...or we're on on the very edge, walking straight into the abyss, totally focused on some mindless diversion on our device's screen?
921 karma · joined February 17, 2022
There is no logical compromise between a KYC value transfer system and a non-KYC system, you either have auditable customer identity or you don't, in which case all is lost due to the Sybil attack: the money launderer can create a limitless number of pseudonymous identities (for example in Bitcoin, wallets) and transfer value both om chain, and off chain, by selling those funded identities (see for example the method used by Chipmixer, where the actual value transfer happens after the "clean" coins have been injected into the blockchain, sometimes months after).
That fiat converters are obliged to follow KYC is irrelevant to the issue being discussed here: blockchains as money laundering machines. The police will never ask a successful criminal for their tornado proof because police will most often be unable to follow the proceeds of crime through the pseudonymous value mixer that is the blockchain.
> the data does not support that money laundering is a bigger problem as percentage of transactions in crypto than traditional finance. The AML laws have been largely ineffective in practice in traditional finance
Anti-money laundry coverage is spotty in the traditional financial system. Where it is employed, it's very effective in exposing criminals, curbing their profits, thus motivation for crime, or pushing them into risky and noisy beheaviours (ex. truckloads of cash). Current blockchains are by design unable to comply with the most basic AML requirements and it's sheer lunacy to brush that problem aside or claim that crypt is in way comparable to physical cash; it's crack cocaine vs weed.
Generally speaking, the professor's advice from 25 years ago is still solid: don't get a PhD unless you are interested in an academic career, research, teaching etc. Due to the prestige of such a career, it tends to have an oversupply of applicants - the majority of which will not get a commensurate payback for the efforts required by a proper PhD thesis. So they will either flunk / present a low effort thesis, or worse still, they will invest a few years into a good thesis but never develop their career and skills gained into a full academic job.
So getting a PhD for the sake of it might not be a good investment of your time and effort career-wise; If you want to do it for the intelectual challenge on a topic you are very interested in, that's always a suficient motivation.
That's just a digital timestamp service, only a small part of what I'm talking about.
Mind you, I don't claim any novelty in the process I sketched above - just professing the need to have it implemented before we can treat crypto-assets as anything other than a money laundry tool.
Law enforcement is subject to laws too, there is no problem with having laws and enforcing them, unless you live in North Korea. What we should object to is extra-legal surveillance, not court orders.
This way, I would have guaranteed and auditable privacy that the government cannot surreptitiously break, but there is an route to find identifying information with a noisy and court approved process. This would involve both a technological side and an organizational one - brokers would have to setup some type of clearing house that processes legal documents and requests for unblinding, approve new brokers and terminate those that do not follow relevant KYC practices, etc. A middle option between banks (no privacy, 100% agents of the government) and crypto (anonymous brokers, untraceable in competent hands, excellent for money laundry).
We cannot continue to pretend that the current crypto crop "is just like cash". I most certainly cannot teleport 1 billion dollars in cash across borders, completely untraceable. If you cannot see a problem with this feature of crypto and the bad types of people it would attract and enable, then you might be suffering from a case of sociopathy.
I believe that allegedly wrong theory applies perfectly to me, since I have watched myself descend into the junk food - junk flix routine. It started with a mild depression which was a perfect excuse at the time, and then continued down into the pits of procrastination where the lazy part of me was feeling fabulous. Thankfully, the devilish side went completely crazy with guilt and frustration, never mind their Satan worshiping sidekick - the wife - and eventually delivered me back into productivity heaven/hell.
So the story of "access to energy" is in fact the story of economic development itself, the story of how packs of primates structure themselves to shape the world using knowledge in the form a transmissible and inheritable culture. Focusing on energy, a loosely correlated intermediate output of this process, is missing the finer details of that structure. As you observe, energy efficiency is just another way a well structured society can improve their well-being despite relative scarcity of raw energy inputs - the welfare effects are primarily the results of structural reasons, not energy reasons.
The well known "resource curse", which I hinted at in my top level comment and which downvoted me to "-1", is a perfect illustration of this principle:
-> We are given an advanced technological frontier AND given a large, free resource that is relatively valuable within that frontier (which we can loosely equate with energy, since you can trade any resource on the world market for oil, gas, uranium etc. or the implements necessary to transform them into energy).
-> There is strong empirical precedent to suggest that, on the long run, the inhabitants of that particular political unit risk decreasing welfare, lower real wages, and curtailed individual freedoms, unless their society is well structured (say, like Norway)
This is why I abhor explanations like "energy poverty": if energy was the real reason, then how can getting more energy make you worse off? Why should we abstract away the very essence of the problem staring us in the face - the political system in the most general sense, culture, social relations etc. - and pick some loosely correlated variable that's neat and makes us sound insightful?
In that limited frame, my assertion is that all poverty is determined by societal and institutional factors, and is also, by economic definition, a relative notion.
As for the economic development of isolated tribes, we can of course speculate about different historic and economic paths they could take. There is an interesting field of inquiry that proposes an alternative history where the Roman empire sees an industrial revolution in the 1st-3rd centuries. As interesting as those speculations are, they are of little help to someone living in a corrupt and dysfunctional state, unable to benefit from the fruits of an industrial revolution that long since happened. Saying to that person "you are poor because you don't have enough energy" is disingenuous, when the real cause is oppressive and extractive power structures that could easily be dismantled.
That's far from sufficient for sustained economic growth. Most feudal societies had strong property rights - as long as you were on the good side of your king at least, and in times of peace. The population had strong individual autonomy and could even sell themselves into servitude, a right no modern state recognizes. But because all productive capital (land) was controlled by an extractive elite, and alternate forms of capital (human, technological) were undeveloped, such societies were not market economies in the modern sense and living in them was hell for most except select few.
Freedom to do and own anything means nothing when you own nothing.
> It requires equality under the law.
A fair justice system is one of those fundamental inclusive institutions I talk about. We have problems achieving that goal even in the most developed countries.
> Was Man of the Hole poor? > Was that a social poverty?
Yes, he was. He may have chosen poverty freely, as was his right, but there is no doubt he was materially poor compared to most his contemporaries.
Furthermore, the main reason for that poverty was social - he lacked the very foundation onto which to build a productive economy, namely other people in his community. He was also constrained by repressive social institutions - his own life experience and culture and the unprovoked aggression by the farmers - and thus excluded from participating in the larger productive economy.
We can of course speculate about his reasons and worldview, but IMHO it's very plausible he may have wanted not to die relatively young of some preventable disease.
The gap between the minimum common denominator of a state - ability to claim and hold a territory - and the stable an advanced state is made up by inclusive political institutions.
Without those institutions, markets cannot exist, you are just at the whim of a connected competitor, local gang leader, extractive and corrupt government official or unavoidable private monopoly that will fleece everything you create. Therefore you don't waste energy investing and creating for the market, and focus on extracting from someone else.
When you put those institutions in place, the effect manifests itself as economic growth, energy use, increased education etc., which in turn strengthen those political institutions, which in turn beget more growth.
Sorry to nitpick an article that primarily talks about energy, not development, but we need to agree on the root problem. If aliens drop an unmovable fusion reactor in Rwanda tomorrow that can output enough free energy to reach western levels, that will probably not lift the country out of poverty but start a bloody civil war about who owns it and can sell the energy to everybody else.
So if you can buy today cells that are 18-20% efficient, you should not expect dramatic improvements in the next decades, only very gradual. The cost will continue to drop, so given the huge areas available for solar, the potential is still huge.
So I can see it making sense for vehicles that have have two modes of operation, for example a tractor or all-terain vehicle that also need to work on public roads at relatively high speeds. A manual gear box is ideal in such a setting, because you seldom need to use it and it's very simple, cost effective and reliable. In any case, only useful for an extreme niche of applications.
> With the “metric” way you need to do two calculations.
That's really an absurd way of looking at it, because one of those calculations is a division or multiplication by 100, and 100km happens to be a typical distance someone might be interested into finding fuel efficiency.
So the answer to me is an immediate mental computation, 2.6 x 5l = 13, you never ever need to compute consumption per km, express things in ml etc.
Your own "easy" examples look to me very intuitive and convoluted, so I guess the systems are 100% comparable, the only difference is the power of habit.
Well, H2 is an "also ran" at this point: it has lower energy efficiency (losing the majority of input energy in the cycle from electrolysis -> compression -> fuel cell -> electric), it requires more expensive and practically non-existent infrastructure, it's theoretical range advantages are negated by the need to have a small COPV bomb on board, forcing the longest range Hidrogen cars have less range than the equivalent electric, they are more expensive and complex, requiring expensive, platinum based catalysts, pushing the prices of H2 models into a multiple over the equivalent BEV. There is nothing that H2 can do that BEV can't do better, with the exception of fast refueling, which is becoming less and less of an issue.
For cars the race with BEV is irredeemably lost, and even for trucks the hydrogen industry needs to perform some technological miracle to stay in the game.
Let's make that: "The optimal amount of fraud a business should accept under the current credit card online payment system is non-zero".
There is absolutely nothing intrinsic about online commerce that requires fraud. Online business routinely operate with a money first, zero consumer trust paradigm. They ask for my payment credentials first, and only then deliver the products.
If we were to design the online payment system from scratch, we would use cryptography to completely remove the notion of credit card theft, and escrow to settle consumer complaints, with an option for paid arbitration when things go bad. I guess you can call some of those cases "fraud" and some customers are so unreasonable that they border on criminal, yes, you can't make that segment zero, but I don't think that's the kind of fraud they are referring to.
The reason we can't have those nice things is because of immense momentum of the current system designed in the 60s by companies that have very little reason to change anything. In fact, an online payment reform would most likely strip them of their oligopoly. So yes, the optimal fraud level is non-zero because Mastercard, Visa etc. can push that fraud onto consumers (via retailers), and they are making much more money anyway from the current situation.
The actual initiation is the easy part and would have been easy in the 70s, exploding wires that are subjected to a number of kilo Ameperes by some kind of avalanche, solid state switch.
Given the specifics of aircraft operation, large amounts of available coolant air, extra mass of cooling gear with available materials etc., I wouldn't be surprised if the result of that optimization problem is always against liquid cooling; at least for ICE engines where you can only achieve limited efficiency gains with higher temperatures and power densities.
That is, until the Chinese get on this fancy new internet thing.
> The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42.
I mean, who isn't ready to upend their lives, leave all their friends and family to move into a poorer country on another continent for the sake of their employer? There is only one name for that: "huge opportunity", thank you lots Google for not being evil.
Without legal protection, "you don't strike for 50 years if we hire you" will be standard legalese in any employment contract. It's the nature of a competitive market place vs a labor market where workers have no individual bargaining power: companies that abuse their workers will be most competitive, and pretty soon they are the only employers left in the market.
This is of course not true for very creative long tail employees, software etc., but it could be argued that such professionals are not representative of the deep labor market; they have such high human capital that are acting as mini-capitalists, during contract negotiation they can force the employer's hand to a degree that no scaffolder or birklayer could ever hope to, so they have no practical need for the power to strike.
... but with an execution speed that consumes negligible CPU time from the moment the template/source is loaded into memory until it is formatted and put on the wire. Compared to that, a PHP template is dog slow. I don't have any direct experience with Go, small GC allocations for string handling might introduce non-negligible overhead.