betterunix2

"SGX is hard because it's trying to preserve the open nature of the platform"

Except that was an afterthought. Originally only whitelisted developers were allowed to use SGX at all, back when DRM was the only use-case they had in mind.

There is already a blacklisting/revocation system for leaked SGX keys -- which failed completely when it was put to the test, after researchers tried publishing some keys they extracted on Twitter. However, it depends on Intel becoming aware of a leaked key, which makes perfect sense for the original DRM use-case and makes no sense in the cloud/server/hosting/etc. use-case.

I'm taking bets on how long before the next generation is completely broken as well. It is only a matter of time, and the timeline is likely short.

Except that the security model on the server side is broken as there is no way for Intel to know that a key is compromised and thus revoke it; at least for the DRM use-case sharing cracked keys on forums is common. Why would an attacker ever share keys in the tenant/host case? Moreover, is there some reason to believe that Amazon, Google, or Microsoft would struggle to extract a key if they are indeed malicious? Is there a good reason to believe that Intel would never just give keys to certain government agencies when asked? If you are worried about a malicious host, SGX/etc. are at best a partial, very limited solution even if all you care about is integrity/attestation.

SGX and TEEs generally are and always were a DRM solution, with the server use-case mostly being an afterthought that the marketing teams pushed hard. They also create a fantastic forced-obsolescence program as they require active support on the part of chip makers throughout an application's lifecycle; Intel can arbitrarily deprecate otherwise functional CPUs by just not revoking compromised keys (and perhaps releasing a few into the wild just to force people to upgrade).

BGP is the de facto routing protocol of the Internet. The basic problem that it solves is computing and distributing routes between independently operated networks. It is actually a pretty ramshackle protocol (among other things it usually uses TCP, which can create some interesting problems [1]) but it is the only widely deployed protocol that can handle the scale of the Internet.

In theory BGP can be used within a single network, though it is not well-suited to such an application except in very large networks. Facebook is known to use BGP internally [2]. Usually an "interior gateway protocol" like OSPF or IS-IS is better for internal routes, with BGP then distributing those routes to the external networks from the gateway routers (i.e. those routers that interconnect the networks). BGP can also be used for other, more niche applications within a single network, like setting up VPNs (VPLS, VPNv4, etc.).

[1] https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/bgp-stuck-routes-tcp-zero-wi...

[2] https://research.facebook.com/publications/running-bgp-in-da...

Have you ever dealt with an estate, or a disputed estate? I have, and I can tell you that technical processes would probably not accomplish very much. I have seen people go to court over whether or not a person was mentally competent when they wrote their will. What is the technical process for resolving that? If anything, a technical solution would make things worse in cases where an elderly person really was taken advantage of when they were planning their estate by leaving less room for a dispute.

The fact of the matter is that we have had the ability to create a technical process for executing a will for a long time. Banks allow you to designate a beneficiary who receives your assets after you pass away and that is executed automatically. We do not have to allow people to dispute that, and cryptocurrency does not really add much over such a system -- but we do not want that system because some objections are legitimate and disputes need to be resolved.

They do not know, but they also do not need to know. Technically they are not limiting resolution, they are limiting throughput on their network; the streaming service will reduce the resolution to avoid long lag/loading times for users.

Yes in my experience.

Do people commonly think types are a solution to most or all problems? Other than correctness I am not sure what software engineering problems a type system actually solves, and the rest of the debate is about the expressiveness of the type system (or lack thereof, which forces suboptimal engineering practices in some languages).

For Jews the Christian position is even more bizarre. Why did God wait for the Second Temple to be destroyed to send Jesus? Why not right before the First Temple was destroyed? Why did it take decades after the death of Jesus for the temple to be destroyed, and why did his disciples continue to make offerings there after his death (according to Acts)? Why did the prophets say that the messiah would bring about world peace and a universal knowledge of God, if the actual messiah would die without fulfilling any of that and leave the world waiting century after century for a "second coming?" What are those prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, and why do you think that any of them are about The Messiah? Why do you accept the writings of Paul, who never met Jesus and whose only claim to authority was his own assertion that he saw Jesus in a vision? What exactly is the trinity (note: do not commit heresy with your answer)?

You asked where the Jewish messiah is, but like the old joke goes, for Jews the problem is waiting and waiting for a messiah that has yet to come, but for Christians the problem is that the messiah came and the world did not change.

Obviously rabbinic answers are not going to be very satisfactory or convincing to you; if rabbinic teachings made sense to you then you would have converted to Judaism by now. That said, rabbinic teachings are not a secret, so here are some answers to your challenges:

The animal sacrifice system was, according to rabbinic teaching, sufficient but not necessary to atone for sin. Among other things Jews point out that during the Babylonian exile there was no temple in Jerusalem and no sacrifices being offered, but that God did send prophets to explain to the Jewish people how they can deal with sin while in exile and without sacrifices. Another point is that when the sacrificial laws are stated, non-animal sacrifices are explicitly described; poor people could, for example, offer just a handful of flour if they could afford nothing better.

Why did God let the temple be destroyed? For the same reason the First Temple was destroyed. The Jewish people were punished for their national sins. In the case of the Second Temple, part of the national sin was dividing into competing factions who would sometimes try to use the oppressive Romans as a means to undermine competing sects.

Why are there no more prophets? In fact the rabbis do not have a single answer, it remains unclear in rabbinic tradition. Is that a problem? There are plenty of unclear, unanswered questions for Christians too; why is Jesus taking so long to come back? That said, some rabbinic answers include: the Jewish people are being punished for national sins; the true end of prophecy was the destruction of the First Temple, with subsequent prophets only repeating earlier prophecies; the prophets were sent at a time when the temptation to turn to idolatry was particularly strong, but that temptation diminished when the Jews returned to Israel and began building the Second Temple.

Maybe none of that works for you, and that's fine -- Jews are not actively seeking converts, so the opinion of non-Jews does not really matter; the Jewish view is that Judaism is for Jews and that the rest of the world only needs to hold to a handful of common sense morals (like not murdering each other and settling disputes in peaceful courts; I assume that much makes sense to you).

Rabbinic Jews do not claim to practice Second Temple Judaism, they claim to practice a religious tradition that followed from the pharisee sect that existed during the Second Temple period. Orthodox Jewish scholars will openly tell you exactly how common modern practices like the Passover Seder developed after the destruction of the temple. There is nothing controversial about it; Judaism as alive and dynamic as Christianity or Islam. Religions change over time because cultures, societies, and the realities of life change over time.

Really though, what makes you think any form of Second Temple Judaism could have survived the destruction of the Second Temple? Moreover, if Jews could find a way to keep Judaism alive in some form after the destruction of the First Temple, why should it be surprising that some form of Judaism was kept alive after the destruction of the Second Temple?

"It seems that it has evolved as a reaction against Christianity"

Citation needed.

Pretty much all secular scholarship I have ever seen on this topic has concluded that both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity were reactions to the destruction of the second temple. Rabbinic Judaism is the direct intellectual and religious descendant of the pharisee sect, and has always stood on its own merits. The only rabbinic tradition that definitively developed in response to the rise of Christianity is the birkat haminim, a prayer that was used to "out" secret Jewish Christians before the final split between the religions. Beyond that, all there is are attempts to deal with / respond to persecution of Jews and Jewish institutions by Christians in later centuries (e.g. the fixing of the Jewish calendar after Christian Rome disbanded the Sanhedrin).

Don't overstate the importance of Christianity to the early rabbis. Rabbinic literature is generally dismissive of non-Jewish religions and Jewish Christians like the Ebionites were seen as heretics -- a term the rabbis used for non-rabbinic Jewish movements of the Roman era (of which there were many, none of which have survived).

As for the Gospel, it does not really matter what people thought hand washing was for -- ritual washing hands did improve their hygiene, just like ritual bathing. Jesus told his followers not to bother, and it does not matter whether or not he understood the hygiene implications, because not washing their hands was still detrimental to hygiene.

If that is true, why would Jesus have taught his disciples the spiritual value of ritual bathing and ritual foot washing?

You can also wash someone's feet if you want to, but don't make it a matter of spiritual, ritual cleanliness as Jesus did.

You can also take a bath if you want to, but don't make it a matter of spiritual, ritual cleanliness as Jesus did.

Also, Christians really need to learn what "pharisee" actually means before throwing the word around the way you do. "Neo-pharisees" would imply that the pharisees were some ancient group that ceased to exist at some point. In reality "pharisee" simple means "rabbi," and the only reason the term fell out of use is that the only recognizably Jewish movement to survive the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish-Roman wars was rabbinic Judaism. Almost any Jews you meet today practice a religion that can be traced directly to the pharisees mentioned in the New Testament. Moreover, the religious movement Jesus led was closer to what the pharisees taught and practiced than it was to any other Jewish movement of that time. One easy example is Jesus' own teaching that a man who has lustful thoughts about a woman has already committed adultery in his own heart; this is the kind of broadening of Jewish law that is common in rabbinic documents like the Talmud (e.g. "yichud," a prohibition on unmarried men and women being alone behind a closed door). Jesus also taught his followers answers to common Rabbinic debates, such as the famous dispute between Hillel and Shammai about when divorce is permitted.

Jesus was not nearly as radical as some Christians think. His movement was very slightly outside the mainstream, and for the most part his focus seems to have been on avoiding blind adherence to tradition. His willingness to accept disciples who were uneducated and even outcasts was unusual, but not that unusual, with the Talmud indicating that Rabbi Akiva was illiterate until he turned 40 and that Rabbi Shimon bar Lakish was the leader of a criminal gang before he began studying to be a rabbi (you may not believe such stories, but remember that the New Testament is no more historically reliable than the Talmud). Paul taught a religion that was much more radical than anything Jesus taught, but somehow I do not think you were referring to Paul when you spoke of "a just man willing to make a real sacrifice."

Christianity already has enormous appeal, it is literally the most widely practiced religion in the world. I never said Christians are against hand washing, I said that Jesus taught his disciples, who lived before Christianity was a religion (if you asked the disciples what they practiced they would have all said "Judaism"), that they need not wash their hands before eating. This is recorded in the gospels, so if you have some kind of problem with it then your argument is not really with me.

I also take issue with the idea that there is no joy or value in life unless someone has a "sincere relationship" with the Christian deity. There are plenty of happy, healthy, and fulfilled atheists, not to mention the many polytheists and idolaters who live equally fulfilling, joyous, and righteous lives. You do not have to agree with how anyone else approaches life, but to claim that only the Christian deity can bring meaning, worth, freedom, or good to a person's life is the darkest worldview I can imagine. Christianity is the world's most popular religion but the majority of the world is not Christian. Do you actually think that non-Christians live depressing lives dominated by evil and unjust practices?

Well, did Jesus tell his follows that they should not be hypocrites who wash their hands because they blindly follow traditions and that they should instead wash their hands because it is good for their health? No, he simply taught them not to bother washing hands before eating.

Moreover, Jesus is recorded elsewhere as having taught his disciples a practice of ritual foot washing (involving washing another person's feet), which remains a practice among some Christians to this very day. He even went on to explicitly indicate that foot washing is spiritually important. Jesus also taught his followers to practice a form of ritual bathing, clearly given spiritual significance and clearly a variation of Jewish ritual bathing, that remains widely practiced by Christians today: baptism. So, if we accept the account of the gospels, it would seem that Jesus was not really opposed to washing rituals in general, nor to treating ritualized washing as a matter of spiritual significance, he just had a different concept than the mainstream Rabbinic tradition.

Except that Jesus taught his disciples not to wash their hands before eating -- a basic hygenic practice that people of his time certainly understood. However valuable his moral teachings may have been, Jesus is not exactly an authority on preventing disease spread...

(Also, the story of Jesus and the leper may have been nothing more than an attempt to talk about Jesus' miraculous powers.)

"distributed group of participants to take it upon themselves to temporarily and physically enforce"

Do you think I should risk my life to enforce your property rights? I have two kids and I want to watch them grow up, I can't die because someone with a gun claimed ownership of a stranger's house.

Without an organized government of some kind, society does not scale beyond about 200 people. We just cannot keep track of relationships and trust and whatnot beyond that. I live in metropolitan area with a population of 25 million people; a distributed group of vigilantes enforcing property rights is not even remotely workable here, and this is not even the largest city in the world. My in-laws live in a suburban area with a lower population density -- their town has a population around 20 thousand, and that disorganized group is not going to work there either.

The people in charge of enforcement would become a de facto government. What distinguishes a government from any other organization is the monopoly on violence (more precisely, the monopoly on deciding when and how violent measures can be employed), and enforcing property rights sometimes requires violence (e.g. if someone refuses to leave your home, eventually the police will have to physically remove them against their will).

Blockchains do nothing at all to help anything about this situation. You could use a blockchain to manage ownership, but it would be far more efficient to use a central database of some kind that is held by whatever organization is responsible for enforcing property rights. In the end you are not going to care how your ownership is managed, you are only going to care that, if someone tries to violate your rights, the police will come and protect you. You need to trust that the enforcement will actually be applied, but what difference does it make if you use a blockchain?

They can use the mortgage as collateral for their own loans, and I am not really sure how that is any different...

I am skeptical of the claim that real estate generally appreciates over time, at least in real terms (inflation-adjusted). Yes that has been the trend for a long time and especially in popular areas, but there is no reason to think the trend will continue.

People sometimes take out a home equity loan, which is kind of like going in reverse with mortgage payments -- you are going more in debt, using the equity in you built up with previous mortgage payments. If the value of your home increases you have access to a bigger line of credit.

A common use for such a loan is to pay for renovations, which can further increase the value of a property. Another typical use is "home grown leverage" i.e. using a home equity loan to pay for some investment, which is commonly done with rental properties (often to make the down payment on another mortgage; the hope being that you can collect enough in rent to have money left over after making monthly loan payments). For a truly US-only use-case, people sometimes wind up having to use a home equity loan to cover medical bills after a major emergency or accident, though I think this was more common before the Affordable Care Act and will probably become even less common with surprise billing being mostly eliminated.

Is the prepayment risk really much different from a callable commercial bond? Call protection is not universal in commercial or even agency bonds.

Your citation is full of errors and fallacies. More efficient mining rigs is basically irrelevant, because Bitcoin miners have no incentive to reduce energy consumption while computing the same number of hashes; it is to compute more hashes using the same amount of energy. So as long as you know the lowest possible energy-per-hash of all available mining hardware you can compute a lower bound on Bitcoin's energy utilization.

Then comes the claim that we do not have data on the energy consumed by mainstream finance, but in some cases we do and it really drives home the point about Bitcoin. Visa emitted over 1000 times less carbon in 2020 than Bitcoin, and processes over 1000 times more transactions per second (7 for Bitcoin versus 1700 for Visa). So Visa is at least a million times more energy efficient than Bitcoin as a transaction processing system.

Then the "pushback" claiming that it's really OK because Bitcoin mining can be switched on when energy is abundant, which could, maybe, possibly, subsidize the cost of renewables. Except there are alternatives that also could be switched on only when there is an energy surplus -- beginning with any energy-storage technology, of which there are many at different stages of development. Every joule devoted to Bitcoin is a joule not charging an electric car, and every dollar spent on Bitcoin is a dollar not spent developing better storage. There are also industrial processes that could be selectively turned on during periods of abundant energy, like electric arc furnaces widely used in steel mills (the ability to turn the furnace on and off as needed is one of the big advantages of electric arc furnaces over blast furnaces).

The outright denial that there even is a problem to solve is a classic example of people becoming religious about a technology. Fortunately better responses have been offered from the blockchain crowd, like pointing to PoS as a technical solution to the problem.

Except that we do not have an alternative to jet airplanes that moves hundreds of times more passengers while emitting less carbon. We do have such an alternative to Bitcoin, in fact it predates Bitcoin by decades and is far more popular: Visa. Visa's total carbon emissions in 2020 for its data centers and offices (their ESG report also discusses emissions from employee commuting and business travel) is a whopping 14 thousand metric tons, over 1000 less than Bitcoin. That carbon was emitted as Visa processed 1700 transactions per second compared to only 7 transactions per second for Bitcoin.

In other words, as an electronic payments system, Visa is roughly one million times less polluting than Bitcoin.

So until NFTs are using a system at least as energy-efficient as Visa, I'll continue to worry...

Regarding cryptocurrency and solar power, the argument has some gaping holes in it. The premise is that solar (and wind) does not have the constant generation rate that fossil fuels or nuclear plants provide, so by having miners going online when there is an energy surplus (and thus it is cheaper) can help pay for solar installations (which must be over-built to supply energy off-peak).

The most obvious problem with this line of reasoning is that miners make more money when they are constantly mining than when they only mine opportunistically. This has already been demonstrated in the real world, with miners generally clustering around energy that is cheap and always available. We have seen miners keep gas-burning plants that would have shut down online, bringing already shut-down coal plants back online, and clustering in countries and regions where coal/nuclear/etc. energy is cheap and abundant (China, a few former Soviet republics, etc.).

Moreover, anything that consumes power and that does not need to run round the clock would have the same effect on solar deployment. Why not create a smart washing machine that waits for energy prices to fall before starting a load? Why not a steel mill? A basic flaw in the argument is the assumption that there is no better use of energy than Bitcoin mining or that Bitcoin is unique in its "flexible" energy needs. Neither assumption is true. There are alternatives with the same "flexibility" that have a clearer benefit for humanity, like direct conversion of atmospheric CO2 and water into gasoline (still a research topic, but prototype facilities are being tested at small scales right now) or any other energy storage technology (which in theory could be operated separately from generation).

Finally, a basic economic point: energy spent on cryptocurrency mining is energy not available for anything else. Even if all Bitcoin mining was exclusively powered by solar, wind, and hydro power, Bitcoin would still be slowing the progress on phasing out fossil fuels by consuming so much energy. Electric cars need to be charged whether or not Bitcoin mining occurs, and if renewable sources are all being sunk into Bitcoin then cars will be charged using non-renewable sources.

I know you asked for the other side, but sometimes there is no other side and this is one of those times. The idea that Bitcoin is actually good for the environment because it could, possibly, subsidize solar production is just a desperate attempt to work around the criticism that Bitcoin wastes energy. Yet that criticism of Bitcoin is very easy to demonstrate: divide the number of transactions processed in one second by the power consumption of Bitcoin, and compare the same estimate for Visa or whatever. Even if the estimated power consumption of Bitcoin is off by a factor of 100 you would still be better off with Visa, since Bitcoin processes 7 transactions per second while Visa processes about 1700 (and Visa's annual reports on the topic always show much lower power consumption figures than even the most generous estimates for Bitcoin -- several orders of magnitude lower).

I'll give credit where it is due: people who reflexively shout "PoS" when these criticisms are raised are at least acknowledging that PoW is a problem that needs to be addressed. That is the only actual counterpoint to the complaints about energy consumption, a technical improvement that is ready for deployment (and is already partially used by Ethereum, with a full switch supposedly coming soon).

It is easy to forget that the Fed was already tightening monetary policy over a period of years prior to the COVID crash, and only loosened policy in response to the economic impact of COVID. The Fed has historically not been shy about triggering corrections, crashes, and recessions if that is what it takes to achieve their targets, and I am not sure why anyone would think they will behave any differently this time around. Certainly the bond markets have reacted in a way that suggests that participants there take the Fed at their word that interest rate hikes are coming over the next 12 months.

I would agree...except that mining operations are literally keeping carbon-emitting power plants online and even bringing already-shutdown plants back online to power mining. NFTs by and large still depend on these energy-inefficient mining operations despite years of promises that "proof of stake" and whatnot would solve that problem in general. Then there are the NFT scams that serve only to discredit the entire blockchain ecosystem, and the fact that NFT proponents have been going around promoting both scams and misinformation. So it is not too hard to see why people are taking the time to weigh in on it...

A meaningless comparison as the mainstream financial system processes far more transactions over a given period of time, and it is nearly certain that on a per-transaction basis Bitcoin consumes more energy. Moreover, the incentive for financial institutions is always to consume less energy per transaction as this lowers their operating costs, whereas the only incentive for Bitcoin miners to consume less energy is if the price of Bitcoin declines relative to the price of energy.

This whole "Bitcoin isn't as bad as they say" is getting tiresome. Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a large country to process just 6 transactions per second. No need to get defensive about your favorite payment tech. It has its problems and those problems need to be solved, why is that so hard for the Bitcoin crowd to acknowledge?

"Capture by value" is meaningless since an object could itself contain references. Combined with the fact that lambdas can have side effects (there is no way to avoid this in C++) it is actually possible for a lambda to wind up owning itself. Imagine a class that has a pointer to a function object as a member, whose type is compatible with a lambda that captured an object of that class. Now that lambda might call a setter for that class member, using one of its own arguments as the argument to the setter. Apply the lambda to itself, and now the lambda owns itself via its ownership of the captured object.

I have no idea what happens in this situation, but it is not at all impossible to wind up with something like this in a complicated and large codebase.