers can then convert it into assets?
That's what I meant by "people": do the consumers of the energy actually have a way to monetize the surplus?
That is where that statement needs to stop.
"... really? You're the guy we seized these from, holding your finger under your nose like a mustache. To cover your mustache."
If you object to the entire principle (or, at least, need to be seen objecting to the entire principle), destroying the assets in a visible public spectacle is the way to go.
California had at least some high profile "street racer" destruction back in the day, and I don't believe any western government, upon seizing a big load of cocaine, goes about trying to figure out how they can unload it to someone else. At least, in easily tracked ways...
Ok, let them buy it again and seize it from them again if they use it unlawfully. Double profit.
> seizing a big load of cocaine, goes about trying to figure out how they can unload it to someone else
Because there is an internationally agreed war on drugs. Cocaine (unlike meth which can be officially prescribed as Desoxyn in the US and heroine which also is used medically in some cases e.g. in the UK) is officially considered pure evil with no legitimate medical use (it can be used for good but in practice 99.9% of its use is abuse and even the 0.1% who use it for good also do that illegally).
AFAIK there is no international agreement on fighting cryptocurrencies mining so far, the mining equipment (let alone the power supply units) are perfectly legal to manufacture, sell, buy, own and use (unless you actually steal electricity to power them) in many countries.
Even such a totalitarian and unreasonably conservative country as Iran officially allowed (and taxed) mining until they found out they are running low on electricity.
This isn't true at all; cocaine is a Schedule II drug, not a Schedule I like marijuana. It has historically had plenty of medical use.
I'm personally glad contractors aren't handling things like this, and would like to see their role diminshed in general.
I have also heard big box retailers (i.e. Best Buy) will destroy unsold items to discourage employees from purposefully hiding or down-selling things in the hope they can grab it for cheap or free.
Though a lot of places will unload these items to wholesalers or discount retailers, and some gets donated to clothing charities. It goes through a few steps first.
Makes me unbearably sad we're such a wasteful species.
Similar reason why drugs are destroyed with a lot of fanfare in most Latin American countries (er, when they are). Surely it'd be easier and cleaner to bury it somewhere after soaking it or something, but no, they need to make a pyramid of drugs and have someone throw a pyre at it to create a big symbolic bonfire that is a toxic mess to clean up.
I don't think the financial disincentive is necessarily corrupt, in the form of fines or asset forfeiture, but I think that they should never be allowed to contribute to government revenue in any way.
If the government has any incentive to prosecute somebody, other than a well founded and provable basis for believing they committed a crime, then the justice system just becomes a weapon to turn against the citizens it's supposed to be protecting. If the government has a financial incentive to prosecute certain crimes over others, then how the law is enforced is not going to align with community needs. For instance, that's why there's never enough police to attend burglaries, but always enough police for handing out speeding tickets.
Making e-waste recycling harder doesn't really help anyone.
Maybe they salvaged parts and only destroyed cases to make a show of things?
Haha, at any rate, my reaction surprised me.
Amazon[1] is probably the most prominent example of this practice when it comes to hardware, but the routine destruction of unsold products remains common across industries, especially the food industry[2][3][4].
I, too, felt ill watching that video, and I felt ill reading these articles. But how do we fix this? How do we avoid letting so much production go to waste, especially when there are still so many people around the world who could really benefit from it? Is it the product of greed, or is it merely a hard-to-solve supply chain problem?
[1] https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-21/amazon-destroying-millio...
[2] https://www.dailydot.com/irl/dunkin-employee-who-exposed-was...
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/perspectives/cabot-dairy-farm...
[4] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf
I'm sure someone would've been willing to salvage those at no cost to the developers, but time is money to those guys. Sad to see such waste.
Gone.
Also (thanks in large part to internet commenters, many of whom on HN fit this archetype) people are afraid that a liability waver doesn't cover them when in reality unless there are aggravating circumstances a liability waver pretty much always caps your loss at the consult fee required to get your lawyer to tell the ambulance chaser to f off.
We can't just throw everything away, no matter if it's cheaper, we will run out of resources if we don't recycle
Each time they wound up bulldozing them after zero takers were found.
Could they have tried to get rid of them piecemeal, as people came to salvage one useful thing at a time? Definitely possible! Though it likely would have meant managing a bunch of different people looking for specific things, after which they would have had to spend just as much time and money bulldozing the things anyway.
Normally these kinds of seized goods wind up at auction.
You'll have a hard time getting anyone to fess up to it for the same reasons you'll have a hard time getting MBA types to fess up to systematically working employees to the bone but there's schools of management theory that say government should engage in conspicuous waste and/or bad behavior as a way to project power.
Remember this next time you see five cop cars blocking three lanes for a fender bender with two cars parked on the shoulder.
Not for those who wrote it.
Sweden even allows the state to confiscate any belongings of a criminal that are “reasonably believed to be the profit of criminal activity” like expensive watches, jewelry or sports cars.
""" Civil forfeiture allows police to seize — and then keep or sell — any property they allege is involved in a crime. Owners need not ever be arrested or convicted of a crime for their cash, cars, or even real estate to be taken away permanently by the government. """
https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po...
How secure is 256 bit security? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9JGmA5_unY
Not a big deal by itself.
But not sha256, no. I think you'd almost have to design it to be vulnerable, if you want that.
2^166 ~= give a separate quantum computer that does as many QOPS as the the most powerful supercomputer does FLOPS to each human who has ever lived and have each of them run for a thousand times the age of the universe.
Symmetric and one-way functions are provably secure, within those characteristics that they define. Notably, they are not designed with "until the end of the universe" promise (and the only proven "until the end of the universe" encryption anyway is a proper one-time pad (or disk) encryption). The reason that certain hashing and encryption algorithms have been broken are due to both compromises inherent in design goals (notably, AES have been simplified from the reference encryption Rjindael to ease up hardware acceleration) and the march of technology simply rolling with faster chips. Quantum computing can speedup this process a bit (a quadratic speedup in most cases), but not enough to outbeat these types of encryption.
IMHO this design decision was a great call.
EDIT: I'm amazed that for 12 hours nobody could point to that well-known fact. NH crowd really knows little about cryptocurrencies.
A few mining systems are GPU's (used for mining certain types of crypto), and those can be resold for other uses, although typically after being used for a few years for mining they might be damaged and no longer usable for other uses.
Nope. Other than maybe the power supply they are single purpose devices - they crack hashes, that's it.
Compared to heat pumps? Yes. But compared to resistive electric heating it's just as good (if not better, since you could theoretically recoup some of the burned energy as cryptocurrencies).
FPGAs are still profitable for other coins that are memory-limited. Bitcoin is just brute force compute.
Is nobody else disturbed that property was seized and destroyed BEFORE a judge or a jury had a chance to hear testimony and make a judgement?
The words Court, Judge and Jury all appear zero times.
This is the usual performative nonsense by a foolish government. They could have easily sold them at auction like they do with all sorts of other seized goods. ASIC's go for a few thousand dollars each.
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, it's heavily tiered and heavily subsidized, but also that it shouldn't be particularly helpful for mining, unless they're splitting it into a bunch of accounts to stay in one of the lower tiers:
Domestic consumer pricing per kWh used, subsidized
4.95 @ 1 to 200 kWh
7.59 @ 201 to 300 kWh
11.73 @ 301 to 600 kWh
12.41 @ 601 to 900 kWh
12.98 @ 901 kWh onwards
(exchange rate of 4.4 MYR to US$1 on 24 November 2016)
- RM 0.218 (USD 0.052) per kWh for the first 200kWh
- RM 0.334 (USD 0.079) per kWh for the next 100kWh
- RM 0.516 (USD 0.120) per kWh for the 300kWh after
Those prices are before the 1.6% tax by the government. And furthermore, any usage above 600kWh is taxed an additional 6% by the energy company.
Generally average about 250kwh per month for 2 people in a 1200 sqf apartment with occasional aircon use. Paying ~6c/kwh is much better than nearly everywhere else on Earth. As a westerner in the country it's basically a rounding error compared to other life costs.
With government bonuses that get thrown around the cost really isn't much unless you are incredibly wasteful or have a huge family/house. Most of the country has gotten big power handouts for covid. I paid 30 RM ($7.50 USD) a few months ago. A pint down the pub costs nearly that.
As far as my information goes, there were times when mining a >30k$ coin was possible for less than 4k$ in electricity, if you had access to really cheap sources. That's far from "don't really make much money".
For me the price is whatever it is on the exchange I can use. It's basically $30k for all that it matters.
That is: as long as arbitrage between the markets is viable (for instance, it must be possible to move Bitcoin and fiat between the markets at a low enough cost), even though there's no single global market, the prices will tend to be close enough.
If the government seizes drugs, they don't just redistribute it because it "makes money."
[1]: Regardless of whether you agree with the government here. I also don't know if bitcoin mining is illegal or if it was just the stealing of electricity that was a problem.
They seized them because they were used in other crime, ie, stealing electricity.
They could have recouped some of the cost of that stolen electricity by selling them to an outfit that actually pays for electricity.
They seized them because they were used in other crime, ie, stealing electricity.
Do police not auction off the cars they seize for their use as a getaway car?
You could maybe save the power supply.