kemonocode

(Transfer)Wise arbitrarily stopped working for Venezuela over sanctions that don't even apply to the entirety of the country, right before I was going to accept a pretty well paid gig that would have covered my living expenses for months. To say I was fuming would be an understatement. Life or death in an impoverished country.

Found a different gig, less well paid but they accepted paying me in crypto. It was a grand total of 0.10 USD in BTC to receive that money and it took 5 minutes before first confirmation.

Yes, transaction fees can be expensive sometimes, but in practically every case I've experienced they're nothing compared to the highway robbery most of the mainstream payment infrastructure imposes upon everybody.

You can have different, non-conflicting goals. Specific projects bring something in particular to the table. Permission-less transactions on an immutable ledger is the very least most bring. A form of rebellion against centralized banking and an unfair global financial system where if you have the means and the connections you can get away with pretty much anything: lemon socialism, laundering billions and paying pittances on your taxes.

To some, these are important goals; to others they are troublesome things to get rid of because they believe centralized economic systems are superior and inherently more trustful and less prone to abuse by criminals and terrorists, or that the perceived ecological impacts crypto mining are excessive.

There are valid points on both sides, but it'll be extremely hard for me to change my position on crypto when it's become a personal lifeline for so long.

As much as Roger Waters lost all my respect back then when he sided with Maduro during the Venezuelan protests, giving the middle finger to Zuckerberg is something I wholeheartedly endorse. The irony is just too thick with his materials in particular.

PoW undermines our attempts to fight climate change, there's tons of examples of fossil fuel power plants being used for the sole purpose of running "crypto" "currencies".

No. There's literally one single concrete example of this happening [0] and a lot of moral busybodies wasting time with rounding errors instead of focusing on the big global climate disasters going on right now.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-miners-are-giving-new-l...

In some ways, the whole debate could be more civil if officers faces and voices were blurred.

Police have no expectation of privacy when performing their official duties, at least in the US, so that should be a non-issue. If they don't want to bring consequences unto themselves for what they're doing, then perhaps they should stop doing such things or think really hard about their chosen career path.

After all, it's not really the individual officer who is at fault: it's the system that trained the officer, and the department policies that require officers to apply unreasonable force.

At some point you can't just blame "the system" and there needs to be individual accountability. Mayhaps if they like the lack of it and with less bodily risk, they could pursue politics instead.

The main problems are 1) that catastrophic events can and will happen in the future. That's why nobody wants to live next to a nuclear power plant.

The chances for such events are vanishingly low when it comes to modern reactors. Seriously, as hard as it is to believe, we've come so, so far from Chernobyl. Thorium-based reactors are meltdown-proof [0], and Thorium comes with the plus in that it's not as easily weaponizable [1].

2) Nuclear waste storage.

Thorium reactors also produce less dangerous waste [2], which is great! They're not a panacea by any means- it is still technically possible to make weapons using Thorium reactors even if it's more difficult, and fuel is harder to prepare, but I do think the upsides greatly overcome the downsides.

Solar and wind aren't viable everywhere, which is why we need nuclear. The sooner we get over our inveterate fear of it, as difficult as it may be, the better.

[0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/200900...

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html#prolif

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257126696_Abundant_...

This is good for the planet because mountains of Xinjiang coal are no longer being burned to achieve literally nothing.

By the same token I could say all the power (and pollution!) used by the US military given that it's actively hostile to my country is a waste, bad for the planet and I wish it went away, but that wouldn't be too fair towards US citizens or their allies.

But yes of course, this is good for Bitcoin. Everything is good for Bitcoin.

Well, Bitcoin is cleaner for now, wasn't that one of the greater criticisms levied towards it? I'm pretty sure by now that it could be found that mining Bitcoin cures cancer and AIDS by tomorrow and detractors would still find a reason to criticize it. I don't think there's a way to win, so I don't bother.

Conspiracy nuts and other unsavory members from fringe communities do make for odd bedfellows when one is being actively censored, thus why I am loathe to promote Bitchute et al. Best second alternative would be their own Peertube instance, but that of course requires them to put up their own infrastructure.

/r/Buttcoin has been about as bad smelling their own farts over the years as the Bitcoin subreddit has.

The occasional blog post by long-time critics (Gerard et al) is the only thing of value you can find there.

The only reason this is news-worthy is because it's tied to the current hot button issue (cryptocurrency). Scams like these happen all the time during bull markets and the crypto investment maxims (never invest what you're not willing to lose, do your own research and if it sounds too good to be real, it usually is the case) apply just as well in any other kinds of speculative investments.

Increasing regulation and adopting that sort of paternalistic attitudes will do nothing except harbor further dissent and widen the divide between the rich and poor, as it always has.

"Waste" is value judgement. For me, it's securing a network of decentralized transactions, so that power isn't wasted. Given my distaste for adtech and certain governments, I'd qualify their power and resource usage as a waste and that the world would be better off without them, even if the people who work in adtech or benefit from said governments would disagree.

Sometimes crypto investors do their investing through means that can be several times detached from the nitty and gritty (e.g. would buying COIN or MSTR stock be considered crypto investing? Some say it would) so it doesn't surprise me that much. I don't think it's too healthy, but hey.

I've had a friend take his own life over a false rape accusation so it forever changed the way I see such things. I wish most people didn't have to go through something like that to stop blindly believing every serious accusation without solid proof, be they male, female or anything in between.

It exists, and it very much works [0] but it has yet to reach the massive levels of adoption people would have expected by now. Simple as that.

[0] https://1ml.com/

Gold is very inert, yes, but it still gets beaten by copper when it comes to conductivity [0] which is why conductors are rarely ever made out of gold instead of merely gold-plated.

Gold's industry use remains negligible in the great scheme of things and only a very small fraction of its value is derived from its industrial uses. It's valuable but not that valuable.

[0] https://www.bluesea.com/resources/108/Electrical_Conductivit...

Yes, actually, people overestimate the reversibility of wire transfers. And before cryptocurrency, there were still shady money services such as Liberty Reserve or Perfect Money with little qualms about their habitual clientele.

Then you hire the services of brokers that don't have the same compunctions about transacting in crypto. And even if you were to magically erase all cryptocurrency from the earth, it wouldn't still stop ransomware, or the same state sponsored actors would gravitate towards even worse things.

It's like nobody has learned a thing from the war on drugs, my point being: you deal with the root cause of the disease (infosec in most companies and even government offices is a joke and bad people have taken notice), not playing whack-a-mole with the symptoms (crypto use) that hint towards systemic decay.

I wonder why such an aggressive thermal cutoff too, 50C ain't that hot even for consumer-grade electronics. Is it related to all that heat reducing SNR to unacceptable levels? If so, that frankly sounds like a pretty severe design shortcoming.

It may be a libertarian rag, but the article is just about what it says on the title: thermal shutdown hitting Starlink users.

In fact, I had tried to submit an article coming from Ars Technica [0] but I deleted it as I saw it gaining no traction and I noticed this one had a sizable amount of upvotes and comments already.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starl...

If you believe banning cryptocurrencies will suddenly stop ransomware, then I have a bridge to sell you.

I've mostly been writing backend code which pretty much works just the same whether deployed on Windows and Linux, that's interoperability by default.

With Java the issues came from elsewhere- it was less so the interoperability and more just how messy the whole ecosystem is and how there are some aspects of the language itself (such as the excessive verbosity and the way the standard library is structured) that kept mounting up as little annoyances over time. Kotlin wasn't really an option at the time, either.

Here's hoping .NET can some day shake off its Windows exclusivity stigma, as I've been writing pretty interoperable C# code for the past 3-4 years or so, and it's been a joy. Night and day compared to Java, at least.

I'll admit it takes some time to get started, but it's smooth sailing once you get past the initial hurdles of setting up your project, understanding some idiosyncrasies when it comes to ASP.NET/Web API/Entity Framework if you're going that route for your backend and such. And now with Blazor, I can even work on the frontend and touch Javascript as little as possible.

If I understand things correctly, it didn't start out with such insane yields- that merely happened once it lost its peg. Even with my skepticism when it comes to stablecoins in general, I'd first put money in something that's overcollaterized so it has greater chances to survive "black swan" events (Such as DAI) or that has been properly audited so there's a guarantee $1=1 token (None yet- USDC is far less dodgy than USDT, but it too has only been merely audited, not attested.)

I knew crypto detractors were going to have a field day with this one. ;)

With DeFi, you're simply exchanging one type of risk for another. Without due diligence you're pissing your money away- as it is to be expected. And as it was brought up before, this was an unaudited contract that had been running for what, weeks? Months?

Personally, I cannot say I understand DeFi deeply enough to get into the intricacies of "yield farming" and such, so I just avoid it altogether. Only have a relatively small amount of USDC and DAI accruing interest on Compound, which has at the very least been audited [0] a few times before, but even if it were to go tits up tomorrow for whatever reason, at least I understood there was that risk.

[0] https://compound.finance/docs/security

I just call it appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Mature internet infrastructure? No. Only perhaps if you want a whole bunch of validating (full) nodes, and only then for the initial bootstrapping and the whole hassle of downloading the entire blockchain up to that point, but past that, even for non-custodial wallets (AKA your keys therefore your coins), broadcasting a transaction takes very little.

For context, I'm running a full node from Venezuela. The initial bootstrapping was... painful, but keeping up with the rest of the network doesn't take much.

As of a little while ago, yes: https://www.binance.us/

I'd rather prefer it died already so the crypto ecosystem can purge itself off it, but I can't make a bet as to when that will happen. It'll be a bloodshed in the short term but it'll recover in time.

We did just fine without it at the beginning, we can do just fine without it now.

Thank you for taking the time to explain things at least. I don't personally rely that much on "instant answers"- at least for the things that I'm most likely to have to look up, but I can see why they're so useful.

EDIT: Also, back to the point: any plans when it comes to only relying on Bing for images? That was the issue in the end- least how I understood it.

I knew he had issues with alcohol from way back, but I looked up to see what you meant. Wow indeed, that's so incredibly sad. That he harbors such a disdain towards his old friends and all is what kills me.