What features are you referring to?
625 karma · joined July 25, 2009
But blockchain itself does not prevent copyright infringement of digital assets. I.e. the artist may sell his photos as NFTs, but I can still use them without permission or resell them through other channels.
Most developed contries have digitized their deed system, so I am not sure how you can con someone out of their deed.
Also, back when we did use physical deeds, there generally was owner’s copy and land office’s copy, and on the back of the deed would be the transfer history.
So to con someone out of their deed, you would not only need to get the owner’s deed, but you would also have to get your name added to the land office’s copy.
And as it is used for digital goods, the signifier of “ownership” is already broken, as multiple people can have a copy of the item without their being any ownership conflict, unlike a house.
For the numbers 6-10 China have hand gestures where number of fingers held up does not correspond to the number.
I was confused by this when I wanted to buy something and the lady crossed her two index fingers.
I took it to mean that the item was not for sale (out of stock), but later learned that this is the hand gesture for the number ten.
How can you create anything of value¹ by limiting yourself to on-chain transactions?
If value is created, the transaction would cover something happening in parallel, and your transparency does not extend to that.
¹ I do not consider lotteries or similar zero-sum games as value creation, but those can be 100% on-chain.
The important stuff is not transparent. For example, how do you know that Tether is backed by real USD? That Binance isn’t manipulating prices via wash trades? That the promises made about various coins are being upheld? etc.
Crypto is reliving the era of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking
> With most of the traditional finance world, it's all very grey and hidden
What specifically are you referring to with “traditional finance”?
Their Office suite may have been internally consistent, but I did a bit of software for Windows 2000 (back when it was the latest version), and I found the UI of Windows (in general) inconsistent, scrollbars would e.g. have subtle difference between applications.
I ended up using Qt for my own work, as I couldn’t figure out what was the official / dominant style to follow.
It is more about some thought-leader being keen on blockchains, machine learning, supply-side economics, or what have you, and looking at every problem/situation through the lens of wanting to apply this technology/policy to solve it, possibly ignoring the downsides/details/side-effects.
The article gives the fictional example of a project “just needing a relational database” but the “domain expert” trying to push them to use SpringySearch because that can also work as a relational database (and because this hedgehog is sold on SpringySearch).
It’s fairly easy, but agree, it is not a practical solution for most people.
But then, most people do not get their income from abroad, so bitcoin isn’t practical either, for example you yourself exchange the bitcoins for cash, to use them locally (rather than use bitcoins to pay for your ice cream).
There is a market for “cash for bitcoin” (I think) because Argentina has capital controls, i.e. people making money in Argentina, that they want to get out of the country, and can’t go through the regulated system, are willing to buy your bitcoins, possible below market rate.
So bitcoin primarily solves the problem of getting money out of a country with capital controls, but most people living in a country with capital controls do not regularly face this problem.
You can say that for you, it solves the problem of getting money into the country, but there are plenty of alternatives, sure, some may have downsides, but bitcoin is not without downsides.
For spending money day-to-day, bitcoin does not solve that problem, the bitcoins have to be exchanged to cash first, as no-one wants to pay a 4 dollar fee to buy an ice cream, or have to wait up to an hour for reasonable assurance that the transaction is final.
> Any time you handle money, whether from a bank or anywhere else, you are accepting dirty money
While this may be true, I was alluding to specific anti-money laundering laws. For example, in the U.S. you have to report cash payments of $10,000 or above. So your ice cream shop, accepting a few dollars in cash, do not have to report this, and would not be liable if it turns out that these money were from selling drugs or what have you.
But if a car dealership accepts $25,000 in cash for a car, and they do not report it, then they are complicit in laundering money (to the best of my knowledge).
I don’t know if such laws exist in Argentina, but they exist in the U.S. and Europa, and I believe they would also apply to accepting cash for bitcoin (although the U.S. reporting threshold is quite high, in Denmark the reporting threshold was around $500, last I checked).
> I'm hesitant about getting cash from strangers for a different reason, which is what I thought you were going to say: they might shoot me or rob my house and take the cash back
My concern was twofold, the regulatory issue, as mentioned, but certainly also, that the people showing up to give you money for bitcoin may indeed be “gagsters”, but I was afraid that this would come off as prejudiced, as I don’t know Argentina, so I shouldn’t make assumptions, but I do know another developing country fairly well, where there is drug trafficking with foreigners involved, and capital controls makes it hard for them to take their profit out of the country, so they have turned to bitcoin, and I really would not want to get involved with these people (i.e. show up and accept their dirty cash for bitcoins).
In that situation, I would look into setting up an offshore corporation with a bank account to hold the income, and then get a debit card that could be used in Argentina.
This would be a hedge against the volatility of bitcoin (but maybe you see that as an advantage) and it would not require you to get cash from strangers, which I personally would be a little hesitant about, since there is a non-zero chance you are accepting dirty money and/or helping people circumvent currency controls, but I do not know the laws of Argentina, and whether or not you are violating any laws here.
The comment you link to say that you cannot get money out of Argentina (due to capital controls).
Fair enough, but in the comment I replied to, you said that you were living in Argentina, and got paid in bitcoin.
Am I to infer that you want to get your salary out of Argentina? And those who pay you are within Argentina?
Otherwise, I do not see the problem.
If you are paid by someone outside Argentina, they can deposit the money (as USD or whatever) into your PayPal or Wise account, and you can send them to whoever you want, get a debit card associated with the account, and spend/withdraw within Argentina (without needing a local bank account).
I do understand that bitcoin is a means to get money out of a country with capital controls, but normally money flows into these countries, as has been mentioned earlier, 20% of El Salvador’s BNP is remittance, i.e. people are sending money into the country.
>> Bitcoin does not solve the “cash to people without a bank account”. > This is not correct. It does
Bitcoin itself does not solve it. But I assume that you have found people in Argentina, who are willing to pay you cash for bitcoins?
I wonder if people are willing to buy your bitcoins (with cash) because they see it as an investment, or because they need to transfer their cash out of Argentina and cannot go through the regular system (due to capital controls).
Can you explain how this is better than e.g. Wise (formerly Transferwise), PayPal, or some other international money transmitter?
And in the case of El Salvador, I think Western Union is popular for remittance because people without a bank account can get cash. Bitcoin does not solve the “cash to people without a bank account”. If the idea is, that people should instead transfer money to each other via the Strike app, when they pay for things, I fail to see how this is different from e.g. sending money to each other with PayPal.
Based on the numbers published though, it does not appear like these people are taking out loans with shares as collateral.
E.g. Bezos declared 4.22B in income and paid 973M in tax. This leaves him with more than 3 billions after tax, so I sincerely doubt he also took out a loan.
By adding a backdoor to E2E encryption? That is pretty much what they have been asking for :)
Amazing that criminals still pick some unknown device over an existing solution with a proven track record.
This is not the first time something like this has happened:
And then there is the re-use of things between services, for example DKIM’s generated public key should be made available as a TXT record by the DNS server, the SSL certificate kept up-to-date by the web server should be used by both the smtp and imap servers, though it may need to include the full chain, and services may need to be relaunched, if the certificate is updated, etc.
I was hoping to hear from someone who had managed to get a “full” server running (with SMTP, IMAP, DKIM, DNS, DNSSec, HTTPS via ACME, etc.), because while I know that I can output raw configuration files, it seems like an extremely daunting task to weave all this together in something semantically meaningful.
Right now I have /etc under git control and a Makefile that handles all dependencies between the various pieces (i.e. to ensure proper files are regenerated/indexed as needed, and services relaunched when dependencies are updated).
The problem I see with NixOS on a typical personal server is that you have to setup all these things using nix expressions, from which the actual configuration files are generated.
That means if you e.g. want to install postfix, instead of learning about main.cf you have to learn the syntax of the nix configuration wrapper for postfix, and postfix having hundreds if not thousands of options, many referring to external files/databases, you have to hope that whoever did this configuration wrapper, supported all the features of postfix that you want to use.
I am using nixpkgs on macOS, and I run a personal server with mail (for a bunch of people), web (for a bunch of sites), DNS (for a bunch of domains), etc. and while I would love to switch to declarative configuration, I fear I would run into shortcomings with the configuration wrappers for the various software packages I use.
I am curious if anyone have experience to share?
It depends on the topic/domain, but I have fond memories of being on various mailing lists, and there was also usenet.
The Danish strategy is to test a lot of people and catch new cases early.
Requiring a green corona passport when entering various establishments where transmission can happen, is both a way to decrease the chance of transmission in these places, and to force more people to get tested, to hopefully catch asymptomatic people before they infect too many other people.
I would argue it’s actually a sub-zero-sum game because the “game master” (bitcoin miners) withdraw 12.5 coins from the pool every 10th minute.
What you store is your private key.
Your private key was generated together with your public key, and your public key is, well, public.
So the question is, can someone re-generate your private key?
In theory, yes, it is possible. In practice, it takes a very very long time.
But sometimes flaws are found in the generation process, like a weak pseudo-random number generated used, which significantly reduces the solution space, and then it becomes feasible.
So yes, it does matter if we let financial institutions disregard risk in the pursuit of profit, when they are gambling with other people’s money.
In the case of Tether though, it’s not a traditional bank that issues interest yielding loans based on the lender’s credit profile.
Rather, the suspicion has been that they are simply issuing USDT coins to buy up crypto, which causes the latter to increase in value, but the money to buy these assets were never there in the first place, and that is why today, they can only show a fraction of the cash they claim to have received.
Signing the agreement is also not just clicking “Agree”, you have to hunt for the contract online first. Last time I did this, their 2FA was down, so just logging in took me about a minute.
It feels like a lot of friction that serves absolutely no purpose, which makes it so extremely infuriating.
This is from the same company whose former CEO pressured a developer to reduce the boot time of the Macintosh (and got a 28 second speedup).
Yes, this stuff really matters to a lot of us!
And for what? There is no way Apple can make it impossible to get malware notarized.
For example will a lawmaker holding a large portion of their wealth in Apple shares want to introduce legislation that forces Apple to allow alternative app stores (costing Apple the 15%-30% cut of all the app store sales)?
I believe double entry accounting can be described as following this architectural pattern (despite predating it with hundreds of years).
Double entry accounting has both a ledger and a journal. The ledger describes the actual transactions, the journal groups multiple transactions and assigns a “why”, it can also link the journal entry to an invoice, receipt, credit note, or user who caused the journal entry to be created.
So the journal is your event log (not the ledger).
> Eventsourcing comes with its own downsides, requires your mindset to change
Similar to double entry accounting: The learning curve I would say is the “chart of accounts”, how to express everything as ledger transactions, be it tax, fees, discounts, credits, prepayments, etc.
But it can all be done, and once you understand the system, it becomes trivial and extremely flexible.
A rule of thumb is that any number in the interface should come from the ledger, e.g. if you issue an invoice and give your customer a discount, there must be a ledger entry corresponding to that discount.
Though the IRS does limit the types of businesses that can do cash-basis accounting, it would be businesses without inventory, and who does not offer credit to their customers, e.g. a hairdresser would probably use cash-basis accounting, but more complicated businesses would not, certainly not a business that needs its own billing system :)
The issues that arise are then a question about how to translate them to journal entries, which will require accounting experience, and maybe your chart of accounts needs to be revised, but the core system should be fairly stable, and voiding an invoice by issuing a credit note comes automatically, as you’re working with an append-only ledger.
The issues about prepaid plans should also be handled, as payments for services not rendered yet should not be recognized as income, but instead kept as a liability: The OP mentions their system is used by 15,000 customers, so I would give each customer their own account (in the chart of accounts).
The main technical issue is what datatype to use for money, the rest are problems solved by following general accounting principles, though I fear that a lot of programmers out there are reinventing the wheel (in suboptimal ways).