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Some banks have already begun dabbling in these areas without regulatory clarity. Earlier this month, U.S. Bancorp (USB.N) announced it was launching a cryptocurrency custody service for institutional investment managers.

This is fascinating. Within a mere 10 years, Bitcoin has gone from a toy to something now intersecting directly with the US banking system.

With each integration point, Bitcoin gets more difficult to legislate out of existence or destroy through capricious police action. Aside from Tether, this is one of the biggest risk factors cited by those who have studied Bitcoin in detail.

It's extremely HackerNews-ish of you to propose that the author of the article ignores your pet theory.

What pet theory is that? All I did was to mention two historical episodes that preceded the event under discussion, and which the paper fails to mention.

The author of the linked article is Barry Eichengreen, widely recognized as the premier scholar of the Great Depression.

So what? We're talking about the paper, not a person.

The article references about 900 pages worth of other articles, believe me: your pet theory about the 1920's events is considered in the conclusion.

On what pages does the paper take up the issue of the speculative bubble leading up to the Great Depression?

Governments don't work like a household. What matters is borrow costs and use of funds. If a government can borrow and the net growth generated is greater than the interest rate on the debt, it's a good thing to borrow. Like any business debt.

A main MMT talking point. Yes, I've read Kelton's book and yes, a government that prints its own currency is not like a household.

MMT is an experiment. For all our sakes, I hope its proponents are right.

A government can be in debt forever, the only thing that matters is borrowing costs and growth rate (and how the growth is generated see eg. Chinese real estate for malinvestment).

What if malinvestment looks like investment until it doesn't?

The article begins with the idea that the causes of the Great Depression are not known or too numerous to pin down. It then continues by claiming that "recent scholarship has resulted in striking agreement on the reason for the crisis." The cause of the Great Depression was the gold standard, according to the article:

... The constraints of the gold-standard system hamstrung countries as they struggled to adapt during the 1920s to changes in the world economy. ... Central bankers continued to kick the world economy while it was down until it lost consciousness.

What this article ignores, like countless articles before and since, is the Roaring 20s. Articles like this treat the Great Depression as an event that hit the US economy out of the blue. But even superficial study of the ten years prior reveals something obvious: a massive, compounding, technology-fueled asset bubble.

The article also ignores the event that kicked off the Roaring 20s: the depression of 1920-1921:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depression_of_1920–1921

This depression resolved itself under a gold standard regime and with minimal intervention by the Federal Government and Federal Reserve.

50 years ago the US abandoned the last vestiges of the gold standard. Today we find ourselves in the middle of a technology-fueled asset bubble. The US president talks, without a hint of embarrassment, about the need to borrow to continue to service debts. This is, of course, the very definition of a Ponzi scheme.

Whatever this comes to, we won't have the gold standard to kick around. It's been out of the picture for decades. What happens when the world's governments decide to outdo each other on how much currency they can conjure into being?

I wish I had a happier note to end this on, but honestly, my biggest takeaway from the whole experience is that maybe some puzzles just can’t be solved. We can try to attribute Jack’s problems to intrinsic biological/psychological issues (social phobia, migraines, etc.) or to environmental causes (super high rate of heroin use and OD in the community), but both sides seem fundamentally lacking in explanatory power. The vast majority of socially anxious people don’t resort to heroin, and despite the problems of these small towns, they are by no means among the worst places to live in America, let alone the world.

Earlier on, the author does speculate about what drove Jack:

To put it another way, Jack was painfully aware that his future options were, “be a complete loser,” or “be a complete loser who feels really really good for a few hours every day.” He chose the latter.

What's striking about this is how it's possible to live this way without drugs. A brain-numbing job eight hours a day and a life-saving hobby for four. A toxic-family life but wonderful community.

It almost sounds like Tennis could have been this outlet:

One time when Jack was in middle school, he walked off the tennis court after a well-played match, and his mother asked him how he felt. Jack said something like, “when I’m out there, it’s so nice… it’s like the rest of the world goes away and I don’t have any problems.”

... recently I’ve heard of some ships not even waiting to load empty TEU’s as they normally would and instead they are immediately leaving for China, literally empty.

If this is happening, what would be the consequences of allowing even more TEUs to be stored on the US side?

It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam.

The author makes this claim without proof. The circumstances may be consistent with the explanation, but maybe others are as well. Also, the source of the claim is not clear. Did he glean all of this information from the boat captain, or someone else?

The problem is that the claim is central to the entire thread and the proposed solution.

If the root cause is wrong, then allowing containers to pile up in yards 6-deep could cause yet another bottleneck - a lack of containers to return back on ships, for example. This could happen, for example, if yard computer systems were never designed for this kind of use and records start going to paper.

This article reports that the port has processed record numbers of ships:

In June, the Los Angeles port became the first in the western hemisphere to process 10m container units in a 12‑month period. The Long Beach port will likely process more than 9m container units this year, exceeding last year’s record of 8.1m units, the most in the port’s 110-year history.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/20/supply-chai...

Nowhere does the thread mention this record-high ship traffic.

This article reminds me of every other article I've seen about blockchain voting. None of them start with a threat model. None of them talk about what's broken with voting. Mostly they just dive into technology, relying on the reader's imagination to address these points.

Here are some simple questions:

1. What are you trying to protect in a vote?

2. Why can't an SQL database with whatever levels of cryptographic assurance you'd like to add do the job?

3. What does a blockchain add to (2) that no other technology does, regardless of cost?

These questions are never answered, and indeed they are not answered here either. Instead, these articles lead with technology and rarely get around to what matters.

Often there's something like this included in the article:

Blockchains are a technology which is all about providing guarantees about process integrity. If a process is run on a blockchain, the process is guaranteed to run according to some pre-agreed code and provide the correct output. No one can prevent the execution, no one can tamper with the execution, and no one can censor and block any users' inputs from being processed.

No. A block chain is a timestamping mechanism. Within certain very narrow boundaries, it makes certain guarantees about the relative ordering of events. A tamper-resistant log file? Yes. A solution to voting? Does that involve relative event ordering? If so, is that the central problem?

Electronic cash systems like Bitcoin will work work just fine without a blockchain, provided they can solve the double spending problem. Bitcoin solved it with a system for ordering transactions based on proof-of-work. There are other solutions, but all suffer from censorship pressures in ways that Bitcoin does not.

I'd be interested in a link to this legal theory and its application under US Law.

Barring that, what sections of the AGPL are you looking at to make that claim?

Not from what I understand. Your copyright (by default) gives you standing. If you hold no copyright, you have no standing to claim copyright infringement.

You're right. Deleting...

Oops, can't do that, it appears.

I and my colleagues at Software Freedom Conservancy are experts at investigating non-compliance with copyleft license and enforcing those licenses once we confirm the violations. We will be following this issue very closely and demanding that Trump's Group give the Corresponding Source to all who use the site.

What standing does the Software Freedom Conservancy have to do pursue this in court themselves? Are they authors of Mastodon?

AFAICT, unless one of the Mastodon authors gets involved, this is not going to amount to much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law)

This article doesn't even establish whether a commercial license to Mastodon (which would render the AGPL moot) had been obtained by Truth Social or not.

That website is a catastrophe. The banner on the left prevents the intro text from being read. There's also a banner on the right which is similar in behavior. Neither can be dismissed. Text can't be copied without dragging along useless marketing material. There is no Reader view to nuke the bad design decisions.

Strangely, the original story ran on Bloomberg itself, which isn't mentioned in the article. Fortunately, the archive.md trick works. https://archive.md

The Houston Firefighters’ Relief and Retirement Fund, which has over $4 billion of assets, said it invested $25 million in Bitcoin and Ether through NYDIG, a Bitcoin-focused subsidiary of asset manager Stone Ridge.

This is a space to watch closely. Pensions are tragicomically underfunded in the US:

https://equable.org/state-of-pensions-2020-national-pension-...

To make up for the shortfall, they're after any asset that moves. Bitcoin's well-known supply cap places it uniquely among all assets.

It's not hard to imagine a near future in which all of the world's largest pension funds own Bitcoin, directly or indirectly. Then what?

NYDIG itself appears to be a company dedicated to making an even more sweeping version of this idea reality:

A provider of Bitcoin-related technology and investment services, NYDIG also said it would be launching “Bitcoin-powered solutions for U.S.-based life insurance and annuity providers.” This comes as the firm announced the addition of reinsurance company TransRe CEO Mike Sapnar, who will be joining NYDIG as the global head of insurance solutions.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/nydig-raises-100-million-and-...

Since we do not have default arguments in Rust, in order to initialize such structure we would have to list all fields:

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Default:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/default/trait.Default.html

It can be combined with the rest pattern to yield something very similar to the solution the author is after.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19650265/is-there-a-fast...

Not even the same league of event. The value overflow incident was a flaw in the protocol implementation itself.

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

The DAO hack resulted from a poorly-written contract. Concerns about the quality of the contract were ignored by the team. The DAO itself wasn't even part of the Ethereum protocol, just an application running on it.

The DAO was like a Bitcoin transaction that spent all output value to miner fees, which has happened a lot. But at no time did that ever result in a rollback of history.

The response to the DAO was the Ethereum community slapping a giant asterisk on the motto "Code is Law." And the community is quite all right with that.

One of the reasons why eating in cemeteries become a “fad,” as some reporters called it, was that epidemics were raging across the country: Yellow fever and cholera flourished, children passed away before turning 10, women died during childbirth. Death was a constant visitor for many families, and in cemeteries, people could “talk” and break bread with family and friends, both living and deceased.

It's fascinating that the article also notes that the older generation at the time (late 19th century) viewed the fad with disgust:

But plenty of Americans believed that picnics in local cemeteries were a “gruesome festivity.” This critique, notably from older generations, didn’t stop young adults from meeting up in graveyards. Instead it led to debate over proper conduct.

This was a phenomenon driven by the times. Lots of deaths mean you spend a lot more time at the cemetery. Cemeteries started to lose their association with loss/decay and gained more of an association with remembrance.

There's quite a lot on this topic, like this article, which notes that another reason for the pull of cemeteries at that time was the Civil War:

... Beginning in the late 1800s, cemeteries were prime picnic spots. Remember, in the aftermath of the bloody Civil War and in an age of cholera and yellow fever, cities created large new cemeteries to accommodate the dead. Family farms or sacred churchyards were no longer the only spots for burial grounds. These new-age cemeteries looked and functioned more like public parks than stark, spooky graveyards. They featured professional landscaping, winding paths, ponds, and pavilions.

https://connectingdirectors.com/55122-cemetery-picnics

It may be counterintuitive, but the best thing that could happen to Bitcoin would be for Tether to collapse in a cloud of dust. Tether is continually cited as a large risk factor to Bitcoin by people who have gotten past the "it's not real money" objection.

But I think it's worth considering what happens if the collapse never comes. If government investigation, findings of wrongdoing, admission of lies, and punishment aren't enough to shake Tether users out of their trees, then what would, exactly?

Ethereum allowed a claw-back of funds lost fair and square to a defective contract. Where is Ethereum now? Oh yeah, near an all-time high and a market cap approaching half a trillion dollars.

What non-users don't get is the fanatical level of devotion by users. It waxes and wanes with the Bitcoin halving cycle, but always comes back stronger than before.

If Tether did somehow implode and users left in droves, something else would come along to take its place and within a year or two and the entire Bitcoin ecosystem would come roaring back stronger than ever.

The problem with the long analogy is that it's serial, not random access. You have to read the entire thing to understand the writer's message.

But I think it can be summarized as follows:

“And this is the way everyone is doing it now? Everyone is using a general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory now, whenever they need a hammer?”

There's something very strange about writing web applications. You can start off just writing without much regard to architecture. But by the time you've implemented a dozen or so endpoints, you realize that tight coupling and code duplication are going to ruin you.

What can you do about it?. Frameworks promise a solution. But you can still end up with lots of duplication and coupling. "Controllers" can be code duplication repositories, especially in "restful" applications. Then there's the fact that you're chained to the framework from the moment you start using it until you quit or the application dies. That hard dependency can make adding certain kinds of features very challenging. And maintenance becomes yet another problem, especially if the framework falls out of favor, which it probably will.

The "iBuyer" model used by Zillow and other real estate companies entails purchasing homes directly from sellers, and then re-listing the properties after doing minor work. But thanks to the current shortage on labor and materials, Zillow can't close, renovate and resell the homes fast enough.

This is the only statement about the cause of the shutdown in the article. I'm skeptical that this is the only reason. I suspect it has something to do with changes in the housing market itself. Namely, higher prices are being rejected by individual buyers and Zillow is sitting on inventory it can't move because buyers won't pay the exorbitant prices that Zillow has paid.

I'm going to simplify the framework here:

- give yourself a stable income

- give yourself energy

- manage your well-being

Unfortunately, this is also a framework for being a non-producer of side-projects. One element that's missing is drive.

You need something driving you to take on side projects. And it doesn't matter if you're a solo developer or a well-paid worker bee at FANGMAN.

Without drive, you'll have no courage to take on a side project. After all, what will you gain by it?

Without drive, you'll lack the guts to stick with a side project that spins out and seems to go nowhere.

Without drive, you won't keep looking for the next thing to fill your notebook to overflowing with ideas that might someday work.

What's the story here? Why is this front page news?

It's an open blockchain. You can see transactions. That's not news in itself.

Original title: "Colin Powell, military leader and first Black US secretary of state, dies after complications from Covid-19"

From the article:

"We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American," they said, noting he was fully vaccinated.

The ongoing high profile, fatal breakthrough Covid-19 cases should not be underestimated. They are to be expected statistically, but taken individually continue to feed into the idea that "vaccines don't work" and conspiracy theories.

Odd that there's no video introduction. The first hit I found on Google had two ads and was a guy basically wandering around the app as if he had never used it before.

Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

This doesn't help me. I use a directory of Markdown files powered by VS Code to take notes already - ever since Evernote began getting bad, which was a long time ago.

What does Obsidian offer beyond that? I can't tell from the page. I'm not asking for an answer here. Instead I'm noting that the page itself doesn't answer the questions that I have as a current Markdown-notetaking user.

The article shows many tables without ever quoting sources. In the previous article in the series, the author claims:

... I’m a “forensic environmental data specialist” (I invented the term just now). I use the troves of free to the public data located in regulatory submittals and permits to extract useful information. ...

Great. If free to the public, where are the links? Clicking on those table images just links to the images themselves.

The article itself is stream-of-consciousness writing with little effort to organize or edit down the useless brain droppings from this author. I bring this up because if the author wants to be taken seriously, style matters, as do bend-over-backwards efforts to document claims. Especially claims against large organizations with deep pockets.

Even for regular HN readers, it helps to be able to verify for oneself claims made of a quantitative nature.

In Upstate New York, where a quarter of US crypto mining takes place, the researchers find that electricity rates have gone up in response to rising demand. Their study demonstrates that because of bitcoin mining’s power usage, households paid an additional $165 million a year in energy costs, while businesses paid an extra $79 million. In China, where more than two-thirds of the world’s crypto mining took place over the past decade, electricity rates are set by the government and inflexible to demand. Crypto miners there were crowding other industries out of the market and forcing electricity to be rationed, the research suggests.

So correlation implies causation?

I'm not sure if the study is just flawed or the article is doing an especially bad job of explaining it.

I won't be reading the paper because of this:

Benetton and Compiani received financial support from Ripple’s University Blockchain Research Initiative. Ripple Labs supports the cryptocurrency XRP.

XRP is a scam run by Ripple labs. The company routinely mis-states the utility of XRP.

<!-- template: blog -->

Many Markdown utilities support front matter, which is designed to solve exactly this problem.

    ---
    template: blog
    other-key: other-value
    ---

The Belarusian directorate for fighting organised crime said in a statement that "subscribers to extremist Telegram channels and chats will be held criminally liable ... as members of an extremist group."

Of course, the nifty thing about this, from the perspective of a government in existential panic mode, is how easy it is to label a group as "extremist."

Want to stage a terrorist action? Extremist! Want to change the government? Extremist! Want to hold a demonstration that could draw a million angry people into the streets? Extremist! Want to complain about the ineptitude and moral decay of your elected officials? Extremist! Want to post some thoughts about current events to a news discussion site? Extremist!

But this [knowing that an internet service will behave exactly as advertised] fails to hold true for general purpose chains acting as a VM, including the front-runner Ethereum. Ethereum nodes can in theory filter modifications to the smart contracts they execute, but in practice, node operators have no reason to inspect or reject these upgrades, because they have relatively little stake in the success of individual contracts or their ecosystems. If an owner of a smart contract publishes a new change, nodes will mindlessly run it. Ethereum is blockchain AWS.

The author fails to define "VM" here. The only thing that makes sense is "Virtual Machine," which is a thing, but only barely makes sense in this context.

The fact that node operators have little incentive or ability to inspect or reject changes to contracts beyond what the protocol dictates isn't a problem in itself. That is, after all, the entire idea. Code is law. It doesn't matter how desperately a single miner might want to change the rules. At least in principle.

This is more of a problem on systems like Bitcoin where miners of side chains literally have no knowledge, from the protocol itself, of what the hashes representing transactions on other chains mean.

The bigger problem, not addressed in this article, is that the vast majority of things you want to do to make a block chain useful outside of financial transactions requires something called an "oracle."

What does that NFT actually secure? Go consult the oracle. Want to know the exchange rate of some non-ethereum token? Go ask the oracle. Want to know what that land title says? Go ask the oracle.

The problem is that an oracle is just a server. Maybe it's a group of servers - doesn't matter. Servers are corruptible in ways that Ethereum is not (or at least should not be) through hash chains and proof-of-work. Servers use logins, admins, and undocumented security procedures. And they offer little protection against Sybil attack.

Or at least post something on how it is done?

The growing surveillance powers in Australia have been in the spotlight recently following the passage of the Identify and Disrupt bill last month. This handed “extraordinary” new powers to the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, allowing them to access three new warrants to access the computers and networks of those suspected of conducting criminal activity, “disrupt” their data and take over their accounts covertly.

By the time complacency ends, it will be too late.