nosuchthing

If only we could trace insider trades using some sort of big data system. Hmm.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-insidertrading-saf...

  KID TRADERS

  Using data on a half a million accounts from Finland from 
  1995 to 2010, the study came to a surprising conclusion: 
  accounts set up to benefit kids 10 years and under did 
  really well at stock picking, and did especially well just 
  before mergers, earnings releases and events that generate 
  big stock moves.


  The analysis was possible since Finland makes available 
  unusually detailed information about the identities of 
  investors.


  “When guardians trade through under-aged accounts, there 
  is a relatively high probability that they are trading on 
  private information,” the authors, Henk Berkman, at 
  University of Auckland, Paul Koch at the University of 
  Kansas and Joakim Westerholm at the University of Sydney, 
  conclude in a paper slated to be published in the Journal   
  of Finance.


  The gap between the junior set and typical accounts held 
  by adults was striking: in the day following trades made 
  by kids, their accounts outperformed the adult accounts by 
  9 basis points.


  Ahead of major earnings announcements, the kids chose 
  correctly whether to buy or sell 57 percent of the time 
  and beat their elders by 1.1 percent in the following day.


  It gets even better - at least for junior. On trades made 
  the day ahead of a merger announcement, juvenile 
  portfolios outperformed by 12 percent the following day, 
  and made the right decision to buy or sell an uncanny 72 
  percent of the time.


  The rest of the market, by the way, chose correctly 
  whether to buy or sell only 50 percent of the time.


  This is probably not all due to inside knowledge, 
  according to the study. The guardians tended to be richer 
  and may simply have been more successful at investing, the 
  authors argue, due perhaps to higher intelligence or an 
  advantage in obtaining legal, but valuable information.


  Even so, the fact that the juvenile accounts outperformed 
  ahead of mergers while the guardians’ accounts did not 
  implies that the adults were smart enough to know better 
  than to trade on inside knowledge in an easily traceable 
  way.

The threat model you sound concerned about could easily be mitigated in several ways. Use a proxy/VPN/TOR to visit the site, don't sign up for the email list. Maybe use a spare email address? I'd assume the email list is just alerts for new documentaries. News letters and email sign ups are extremely common?

Why does this site look like a honey pot?

Paradoxical intentions? Can you clarify what by visiting a website, you'd have "so much to lose"? That seems excessively paranoid.

I'm not involved with thoughtmaybe.com - if there were any other website hosting Adam Curtis films, please feel free to share.

You're wary of sites with opt in email list subscription links?

From the site header ABOUT page:

https://thoughtmaybe.com/about/

"Thought Maybe is a 100% independent, autonomous, not-for-profit, self-directed project that exists to inspire action on a whole bunch of issues surrounding modern society, industrial civilisation, globalised dominant culture.

This website does not use nor support corporate “communication networks” such as YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. We think its important to maintain an independent platform for publishing—insofar as it’s possible to do on the Internet of corporate-controlled gateways or ISPs.

We run this project using Open Source Software and embrace the notion of Creative Commons, and supportive sharing.

--

We don’t run advertising on our site because we find it repugnant, compromising and unwanted!

This project is entirely not-for-profit—an open library funded by a small crew of dedicated media activists throughout the world. This freely accessible library is our labour of love project for positive social and political change. Even though it is a hard job, we don’t get paid.

We don’t receive any outside funds of any type, and we don’t receive nor would we accept money from any corporate or government entities. Our vested interest lays solely with humanity and the natural world, not this culture, not this system.

--

This library is independent and autonomous. It is a labour of love run by a small crew of dedicated activists throughout the world. We have no affiliations and are not part of any organisation or group, which means no vested interest, which means we can publish what is needed without interference, censorship or vetoing.

We don’t work with any commercial organisations, religious groups, political parties, etc—we’re entirely independent and self-determined in order to remain effective about what we set out to achieve, which is to cultivate and nurture an effective culture of resistance to the pertinent social and political issues outlined in this library. It is why filmmakers make films, it’s why we do what we do to support getting them seen and acted on. Where it goes from here is up to you…"

Here's a better source for Adam Curtis's series:

https://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/

  The Century of The Self

https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/

  HyperNormalisation

https://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/

  All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-lov...

  The Power of Nightmares

https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-power-of-nightmares/

  It Felt Like a Kiss

https://thoughtmaybe.com/it-felt-like-a-kiss/

Turn around time is mostly due to shipping samples to outside labs, in addition to outside labs lacking automation.

Simply not true.

Faith in cryptography will not help anyone with fraud, theft, and trust.

Naive neo-liberal libertarians and anarchocapitalists attempt to claim deregulation will just work because they've never encountered abuse, fraud, negligence, or read any history.

  One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion 
  people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or 
  Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And  
  if we just include all balances, we include many dust 
  balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at 
  0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The 
  imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient 
  among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH 
  per address. So this is the distribution of ownership 
  among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July 
  2017.


  In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like 
  this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the 
  ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking 
  information on all holders with balances >$20,000. 
  Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini 
  coefficient would mean that a government would only need 
  to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a 
  large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with 
  it the ability to tank the price.

  With that said, two points. First, while one would not 
  want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as 
  then only one person would have all of the digital 
  currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost 
  the network), in practice it appears that a very high 
  level of wealth centralization is still compatible with 
  the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we 
  show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better 
  metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder 
  concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of 
  arbitrarily choosing a threshold.


  ...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious 
  issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion 
  of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini 
  coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it 
  does not directly measure the number of individuals or 
  entities required to compromise a system.


  Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a 
  subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini 
  coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners 
  with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that 
  compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be 
  sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the 
  maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges 
  rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck.


  Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries 
  with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem, 
  then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would 
  again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a 
  Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in 
  >51% of mining being compromised.
  
  - Balaji S. Srinivasan (the CTO of Coinbase) 

https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...

Why waste energy on a system that's designed to grow increasingly inefficient over time (Crypto PoW mining), when you could simply store the energy or use it on something that is helpful to the local community, as in food or manufacturing?

Where is the demand?*

*If you read the article, it explains the demand was from the person behind Bitfinex printing a seemingly unlimited amount of Tether to steal BTC from other exchanges, so the demand is in effect a huge heist across all exchanges that supported Tether / USDT.

In Bitcoin's ideal use case, internet transactions - nearly all businesses have rejected BTC as a form of payment.

Stripe, the famous silicon valley payment processor discontinued Bitcoin support:

https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support

"At Stripe, we’ve long been excited about the possibilities of cryptocurrencies and the experimentation and innovation that’s come with them. In 2014, we became the first major payments company to support Bitcoin payments.

Our hope was that Bitcoin could become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions and help our customers enable buyers in places that had less credit card penetration or use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive.

Over the past year or two, as block size limits have been reached, Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange. Given the overall success that the Bitcoin community has achieved, it’s hard to quibble with the decisions that have been made along the way. (And we’re certainly happy to see any novel, ambitious project do so well.)

This has led to Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments, however. Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires.

Because of this, we’ve seen the desire from our customers to accept Bitcoin decrease. And of the businesses that are accepting Bitcoin on Stripe, we’ve seen their revenues from Bitcoin decline substantially. Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense.

Therefore, starting today, we are winding down support for Bitcoin payments. Over the next three months we will work with affected Stripe users to ensure a smooth transition before we stop processing Bitcoin transactions on April 23, 2018.

Despite this, we remain very optimistic about cryptocurrencies overall. There are a lot of efforts that we view as promising and that we can certainly imagine enabling support for in the future. We’re interested in what’s happening with Lightning and other proposals to enable faster payments. OmiseGO is an ambitious and clever proposal; more broadly, Ethereum continues to spawn many high-potential projects. We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow. It’s possible that Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, or another Bitcoin variant, will find a way to achieve significant popularity while keeping settlement times and transaction fees very low. Bitcoin itself may become viable for payments again in the future. And, of course, there’ll be more ideas and technologies in the years ahead.

So, we will continue to pay close attention to the ecosystem and to look for opportunities to help our customers by adding support for cryptocurrencies and new distributed protocols in the future."

Case study in Bitcoin as a payment system where even highly technically proficient users were unable to reliably use BTC to buy digital goods (Steam games):

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/12/steam-drops-bitcoin-p...

Isn’t bitmain ramping down production already though?

It’s true, that’s why cryptocurrency advocates attempt to sell you the money they minted and then gimp the mint so no one else can produce the supply for the same work energy.

Anytime someone advocates cryptocurrency x, ask them if you’re allowed to mint the money for the same amount of work as they (the sellers, speculators, advocates) are/did.

Presumably people wouldn't want a cryptocurrency as plutocratic and centralized as Bitcoin has become. Some lessons were learned with BTC as an experiment, and as we can see there's evolution taking place and plenty of more advanced alternatives are making prior software like bitcoin obsolete. It's especially troubling how centralized the minting and mining has become. And it's easy to forget there's the problem with energy consumption related to the PoW algorithm eating almost 1% of the entire world's energy simply for an accounting database. The major reason you don't see payment processors dealing with cryptocurrencies is because the major usecase for most cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Monereo, and Ethereum is money laundering. One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And if we just include all balances, we include many dust balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at 0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH per address. So this is the distribution of ownership among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July 2017.

  In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like 
  this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the 
  ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking 
  information on all holders with balances >$20,000. 
  Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini 
  coefficient would mean that a government would only need 
  to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a 
  large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with 
  it the ability to tank the price.

  With that said, two points. First, while one would not 
  want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as 
  then only one person would have all of the digital 
  currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost 
  the network), in practice it appears that a very high 
  level of wealth centralization is still compatible with 
  the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we 
  show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better 
  metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder 
  concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of 
  arbitrarily choosing a threshold.


  ...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious 
  issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion 
  of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini 
  coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it 
  does not directly measure the number of individuals or 
  entities required to compromise a system.


  Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a 
  subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini 
  coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners 
  with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that 
  compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be 
  sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the 
  maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges 
  rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck.


  Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries 
  with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem, 
  then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would 
  again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a 
  Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in 
  >51% of mining being compromised.
  
  - Balaji S. Srinivasan (the CTO of Coinbase) 

-https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...

It's slower than random access mediums, but tapes have built in memory for track location which is nice when you're listening to something (in the car) and want to switch devices and carry on from your last listening point (books on tape).

So an Oligarchy that's less monopolistic?

Where do the coins come from? Has there been any other mechanisms for minting other than minting the supply from day 1, or burning computational capital/energy in the form of PoW mining?

Presumably people wouldn't want a cryptocurrency as plutocratic and centralized as Bitcoin has become. Some lessons were learned with BTC as an experiment, and as we can see there's evolution taking place and plenty of more advanced alternatives are making prior software like bitcoin obsolete.

It's especially troubling how centralized the minting and mining has become. And it's easy to forget there's the problem with energy consumption related to the PoW algorithm eating almost 1% of the entire world's energy simply for an accounting database.

The major reason you don't see payment processors dealing with cryptocurrencies is because the major usecase for most cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Monereo, and Ethereum is money laundering.

  One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion 
  people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or 
  Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And  
  if we just include all balances, we include many dust 
  balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at 
  0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The 
  imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient 
  among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH 
  per address. So this is the distribution of ownership 
  among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July 
  2017.


  In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like 
  this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the 
  ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking 
  information on all holders with balances >$20,000. 
  Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini 
  coefficient would mean that a government would only need 
  to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a 
  large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with 
  it the ability to tank the price.

  With that said, two points. First, while one would not 
  want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as 
  then only one person would have all of the digital 
  currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost 
  the network), in practice it appears that a very high 
  level of wealth centralization is still compatible with 
  the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we 
  show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better 
  metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder 
  concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of 
  arbitrarily choosing a threshold.


  ...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious 
  issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion 
  of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini 
  coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it 
  does not directly measure the number of individuals or 
  entities required to compromise a system.


  Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a 
  subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini 
  coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners 
  with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that 
  compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be 
  sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the 
  maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges 
  rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck.


  Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries 
  with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem, 
  then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would 
  again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a 
  Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in 
  >51% of mining being compromised.
  
  - Balaji S. Srinivasan (the CTO of Coinbase) 

-

https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...

  "The decentralized design that Bitcoin uses needs people to do lots of processing work"

You should try reading Satoshi's white paper which explains what that processing work is. (hint: there's not really any processing outside of generating a bunch of random worthless nonces in the hope that one nonce will be accepted as a winning lottery number)

The Proof of Work "algorithm" is completely unnecessary for processing transactions, and it's actually quite simple. To the point, PoW simply asks for a random number for the purpose of creating a lottery. If you want Bitcoins, you need to waste more real world energy and capital on hardware to print more lottery tickets (nonces).

The Bitcoin network and all the transactions on the network could easily be run on cheap hardware, a raspberry pi even. The PoW filter is a psychological tool for "governance" (write access) to the database, granted now exclusively to wealthy capital holders. Effectively granting the Bitcoin / PoW network to the wealthiest speculators who can devote resources to be sacrificed in return for digital lottery printers, which in turn give a chance to generate numbers in the cryptocoin database.

Curious why someone would design a currency system in objection to the financial plutocracy, when the design inevitably restricts control of the entire network only to existing capital?

It's no mistake Satoshi owns at least 1,148,800 BTC.

It only takes one veto (bug) to nullify the entire network, CVE-2018-17144 for example.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...

No one should have to buy Bitcoin when you can mine it, oh wait it's all being printed in warehouses owned by wealthy capital holders.

Surely this is Satoshi's design goal.

Also don't worry about the exchanges operating out of obscure off shore islands, they probably arn't operating fractional reserves.

It sounds like you're saying extreme violence from the local anarcho-capitalist-libertarian business/corporation/cartel is excused and normal because... there are no checks and balances in nation states.. so oh well!

Wow so crowdsourcing the military industrial complex's artificial intelligence KILLBOTS?

This almost looks like it's satire, but it's completely real and for sale, just $499!

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlO2gcs1YvM

It was also because in the Battle.net chat rooms, your icon would have a higher number if you were ranked lower.

So if you wanted to be rank 9999, you just forfeit all your ladder matches.

There's no point in a hard fork when you can just start fresh, and mint a new network of cryptocurrency.

Especially due to the fact that the early cryptocoins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monereo each designed their supplies to dump into a plutocratic distribution.

The spot price on unregulated exchanges which are presumably operating fractional reserves, wash trading, front running, and spoofing the order book.

And don't forget 3 billion Tethers, likely being used to manipulate margin trades. (see "the bart" pattern, which is likely an indication of either Bitmex or Bitfinex wiping out margin traders with temporary price manipulation)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066

https://amycastor.com/2019/01/17/the-curious-case-of-tether-...

https://omniexplorer.info/address/1NTMakcgVwQpMdGxRQnFKyb3G1...

Bitcoin doesn't offer the protection and services provided by banks and stock exchanges, let alone the transaction volume.

Employment is a good point, as financial companies employ millions of people but then you would need to add in the additional metrics from companies and OPEX/electrical/hardware related to blockchain startups.

All of that is mostly irrelevant though, because the principle design of "Proof of Work" software is to maximize the inefficiency and operational waste of transactions as the network gains users and as time goes on, without any increase in network capacity. The other curious design choice is to decrease the economic output (production) as more work enters the network, which seems quite malicious, but few people have bothered to read and comprehend the design choices in "Satoshi's white paper".

Don't forget the total costs of running Bitcoin software:

Bitcoin's current estimated annual electricity consumption* (TWh) 63.23

Bitcoin's current minimum annual electricity consumption (TWh) 38.25

Annualized global mining revenues $6,705,703,327

Annualized estimated global mining costs $3,161,647,973

Current cost percentage 47.15%

Country closest to Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption Switzerland

Estimated electricity used over the previous day (KWh) 173,240,985

Implied Watts per GH/s 0.125

Total Network Hashrate in PH/s (1,000,000 GH/s) 57,577

Electricity consumed per transaction (KWh) 465

Number of U.S. households that could be powered by Bitcoin 5,854,904

Number of U.S. households powered for 1 day by the electricity consumed for a single transaction 15.7

Bitcoin's electricity consumption as a percentage of the world's electricity consumption 0.28%

Annual carbon footprint (kt of CO2) 30,036

Carbon footprint per transaction (kg of CO2) 220.7

Source: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

The reliance on the severely distorted plutocratic ownership of 0x, Ethereum, and most of the cryptocoin supplies is a huge risk factor that is often conveniently swept under the rug.

By building on 0x, or other cryptocoin software it's essential to be aware of the elephants/whales in the "economy" of cryptocoins and tokens.

There's no way for the blockchain to validate time stamping due to fluctuation in hash power and the nature of an adversarial network with untrusted data.

What's been happening is blocktimes wildly fluctuate, anywhere from 20 seconds - 90 minutes + even though the software attempts to calibrate for 10 minutes.

Ranked choice voting, and efforts to eliminate gerrymandering. The 2020 census.

https://old.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_tabl...

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/gerrymandering-illegal-mathema...

https://theintercept.com/2017/11/03/maine-ranked-choice-voti...

I'm guessing because actual wealth accumulates though capital gains and income sources that are not classified or taxed as "income"

Financial institutions offer a vast array of services, safeguards, and functionality and significantly higher transactional infrastructure versus Bitcoin/cryptocoins.

Exchanging cash versus submitting a Bitcoin transaction would be more on par.

The two-party system is a direct result of FPTP election forms.

  First past the post receives a lot of criticism for 
  restricting options to vote for due to the idea of vote 
  splitting and strategic voting. This leads elections to 
  run into the commonly referred to "Lesser of two evils" 
  dilemma and ends with a 2-party system in place. With 42% 
  of Americans saying they identify as independent and 60% 
  of Americans saying the need for a new party is apparent, 
  it would suggest that the FPTP voting system is failing 
  democracy, failing Americans, and failing America.

https://old.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_tabl...

Marijuana legalization is proof of the contrary