magicjosh

Agree that returning user information can be delicate. I would think journalists dealing with such a sensitive contact would be more careful, but that's a dangerous assumption. Sure, I can use Tails and Tor, but for someone without a tech background it may be difficult or impossible to use those tools properly. Making privacy-preserving tools and practices the default is way. I appreciate the various guides the EFF puts out on privacy and digital hygiene.

Ya the core of the article is missing a key point.

Did you enter "Mustafa Aksu" as the title of the Otter recording? If so, they just took the text you entered and emailed it to you. Why did you write this sensationalist article?

If they transcribed it and send it to you, maybe there's something here. But expecting Otter to be secure is an entirely different issue. But the article conflates this whole thing about the title with insecurity and it's unclear.

There is certainly an article to be written about the dangers of using Otter. But this stuff about the email and the title is a distraction. It attempts to "storify" something that doesn't need it. Automated recording means sending recordings to the cloud where you don't control them. That's a terrible idea for sensitive content. Full stop. That's the article.

Disclosure: have used Otter, like it, but wary of security issues. Self hosted option sounds good.

By hosted I mean stored on IPFS. It's a bit like downloading a file from Bittorrent in that it can be fast and distributed, but with some added crypto layers.

The only part stored on the blockchain is the address itself. The files are not stored on the blockchain.

More here: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/what-is-ipfs/

Appreciate your question! That should get you started.

I like how you put this. Yes, it does seem like our ownership of digital services is tenuous, unlike owning a knife or a car. I could wake up tomorrow and conceivably be locked out of my Twitter, Gmail, Facebook accounts forever.

Perhaps in the new era of tech we'll have better data portability and ownership. Sure, maybe Google can kick me off but they should still let me export all my data.

See my reply below about public blockchains.

If your email were hosted on a public blockchain, Google could not kick you off.

- Decentralized file hosting for all the emails using IPFS instead of Google's servers

- Decentralized login using ENS / Ethereum Name Service instead of Google's login

- a UI on top of your data, plus an outbound server for relaying to/from non-blockchain email accounts

Overall, you end up with portable data thanks to IPFS, and a login through ENS to whatever UI you want to use/pay for.

This seems like a win to me. Haven't seen anything yet that pulls this together but the pieces are there. Maybe someone here wants to prototype it.

Here's the start of what that might look like: https://ethmail.cc/

As far as I can tell this is just like regular email that you login using your Ethereum Wallet. Data is still stored the web2 way.

I'm curious about blockchain solutions for this.

Public blockchains have potential to be part of the solution. Imagine the following:

- Decentralized file hosting using IPFS

- Decentralized login using ENS / Ethereum Name Service

- Email service gives you a UI on top of your data, plus an outbound server for relaying to/from non-blockchain email accounts

Overall, you end up with portable data thanks to IPFS, and a login through ENS to whatever UI you want to use/pay for.

This seems like a win to me. Haven't seen anything yet that pulls this together but the pieces are there. Maybe someone here wants to prototype it.

The full article goes into the advantages and disadvantages of rounded corners.

From the article:

+ Boxy shapes are commonly seen as reliable, uniform, traditional, and professional.

+ Round shapes are commonly seen as charismatic, endearing, harmless, and friendly.

Sounds like you and the authors would agree.

To be clear the paper claims they developed their own methodology. And that this methodology lines up with the previous source: "This figure is consistent with research conducted by Ratliff in 2014 (n. 5) and Chainalysis in 2017.6"

Whether you want to believe them is another issue, may simply be that they took the source and built a curve around it.

Happy for any other sources or surveys you care to share.

It sounds like you think scams and user error are not equivalent. Let's say user error losses are 150 bitcoin per day instead. That would suggest scams are 10X losses from user error.

Indeed!

"He works in a very boring building. It basically never gets robbed. He sits in his security guard booth doing the crossword. Every so often, there’s a noise, and he checks to see if it’s robbers, or just the wind.

It’s the wind. It is always the wind. It’s never robbers. Nobody wants to rob the Pillow Mart in Topeka, Ohio. If a building on average gets robbed once every decade or two, he might go his entire career without ever encountering a real robber.

At some point, he develops a useful heuristic: it he hears a noise, he might as well ignore it and keep on crossing words: it’s just the wind, bro.

This heuristic is right 99.9% of the time, which is pretty good as heuristics go. It saves him a lot of trouble.

The only problem is: he now provides literally no value. He’s excluded by fiat the possibility of ever being useful in any way. He could be losslessly replaced by a rock with the words “THERE ARE NO ROBBERS” on it."

Good point let's factor that in. Let's say 4% per hear or 1,500 Bitcoins are lost per day as of 2020 (crappy sources but let's use them as an example) (1)(2). That puts us at 547,000 Bitcoin lost per year compared to 350,000 from scams across all cryptocurrencies.

(1) https://coinquora.com/bitcoin-supply-loses-1500-coins-per-da...

(2) https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d580747908cdc0001e67...

This attitude was used as an example in "Heuristics that almost always work": https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost...

Similarly an onboarding on common user errors would be useful too. An estimated 10x more cryptocurrency is lost to user error than scams. (source in my other post on this thread)

> BTC will never be stable.

Care to elaborate?

User error is an order of magnitude more dangerous than scams.

Estimates suggest 4 million bitcoin are lost due to user error [1]. Estimates also suggest $14B per year of cryptocurrency is lost to scams. [2]

At $40k per bitcoin this suggests 350,000 bitcoin are lost each year to scams and theft, ignoring all other cryptocurrencies. This would take 11 years to add up to 4 million lost to user error.

Testnets are good for overcoming user error. Please learn on testnets to your heart's content.

1 https://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/

2 https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/06/crypto-scammers-took-a-recor...

Depends on what you want to learn. Rocketpool has a testnet setup so you can play with ETH staking: https://docs.rocketpool.net/guides/testnet/overview.html

Get some free testnet ETH and try it out!

I haven't looked into minting NFT on testnet. You can write your own contracts on testnet tho but that's a heavier lift.

Disclosure: I own crypto and think ETH will be <$0.05 USD for a transfer within 4 years.

I was curious about how prevalent the use of crypto is as referring to cryptocurrency.

I had to get to the fifth page of Google results for "crypto" to get to this non-cryptocurrency gem: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/crypto

Depends on what cryptocurrency you want to experiment with. Bitcoin Cash looks to have $0.0007 transaction fees [1]. Seems like $5 would get you some basic experience. Another option is to get some free tokens from a testnet faucet, then everything you play with is free.

[1] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/charts/median-transactio...

The writing style is hard to follow. Did anyone who read the article find interesting points?

Overall, would not recommend wasting your time with this article. Dunno why it was posted or written. Kind of a stream of consciousness thing, doesn't work well.

If you want good crypto content check out the Zero Knowledge podcast.

Yeah. It's a summation/averaging word. It's supposed to indicate "so much here" instead it means "nothing here".

HN thread on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165118

A neat follow up article would be "I was so excited about my dinner with Pete, it overwhelmed my ability to write about it and here's what I learned about myself and my needs"

"Language that adults think works on children but kids are smarter than you think and see through your bullshit"

Huh I usually like Perell's stuff but this one seems a bit empty, like a cream puff without filling. The examples seem weak, for example the McKinsey story about smartphones is vague. Sure, people get things wrong, and groups certainly do. I wonder what the purpose of this piece is. Maybe there's 100 more pieces coming influenced by this dinner, this was just getting the crumbly cork out of the wine bottle.

Or maybe the secret is dinner with Pete was boring af.

Now I'm wondering if the cost of escaping regimes is actually part of the reason regimes persist. This may be more obvious to others, appreciate other perspectives here.

Came here for this comment. This choice of headline by Meta seems like a bad choice. The language just reeks of double speak even if it isn't (No, I haven't read the article!). Who is running PR at Meta these days? "Dad Is Absolutely Not Threatening to Leave Mom".

Getting in to the article, the language is bizarre: "We have absolutely no desire to withdraw from Europe; of course we don’t." What? Who talks like that.

I was curious about the importance of Forbes. It's been linked over 1,000 times on Hacker News: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Forbes

There seems to have been an informal requirement [1] to have $25 to pass through Ellis Island less they become a burden on the public system. Adjust for 1909 dollars, that's $700 today...or 0.02 BTC. "Many families sold everything they had".

Unfortunately, escaping regimes is expensive. Many Americans today would not be able to pay this fee.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=QjA_AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA77&lpg=P...

I encourage you to push your question further. The tech exists, some people want it according to this article. "Do we really want the ability"....if your answer is "no", it sounds like the window is closing for you to do something about it.

The article is a few days old. The site has since raised over 21 BTC (>$900k USD): https://tallyco.in/s/lzxccm/