Tarsnap is entirely encrypted and the service provider can't see the keys. They run it on EC2 and S3: https://www.tarsnap.com/infrastructure.html
1,944 karma · joined August 12, 2019
Just to be clear, you're alleging a massive fraud by these people: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/circle-2
> But I find it generally a bit suspicious that people would choose to buy a stablecoin in order to buy bitcoin instead of buying the bitcoin directly (the explanation given is usually something about evading currency controls/KYC).
I think it has more to do with how DeFi works. You can get huge yields on stablecoins right now (like 40%+), so a lot of people are taking money they would normally put in the stock market and are farming yields with stablecoins instead. I'm sure you'll identify this as a big red flag for scam, but it's actually not. It's the modern equivalent of saying "open a bank account with $100 and get a free toaster", except the numbers are much larger, and they're tokens instead of toasters.
> In a bear market, I find it even more suspicious that there would still be more buyers than sellers of these stablecoins necessitating further creation.
In a bull market, people sell their stablecoins to buy bitcoin. In a bear market, people sell their bitcoin to buy stablecoins.
Fascinating. How much interest have you had?
Blockchain NFTs do about $800k/day in sales, mostly on the Ethereum book, which is worth about $23B.
How many NFTs are being add to your book per day? How much is the total value of that book worth?
If your book and the value of the ownership that it annotates is larger than Ethereum, then you've really got something special going on, and all these crypto bros should probably give up and join your project.
Now you might be thinking "that's not fair, this is a growth project! we just started!". Ok, maybe you've not displaced Ethereum yet, but you will soon.
Are you experiencing hypergrowth? Are investors clammoring for a share of your book? If so, I'd like to learn more about what they find interesting and how I might invest. If not, it sounds like your project might not be a good investment opportunity.
What does "Just printed $100,494,053 USDC!" mean?
I think this means that someone minted $100M of USDC by depositing USD.
The way this normally happens, USD deposits are made to an exchange that has a relationship with Circle, and 1 USDC is minted for each 1 USD on deposit at Circle.
Circle then invests those funds in things that are considered financially prudent, making some amount of money, but preserving the full amount of USD required to back the issued USDC. What they really do with the money has historically been the concern by people who don't trust corporate transparency, maybe rightfully so.
These "usdcoinprinter" tweets seem to imply that Circle is just making up fictional USDC not backed by anything to prop up the failing crypto market. As in, "we just minted $100M USDC which we'll now use to buy bitcoin, to keep the price of bitcoin high"? I'm not sure I see how that could work without Circle risking their entire business and probably committing some type of fraud.
I found this reference for you: https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf
See under "Illegal and Condemned Content":
> Bitcoin’s blockchain contains at least eight files with sexual content. While five files only show, describe, or link to mildly pornographic content, we consider the remaining three instances objectionable for almost all jurisdictions: Two of them are backups of link lists to child pornography, containing 274 links to websites, 142 of which refer to Tor hidden services. The remaining instance is an image depicting mild nudity of a young woman. In an online forum this image is claimed to show child pornography, albeit this claim cannot be verified (due to ethical concerns we refrain from providing a citation)."
I'm sure if you really put your mind to it, you could find and recover the images, but then you'd just have illegal content and that's not very useful, so why dig for it?
That sure sounds like a useful product to me.
I think HN is so anti-crypto because so few people in the industry currently have your use-case.
Personally, I think what you're doing is exciting and helps put a value on the utility of paying to run these contracts.
Not 20 years ago, it was rare to be employed in tech outside of one of the major hubs. Today, some small towns couldn't even exist without Amazon. When I was a kid, if you worked at Wal-Mart, you probably screwed up. Today you can have a high paying SWE job for Walmart. Microsoft is now one of the largest video game developers in the world, and Netflix and Google have essentially killed the entire business of cable TV for anyone under 40. Apple has the most successful and widely adopted consumer electronic device on the market, and without it, people would lose their collective minds.
Everything is now tech.
So, there's a third, middle option: the fed actually walks the tight-rope and the amount of inflation is acceptable and stocks take a couple of years to regain their losses. This is the most likely option. That could mean raising rates as planned, raising fewer times than planned, or not raising at all.
If that works, then great, everyone's stocks will recover over time and they'll be happy, and inflation won't get too out of control. Keep in mind that some inflation is considered "good" in this system and has been going on pretty consistently since we started central banking.
If that doesn't work, then the fed has so much authority to take direct action in the markets, they have essentially infinite capital to deploy to move markets in any direction they'd like. Using this authority is a risk, but they have been successfully doing some type of "quantitative easing" since 2010.
There's a lot more creativity to go in engineering financial markets before they'd simply give up the game and accept loss of control of the currency, because it would invalidate the idea of central banks and be incredibly disruptive to society.
With most of congress filled with wealthy elites, if it comes down to a crisis like in 2008, everyone will cooperate to preserve their elite status, which is exactly what happened then. It's essentially mutually assured destruction between governments and business if they can't work out a deal, which is what they were able to do. They'll do it again if needed.
Also, as long as things change slowly, people generally don't notice, or don't do anything about it because it's become normalized. There's $1.7T in US student loan debt and that's barely crossing the threshold for people being upset enough to take political action about it.
Since this is HN, does anyone know what are the best ways to draw graphics into modern terminals?
You may be naive, but this is right. Try not to see it as such a bad thing.
It sounds like you're looking for a job that does some good for the world and isn't concerned with efficiency.
All the jobs that promise this are lying to naive people to exploit them for profit.
The reality is that even the non-profit world is concerned with the cost of labor. As a SWE, you're essentially a high paid laborer.
"I'm kind of looking for a job" sounds like you're thinking about making a religious conversion to join "the employed". Jobs aren't where your identity should come from. Rethink your position as "I need to trade some of my time for money" and the labor market will make a lot more sense.
> People who work 8 hours a day, mostly for a paycheck, how do you cope without wanting to off yourself?
I'm betting that I'll be able to do the time<->money trade efficiently enough that I'll be able to stop working eventually.
As you're working and acquire capital, you need to invest as much of the capital that you earn as possible.
By investing, you're employing laborers (usually by proxy of a company) to produce capital for you.
Once your capital can produce more than your labor, you have achieved "financial independence" and no longer need to be concerned with finding work.
Given that anyone with basic coding skills can get a job paying $150k+/yr without too much effort, and all work is remote, you should be able to invest about $100k/yr without too much trouble. Without having other financial obligations, you should be able to hit financial independence in about 5-10 years.
Also, if you have the option to use for work purposes, get your organization to consider contributing to tor. If you find utility in it, consider running additional nodes.
If your goal is for anonymity to be possible on the internet, start using tor wherever you can.
There, I fixed it for you ;)
But if I'm being honest, so much has improved for me during the pandemic that I don't know how to feel about it.
I feel very guilty for saying this because people are dying and I've got more privilege than I can handle, but consider the following:
I was already anxious and depressed and wanted to self-isolate. Now everyone is anxious and depressed and forced to self-isolate.
I used to hate interactions with random people, especially delivery drivers. Now nobody wants to interact with anybody.
Being a remote worker was sort of weird. Now I can be remote and competitive.
There's so much more good content because everyone is at home and online. Also bigger gaming playlists.
Being a science news junkie has unlocked some real world value about how to best stay safe.
I learned a lot about how the public gets information and got rid of some "vaccine hesitant" friends and family.
mRNA vaccines are going to treat so many diseases so much faster now. HIV vaccine soon!
It used to be strange to wear a mask anywhere, even though it will keep you from getting sick during flu season, but now it's become normalized.
I'm sure there's a bunch of other things that I've already gotten used to and forgotten about, but mostly it's made avoiding face-to-face contact possible in pretty much every situation, which is really working for me right now.
Sure, I'm dissociating as years drift by with absolutely no social contact or memories, but I was probably going to do that anyway.
For me, this used to be a "mental health issue". Now I'm just responsible!
Of course, I won't be shocked if the virus ends up mutating in a way that wipes out humanity... but so far, with a little bit of luck, it's been a pretty big improvement for me personally.
I hope we somehow bring this to a sane resolution the same as everyone else, but I'm going to capitalize on this guilt-free way to self-isolate for as long as I reasonably can.
Clearly this some sort of bad and unhealthy way to live, but it's kind of comfy. I think English may lack a term for how this feels.
If I'm ever incapacitated, I know the doctors can't say "let's not save this one. we could keep them alive, but it's better for everyone to not do that". That is insane to me, and it makes me deeply distrustful of the whole institution.
To give non-Americans a sense of how things work here: if a doctor suggests that you have surgery and it's not an immediate need, you should seek the opinion of several other professionals to see if you really need the surgery or if the doctor just likes doing that one. Also quackery like homeopathy and chiropractory is allowed in the open.
Smart Americans learn early which parts of the medical system can be trusted and how to get maximum benefit out of them. But I can see how someone might not want to go through all that effort, tune the whole thing out, and tune out vaccinations along with it.
I see this as a trauma response to knowing how abusive the system can be unless it's handled very delicately.
If you believe that all the world is really the divine right of the queen, I suppose sending payments instantly within the UK is more than sufficient.
> Uptime is legitimately amazing. But when you look at the computational speed - a Raspberry Pi on a UPS is probably more powerful.
Way more powerful, but practically useless, as 100% uptime globally is the requirement.
> Trust is great. How do you do a chargeback on a fraudulent transaction on Ethereum?
Blockchains completely prevent chargeback fraud by simply not allowing for reversal of transactions. You might not want this feature if you're buying a cup of coffee, but it's very important if you're dealing with large sums.
Part of me wonders if the real reason the US has such low vaccination rates is because of the amount of medical trauma that everyone has experienced.
One killer feature that doesn't get nearly enough hype is uptime. Check out these stats: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ The last incident to cause downtime for bitcoin was in 2013. Ethereum has never had downtime.
Another is speed. People like to talk about how slow web3 is, but even Ethereum is super fast compared to a traditional banking transfer. Traditional accounting isn't expected to be instant, so it has a lot of waiting periods and days-long SLAs.
Also trust. Not everyone can trust their local bank or local government. And even if they can, why should the default preference be to have a company with a spreadsheet tell me how many assets they have marked to my name? I'd rather have a decentralized ledger that doesn't require me to place my trust in an individual company or government.
You can't really build these features without some sort of "blockchain". You could try to put together a consortium of companies or individuals to run a shared database with consensus and vote about administration, having it backed by contracts that would be enforceable by world governments. That'd get you 95% of the way there, but it'd still be less good than a public blockchain run by volunteers that provides the same trustless features.
When you say it like that, it sounds like you're poking fun at the stupidity of defi and cryptocurrencies in general.
But what if there were public contracts, with billions of dollars locked in them, with no firewalls, essentially a huge self funded bug bounty, widely publicized, running for literally years, and it... just works as intended?
You probably still wouldn't like it because it doesn't fit your mental model of how security should work.
But if years go by and any of it keeps working despite the massive bug bounties, people will build on the stuff that works. 90% of smart contracts can fail, as long as knowledge is gained and confidence goes up in the 10% that are left. The contracts are composable, so if something works, you can reuse it in a trusted way. After all, anything with billion dollar bounties that survived this long must be pretty strong.
The contracts provide a feature that you can't get anywhere else: trustless decentralized computing. The "pile of money exposed directly to the internet" is actually a feature that tests trust.
It might not seem like a big deal to you, but for banks or funds or nations or anyone with very large sums of money, the ability to withdraw/transfer/borrow/lend with no possible downtime or fraud is extremely appealing.
With all the billions being thrown at this problem, I don't see how smart contracts could fail.
> when things inevitably go pear shaped
If you really believe all of these contracts will inevitably go pear shaped, are the billions not enough incentive for you to go find the bugs yourself?
> It’s interesting the folks with piholes and boobie trapped routers are the first to get behind this idea.
Yes, these people are called "early adopters". They're excited by new technologies, even when they involve risk. You should try it sometime.
The government<->church connection makes it easier to be distrustful of the church when you're distrustful of the government, which detracts from the divine nature of faith and creates a more secular nation.
Compare that to the US (The Simpsons depiction is largely accurate), where the US Government and the church are completely separate. That means your church can be right and your government can be wrong, which creates all sorts of problematic dynamics in the states.
Currently, the "my church is right, government is wrong" crowd has essentially adopted the Trump family as their new church. I don't think you guys could have that happen across the pond. That's why we're about to do a fascism.
What's membership actually look like?
I'd consider joining in a secular/political sense, but I have no interest in hanging out with people who believe in and actually praise a "Satan" deity.
As a skeptic and non-believer of all things spiritual, whenever I have one of those "meaningful messages" moments (we get them too), my reaction is to debunk that feeling by thinking about how others might have interpreted the same event, or how the fortune cookie supply chain actually works.
It's funny that some people lean into that feeling and assign it great cosmic meaning while others rationalize it away.
After agile: it's not done yet
I think the more likely explanation is that it's a way for people who own crypto to borrow and lend.
It's probably one of the first things to be built because there's a lot of people with crypto and banks don't want to accept it as collateral.
It'd be a useful addition to https://sponsor.ajay.app/ which is already modifying the youtube UI.
I wonder if it would work during wildfires.
Also, every hacker online pre-facebook realized that it wouldn't take that much effort to do social engineering on a mass scale, but there was a brief period before any large organizations actually got involved and started doing it.
I think we got a glimpse of something special in the early internet, and I think we can build toward that again.
If we can't disable it somehow, we'll switch operating systems.
Keep in mind that we're still seeing jailbreaks for iPhones after all these years.
Reading this article and the other HN comments, it makes me think our community is aging and becoming stuck in old ways of thinking.
It's surprising and disappointing to see it happen to this group, but I guess it's inevitable.