4,811 karma · joined February 10, 2012
You can thank Vitalik for saying he sees utility for social media on the blockchain in his july talk[0]…
I'd rather see indie game devs use nfts for merc/skins/etc in their applications than social media onchain.
I'm not quite sure anyone has a monopoly on a definition of what this could be, and very much subjective to various forms of "cultural hangups" that might be prevalent around the world at any given time.
I honestly would believe that more if companies made long term investments and bought out infrastructure in EMs and converted it to be more clean[0], rather than rely on some kind of indirect status signaling:
"The proposals will include a shortlist of existing coal-fired power plants across Asia to buy and retire well before the end of their life cycles and replace them with clean energy.
"We have not settled on a precise size [financially], but would expect the pilot to acquire several coal-fired power plants at a minimum," ADB Vice President Ahmed Saeed told Nikkei Asia.
HSBC is also part of the initiative which involves scouring the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia for coal-fired power plants to close a decade or more early.
The initiative was first reported by Reuters this month. BlackRock and Citi are also working on the scheme, according to the report. The companies did not respond to requests for comment."
Still in the word soup/lip service stage.
[0] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Environment/Climate-Change...
More governmental jurisdictions offering a variety of ways people can try to live the way they want to live is better than less, imo.
They did, always another task force this that or another (I was only aware of some of this growing up), but never really changed the realities on the ground that some were exposed to more than others. Just learned to grow up and not expect that much and try to work with the people around me and watch each other, which wouldn't be possible if we were just trying to coerce one another to do things we didn't want to do (and was already kind of hard because I couldn't necessarily trust some around me).
By all means, live where you want to live and shoot your self up with the latest drug someone is pushing (whether that is some kid selling "water" on the corner or Pfizer incentivized doctors in a pop up tent) to your ability to do so.
Fair enough, but thats never really how i've been, and old habits die hard.
> So many people have had no choice but to comply with some pretty harsh restrictions
True, but the writing has been on the wall for a while in certain jurisdictions that could even enable governments to do such things. I have a lot of sympathy for those who wanted out but couldn't for whatever reason (this goes beyond covid).
> Colombia, from your list, for example may be open now but a few months ago the cops were beating people for going out. Not "please sir go back inside" but literal beat downs
Yeah, cops like to beat down folks for various reasons everyday throughout the world (some places more than others), with or without covid restrictions, and that sucks in general.
Ha, I faced more risks growing up when I had to avoid the local gangs walking to school as a kid than I do now. Most people never gave a shit about that (and still don't), esp those that didn't live there. I won't really pretend that people really care about my safety or the safety of others any more so than their personal preferences.
I live in a country with less than 10% vaccination rate now, and there is plenty of hospital capacity to cater to non-covid related things, esp for ones that see more expats than not.
Would be great to see more remote friendly + no covid restriction places esp as other countries double down.
And then one can compromise and infect millions of such backdoored devices and start feeding (much cheaper than the government enforcement implementation) spoofed data into these systems at scale on these backdoored devices that act like "swatting as a service" and completely nullify any meaning they could get from doing this.
I'm personally really interested in router level malware + 0days on devices as distribution vectors rather than the typical c&c setup.
> They'll go after people hosting it.
Not too hard to imagine one being able to distribute such things across millions of ephemeral devices that are networked and incentivized to host it, all across the world, regardless of illegality in any particular jurisdiction. Technology enables this, without such, it wont be possible.
> I think hackers and engineers really, really want to believe that math trumps policy, but it doesn't
I don't think that at all, I think it comes down to incentives. I was listening to a talk the other day where someone mentioned that for the longest time (since at least wwII), governments pretty much had a monopoly on cryptographers and now there are lots of places/systems that are willing to pay more to apply cutting edge research.
> but let's also fight for government policy that supports it, rather than assuming encryption and open source is a guarantee we can circumvent bad policy.
Much more cheaper for an individual, with more immediate feedback mechanisms doing one vs another. One can also scale a lot faster than another esp since one is very much divorced from implementation.
4th largest country by population
Most people clamoring for regs around stablecoins haven't gotten a chance to wrap their minds around this yet… nor have most of them considered the $ demom "cash and cash equivalents" that are on banks balance sheets not domiciled in the US, who have even smaller cash flows than some centralized stablecoin issuers folks love to pick on…
I don't use credit cards and never had. When I need fiat, I swap with "friends" locally who want crypto or who do have accounts (they "shill" crypto brokerages on television stations shows [and their ads on other show slots] in the country i'm in and there are more local users of crypto than people who actually have regular brokerage accounts to trade local stocks in the country). And there are local websites where I can actually pay for bills with crypto but I see no real need to when its relatively easy for me to get cash (cash top ups for alot of apps that can be used to pay for lots of things from bills, goods/services and food). Any brokerage accounts I've had (IB and robinhood), I've long drained the funds/liquidated assets and these days I'm really only exposed to what I can trade on a dex.
Other foreigners I've talked usually jump through some hoops to have a local "agent" to set up accounts for them that they have control over, but i cannot be bothered. Less exposure to bailoutistan, the better.
To use crypto, you need to find someone else who will swap for it, and over the past 10 years, that has increased enough for me to be ok with the work arounds. May not be ok for the way you want to live your life, but it works for me.
One day i'll be "stateless", but a lot more work to happen on that front with many others for that to come into fruition… ;)
Easier for me to be bankless as an american abroad than to try bother to jump through all the hoops and getting a "real" bank account.
I see this as a good thing™, since more onerous rules will probably negatively affect a lot more people who may not even care about cryptocurrency just because they may be doing something that could be used for interacting with them.
The more invasive the better!
Even then, I see plenty of chinese users (talking in mandarin) on various forums/servers using decentralized protocols, hardly that effective.
Pipe dream laws for pipe dream deficit spending to continue to prop up zombie companies and industries.
And that's only for centralized services… permissionless decentralized protocols with no articles of incorporation running on decentralized systems… this diktat is just the senate pissing in the wind…
Might as well be like clergy in the Ottoman Empire standing in the way of the printing press by saying it was a sin and it was invented by infidels…
> …giant banks and institutions received trillions of dollars in unprecedented bail outs [1] while 'main street' suffered with record unemployment, foreclosures, and destruction of small businesses.
> People rightfully realized that perhaps government should not have absolute and total control of the monetary supply and financial system.
Is defined as illegal in of itself by a government, then sure, there's no argument against dismissing it as illegal. Just like PGP falling under being illegal (from another comment) because it could exist as:
> digital copies of the binaries and source code were prohibited for export as a munition
There's no successful argument one can make against such illegality to said government. And I wouldn't bother, such people will never acquiesce if they haven't felt the lack of sufficient recourse to [1] (because they quite possibly may gain a lot of benefits by being indirectly or directly involved in [1])
Luckily, reality isn't so rigid as to what people (or even other traditional governments abroad) will actually accept (then and now) and have sovereignty over deciding what they want for themselves and side stepping based on what can actually be enforced in totality in practice regardless of what any given institutionalized jurisdiction may think of it.
And that is, unsurprisingly (and quite banally), used by many detractors to dismiss it all while handwaving away:
> Bitcoin was born in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the occupy wall street movement.[1] Events where, giant banks and institutions received trillions of dollars in unprecedented bail outs while 'main street' suffered with record unemployment, foreclosures, and destruction of small businesses.
> People rightfully realised that perhaps government should not have absolute and total control of the monetary supply and financial system.
Like people still hand wave away all the metadata and other work-arounds to compromising popular crypto systems that are highly touted because they are popular/convenient/etc or all the "get rich quick" mentality/motivations that exist outside of cryptocurrencies and have always existed…
I can imagine at some point a 0day targeting iOS devices that when they connect to a public wifi network with a compromised router, it distributes CP malware/botnet on to their device and then everyone else that connects to that device in the future (muddying the waters).
Similar actions could also be taken against other companies and state entities systems.
And these actions don't need to rely on most of the population to take them.
The more these "kill chain" like systems become automated and cheap to deploy, the more incentive individuals will have to pursue these types of attacks.
… and then proceed to conduct asymmetric warfare against state and corporate cyber systems alike.
DeFi has alot of power because of the social economic implications that finance does in the world now ranging from resource allocation in a society in decentralized and incentivized ways to being able to wage war… DAO's in DeFi (not those that have centralized teams and incorporated in some jurisdiction) really have the opportunity to exert their sovereignty in the physical world over nation states (like nation states did to the church before them).
Oh well, glad for FOSS!
The regulatory system, and people who are ok with deferring to it in its existing incarnation (i.e. the revolving door between people within TBTF bailouts-every-day with "open" "market" operations banks [where these cash dollars inevitably end up] and the people who "look" after them system), are fine with this because slaps on the wrists and fines are considered the cost of doing business and there can't be anyway possible to live and exchange value without them being involved under the guise of "protection" or "else" racket.
Robin Hanson would probably call this phenomenon a form of "Elite Tax" on society. [0]
[0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/08/how-high-our-elite-ta...