datadata

It depends entirely on volume of messages vs available memory (ram or disk) how outrageous it is

Also in order to track UUIDs that have been received, you would either need an infinite amount of memory, or have the system bounded in terms of how many messages out of order a message be delivered and still be processed correctly.

So you can also exchange bonds for goods and services. If you are using an interest bearing bank account, this is basically exactly what you are doing-- your dollars in the account are not actual dollars, but have been pooled into a fund that buys short term treasuries or other debt. The bank is paying you the interest on those treasuries, while taking a fee, and betting that a run on the bank doesn't render them insolvent.

I think the point to be made is that government bonds don't have any collateral baking them. For example, if a corporation has secured debt, the holders of those bonds might get first liquidation preference-- if the company can't pay its debt, the company's assets are distributed to bond holders, so you get something back. Governments have assets, but since they also have central banks which can issue dollars, in the even of a default, it seems far fetched to think government bond holders would claim government assets-- instead the central bank would just dilute its currency. This was not the case by the way in the gold standard, where government bond holders could redeem the dollar bonds and then also redeem them for gold, which would still have value outside of the failed state.

A lot of bitcoins associated with known crimes or sanctioned owners are flagged, and actually blocked by exchanges, for example there is an OFAC sanction list of bitcoin addresses. One problem with such approaches however is "dusting attacks". The owner of a blocked address could send tiny amounts to vast number of innocent addresses, thus tainting them as well. Seized bitcoins from crime have also many times been auctioned directly from authorities. So coins sold in that manner in some sense become 'legitimate' again. [1]

In any money system, maintaining fungibility is really important. You wouldn't want the distant history of a bitcoin or dollar bills to be of concern to someone transacting with it. You could probably say something similar about dollars, for example there is the famous finding that 25% of US Bills have traces of cocaine on them [2]. This doesn't make me personally feel like by using dollars I am providing liquidity to drug cartels.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/19/what-the-us-government-does-... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_currency

Germany actually recently sold negative coupon bonds, i.e a buyer of this bond would pay more upfront than the maturity value.

https://www.reuters.com/article/germany-auction/update-2-ger...

Well before bitcoin, I never felt comfortable with dollar bills stating "In God We Trust" on the back.

Could it be that broiler chickens are being slaughtered ahead of time to prevent forced losses from avian flu? No clue about this industry.

So apparently eugenics is just fine if it is for the environment?

Users have lots of wants, but the product(s) that they will like is not necessarily the same thing that they want.

They reached "scientific breakeven", you are referring to "engineering breakeven" or "economic breakeven". The vocabulary here is nicely defined: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor

I think if MoM were widely reported, it would be stated as annualized to make sense for people in a headline. This would cause a lot of overreaction.

You could say the same thing about Eurodollars-- "US Dollar" denominated assets that are held in banks outside the United States and not subject to US Bank regulations. The size of this market is more than 10x all of crypto.

I think the policy is outrageous, but that doesn't make the title correct.

Also, 5% is not really significantly more than the typical fee an ATM already charges.

The title is a bit of an exaggeration. Withdrawals above that are not banned, but subject to a 5% fee. Also, it is not a new rule but a lowering of the limit of an existing rule.

Stand alone AI bots are only one part of the problem. Actual humans could use AI to assist what they post, especially if there is a financial reward involved. For example, a popular youtube account of a real human could leverage an AI model to reply to user comments on the videos in an almost super human way. Another example is recruiter and salespeople spam, where tools already exist to make automated, machine generated messages that seem personalized.

This model is not learning, but the transcripts being farmed at scale are for sure being used (with human assistance and control) for building the next models. I don't think the kind of exploit of the microsoft bot is possible, however the next model might give a superficial appearance of being safer, since the transcripts we are given OpenAI of us trying to outsmart the model will be used to train it further.

I sincerely can't tell if this is real or parody. Which is it?

A simple answer is that it is a highly effective tax. It dilutes our purchasing power and channels the upside of that dilution to those who control the money supply (or those close to those who control it [0], or own dollar denominated debt. I do not think a government would be willing to give up a tax opportunity, especially if it is not politically objectionable.

[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/biflation.asp#toc-the-c...

"Convincing people to buy homes" is literally an example of misallocation of capital, in the sense that monetary policy is meant to be an intervention in a free market.

The 2% inflation target is for price inflation (the cost of a basket of goods), not monetary inflation (the amount of money). Only monetary inflation is needed to support a growing population, so this does not explain having a target of price inflation.

And the law of unintended consequences gives a huge unintended consequence here.... Rather than worker harder forever, which people really want to try to avoid, things other than money will be used as a store of value, since money is by definition leaking value. Housing, stocks, gold, crypto, etc.

Got it. I agree my proposed rule is arbitrary. I also think twitter must have some form of spam prevention-- any kind of API rate limit would be by your definition be censorship also. I think you might be assuming I think twitter could or should strive to be censorship free, I don't think this is desirable or possible.

Genuinely trying to understand your beliefs here. When you say "Any conditions you place on it are arbitrary" does that also apply to the laws around speech themselves? For example if spam was made illegal, would it then (according to you) not be censorship to block spam?

My belief is that illegal speech is also still a form of censorship, just one that we are OK with. And that spam is more like a denial of service attack. Blocking spam is not about blocking the expression of an idea, but making sure that a communication channel is not abused as to make the channel ineffective.

Why would Y==1 for email spam? In spam, the same message is sent many times. Entropy to try to make spam messages different is generally merely meant to. circumvent spam blockers.

Censorship = you can't say X at all

Spam Blocking = you can't say X more than Y (>> 1) times

While technically censorship, there is a big difference, I think. Obviously in practice spam blocking could maliciously or accidentally be used for censorship.

> I disagree, if 97% of servers at AWS were there for some hand-wavey notion of 'providing security' without quantification I think Amazon would be roundly mocked.

Again, you fail to understand that the number of a machines that find a block could be changed by making the blocks smaller. You could do that by also reducing block size to keep the total number of transactions the same. But the larger point is that mining pools make it so that mining machines are paid for partial work, even without finding a block. This enables the utility of mining to be measured by hash rate, rather than by number of blocks solved.

You called it a gray goo style positive feedback loop. It is not, there is a upper bound on how much will be spent. There is no feedback loop as well, if the price goes up, more will be spent on mining, but that does not feedback to make the price go higher as required for a loop. Moreover, the block reward is exponentially decaying.

Your reading of the tweet is that a person saying a system should use less CO2 implies that person believes the system is unsustainable. I don't think that is reasonable, e.g. an Airline CEO launching an initiative to reduce the airlines CO2 usage would not believe that the airline is unsustainable. I did misread the other part of your statement-- you said bitcoin is ridiculous, not that Hal said that.

Cool, so you moved the goal posts from saying "there is no such thing as stranded energy", to saying "yes, bitcoin is reducing the environmental impact of flare gas burning, but we should be doing something else instead (no concrete ideas) that can solve this problem even better". I have explained to you how bitcoin can have a net positive impact on the environment, given existing practices. You now say that since this is not a perfect solution, we should go back to harming the environment more, presumably since you have already made up your mind that bitcoin is evil?

You didn't understand my point. If bitcoin had 1 minute blocks instead of 10 minute blocks, more than 3% of miners would find a block in their life time. But that change alone would not change any meaningful properties of bitcoin. You think bitcoin is a total waste, I get it. But that statistic doesn't help your argument.

> The answer isn't "as much as you can afford period no follow-up questions."

You are right, and this isn't how bitcoin works. The amount of mining should be determined by the block reward, market price, and fees per block. Mining in excess of this is not economically rational, and shouldn't happen. So it is not "unlimited security" at any cost"

Where in that tweet does Hal characterize bitcoin as ridiculous or unsustainable?

The original comment that bitcoin is carbon negative is ridiculous, I agree. But you are posting empty/wrong rebuttals as well.

In the case of flare gas, it is a byproduct of gathering oil that is unavoidable. The oil is economically worth collecting, but the extra gas is not. I think this can be more finely split into natural gas vs methane-- sometimes the natural gas is worth collecting, but the methane never is.

You could argue that there should be laws to force the methane to be collected and used elsewhere as a condition of accessing the oil. That might be overall better. But prior to bitcoin, that perfect solution was not really implemented. In this sense, bitcoin mining of flare gas is a step forward.

Note that the argument is not just that economic value is created by mining bitcoin, but that running the gas through a generator leads to cleaner combustion and thus less greenhouse gas emission than simply lighting the gas on fire. In this sense, the bitcoin flare gas mining operation by itself could be considered carbon negative (again, surely all bitcoin mining is not). The bitcoin mining pays for the generator. So bitcoin mining is giving the industry a subsidy that enables reduction of environmental harm. It is not perfect, but it is an improvement.

That's an entirely different topic/point. I was responding to your ridiculous point that 97% of bitcoin miners never find a block. You didn't even try to defend that point.

What is your source around Hal Finney? I have not heard that.