manholio

> What do you think they should do instead?

How about... they, and everybody else around the world, should work hard for good governance for all people of Earth?

It's simply obscene to claim that a speculative token peddled by SV venture capitalists could somehow magically solve things like disease, violence, corruption and lack of basic infrastructure keeping these nations down. It's so self serving and detached from developmental realities of poor countries - which I experienced fist hand in my life - that it makes my blood boil in disgust for the crypto bros.

> Another alternative is these messages are broadcast through a public and decentralized ledger.

Trouble is, the "decentralized ledger" can only reliably timestamp if there is a financial incentive that motivates peers to burn hashes, stake and vouch for blocks etc. Without that financial incentive the whole blockchain breaks down to something inferior to even the PKI distributed systems described by Lamport in the 70s and 80s.

That's the major fallacy of "blockchains" as a technology, they are always a disguise for token speculation, they require native minted tokens of speculative value to operate.

The only revolutionary thing blockchains enable is decentralized electronic cash and financial assets, which are fundamentally bad ideas, and the reaction is justified.

Any other "blockchain" related innovation is just a solution in search of a problem with the real purpose of pumping some virtual asset and selling it off in volume to other speculators. Anything you claim can be done with blockchains (other than decentralized finance) can be more easily done with databases, PKI, hashtrees, ZKPs and other technologies that exist for decades, and that includes smart contracts and anonymous & decentralized communication.

An unsupervised pack of wolves could always be attacked by a bear or hunted down by mistake, a clear case of animal negligence. Wolves should be accompanied at all times by armed midgets.

Let's be clear about something: this is not "contagion", as if panicking people are causing bank runs against iliquid financial institutions that have strong assets in the long run.

No, this is a ponzi scheme running out of suckers: the fundamental source of crypto growth and liquidity was getting new people and new money in, and that flow largely stopped this spring. Without that inflow, the bubble explodes because it has unsound fundamentals, there is nothing in the crypto space today that could justify a 1 trillion dollars value creation. Maybe some day crypto will create that value and some people want to be there and invest today, but this is only a belief, and a belief shared by enough people and with no basis in reality is called a bubble.

Of course, the first to go are the most fraudulent and sketchy shops, like FTX turned out to be, and it would apear they "caused" the crisis, like Lehman in 2008. But the economic reality is that the crisis was unavoidable, it's intrinsic to the limited real world utility of crypto.

Buy back is implicit in the price stability mission any central bank has; it cannot be fulfilled without controlling the supply of currency in the economy, i.e (at least) limited buyback. Without that, what you get is something very much like a cryptocurrency in terms of volatility.

So the assets of a "crypto hedge fund" that somehow kept "a large majority" of the fund's total assets on a 3rd party centralized exchanged is "real money" now?

That's the very definition of fake wealth, hot money seeking 50% returns in the hot risky mess that is the crypto market. The recursively leveraged self-licking icecream is melting down.

The body cam footage is a good example, it's deeply hated by the police and a frequent source of incriminatory evidence against the wearer.

Since "you got nothing to hide", as the old saying goes, why not bodycam yourself and offer the authorities a great source of evidence they can use against yourself?

The trouble with any such footage is that it can be used against you ("as the the defendant's own records show, they were present in the murder area") but they generally won't extricate you when produced by you, since you clearly have a motivation to use it selectively. So you showing a picture of yourself reading a book during what you claim is the murder night is not an alibi, because it could have been produced at any other time, and you will have a massive uphill battle in the court to authenticate that image, and risk even sink you further if you fail ("the defendant even prepared an alibi").

The only way I would accept a commercial product performing this always-on archiving is if:

1. It's encrypted by default with a strong key that can't be subpoenaed or circumvented.

2. The encoder generates its own random key upon installation which I don't know (recoding effectively random, undecodable data), and I then have to manually change the key if I expect to ever read the recording.

Number 1 allows me to review and footage and only release it if it's in my interest, and number 2 affords me plausible deniability, if I don't release the key I can claim I did not know you need to set it manually.

Sure, as long as you are the only nerd doing this, you don't need this complex setup, and you will probably get to use it the unencrypted footage only in your favor. But when it becomes widely accepted as a social norm (say, everyone wearing Google glasses), you can expect law enforcement will become aware of it as a cheap source of self-incriminatory evidence.

I don't think that's entire believable anymore. This direct account from a Alameda employee linked in the other frontpage discussion alleges the Hong Kong office was busy at work trying to sell Alameda assets to cover ftx.us withdrawals (in addition to ftx.com). Why would ftx us need this support if they were fully segregated?

https://twitter.com/libevm/status/1592383746551910400

Many of their customers (if not most, on volume) wired USDT obtained from other parts of the ponzi ecosystem, then traded them internally for dollars. This way, FTX could accumulate internal USD liabilities without ever having those dollars wired into their accounts. Even if we were to take at face value the $5 billion liabilities from SBF's "Excel ballancesheet", that's still less than a third of the loses.

Sure, Tether should have a 1:1 backing to real dollars or dollar denominated assets - but it's like the ponzi-world's worst kept secret that they don't, as we'll soon find out.

> FTX may be one of, if not the, biggest financial frauds/scandals in history. The media doesn't seem to be treating it as such.

Most of that wealth was manufactured in the crypto bubble, not actual money people worked for and put into crypto, just early stage ponzi investors that kept rolling their investment. The wealth, while apparently substantial, was never actually there, I think most understand that the mirage would have collapsed anyway if most investors would have attempted to exit earlier.

Basically, any early holder of Bitcoin today, while losing 70% or so of the peak value, is still a bazzillion basis points in the black, because they can get real dollars for what is essentially an early and rudimentary shitcoin with arcane limits, slow transaction times and extreme volatility, which is only used in the real world for speculation, money laundry and trading other shitcoins. Pretty ironic that's the "gold standard" of the crypto world, followed by an entire brown spectrum of shittier and scammier tokens.

They are both anti-consumer. The regulatory solution is to break the dealers monopoly in selling cars in an area, but also force-open the repair, service and spares part markets which most car manufactures use as profit centers. I don't know the Tesla situation specifically, but some companies use extremely dodgy techniques, like voiding your entire warranty for getting oil changes outside their networks etc.

Since the central bank controls the unit of account value and can always devalue and print itself out of any sticky situation, the only meaningful way it can go "bankrupt" is to lose the ability to appreciate the currency. I agree it's a stretch.

The notion that the central bank can conjure pure profits out of thin air and has no liability against its issued currency is fantastical, it would suggest a perpetual profit machine. In reality, any issued currency comes with a strong liability to buy it back in inflationary times, so it's clearly an external debt from the CB's perspective, this is a well established notion.

This has origin in the pre-modern, free banking era, where competing private banks issued "bank notes" attesting their demand deposits, and which in time became widely accepted. This is basically the exact thing a central bank does, with a state granted monopoly, and no link to the gold and silver the bank "owes" for the notes.

Yes, exchanges shouldn't commingle their assets with clients funds, yet they have large operational outlays (coding &security, traditional financial fees, meth & luxury condos in Bahamas, etc.) that seem unlikely to be coverable with trading fees alone. Even if we allow them to work like banks, they still can't seem to justify the tens of billion valuations.

It's not just "accounting convenience" it's literally the way the profit vs loss of the central bank is defined. The central bank typically has a legal obligation to maintain stable prices, so while outstanding currency is not a liability in the conventional sense with a certain maturity date, interest etc., it's undoubtedly a debt towards society at large, which could presumably need to be redeemed and sterilized in the course of monetary policy, at least in part. Outstanding currency is a perpetual zero interest loan towards the central bank by the holders of currency.

If a central bank loses 80% of its real reserves, and financial circumstances arise where it must repurchase more than 20% of it's issued currency, for example to defend the exchange rate against a capital flight, than the bank is effectively "bankrupt" - it can no longer fulfill its legal role and regulate the value of the national currency. It's not a traditional bankruptcy, but it's a de-facto failure which many central banks experienced.

The coin the central bank issues is a liability in its balance sheet. If it prints 1 trillion, uses it to buy 1 trillion worth of commercial paper and those assets lose 10%, then the bank has liabilities worth 1 trillion (outstanding currency) but only 900 billion in assets to cover them. Technically in default, but also in a very special economic position, because no body expects the central bank to ever cover its full liabilities.

Bankman would have not sanctioned it because he's got much more to lose the greater the hole is. Someone around Bankman though, that has no substantial stake in FTX and suddenly realizes he was an accessory to financial fraud, has strong incentives to burn the house down.

From a secure and audited system where only a handful of people had access and the actions of each are recorded (if we dismiss Bankman's "backdoor" for a moment), all of a sudden we have a system that was wide open to the world and raided exactly after the financial collapse. As it's easy to see, your Honor, the hackers were in the system all along, forging the so called audit trail allegedly incriminating my client; when the game was up, they pounced.

This sounds like a great insider action to cover the fraud and mismanagement: leak the keys to the kingdom in a dark web forum, so that in the resulting commotion you can blame the hackers who had access all along and obviously made your platform fail. Something, anything that your lawyers can grasp at.

If we can have this and the animated gif where the woman shoots the guy wearing VR goggles, that would be a complete kit for making fun of Meta and Zuck.

That's precisely how you would keep a peg: let the market enforce it and bear the brunt of the speculative action, then intervene brutally to restore the peg and reward those who held the line with profits. If you do it a few times, nobody will bet against the peg ever again.

Of course, this is all predicated on you actually having the massive assets required to fight a speculative market. That shouldn't be a problem for something like USDT which should be backed 1:1. So let's sit back and enjoy some price discovery (though I wouldn't be caught dead in USDT).

To see them in action, type the word "random" in Notepad++, select it and go to the ? -> "About Notepad++" menu. A new tab will appear where one quote will be typed out.

Construction has to be something like one the most common and universal of human occupations, you can surely find heaps of documentation.

That being said, the actual techniques used tend to be localized and adapted to specific local conditions, available materials, geography and climate, labor cost etc. There isn't one standard way of going about it, you always learn the local Community of practice [1].

If you are looking to build the stereotypical noth-american stick frame house, the work of Larry Haun comes to mind [2]. The other major tradition is the European brick/concrete/AAC house, again, extensively documented; but you would start with a well engineered project designed by a professional, since failures tend to be sudden and catastrophic.

As for "repairs" the number of trades is almost endless, from the core like roofing, drywalling & paint, plumbing, gas & HVAC, electrical - which today includes house automation and data - concrete work, landscaping etc. to the uncommon like specialist thermal & insect treatment, stonework, chimneys etc.

Each trade has its own community language used by tradesmen in a certain geography, so you need to sink at least some hours to watch Youtube videos etc. pertaining to your specific problem. The number, complexity and local specificity of these trades is so vast that's inconceivable to learn them in bulk, you would always deal with the problem at hand, and if you continue this for a suficient number of years you become knowledgeable in the construction field.

[1] https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/building-complexi...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQmt27qN6AI

Do we have access to the sauce code of the Viewpoints team?

Sounds like they had a very effective method to generate communication stacks.

> Get that through your head. They owe you nothing.

If you want to be abrasive on tangents, you can definitely be that guy, but that was not the subject, rather the nature of censorship. You completely disregard my example of iligitemate private censorship by the banks, intended to point out the problem, only to forcefully restate a extremist ideological position that doesn't really function in any true society. Ok...

> How is usage of a private company's private server resources any different?

If you push that argument to the extreme, why should anyone be allowed to publish anything in our county? They can always go someplace else and speak their mind, but we don't want it around here.

What I'm saying is that exists a gradient of power between the dictatorial (state censorship) and inconsequential (your couch), and we have a social contract that allows the same suppression of speech in the latter but disallows it in the former. We call the consequential type "censorship" but it's the same basic action, there is a gray area where private agents working under the authority of the state can be just as powerful censors as the state itself.

For example, if private banks deny services to a newspaper hostile to the government, I could take your argument and spin it around, they are "free" to publish on their own pocket cash, private banks are not forced to "offer a platform". But we clearly understand that publication will lose advertisers, fail commercial and the interests behind the banking ban will have succeeded in suppressing free speech - suggesting them to distribute leaflets will not help.

The cut-off point where private suppression becomes consequential censorship is, in my opinion, when the gatekeepers of speech are centralized and oligopolistic, like for example social media and, unlike for example, traditional print media. A single publication denying publication is perfectly fine, as long as others exists and have reasonable similar access to distributions channels. With the death of traditional print media and the highly concentrated nature of the visual media and internet space, this less the case.

You can of course publish on your blog with zero traffic, but you are effectively shut out of the relevant distribution channels, you are effectively distributing leaflets in your corner of the street.

True in the absolute, but irrelevant. Censorship is always contextual, in practice censors fall short of the 1984ish "ideal" of total domination of the individual.

This dichotomy (free speech for all, but no one is required to offer a platform) works in liberal societies because you have a diversity of publishers.

Like in the NI case, it's conceivable that only the most rudimentary artificial intellects will fall pray to this self hacking.

Trully intelligent agents will be capable of introspection and self-defined goals and rewards. You know, just like a certain species of ape, hard wired for banana maximization, the descendants of which sometimes dream of visiting Mars.

In social media, moderation of this style is practically equivalent to censorship because the visibility of the content is determined algorithmically: if the algo decides to "hide" your posts they become invisible (or much less visible) in other people's feeds. The fact that they're still visible for the die hard followers that refresh your page to see them is mostly irrelevant.

Your speech is effectively censored by the moderators because you cannot use that tool as intended, to reach audiences with the same ease other types of speech can.

It's like requiring a newspaper to "moderate" all articles by a certain author publishing them in the form of a short notice "If you are interested in the writings of Mr. Smith, who may or may have not published an article for today's issue, then please send a self-addressed enevelope to PO-Box ....".

There is also a giant fallacy in this advice that you "gain an extra 2 hours". no, you start working 2 hours earlier, but you will be just as beat in the evenings, and still unable to do more than slouch on the couch and watch Netflix. If you don't use that time for working already, than why would you ruin your sleep patterns? especially since 2 hours less sleep is a massive reduction for most people.