gst

I think QR menus are great if it's possible to also directly order and pay from the phone. Especially when going out in large groups where you don't want to necessarily split the bill or where the organizer doesn't want to risk having to pay for items that nobody else claims.

> Doing a 2.0 release on a (US) 2-day holiday weekend is an interesting move.

Their HQ seems to be located in London.

Deposits for USDT (SOL) have been re-enabled again: https://www.binance.com/en/support/announcement/deposits-of-...

I don't disagree here. My point was just that the interest that you see on exchanges is not directly related to the stablecoins.

I'm not sure if there are any legal or regulatory issues that would prevent stablecoins from getting those certifications. Tether definitely looks sketchy, but USDC has regular audits with public results.

> The cryptocoin community wants 6%, 10%, 18%+ returns on their "stablecoins".

As far as I know the two largest stablecoins (Tether and USDC) do not pay any interest. The interest that some exchanges pay on stablecoin balances is because they lend them out and/or use them as collateral. But that does not have anything to do with the stablecoin itself. If VMFXX was tokenized on the blockchain it would be used in exactly the same way.

We might be talking about two different things here when using the term "staking".

I'm referring to coins that are staked by validators in a proof-of-stake chain. The "other side of the trade" is not someone borrowing the coins, but are the transaction fees on the chain and for some chains also the artificial inflation (due to newly created coins).

There is risk involved, but not traditional counterparty risk (when excluding the exchange itself), as nobody is "borrowing" the coins.

I'm not going to predict any crypto future, but here's a counter point: If crypto has a future (not saying it will) then it's essential to drive bad actors out of the market (which is happening right now).

> Except the consumer is drawn to the crypto-exchanges with significant "staking" rewards. Like Crypto.com or FTX.

Staking itself wouldn't be a problem. There would be some risk involved in case of technical problems (for example due to Slashing on Ethereum), but in overall that risk should be relatively small. Exchanges could still hold all of the coins, but just use some of the coins for staking (if users owning the coins opt-in to staking).

The problem occurs when exchanges lend out stored coins without the approval of the user: Either to lend them for shorting or to invest them into something that they assume would appreciate faster.

> There’s also some very interesting discussion at the end about preventing runs: first if banks can suspend withdrawals, and second through central bank backing. I’ll avoid summarizing it because I’m too dumb — but to quote: “Deposit insurance provided by the government allows bank contracts that can dominate the best that can be offered without insurance and never do worse.”

The simplest approach for crypto exchanges to prevent bank runs would be to not lend out or trade with deposits. In fact, that's what some exchanges have always been doing (or at least are claiming to do).

> EasyList is hosted on Github and proxied with CloudFlare.

What is the reason for proxying through Cloudflare? Are there any bandwidth limits or performance issues when directly serving those files from GitHub?

> notably post qualcomm pixel phones from google have five years of guaranteed updates. (pixel 6 and above)

5 years of security updates. Still only 3 years of guaranteed Android version upgrades: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705

> Qualcomm has been a big culprit in this for many years now. They refuse to support their chipsets for too long, because they can reduce expenses not having to maintain them, and more importantly they make more money selling more chipsets to manufacturers.

In the past I've seen that argument a lot when it comes to Google's Pixel phones. But nowadays Google uses their own chips, yet a new Pixel 7 that you buy today will still only get guaranteed major Android version upgrades until 2025.

The same example also goes into the opposite direction: Let's assume your phone gets stolen in a foreign country: With a regular SIM card I lost my phone service for the remainder of the trip. With an eSIM I can buy another phone (that supports eSIMs) and login to the website of my provider to download a new eSIM. Problem solved.

> the U.S. person must deny all parties access to that virtual currency

With Bitcoin that would be relatively straightforward: Just ignore the UTXO because the incoming funds are clearly separated from any preexisting funds.

But with Ethereum that's different due to the account-based approach: What's the impact if those funds are intermingled with preexisting funds on the same Ethereum address? Is it now unsafe to spend any of those funds or can existing funds be spent as long as the minimum balance doesn't fall below the amount of sanctioned funds?

Also what's the impact in terms of taxes: Could there be a situation where Redox OS needs to pay taxes on those 299 Ether but at the same time is not able to disburse them? Due to the high crypto volatility this could become a headache quickly: Imagine having to pay taxes for this year, but then due to the sanction only being able to actually sell those Ether in a later year when the price could be potentially a lot less than the tax liability.

In Apple's video it sounds like there's 2-way communication: https://youtu.be/V35jHAkpUIk (at about 1:20 in the video)

It's different on the 48MP Quad Bayer iPhone sensor:

Instead of something like RGBRGBRGB for the subpixels the subpixels are layed out as RRGGBBRRGGBB (in both dimensions). So while those additional subpixels provide some additional information (either brightness information or a different exposure time for HDR) in terms of color information the sensor would still be pretty much limited to 12MP. Based on the reviews that I read in the past Quad Bayer sensors seem marginally better than comparable regular sensors (48MP Quad Bayer vs 12MP regular), but nowhere near as good as the MP number makes them look like.

> but as a digital simulation from 1x and thereby only at 12MP, and so it isn't fundamentally different than my existing phone

My understanding is that it's even worse than that, as the 48MP sensor isn't a regular sensor but a Quad Bayer sensor. While there are some benefits over a 12MP sensor, based on what I've read it seems that the image quality is more comparable to a 12MP sensor than to a 48MP sensor. So cropping to 2x would match a 3MP sensor.

That's currently the main reason why I'm planing to keep my 12 Pro a little bit longer. A 2x lens seems more useful than 3x to me and if the assumption above is correct the 2x quality on the 12 Pro should be better than on the 14 Pro. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a lot of discussions regarding this topic, but there's a YouTube video that comes to a similar conclusion: https://youtu.be/u9sJb_E6h5E?t=588.

> The reverse might be theoretically possible during activation (if you feed the QR code to your own custom device and your software implementation doesn't guard the keys, letting you copy those freely), but I suspect there is some form of attestation so it won't let you activate with anything but "trusted" devices (by network, not yourself).

There are programmable SIM cards available that allow you to install an eSIM from a QR code. Those SIM cards can then be used in any phone that doesn't officially support eSIMs: https://esim.me/

> I don't know engineering wise why China model phones can't ship with both dual physical slots and support any combo of two physical/eSIM. There doesn't appear to be any obvious technical limitation.

As far as I know Chinese carriers don't support eSIMs for smartphones yet. I'm not sure if Apple would have been able to legally ship eSIM support in China, but even if they would be able to do that it would be an additional cost for a feature that nearly none of their customers there would use.

> Everyone who uses the carrier gets the same code.

I don't think that this is always the case:

For my eSIM at T-Mobile US it was as you described: The QR code appeared to be a general QR code and T-Mobile seems to have recognized my phone based on the IMEI that I configured previously. But for my eSIM at another European carrier that I'm using each QR code appears to be different and at no point in the process the website asks about an IMEI.

> Canadian roaming rates are so utterly shit the SIM card comes out the second I'm on the plane. It's like $15 per day to roam in the EU. Not per month, per day, let that sink in... I can get a plan in Europe for 30€ month that puts my Canadian plan ($90/month) to shame...

That's cheap. My Austrian provider charges 1 Euro per 100 KB when roaming in Canada (no - that's not a typo). So for 10 GB that's a cheap 100k Euros.

> Solend realised this, and took a vote on seizing this amount (effectively removing the tokens from the owner's ownership and preventing them from exiting their position) requiring only 1% of token holders to approve. The vote passed.

Wouldn't it be in Solana's interest to continue being used as collateral? Why would anybody continue accepting Solana-based collaterals if funds can be seized at will?

Anything after Jan 1 2020 is probably not a good comparison due to the Covid-related market volatility. Anything before could also make sense (personally I have a long term target so I care more about longer time ranges), but would be even more in favor of Bitcoin.

Because a well diversified portfolio is a good comparison/reference for individual investments. A better choice than S&P 500 would probably be the FTSE Global All Cap Index.

Under certain conditions HODLing can be an ok strategy. Assuming my investments are diversified enough and Bitcoin is only a small percentage of my overall net worth, why deal with the stress of active investing and trying to time the market?

I can totally understand the mindset of investing some amount today but not wanting to have to care about that investment for the next X years. Especially with the high volatility of crypto currencies.

There are different approaches for that based on different assumptions and based on which risk level you prefer. My favorite strategy is the one outlined here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345065.0 (here's a calculator for it: https://jlopp.github.io/bitcoin-savings-plan/).

Basically every time the prices increases by X% sell Y% of your investment and don't touch the remaining part unless it is X% higher than the previous peak at which you sold. This ensures that you're realizing gains on the way up, but still benefit if the price continues to climb. In addition what I like about that strategy is that it takes emotions out of investing: Decide once what your parameters for the strategy are and then just strictly follow it, whatever happens. It's a lot easier to stomach a 90% price decrease if you realized a sufficient amount of gains on the way up.

In 2020 and 2021 Bitcoin went from less than $10k to $60k in a couple of months. Now it did basically the same but in the opposite direction, except that we're currently at $18k instead of $10k.

I wouldn't buy at either price, but to me Bitcoin at the current $18k looks like a much more promising investment than a couple of months ago when it was $60k. Not only based on the price, but also based on the fact that a lot of players with risky business models are driven out of the market.

For comparison: If you invested on Jan 1 2020 into an S&P 500 index fund you increased your investment by 18% (based on the total-return index version of S&P 500 which includes dividends). If you invested the same amount in Bitcoin you more than doubled your investment and are still at +150% of your initial investment. I'm not saying that Bitcoin is necessarily a good investment in the future, but based on the large volatility in the past the current decrease in value doesn't really look concerning to me.

Less than two years ago Bitcoin traded below $10k. It's a volatile asset so of course it's going to go down as fast as it goes up. This doesn't mean that this is the end of Bitcoin, just that yet another Bitcoin bubble is deflating.

But it's only an issues for other connected entities when they are using risky business practices themselves.

A stablecoin that backs its assets in the currency that the stablecoin issues (for example a USD-based stablecoin that is backed by US treasuries) won't be affected by any disruption in the market. An exchange that is fully backed and does not allow margin trading won't be affected either. Regular holders who hold their own coins or use responsible exchanges also aren't affected.

Yes - there's quite a bit of propagation. But all entities affected by that propagation didn't seem to have proper risk management and used business practices that work well when the market does well, but that fall apart in case of high volatility. Maybe I'm just biased because I'm not a fan of margin trading (and similar practices), but I don't consider it a disadvantage if an ecosystem is hostile to those types of business practices.

> In crypto, there is no buffer. Auto liquidation of undercollateralized positions occurs. All of those humans in the loop, “unfair rules”, and settlement delays crypto proponents complain about are the very things that make traditional finance stable.

Is auto-liquidation a bad thing? It leads to more volatility in the short-term, but it seems that there might be long-term benefits of ensuring that players with unresponsible business practices will be forced out of the market.

"Traditional" crypto holders will be affected too (the value of their investment goes down while people are forced to sell), but this looks more like a temporary impact. As long as they don't trade on margin they won't be forced to sell and as long as they hold their own keys they are unaffected if exchanges are crashing.

From a "price" perspective the current events might be bad for the crypto ecosystem, but from a "health" perspective I think that they could be positive, as only the responsible players with healthy business practices are going to survive.