trevelyan

Everyone knows that mutations that increase transmissability generally hurt morbidity. Is there some reason you think this supports zoonotic hypothesis? It is public knowledge RaTG13 was collected from a mine shaft where a similar virus killed 50% of infected workers and where WIV was doing significant sampling work.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.5815...

Your comments on mutation rates confirm that RaTG13 is not closely related to COV (we knew that) and imply we should expect to find a closer relative. Yet we haven't. And the paper you share argues (again) against your conclusions by pointing out that neither Yunnan nor Wuhan are expected hotspots for missing zoonoses to emerge. We've also now spent more than a year hunting there and elsewhere in SEAsia and haven't discovered anything remotely related. But China won't let anyone look at or sample Tongguan mineshaft.

Your comments on the State Department factsheet don't say anything except express a vague chummy solidarity that would lead a reasonable person to believe that SOMEONE in your group of international scientists should be able to confirm or deny allegations the WIV was in fact shutdown for a week in September. If no-one cannot confirm or deny this direct and very specific allegation how can anyone take seriously your claim that international civilian researchers would have any clue who was doing what kind of research in the facility or with its materials elsewhere? And if your mouse answer is correct surely it should take significantly longer than 4 months to bootstrap a program that can do practical experiments on mice with human ACE2 receptors, if only because IVF is hardly the start of the process.

None of these things support your argument. They just raise further questions that you seem to have zero interest in flagging or asking, despite having a very keen interest in the conclusions that you want people to draw. Science does not work that way.

James,

I read your post on Reddit back in the day. It was evasive and frankly condescending because you basically argue against something no-one familiar with the science is claiming: that COV is a chimeric virus that is the product of copy-and-paste genetic manipulation rather than directed evolution or gain-of-function research that has resulted in phylogenetic drift against something that was found in the wild -- most likely RaTG13.

And why should anyone take your writing seriously when you don't even talk about "gain of function" research or the various other techniques that have been used in the past decade to aerosolize viruses like H5N1? If you know about them and are deliberately omitting all mention and analysis you are just being dishonest. If you don't then you clearly aren't an expert.

There are also lots of on-topic scientific claims you could address that would let people evaluate your competence and also provide illumination -- what do statistical models say about how long it would take for RaTG13 to evolve into COV19 in the wild? What about in a lab? How likely or unlikely it is to find virii so far away from known ancestors? What are the chances of finding them once we start looking in the wild -- should we have expected to find a closer ancestor by now? And what about the claims made by the State Department about WIV, its closure in September (related: who in the West should be able to confirm/deny if this is the case)? I'd also personally be interested to hear how long it takes to develop research mice with ACE2 receptors since their existence by mid-2020 surely suggests a targeted research agenda that preceded the outbreak? Could scientists in Beijing really have done that in 2 months or whatever?

If you want to be taken seriously, you need to frame the top two or three most credible lab-escape scenarios that work with what is actually public knowledge. Then address the evidence for and against. Setting up strawmen argument, knocking them down and then virtue-signalling on racism isn't useful or on-topic.

> There is circumstantial evidence the virus was introduced by an animal/person who traveled to the wet market.

Not for this one. There were several cases we know preceded the wet market cluster. This was known in January 2020.

Saito (https://saito.io) is a leading third-generation blockchain. If you're in the blockchain space and have yet to hear of Saito, that will change this year.

Saito is unique in not being built atop POW or POS. Instead, it is built using a new consensus mechanism that pays ISPs instead of miners or stakers. The solution is also notable for not having 51 percent attacks or discouragement attacks, and for making sybil attacks strictly unprofitable.

https://org.saito.tech/jobs

We are looking for help with the development of a high-throughput Rust client as well as assistance continue to polish and improve the various applications that are already running on the network and that people are using. Most of the team is based in Asia, but remote work is OK if you're a good fit. Details on the jobs page above. Thanks for reading!

Thank you for the reference. [1] particularly interesting.

RaTG13 geonome was published January 23, 2020 by Wuhan Institute of Virology.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v1....

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MN996532

The NIH has also addressed this topic as well.

"We speculated that in COVID-19, beyond the classical pulmonary immune-inflammation view, the occurrence of an oxygen-deprived blood disease, with iron metabolism dysregulation, should be taken in consideration. "

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7267810/#:~:tex....

The guy complaining here is simply wrong. He's backpedalling because he made an unscientific and unsupported statement that oxygen deprivation is caused only by inflammation. There is plenty of evidence of other mechanisms at play. Nitpicking them is fine, pretending they don't exist is foolish, which is what he is getting called out on.

Thanks for sharing your off-topic criticism. Here is NIH on the same topic:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7267810/#:~:tex....

Next time, if you're going to try gatekeeping, be sure you have grounds for it.

> As far as I know we simply do not have evidence if or if not gain of function research played a role.

You can examine phylogenetic distance -- the degree of evolutionary drift that the initial virus had from others which are subject to natural (in-the-wild) evolution. COVID is way out there. And even then the closest "natural" virus had its genome published by the Wuhan lab long after the initial outbreak.

The lack of any close relatives suggests that gain-of-function very well may have taken place, as does the heightened vulnerability of typical lab-animals. What there isn't much evidence of is zoonotic transfer.

Parent is correct about COVID attacking the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen. This has been known for a while. Many sources if you search. Here is one:

https://chemrxiv.org/articles/preprint/COVID-19_Disease_ORF8...

Look into Saito Consensus:

https://saito.io/saito-whitepaper.pdf

The network pays the nodes that run infrastructure rather than miners or stakers. Cost-of-attack is generated by the same nodes, so paying for infrastructure does not defund consensus. Security scales with fee-throughput of the network, while fee-throughput pays for scalability.

Yeah. They don't know that Marian has it.

You don't need a transaction to be routed by many nodes: how quickly it propagates (and thus how quickly it gets included/confirmed) just depends on how much hashing you do before sending it.

The halving penalty on work just forces attackers (who have +1 routing hop compared to honest nodes) to double the work of those honest nodes if they wish to outcompete them in producing a longer chain (i.e. no 51% attack).

It also allows users to respond to attacks in real-time by affixing harder proofs to their transactions, increasing the attack-cost on the network in minutes should anyone try to pull off the sort of gambit described in the linked page.

Distributed Proof-of-Work is not vulnerable to this:

https://org.saito.tech/eliminating-51-attacks-in-proof-of-wo...

The community of users simply attaches harder cryptographic proofs to their transactions, forcing up the cost of producing empty blocks. The approach is capable of bankrupting nation-states as a side-effect of eliminating 51% attacks.

> the technology is broken beyond fixability.

Saito fixes it (https://saito.io/arcade). There is no 51% attack and no scalability trilemma. So you have a network that pays for itself and generates a quantifiable cost-of-attack in all situations.

This doesn't answer your final question -- what the use cases are for a public network that cannot exclude users -- but isn't claiming there is no difference between that and permissioned networks the same as saying that Linux will never catch on because it is competing with Windows?

Openness is the bazaar.

US government documents are public. You can legally publish and discuss them. No-one has a legal obligation to secrecy unless they sign it away as part of an employment contract with the government.

Thus the attempts to nail Assange for conspiracy, something that is self-evident nonsense given the Adrian Lamo chat logs published by Wired show Manning contacting Assange with express intent to leak.

Ruffled feathers

Blockchains does not require append-only. There are pruning techniques like Automatic Transaction Rebroadcasting coming out on high-throughput blockchains like Saito:

https://youtu.be/agppUdX9YvI?t=65

These techniques will eventually get ported over to Bitcoin or whatever survives long-enough to need it. We'll get 20, 50 and 100-year rebroadcasting chains. Fees will be higher if the data needs to be stored longer. Spectrum of uses from investment to cash with different degrees of value-persistence.

The Adrian Lamo chat logs (published by Wired) show Assange was contacted by Manning with express intent to leak. So there was no conspiracy.

Not disagreeing with the rest of your post, just pointing this out because there is no reason to retreat to the common sense position you advocate. The fact that you have to make such a sensible point is a reflection of the deep deceit and dishonesty of the prosecutors who clearly know this and are omitting it in order to try and paint a portrait of conspiracy that is factually wrong and they know it.

There has been no evidence he hacked anything. Prosecutor cites him saying, "no luck with that" as evidence he did try instead of evidence he didn't.

The conspiracy stuff is also nonsense. Adrian Lamo logs show Manning contacted Assange with intent to leak. It is all selectively-selected and maliciously presented hogwash.

It's self-evident bullcrap. The Adrian Lamo logs (published by Wired and available online) show very clearly that Manning contacted Assange with intent to leak.

Ah yes, the insinuation that Assange was hacking stuff because he supposedly sent a message saying, "no luck with that."

If there was evidence they wouldn't have fabricated it. You should be ashamed of being an apologist for tyranny.

Vitalik is spinning a false dichotomy. Saito (http://saito.io/arcade) has already solved the 51 percent attack.

The mechanism used (using fee collection as work) eliminates the profitability of collusion while still rewarding cooperation.

Gain of function serial infection techniques do not constitute natural evolution: they constitute lab-directed evolution.

That is for all intents and purposes man-made, unless one is splitting hairs, which much of the politicized media is doing.

> SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins were so effective at binding to human cells, they had to be caused by natural selection.

Read the article you are citing. There is convincing evidence that the virus developed via evolutionary mechanisms. That in no way refutes lab-origin and is entirely consistent with how most labs promote infectiousness (particularly airborn infectiousness) through gain-of-function research.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4693520/

"The double-spend attack is not the same as the 51 percent attack. It is strange to have to make this point in 2020, but it is true: while having 51 percent control of a blockchain makes double-spend attacks free, that is only because it makes ALL economic attacks free. The vulnerabilities are distinct (you don’t even need 51% to pull off double-spending), and fixing the 51 percent attack requires far more than addressing double-spending."

Author here -- impetus for the piece was a few discussions with proof-of-stake people who switched immediately to talking about "finality" (i.e. using validators to prevent chain-reorganizations) in a conversation about economic attacks.

It was actually IMPOSSIBLE to have a conversation about the economic fundamentals of their networks (and vulnerabilities like discouragement attacks) because they kept insisting they they were addressing them with finality. It took much tooth-pulling to get them to see that they were two different problems and they were making no headway on the more difficult one. This is an attempt to condense that red pill into a more digestible form.

Saito (saito.tech) pays for routing work rather than hashing work. Requires solution to 50 percent attack but means that all fees pay for the work of running the network rather than unrelated activities like hashing or staking.

It actually has to be costly, not difficult. And not wasteful.

To see this, note that all POW and POS chains have "difficulty" functions that are actually just cost functions in external markets (hashpower or capital). What secures the difficulty of the attack in all casds is the supply curve of some block production factor in an external market.

Just as a heads up, Saito has a quantifiable cost of attack (for attackers) while still paying for a form of useful work (tx routing / fee collection) so waste and security are not intrinsically related.

https://org.saito.tech/saito-economics

The approach works exactly because money is guaranteed to be pulled away from the block producer. Given that it always costs more money to produce blocks than attackers can earn from them, only honest nodes (who spend other people's money) have am incentive to do so. Cost of attack is the money attackers cannot get back if they spend their own money to censor the network. Check it out!

Sweden does not offer habeus corpus to detainees who are under investigation but have not been charged. This is the category in which they placed Assange.

https://wikileaks.org/Sweden-Tells-the-UN-that.html

The Swedish desire to maneuver Assange into a black hole is self-evident in its refusal to interview Assange by telephone. Once that was done they would have had to charge him and present their evidence to the public under Swedish law.