(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.
Yeah, how could anyone not like the US puppet pick. We've been trying to eradicate the socialist government of Venezuela for the last 20 years.
Guaidó has received in indeterminate amount of Venezuelan cash frozen in the US. If that doesn't speak to who is pulling the strings here, I don't know what will.
>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.
> 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.
> Police have no expectation of privacy when performing their official duties...
True, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to escalate to the point of publicly shaming officers. Or at-least maybe we don't always need to, sometimes it's definitely called for.
> At some point you can't just blame "the system" and there needs to be individual accountability.
I don't think any actions by any individual police officer is likely to scale far.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
You could make that claim, but of course, if the US military went away I suspect more than a few people would notice.
However, Bitcoin continued to work exactly as well without the extra hash rate. No byzantine generals were harmed in this hash draw-down. As such, when I say it made no difference, I mean it.
Mining exhibits an un-damped positive runaway condition with respect to price, as price goes up it becomes more economical to mine. As such you can waste more power and add unnecessary extra hash capacity and make more money. Not just can, have to, as others do so, to avoid getting left behind. Full on prisoner's dilemma. When 70% of it disappears en masse, it makes no difference.
> Well, Bitcoin is cleaner for now, wasn't that one of the greater criticisms levied towards it?
For sure, but it won't last, that's kind of my point.
The criticism is that it's roughly speaking the least efficient system humanity has ever implemented. Moving a mountain with a spoon is likely more thermally efficient. That hasn't changed, really, it's fundamental to the model.
> The criticism is that it's roughly speaking the least efficient system humanity has ever implemented.
Maybe, but setting bitcoin aside for a moment, the blockchain and the distributed trust is a revolutionary technology.
Imagine people complaining about how much cars pollute and how we should stick with horses. Are you willing to give up your car and everything that has an internal combustion engine?
The US Navy ensures the world's shipping lanes are free from piracy. Without this, our imports would be much more expensive. Someone with better math skills than me could verify this, but I imagine this endevor is net profitable.
so you would have more expensive imports, maybe. and you would move to produce things locally. also, the cheap imports are cheap because there is a human price (ie basically slavery) paid at the origin. if you produced things ethically they would be more expensive rendering the navy useless as you would once again shift to producing locally.
also, since when does the us navy provide this service? i mean maybe it provides it, but i have a hard time believing it protects all the shipping lanes all the time (ie other nations surely protect their trading routes)
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.
Q: What's the difference between fake news / conspiracy theories and the real news?
A: About 8 months.
Sure this joke is an exaggeration, but occurrences like this seem to be getting more common. Sometimes it's much longer than 8 months. The informed reader can fill in the blanks.
One very big problem is YT and other content providers intentionally provide recommendations to reinforce confirmation biases of the viewer. If you click a few wacky conspiracy videos you will start seeing more in your feed. If you click fact and logic based alternate videos, you will start seeing confirmations of this particular view point, but no factual/logical discussions from opposing viewpoints. What's worse, inevitably you will start seeing references to censorship in your favorite topics. This feels very much like a political agenda on the part of big tech content providers.
In any event it is clear the algorithm is not interested in healthy reasonable discussion and debate to further democracy.
It's the fact that the censors are there to step in for things that are plausibly true. There isn't any need to censor flat-earth theories. Nobody cares, it doesn't have any implications and it easy to disprove (eg, the fact that the horizon dips away).
The censors only get really active for things that could plausibly be true or things that are absolutely true but inconvenient to the people who control the censorship office.
Not talking about flat earters. I’m taking about tech companies picking election winners by “fact checking”/suppressing stories that make their chosen guy look bad.
Todays conspiracy is often tomorrow's orthodoxy. Society is better served by erring on the side of free speech and letting evolution decide what ideas are good and where are not. This was settled hundreds of years ago but apparently this generation did not get the memo.
Flat earth is 5% idiots and some damn near remainder trolling, but the other two… what if they were right?
Obviously they aren’t.
But in this scenario, what if they were and you were part of the useful idiots covering up for someone? You would be the bad guy directly hurting society… so instead, how about a free marketplace of thoughts and opinions and allow the “orthodoxy” to be organic even if it might slightly be flawed on average (to the example we land on “no vaccines aren’t bad, but we have a lot more required testing and liability just incase”).
What makes your pet theories better than anyone else’s? Why “can’t” you be wrong?
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.
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.