tomputer

In the documentary Alone Against the State, five mothers who became victims of the Dutch childcare benefits scandal share the chilling stories of how their lives and that of their children were destroyed by a state system deprived of humanity.

It is a Dutch documentary, unfortunately without English subtitles:

https://www.2doc.nl/documentaires/series/2doc/2021/alleen-te...

Same Tweet on Nitter: https://nitter.net/Trezor/status/1510558771944333312

It depends on how you define the existing money supply. If you look at broad money it does not seem that ridiculous. For example, gold is currently worth $11.5 trillion [1]. That is almost twice as much as the M0 money supply you are referring to.

[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/assets-by-market-cap/

Can confirm. I just checked Debian 7/8/9/10/11 servers and none has pkexec (or policykit-1) installed.

Have a look at:

https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet

I’m unable to read the full article, it looks like a repost from two months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29355447

> You're missing the forest for the trees. Bitcoin is broken and will never be more than a speculative asset with no intrinsic value.

I disagree. It's off-topic so I'm not going start an endless discussion about intrinsic value.

> Decentralisation can quickly become federation. Example: a global id system where the "miners" are countries. It removes the need of physical passports and their associated costs and delays.

As long as humans submit the external data to the blockchain someone can cheat with the data. Actually, cheating is a nice feature if you need double passports for diplomats, spies or informants. The result is a blockchain with permanent records with data you can not fully trust because the data did not exist on the blockchain in the first place.

I'm all for a digital solution instead of physical passports but I do believe this can be solved with distributed systems and international standards, instead of permanent records on a decentralized blockchain.

I don't see why something like insurance needs a token on a decentralized blockchain. The Bitcoin blockchain needs a token because the token itself represents the value (BTC) inside the network. The token is also needed because it adds an incentive for nodes (miners) to support the network.

Note: this is my current view of it. If someday it turns out it is useful, I am happy to admit that I was wrong.

I don't think it's a naive example. All these kind of proposed blockchain solutions raise the same questions for me:

Why do you need a decentralized blockchain with tokens to solve that problem? If not for the tokens, what incentive have people to keep running and protect the blockchain against attacks? The oracle problem: how do you prevent someone from pushing false or duplicate data to the blockchain?

> Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit.

Anything that does not exist natively on the blockchain doesn't need a blockchain at all.

If a token on the blockchain would represent you as the owner of a car and one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that person is now the owner of your car. Still, the car keys are located in your house, the license plate is registered on your name and address, the insurance is on your name.

I guess I don't need to explain further how ridiculous that idea is that a token would officially represent you as the car owner.

Comparing Bitcoin with companies and software products is not a good comparison.

Replacing software or products is not the same as exchanging government-issued fiat money to a new decentralized non-governmental form of money. The transition between different forms of money depends on trust which takes time[1]. E-mail and internet (web) took of faster but these inventions did not require people to exchange their money into an alternative system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money

> But why would fuel prices be high in a country with large oil and gas reserves?

Not because of Bitcoin miners:

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/08/1071198056/theres-chaos-in-ka...

Fantastic article. Great read!

> Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere.

This is an important line. People buying NFT's who are not aware of this may assume the NFT pictures itself are stored on-chain.

> It's an unregulated trading product, it's not practical as electronic money.

What if Satoshi wanted Bitcoin to be digital cash but with a limited supply like gold?

From the bitcoin whitepaper:

The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation.

Before Bitcoin there was no ‘cash’ on the internet. Only electronic corporate (controlled) money.

> That CSV is actually really interesting. The median wallet holds about $30, the largest holds $10b, and the standard deviation is over $2m.

Top 100 Richest Bitcoin Addresses:

https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....

It looks like they went from too tight to too loose:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE

I’m not an economist but that graph looks unhealthy.

This looks great! Signed up for the Box 2 mini because it will be manufactured first. If that works well, I'm definitely interested in the Box 5.

I hope this can replace my own poor man's Pi4 NAS which has USB storage attached.

Someone on Reddit recently explained PoW vs PoS:

Besides POW there are other ways to delegate control in a decentralized system. Actually, for a smaller network, POW is not a good consensus mechanism at all, because it is not prohibitively expensive to dominate the hashpower of a small network. Many altcoins have been successfully attacked like this. So how to decide who controls the network?

Proof of Stake (POS) is probably the most common alternative. In POS there is no electricity cost to mining, there is no hash puzzle to solve. Actually there is no mining and no miners, only validators. The users who own the most coins are allowed to validate the most blocks. To attack the network you have to buy 51% of the coins and the theory is that you wouldn’t want to attack your own asset once you own that much. The “staking” refers to the fact that the validator has to lock up some of his coins and promise not to use it while he remains a validator. If you own 3% of the total staked coins, you are given 3% of the blocks to validate. Because validating a block has a reward, this means you also get 3% of all new coins.

Part of the criticism of POS is that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer because the more coins you own, the more blocks you will validate and the more coins you will get as reward. This means you can stake even more coins and get even more rewards, and so on. This POS mechanism gradually consolidates most coins into only a few hands and leads to centralization. You could ask how is this different with POW. The miners with the most mining rigs validate the most blocks and gets the most rewards and accumulates more and more coins?

The truth is that most miners have to sell their Bitcoins. Mining is not a passive investment like POS because there are ongoing running costs. A miner must not only pay cold, hard cash for the electricity to make a block, but also invest in expensive equipment, maintenance, salaries and so on, put in actual work. Would you rather pay someone who can prove he did some work, or someone who can prove he is wealthy?

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/pfryce/pow_vs_pos/...

Didn’t know about real estate trust funds. Thanks! :)

These are also a store of value / investments but Bitcoin is different.

As far as I know, I can not buy small parts of real estate. Gold supply is not fixed and it’s hard to validate. Companies can go bankrupt.

I can not transfer real estate, gold or stocks over the internet to someone else directly, without using a third party.

Have other existing privacy cryptocurrencies been considered?

Grin is a lightweight privacy cryptocurrency using MimbleWimble. It uses a fair distribution (no pre-mine), with an emission of 1 GRIN per second:

https://grin.mw/

Is it possible to test with openssl s_client if TLS renegotiation is on or off?

I’m also not sure if it is about legacy or secure renegotiation (or both).

According the the link below: "All major software disabled renegotiation by default since as far as 2009 (nginx, haproxy, etc...)."

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/24554/should-i-...

I agree, went to the Alive 2007 show in Amsterdam. Fantastic!

I remember that ‘Da Funk’ was played daily on MTV somewhere in 1995-1996. I was 10 years old and did not know the artist but loved the sound/beats and the strange video with the dog character walking in the city.

A few years later I (re)discovered their music and went to the Alive 2007 show in Amsterdam, Heineken Music Hall.

During the show, they also played “Stardust - Music Sounds Better With You”, which was also produced by Thomas Bangalter.

The ‘Stardust mix’ has only been released on a limited edition (disc 2) of the Alive 2007 album:

https://www.discogs.com/Daft-Punk-Alive-2007/release/1141123

Edit: it seems it is on Spotify. Not so limited anymore. :-)

These "Bitcoin is using too much energy" articles are posted almost weekly here.

With all the great minds in the world, instead of fighting and complaining, why hasn't anybody come up with something better than Proof-of-Work to keep Bitcoin alive? Bitcoin is open source, if there is something that can keep the network secure without using all the energy, feel free to submit a bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP).

After all, if the world would agree and shutdown the Bitcoin network today, all the energy after all these years would "really" be wasted.

Grin project site:

https://grin.mw/

> Don't look at Bitcoin. That hasn't changed much and not much interesting stuff (besides some drama) goes on there.

No. Look at Bitcoin first.

If Bitcoin fails altcoins will most certainly fail too. There is a reason why Bitcoin does not change that much, it has to be safe and trusted for storing value. It is not a "move fast and break things" project.

> Look at the Ethereum space. That's where most of the action is these days. DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is the current hype.

Bitcoin is DeFi (Decentralized Finance), if anything.

Instead of only finding the location of my stolen device, what I really would like is using this to remote wipe my device, before someone else can or will turn it on (if it has been turned off).

Because it is not like I will fly to some other country to catch the thief or new owner of my stolen device.

I was wondering, with these new laws, did FastMail consider to operate (partly) in other countries?

For example if FastMail has servers in Amsterdam (NL). Would it be possible to let customers decide on which servers they want to host their mail, so that it falls under the local (or EU) laws?

Thank you in advance for taking the time to reply here.