helloworld11

A bit late to the reply party, but for me it's simple: Crypto offers an imperfect but refinable digital means by which people can exchange perceived value with each other worldwide without middlemen or arbiters of what should be permitted or not.

Sure, many people use centralized systems for this now even with crypto and thus miss out on that fundamental aim of these blockchain systems, but the idea itself is doable even in its current form and needed for many edge cases, and for basic financial privacy without often idiotic restrictions and snooping.

I know many people here will hate on that because they're firm believers in the twin gospels of KYC and AML, but so many of these laws are utter abominations in their intrusiveness that i'm glad to see at least something exists which can eventually be made to circumvent them more broadly.

Most of us are not terrorist money laundering cyber criminal drug dealers, and don't deserve to be treated as such with presumptions of guilt and zero privacy rights just because we'd like to spend and move money around without being pried into as if we were little children spending their piggy bank change.

Paper/metal cash used to widely, nearly universally allow for this without so much hand wringing, but sadly, it's slowly going the way of the dodo, and something needs to take its place that isn't loaded with moralizing, puritanical scumbaggery such as that found with credit card companies and banks, or the utter mondstrosity that would be CBDC if implemented as some regulators are planning.

Binance and Tether are nowhere near big enough to be major financial weapons against the west. They also have nowhere near the sort of supposed major government or criminal support from anyone interested or powerful enough to stop their possible collapse. That you're claiming they do is odd compared to many, many other more mainstream financial systems that have been used as tools by governments and criminals for a lot longer than crypto has even existed. People could have claimed something similar to what you say about FTX just months ago, and would have, as we now know, been very wrong.

Edit: Just the daily trading volume of, say, the forex market, completely dwarfs both the total market cap of tether or the daily volume of Binance. The total value of global equity trading worldwide is also insanely bigger than these two combined.

I think it's amusing as hell how the founder of Binance had a spat with SBF and was partly responsible for hurrying along the collapse of FTX (though that dumpster fire was doomed anyhow), and is now reaping the whirlwind of his own backstabbing of another major crypto bro.

Note: I personally believe in the utility of crypto and think much of the hate for it on HN is downright idiotic and ignorant, but giant shenanigans like these are are a separate matter of natural human greed, fraud, lies and self destructive foolishness.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/11/binance-f...

>used the word Latina instead of the correct latinx.

It's not the "correct" term, and almost nobody I know of takes it seriously outside of really, really narrow little social media woke bubbles. If someone is a woman and of latin american origin, they will almost universally refer to themselves as latina and not care if others do. What idiotic nonsense to assume that something else is "correct" despite it going against the grain of a vast majority's word use.

I live in Latin America and have latin american family of all kinds. This aside from many friendships of both sexes and variable gender identifications too.

Yes but the key question is, where is the listening done and where is the data stored?

This isn't quite right. U.S politics is much less party-centric than it is in many other countries. Basically, though you've got a vast majority of candidates for X or Y office who are either democrats or republicans, their platform tendencies can be quite diverse, even though they often go against the grain of their own party's nominal positions. It's somewhat subtle, but this detail of U.S party politics makes for a strong multi-party diversity of candidates even though there are formally only two parties that mean anything for votes.

This is how you can have, for example, a surprisingly moderate republican senator like Susan Collins, sharing the same party with someone like Trump. And then also in the same party, a Rand Paul type.

Is this a persistent problem in android phones? Is there any way to avoid it (except using iOS)?

you're presupposing that your experience of cash transactions is and should be everyone's experience of cash transactions. Yes, many normal people sometimes conduct business with larger amounts of cash over 10k euros, which by the way isn't all that much anymore. And even if this is unusual, banning the unusual is a terrible way to run laws. If you defend financial privacy, I can't see how you could defend such an idiotic and intrusive law.

>Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone.

No, it's a way of defending the basic idea that the state's right to squeeze every penny and justify any law in the name of being able to do so shouldn't be automatically unquestioned. You saying that this cash amount represents a significant piece of income for someone takes as given that the cash in question is being laundered or used for evasion. Do you really believe that this should be a default assumption, or that it's right for the government to assume such guilt just because money is present in someone's daily business? Imagine if all legal issues were handled in such a disgusting way. For some reason, too many people put on emotional blinders and with tax law, ignore how barbarically stupid that is if any respect for presumptions of innocence exists.

You are certainly naive about how reliable government is about being able to pry into everything financial, or how absolute should be its right to squeeze for any amount of money.

Well don't I feel foolish..

With that much hatred in your opinion of our species, i'd say that you suffer from too much garbage thinking that has lost all perspective or balance in judging humanity. Yes, we can be a terrible species and in many ways continue to be awful to our own kind and other species, but we're also extremely social, capable of incredible acts of good and by our basic nature tend more towards cooperation, peaceful interaction and friendly exchange than towards violence and murder. We literally couldn't be where we are right now if the opposite was the case or if we were even half as bad as you describe.

Also the obvious: Fashionable misanthropy is all fine and well if you enjoy pretending that obvious things aren't actually the case, but if you're taking it as seriously as you claim, nothing stops you from removing yourself from the human world around you if you hate it so much. Personally, i'd suggest therapy and some calming, professional external perspective.

This infographic is a bit off on a few of them. On Neptune and Saturn "surface" gravity is only modestly higher than on earth and atmospheric density is fairly modest too along the cloudy layer that we could call the surface of these planets.You'd either freeze to death or suffocate well before being crushed by falling deeper down on any of them.

As for Pluto, average surface temperature sits at -394 Fahrenheit, so damn cold that you'd flash-freeze nearly solid in seconds, well before you'd suffocate. This applies even if we take into account a near total lack of atmospheric pressure (mainly because most of its atmosphere is goddam frozen to the surface because of the same deep cold)..

And why petrification for Mars, but not Pluto? If it's because of the cold, then that applies to Pluto, not Mars. On Mars you'd asphyxiate well before freezing. Even at its coldest, the red planet is nowhere near as truly deep space cold enough to flash freeze you in the way that Pluto or the outer gas giants could. Hell, in many places on the Mars surface during the day time, temperatures reach up to 20 degrees Celsius, almost earth-like, except for the suffocating 1% atmospheric density, which is, as I argued above, what would really kill you.

Venus, Mercury and the Sun seem legit though. Especially Venus with its atmospheric density being the same as a sudden trip 1km below the earth's oceans.

As another person here said about Earth, most likely drowning, so the visual even got that wrong.

first link below estimates that YouTube's total storage needs for all of its content are roughly 10 exabytes. It goes into a lot of detail that you can check for yourselves, because it's a bit too much to copy over here, and though I can't say it's correct for sure, the description of how they reach their calculation is quite robust.

Anyhow, if we assume storage costs for YouTube are the same as what AWS charges per month (roughly 2 cents), this would mean that it costs YT about $2.4 billion per year just to store those 10 exabytes. I'm assuming that Google can cost its storage at quite a bit cheaper than 2 cents per GB at the immense scale it operates on, so let's halve that. This still means simple storage costs of $1.2 billion per year.

These of course don't include hardware replacement, other capital costs, or the bandwidth costs of all that video being uploaded (and downloaded).

Youtube's revenues for 2019 (so a bit out of date) were nearly 16 billion (2), so while they certainly have lots of costs beyond what I described above, they're also wonderfully profitable it seems.

1 https://www.productmanagementexercises.com/9018/estimate-tot...

2 https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q4_alphabet_earnings...

This is absolutely laughable. The very opposite is the case:

Wealthy, well connected people, politicians and businesses already can and do transfer and launder money on industrial scales, with only minimal worry about rules like this one, which doesn't even really affect their ability to launder or evade. They can instead use armies of lawyers, accountants, political connections for the high levels at which their laundering and tax evading happens. And if those fail, they can then simply pay whatever fines as a cost of doing business while minimizing convictions of real, actual people behind a business structure.

This cash prohibition rule on the other hand turns many average people across the EU, possibly millions of them in total into potential lawbreakers just because any number of normally, morally non-criminal random circumstances or worries about digital finances being frozen make them want to have and use cash for modestly large transactions.

All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them.

>Privacy shouldn’t exist for financial transactions. It makes it easier to launder money or hide wealth. There is no other use for “dark” financial transactions.

This makes a very tenuous assumption that government is always justified in any money it seeks to take away or trace, or that nobody ever has a good and even moral reason for hiding their money from a hungry state.

That's an awfully narrow view of reality or even the long history of governments becoming downright predatory.

Yes, privacy absolutely should exist for financial transactions. It's flat out naive, or elitist and authoritarian to believe that the state deserves a constant right to know where every penny you have goes and how to confiscate it whenever it pleases.

And why do you need to justify that something should be made illegal just because your personal circumstances don't include it as an experience in your life? Unless something is explicitly (or sometimes implicitly) harmful to others, it should not be banned just because you don't live it. Part of even a basic respect for un individual freedoms means not automatically trying to ban things that don't rigidly fit a common notion of how you "should" live.

>That will change with this law, finally. Or put them out of business. That's a good thing, don't you agree?

Or here's a novel idea: Try not to support coercive laws and rules that seek to stamp out the possibility of people having unorthodox or somewhat unusual voluntary payment preferences, just because you don't personally like them.

>If you having to pay transactions >10k frequently enough that network outages block you, I'd wager you're doing exactly the kind of something this law should prevent.

Because somebody has cash and payment needs, or levels of preparedness that your own narrow thinking doesn't digest isn't a good reason to automatically assume that they're probably a criminal who should be targeted by invasive and authoritarian controls. Frankly, it's something of a sick mentality to immediately treat with suspicion of criminal activity those who support or personally prefer conducting their financial affairs differently from how you do.

As for your final comment, People wanting to transact privately aren't nuts and bolts to be removed from the scene by some nasty, dirty little toolbox of edicts by politicians who regularly protect corruption on larger scales. It's absurdly malicious, or at least plain ignorant to think that way. There are much more fundamental and obvious reasons underpinning the fight against parasitic, invasive financial laws. Read a little about both modern politics in much of the world and modern history even in Europe itself to at least slightly understand the basis for resisting these rules on cash.

Love the Lecter reference...

And of course this is intolerably awful because only progressive, woke, leftist, pro-Government-covid-control sources should in any way be tolerated in their views? Only they're free of slant and emotional bias? Indeed. Why not analyse a source for its specific arguments and their evidence instead of its political tendency?

Anecdote here, but any time I use dark mode even for a few minutes, it makes my eyes feel awful, and leaves ghostly shadows of text lines in my vision for up to a minute or two after leaving the screen. Reading anything in light mode on the other hand doesn't cause me much trouble even after hours of doing it nearly without interruption.. I have a hard time believing that i'm the only one. Personally, I detest dark mode and have never understood why so many people recommend it.

I've been using it for some of my work for a few months now, after a multi-year hiatus because it always, no matter which version I installed, slowed to a crawl after a short while of use. Now that I've restarted using it.......... Same damn thing as before: If I open more than a couple of tabs and leave it running for a couple hours, the whole thing slows to a crawl. This problem has persisted for me across nearly a dozen laptops over several years. I don't think it's specific to something I'm doing wrong. (though I'm happy to be corrected on this so I can finally fix that thing and use firefox regularly)

Chrome on the other hand can be open with dozens of tabs (yes I'm a tab hoarder, sorry) and run just fine. I don't like Google in so many ways, but damn is it hard to argue against using chrome over FF when FF keeps being so damn stupidly shitty on lightness of use.

My daily work laptop is admittedly pretty low-spec, but if one damn browser doesn't make it crawl, why should it be so hard for the other damn browser that promotes itself so heavily to pull off the same thing?

Conclusión from this little corner of the browser user space: Firefox, get your shit together finally please? It's been over a decade, you've had plenty of time to stop fucking basic things like lightness of performance speed up.

The prohibitionist puritans never learn. Laws that reduce smoking permissiveness in public places? Sure, Laws that set rules for advertising and legal buying age or location? Okay, why not. Banning tobacco completely in a spasm of nannying, health-fanatical "for your own good" intervention in people's personal body choices? Why? Have decades of absolutely idiotic drug laws and the previous idiotic bans on alcohol not shown why this is not only a bad idea practically but also just morally wrong by basic definitions of individual's rights to autonomy over their own bodies?

Doubtless there are many people here who personally dislike tobacco and thus think it's just fine that others should be banned from using it, but remember, where one set of laws tries to ban some personal way by which a person uses their body, its guiding principle can be expanded widely to include all sorts of other things you do support being able to do.

As a basic notion, the whole idea of the state acting as if people should be treated like little children in situations where their actions don't cause non-voluntary damage to others is just plain toxic in so many ways.

Not sure about suicide cyanide teeth, but the pill version was very real. A whole bunch of high-ranking Nazi's left the stage using exactly this. Among them Hitler (slightly disputed about whether he simply shot himself right after biting a pill or just shot himself and didn't bother with pill), Himmler (definitely, in front of eyewitnesses shortly after being identified), and Goering while awaiting execution in his jail cell.

It's absurd but increasingly common to see such bad, ignorant metaphors of technologies used by people with en emotional vitriol on a site like HN.

The mafia is a emphatically criminal organization made up of people whose unique and specific purpose is to extort, rob, threaten, kill and steal as their core activities.

Crypto is a bundle of interrelated technologies and cryptographic protocols that can be used for bad, good or neutral purposes by humans with all kinds of agendas. In the case of decentralized cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, nobody's even in specific control and claiming they're evil is like claiming a random algorithm is evil, or that encryption is evil because alongside dissidents and social activists, pedophiles and con men also use it to keep their communication private. Ridiculous.

So I guess that this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33897793

is part of the reason why? Or will there be a backdoor in their supposed "end-to-end" encryption of iCloud data?

Wonderful, great, but oh god why do it in sight-destroying white on black text? I can't be the only one that suffers shape outlines in my eyesight for minutes after even a few seconds of looking at it.

>The reason he won back then is in a large part due to the misinformation campaigns supported partly by Russia, see Cambridge Analytica with the psychographic targeting etc.

I call bullshit on that. The progressive side of US politics and society badly discredited itself with its endless harping about Russian electoral manipulation. They spent years doing this without ever putting forth any credible, concrete evidence and in other cases ignoring evidence that showed connections between Russian officials and their preferred political affiliations. This latter event to the point that now, we have several major media outlets being forced to admit the importance of the Hunter Biden laptop story that they previously sneered at after the New York Post made it very public. The levels of partisan absurdity only grow more laughable.

Much of this, I suspect pushed by a near hysterical desire to find an external cause for millions of Americans who voted for him (for whatever numerous reasons of their own) not listening to the preaching by their supposed superiors in the major media outlets and social feeds.

How many people right on this site frequently talk about how difficult it is to convince people through online advertising even when the spending is in the billions by agents that know a lot about individual's preferences because of online habit tracking. And then at the same time we're supposed to believe that tens of millions of Americans were brainwashed into voting against their own preference by a Russian manipulation campaign run by a government that has repeatedly shown itself to be inept at so many things (war most recently), with a relatively modest budget, limited personnel and a general cultural divide between the mentalities of the perpetrators and all those average Trump voters in the U.S.

The entire accusation reeks of idiotic nationalistic elitism justifying a profound disdain for a huge percentage of the U.S population that "refused to listen" (to progressive arguments against Trump).

>countering scientific consensus with harmful conspiracy theories

You mean "harmful conspiracy theories" such as previous suggestions that COVID might have accidentally come from a lab accident? or that the vaccines didn't work as wonderfully as first advertised, or that they may just cause harm to some people? How about others that also later proved to have some truth to them. All of these things would have been perfect candidates for using your supposedly moderate "harm reducing" stance on free speech to snuff out worthy debate even if some of it is colored with tones of irrational conspiracy thinking.

And that is exactly why free speech moderation is so dangerously stupid. It allows reasonable sounding people to crush attacks on reasonable sounding ideas, right up until both these reasonable ideas and the people supporting them become unreasonably authoritarian, and attack even wider ranges of open expression.

>The results are very visible these days in the US and I'm happy they're not in Germany (at least not in a relevant way).

Your "tolerant" western Europe has no shortage of ingrained racism of all kinds that it just sweeps under the rug to a degree that in the U.S doesn't happen nearly so much. Many Americans are indeed racist but at least in the U.S there's a lot of very open, free and very public discussion and debate about it. In the EU, it's more a case of people patting themselves on the back because they ban symbolic things and hide the modern nasty traits so many of their fellows still have towards all kinds of ethnicities.

Free speech "radicalism" is not responsible for racial tensions in the U.S. If anything it helps ease them slowly by bringing them into the open.

>In the West we still have democracy - yes might be on its last few legs, but it's not too late, as the 2020 election showed

This is laughably biased. Whatever his defects, the election of Trump was if anything a much better example for democracy in action than the forced-along Biden election in which as much as possible of the mainline media and tech companies did everything possible to ensure it went that way.

Trump legitimately upset the applecart by winning (even if it was an electoral college victory, it was nonetheless part of how the system formally works) and surprised many people including a majority of the media landscape fully against his campaign. Because you detest that particular president's politics (im no fan of them either in many ways) doesn't make it an antidemocratic step backward..

Honestly sorry then. That one flew right over my head. And since some people really do think exactly that way, all the more believable.