Exactly right.
989 karma · joined June 2, 2016
One thing I think most people don't appreciate is that the switch to self-driving cars will transform America into a mostly-transit society. Once you don't need a car to live from day to day, you sell it. Then you take a self-driving Lyft from your house to the bus depot, train station, or airport.
The market for self-driving busses between cities will grow alongside the market for self-driving cars within cities.
What a great market that would be for Waymo. Predictable routes of mostly highway driving would be right up their alley.
They're not a legal immigrant, because they lied on their immigration papers, making their immigration invalid.
If they're an illegal immigrant, their children would be granted citizenship.
If they're a diplomat, their children would not be granted citizenship. The child of the Russian Ambassador does not become a Canadian citizen even if born and raised in Toronto.
I think the government's argument that they're more like a diplomat (an agent of a foreign country) than an undocumented resident (e.g., someone who's entered the country of their own volition for work) is pretty sound.
This has ALWAYS been the problem with "ASIC resistant" coins. "ASIC Resistant" just means that you can rent an AWS instance to attack the coin because any generic CPU or GPU will work.
Bitcoin isn't safe just because it's big. It's safe because Bitcoin mining hardware has no purpose other than to mine Bitcoin. Which means the economics are such that Bitcoin mining is only profitable on the fully amortized lifetime cost of the miner, not on the marginal rental cost.
(That's because competition between miners drives the difficulty so high that marginal revenues fall until they equal long-term marginal costs, which are (land rent + labor + fully amortized hardware + electricity))
ASIC driven Proof-of-Work is fine as long as your coin's POW is unique. Only by forcing miners to make a 3-5 year investment in mining hardware can you align the long term incentives of miners and end-users.
For example, accidents that occur at 35 MPH or less are much less likely to result in a fatality or major injury, due to the amount of kinetic energy that a human body can safely dissipate. So if Google cars have even slightly better braking or speed control, you're going to see an improvement. Looking at the average speed at which accidents occur would be useful information.
Android could find other, more transparent and competitive, revenue models.
Okay then, but Google Search is what paid for Android development, so if you can't tie them together, Android needs to seek other sources of funding. The most obvious one is some sort of licensing fee.
(It could also possibly fund itself from search revenue (like Firefox) and App Store fees, although the second one could be broken up by the EU too on anti-tying grounds)
It's no different from when Windows was prevented from tying Windows to Internet Explorer. It opened competition in browsers (and we now have Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Brave, etc.), but it also forced browsers to find independent business models.
The economy can grow over time, but on any given day it's a fixed pie, and it has to be divided among workers (who are doing the labor now) and retirees (who accumulated the capital in previous decades that today's labor uses to magnify their productivity).
Everyone is feeling squeezed as individuals because of falling incomes, but the real culprit is a falling ratio of income-makers (labor) to income-takers (capital, whether retired individuals or just wealthy).
This cannot last. The ratio of labor income to capital income will eventually be restored (hopefully in a peaceful manner, but we can't rule out alternatives). The reasonable fix will be raising retirement ages, but good luck getting a sufficient raise there to restore a 10:1 ratio.
This is so stupid. A population will recover from this in a single generation, because the second you stop releasing sterile males, the remaining males (no matter how few) can repopulate the species.
If you want to make a species of mosquitoes extinct (and I'm in favor of this, they serve no irreplaceable environmental purposes), the more effective method would be releasing males that only have male offspring.
That's a joke, but I think Windows vs. Linux is the right reference frame here, assuming that RISC-V proves out. Those who want to roll their own and control their own destiny may go with RISC-V, while those who want a packaged solution will go ARM. And ARM will have to get better to compete.
Western Digital has gone with RISC-V for a controller, because Western Digital is the kind of company that wants to commoditize its inputs so it can sell a packaged solution to its customers as cheaply as possible. I can also see Amazon or Google finding uses for RISC-V in their data centers.
Phones ... I'm not so sure. Maybe Apple could go that way, as they're vertically integrated and already make their Ax chips in house. But the Android OEMs wouldn't unless Google leads the way.
There's also no discussion of life extension, which seems more near term than interstellar starcraft.
Anyway, we will probably have good data on the optimal size of asteroid colonies long before interstellar colonization is a live issue.
I'm not familiar with all of those small coins, but the problem with Bitcoin Gold is that it uses the same Proof of Work that several other coins use, so a miner can buy ASICs and then switch between coins.
So they can mine honestly on Coin 1 for a while, then switch to Coin 2 and do some double-spend attacks, then when Coin 2's price collapses, they switch back to Coin 1 or move on to Coin 3. The miner has no long term incentive to support the value proposition of any one coin, and they can attack coins that use the same PoW algorithm as their "main" coin at will.
The same problem applies for coins that use ASIC-resistant PoW's, only more so. You can just rent an AWS cluster for an hour to run your attack, then ghost with the profits.
What coin developers need to do is design their proof of work and mining activity to ensure that miners have the same (or close-enough) long term incentives as coin holders.
> during the first 6 hour cycle where the photoelectrode generated 0.18 μmol/cm2 of hydrogen
And then...
>After a further 6 hours illumination, the LaFeO3 thin film generated 0.08 μmol/cm2 of hydrogen (Figure S8). This provided additional evidence that the film is re-useable, although the amount of hydrogen produced is almost halved
From 18 to 8 units/area in just six hours is not a good decay curve.
Are investors in gold relying on the efforts of others for their profits? After all, there are people out there making gold exchanges, developing gold mines, marketing gold jewelry, minting coins and bars for vaults, etc. etc. There's your efforts of third parties which drives up value of gold.
Of course the answer is "maybe" until the law is written or the case decided, but let's not lose sight of the fact that the law already has categories that are a closer fit.
Who's the third party in a decentralized ecosystem? Everyone who's ever contributed a line of code? Everyone who has developed a DAPP that feeds the demand side of the market?
Where's the common enterprise that's being invested in?
Full disclosure: I am also a lawyer, and I work in markets trading at a bank. That's not an endorsement of Coin Center's conclusions, but it's my informed opinion their arguments are sounder than the idle speculation of the author.
If there's anything that Ether is similar to, it's a currencies (my area), collectibles, or commodities (adjacent to my area). There's no underlying business that's being invested in or paying dividends to you. It's 100% a speculation on appreciation.
I'll give you an example. Say Vitalik owned a oil exploration company, and he also owned oil rights to a big patch of oil in Texas somewhere. Instead of selling shares in his company to raise money, he pre-sells the oil. "You give me money for the oil, and I'll go dig it up for you."
You don't own shares in his company. You own oil. Oil isn't a security.
Also, Buffet is the insider's insider. Banks work for him. He has exactly a 0.00000% chance of having his accounts frozen. The US Congress would hesitate to pick fights with his companies. When you have those kind of connections and power, you're not well placed to understand the benefits decentralized sources of authority provides.
What Buffet is missing is that bitcoin is an alternative to cash, and when lightning networks and side chains are widely deployed it will be very, very competitive with cash on most axes. Eventually (if hyperbitcoinization actually happens) even the variability will be less than any one national currency, since global demand and stabilizers will buffer it against any localized shock.
Long haul trucks will probably use it.
/Looks at batteries 1/5th the cost of what they were 10 years ago, and still falling. Just another 1/2 reduction to being cheaper than an ICE engine
Yeah.... even if this made diesel cleaner than baby smiles I don't think this is going to save diesel.