The thing is, ownership of any of these can change at any time. Bitwarden, Mullvad, and Tutanota could be sold to very different owners.
That is up to and including something like uBlock Origin, which only has one developer, and would suddenly be very different if that developer died and the project had to be forked.
You can never trust that the person who takes on the reigns has the same ideals as the people running them now.
Hell, Mullvad was abused to the point they removed access to Port Forwarding on their VPN service, which has led to many people needing to switch to crummier, shadier VPNs that still offer port forwarding access. That’s not Mullvad’s fault, but it is an example of them having to change their philosophy and what they offer because of abuse.
Trust should only go so far, and loss of trust should be very easy. There’s not a good reason to keep “trusting” something when it has fundamentally changed from its initial ideals.
Hell, Mullvad was abused to the point they removed access to Port Forwarding on their VPN service, which has led to many people needing to switch to crummier, shadier VPNs that still offer port forwarding access. That’s not Mullvad’s fault, but it is an example of them having to change their philosophy and what they offer because of abuse.
Hell, Mullvad was abused to the point they removed access to Port Forwarding on their VPN service, which has led to many people needing to switch to crummier, shadier VPNs that still offer port forwarding access.
Unfortunately port forwarding also allows avenues for abuse, which in some cases can result in a far worse experience for the majority of our users. Regrettably individuals have frequently used this feature to host undesirable content and malicious services from ports that are forwarded from our VPN servers. This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.
The result is that it affects the majority of our users negatively, because they cannot use our service without having services being blocked.
The abuse vector of port forwarding has caught up with us, and today we announce the discontinuation of support for port forwarding. This means that if you are a user of forwarded ports, you will not be able to add or modify the ports you have in use.
They made a smart call that has probably increased the long term privacy of their users.
People were using port forwarding to host illegal shit, and governments were getting pissed off about it. Mullvad has been able to prove in court that they don’t keep logs, but that’s not a perfect deterrent; a properly motivated government, perhaps if somebody is using Mullvad to host CSAM, might attempt to legally force Mullvad to put logging in and add anti-canary clauses.
Preventing port forwarding keeps customers as consumers rather than hosters, and avoids this issue.
I used to use proton until I saw them give info for a warrant. After that I gave up on the VPN thing. If I lived in a country with limited streaming options I might use them but shrug-outta-hecks
This is true and people should always be mindful of this. Additionally you should consider not just the ownership of the companies but also the infrastructure they rely on such as their rented servers, payment processors, on-site staff etc. However commercial VPNs remain a convenient compromise for many use cases. These services are probably fine for your shitposing needs but should not be relied upon for activism for instance.
I’ve been trying my best for a while now, friend. I’m also trying to normalize treating having too much wealth as embarrassing. Like, it should fully be seen as a character flaw to have more money than anyone could ever use. I’m far from advocating for enforced equality, but there should be some limit to wealth upon which exceeding it is viewed as gross by the rest of us plebs. Those parasites certainly shouldn’t be fawned over like so many people do now.
You are the first rando to ever call me friend like my friend does and I’m super here for it. Thank you for that, I really liked it. :)
I’m super behind you, friend. I will continue to call them oligarchs, I will continue to make wealth an embarrassment. I mean I’m poor and always have been so of course I’ll rail against the overlords… but 40% of the US population is poor, we are nearing a majority and that is super fucked, and that’s a huge potential voting bloc! We should really do shit with that!
Gosh, it must suck to have so much money and not do anything good for society with it. How embarrassing for you to have so much and do so little with it.
I mean look, if we just taxed shit appropriately we’d probably be mostly ok. There’s a reason tax cuts are so influential. And there’s a reason anyone over a certain income bracket should have $0 worth of loopholes. I’m down with tax loopholes but if you have more than $x in any bank account you are disqualified from claiming. Why not, right? Who does it harm? Nobody who matters.
I’m truly glad I was able to help you have a nicer day. We all need to look out for each other and prop our friends (current or future) up in this system rigged against us.
I’m with you in that most of the population are comparatively poor. The problem is that the oligarchs know exactly how to keep us down, by playing our minor differences off against each other. We need a whole lot of love and understanding to counter that power.
I mean, I’m so goddamn fortunate compared to like 95% of the earth’s population. I grew up fairly poor to working-class parents who had to really struggle to provide for us and keep a roof over our heads. But poor in Canada is a whole world’s difference from poor (or even doing okay) in most other places, and I include the USA in that latter category.
I’m now nearing 40 and for the first time in my life I don’t have to outright directly stress about money. My wife and I are lower-middle-class, and along with the rest of my family were able to buy the business we all worked for. It’s still a struggle - now I have to worry about keeping the business afloat for everyone who depends on it, and we had to make a lot of sacrifices to make this happen. (It’s still up in the air whether my mom, the president of our company, will be able to retire in time to enjoy it.) That said, part of the reason we could make this happen was because we had my wife’s family to fall back on and have “temporarily” been living rent-free in their basement for 9 years now. This is something else that so many other people lack. I can’t remember the technical term for it, but having a family or other social network to lift you up is so crucial to keeping people out of poverty or otherwise helping them better their lives.
This is getting stupidity long-winded, but the point I’m getting at is that for the first time in my life I have the potential to become very wealthy over the next few decades. However, myself and my family are in full agreement that we don’t want that. As our business becomes less of a struggle we certainly want to pay ourselves a little better (with our skills and experience we could make far more anywhere else than we can currently afford to pay ourselves), but we want to raise the wages of our staff right along with our own - never making much more than the average person we employ. To us, that’s the real mark of business success - creating a thriving organization that lifts up everyone involved.
We’ve all seen what egregious wealth can do to a person and want no part in it. If our business does well enough to potentially make us rich, I want us to be taxed punitively- to properly incentivize us to reinvest our profits into creating more jobs and paying them increasingly well. To get rich would be the death of who we are as people.
With this all being said, all of us who want to make the world better in spite of the egregious power of the rich need to stick together. Leftism is so prone to infighting over minute technical details when we ultimately all want the same core things. I’m certainly critical of certain strains of leftism, but at the end of the day I have way more in common with ya’ll than I do with the rich. (In fairness, my family technically owns some of the means of production, but the tiny sliver we own is worth less than a typical house in our low cost-of-living area and we don’t own houses because of it. As such, I think the worst we could be accused of is being petite bourgeoisie.)
The rich, on the other hand, possess a remarkable class consciousness. A white warehouse worker has far more in common with a black supermarket worker than a Saudi Sheik has with an American or Russian oligarch, but you’d never know it. They’ve gotten so good at playing us against each other while cooperating to keep us all down. It’s a tale as old as time.
And I wrote out a really long reply but… I deleted it. Because it was probably too much trauma to throw at someone I don’t know :) and I really enjoyed what you wrote to me, but I know that I’m “much”, sometimes “a bit much”, sometimes “too much”… either way I don’t want to lead on that because it never works out for me so.
I really enjoy you friend and I want you to know I read everything you wrote I just don’t have the gonads to actually engage with this the way I want to.
Instead, here’s something that helped me be who I am today (jokingly, old humor you may recognize)
I definitely recognize that video! I’m sure I saw it on Ebaums World or something way back before YouTube.
As to your comment itself - don’t worry about being “too much” with me, especially after that info dump I fired at you. Many of us at my work struggle with mental illness and joke about how blatantly we trauma-dump on each other all the time. Sooooo, I’m used to it, and regularly perpetrate it myself. I’ve also been through two full-on mental breakdowns myself so not a lot can shock me.
It’s late and I need some sleep but if you ever need a friendly ear to vent to, add me on Mastodon ( @herrcaptain ) or straight up shoot me an email ( [email protected] ). I skimmed some of your comment history and you seem like a good egg and we have a lot of common ground for a friendship.
I appreciate you friend. It’s been a solid while since I drank (which is better for everyone, I’m a fucking mess!) and so I’m kinda very aware of myself. I’m trying to be a better person and I fail every time. So if I limit my exposure surface area I can’t be so abrasive right…? Or something? (Frankly idk what’s wrong with me, but I’m clearly unlikeable so I try to limit my… exposure surface area I guess? Hence deleting my post. But telling you about it because i want to social…
I hope you have a wonderful night, and sleep wonderfully. I always like to encourage my friends to have soecific thoughts, so if you read this before you go to bed, I hope you fall asleep thinking about a random mountaintop stream leading into a lakebed. I hope you see trees around you, filled with fireflies. You see the lake lapping at your feet with the wind, and bioluminescent glow around your toes.
You as well, my dude! And for the record, you seem very likable to me. Please do feel more than welcome to reach out if you ever need a friendly ear. I often feel powerless in the world, but one thing I am capable of is acting as a sounding board for someone who needs to vent. As I said in another comment earlier today, I’m pretty pessimistic about the state of the world, so these days I focus on just helping people where I can.
Aww that’s super nice of you :) even my friends struggle to…. Not dislike me :) I struggle with it myself but you made it a bit easier today, being very open to things.
It won’t be tonight but I do hope to run into you again. I… can’t reach out to you, it just isn’t a thing I can do at this point (always goes horribly) but if you do want to keep touch, please do feel free to dm me, or whatever that looks like on Lemmy/fediverse…?
Honestly it has not happened, and irl people who give me their contact info tend to do so with zero expectation of follow-up (I have learned through failed attempts to follow up), so idk how to do it or what it looks like… but I would like to keep contact if you’d be into it.
But if not o hope you have a great night all the same :) no pressure or whatever :) but do think of that mountain stream, maybe throw in glowing trees if you feel adventuresome! I have a whole dream town and it’s so fun to have a place to explore. Give yourself a glowing woods while you can ;)
Well, I’ve favorited you here on Lemmy and will make sure to keep in touch. I wasn’t sure there was a DM feature, but looking in my app it appears there is, so I’ll do that in the coming days to check in.
No glowing trees in my dreams, but a good sleep nonetheless so thanks for that!
No worries! I just shot you a DM being that this thread is already so long. It’s the first I’ve sent on this platform, so let me know if you don’t end up receiving it.
As a British person, I had a few awkward conversations with other British people when I’ve asked them to explain the difference between a royal or a higher level aristocrat and an oligarch.
It seems to be something to do with the length of time society had to endure their bastardry. Well, it’s either that or that they’re not from the Oligar region of Russia. Its one of the two.
I guess the technical difference would be that one had ancestors who took their power by force and managed to cement it into hereditary rule, while the other acquired it as a “captain of industry” and then largely did the same thing through lobbying or other forms of cronyism.
Mostly the same end result, but for some reason we put one on our coins and hold celebrations in their honor.
Would you still feel that way, about the very first part, if I was to remind you that some of the Russian oligarchs were crime bosses who took power and wealth by force?
Admittedly, it doesn’t have the hereditary rule part but that, for me, would simple fall under “the difference is the passage of time.” I see it much like the difference between a cult and a religion.
Here in Ukraine, we don’t really have those illusions about them, yeah. Some of it might be remainders of Soviet collectivism, but even back then there were people who hoarded money and power, just under different pretenses
I only play single player games, but couldn’t care less about achievements. It is all about exploration, story, game mechanics and modding for me.
People treat achievements as if they are a status symbol. I mean sure, if you don’t know what else to do in a game, they can give you some goal, but IMO the game itself should encourage you to reach the goal, not some external badge. The experience doing the task should be the reward in of itself.
depends on the game, achievement hunting can be a lot of fun in a game u already love its just more stuff to do and more reasons to play, sure if all the achievements in a game are things like getting all of a collectible or beating certain story missions/quests they are pretty boring but in pdx map simulators for example many of the are interesting run ideas or they indicate where the hand crafted content is at. And despite how much i love the game i dont think i would have played as much of Tyranny as i did if i hadnt decide to get all the achievements.
There used to be an effort made with how you play a game to get achievements. The Orange box was a great example of this. The ‘Little Rocket Man’ and ‘The One Free bullet’ achievements both made you play the game in a different way. Sadly now it’s mostly just ‘play the game’ ‘collect all the things’.
Only silly people flaunt achievements. I use them as a meta-gaming guideline, which in a good game leads to interesting and fun challenges. In an RPG, it’s like a check box for getting every ultimate weapon, fighting every boss, etc.
Can also give me something to do in a game I’ve played but loved. Retroachevements for instance encouraged me replay SaGa (aka Final Fantasy Legend) with only one character in the team. Wasn’t too hard, but definitely a second playthrough thing.
True, if and when I ever get around to replaying things that could be a problem (although the industry has seen to remaking everything I cared about, sometimes poorly, but that’s another problem).
Another shout-out to the nerds running retroachevements though because they thought it that; they have an encore mode that let’s you redo achievements. Although honestly you could just make a second account, that stuff is for emulated content anyway and it’s not like it’s DRMed, haha.
I love any game with a handcrafted map and some exploration. Even Satisfactory, a factory building game, does an excellent job at that. Procedural generation has its uses but lacks soul I guess.
Tipping my landlord, hell no! I did tip a live in superintendent at one building I lived in every Christmas. Dude lived a rough life but somehow found his way to maintaining an old building, and he was great at it. If you saw him on the street you’d assume he was homeless, but infact he kept a building housing many people running. He was very friendly, kind, and respectful. He was an exception, I’d give him a small gift, usually chocolate and a small gift card. He was a very good dude and that deserved to be acknowledged.
I want to see what you mean in practical terms, because the only other example that I know besides questionable crypto currencies is NFTs and that was an epic lesson on what not to do. 😅
No, NFTs do have good uses, but things like image NFTs are just a misappropriation, like SPAM is to email.
One use case, is clear, independently verifiable ownership of non-tangible things, like Intellectual Property rights. Movie rights for a book adaptation for instance moving between companies in IP sales and mergers/acquisitions.
One use case, is clear, independently verifiable ownership of non-tangible things, like Intellectual Property rights.
Why is your system better than the existing one?
There is, for example, the first-owner problem in a public blockchain. What happens if I make an NFT saying I own you property? Without an external system, how can you prove your NFT is real and mine isn’t? And if there’s an external system, why not use that instead?
I thought of that problem the moment when they started explaining their use case. I had no idea there is a name for it, kinda cool. If the blockchain people have a real solution for it, it would be a pretty big deal
IP rights is not a problem that needs solving. In fact, the existing system has ways of punishing copyright violations whereas the Blockchain does not.
Supply chain validation is also an example of the block chain “in action”. But the people that are entering the data on the Blockchain are the same people that were typing it in an email yesterday.
I used to be a fan of the technology as well but so far it hasn’t show itself to be useful. A solution in search of a problem.
Yeah I think a lot of people don’t understand that “good for x problem”, “better than existing solution”, and “switching to this solution is better than staying with the existing solution” are three vastly different things
Blockchain fails because switching to it is consistently worse than sticking with current solutions, and often it fails at being better than current solutions in the abstract
The perfect use case is tickets to live events. One entity creates one NFT for each seat or spot available and can initially sell them. The owner of that NFT (ticket) can then do whatever they want with it without the need for a third party (Ticketmaster) to scalp the shit out of any subsequent transactions.
Proof of ownership of a single ticket at the time of the event is the end goal, which is what NFTs do.
Why this hasn’t been done is pretty baffling to me.
What’s better, is if artists want to provide a subset of tickets that are not resellable they can. Those tickets will only be accepted if a single transaction has taken place.
Why this hasn’t been done is pretty baffling to me.
Because the blockchain needs an incentive. Who is going to be taking part in the blockchain if there is nothing in it for them? That’s why these tokens are often tied to crypto currencies, as mining is the incentive.
The sounds like scalpers paradise. They can buy multiple tickets and sell it without thinking about any authorization (id card or something) when using that tickets
The owner of that NFT (ticket) can then do whatever they want with it without the need for a third party (Ticketmaster) to scalp the shit out of any subsequent transactions.
How is that supposed to prevent scalping, exactly?
Proof of ownership of a single ticket at the time of the event is the end goal, which is what NFTs do.
And that’s better than physical tickets, because…?
What’s better, is if artists want to provide a subset of tickets that are not resellable they can.
That’s also already a solved problem: write a name on a ticket and validate that name with an ID.
Just responding to the “scalping” quote. It absolutely wouldn’t stop scalping, what I HOPE op was trying to say was that it could be used to prevent Ticketmaster, or any entity like it, from charging fees on every exchange of said ticket.
That is an absolutely TERRIBLE use case because it is by definition centralized. The venue already has ample control over who tf gets in and there is little problem with counterfeit tickets.
That’s not a perfect use case for it. That’s a central authority (venue) selling tickets to anyone who wants to buy them. But instead of using a local database and approving transfers from person to person and losing the ability to reverse transactions due to fraud, it’s hosted in the wild west of crypto.
There’s nothing stopping a venue from offering your perfect use case in a centralized system, but they outsource it to Ticketmaster (namely because Ticketmaster owns like 80% of music venues or something) so they don’t have to deal with it.
Your scenario outsources it to the block chain, who will charge gas for the transactions instead of ticketmaster charging fees.
And it’s ALWAYS the same problem. You can have all the lists you want. A central authority has to recognize and enforce that list. At which point, the structure of your list is completely irrelevant. It could be ANY list. What matters is that it’s chosen to be enforced. And currently, most power structures are happy with plain old databases. Or pen and paper.
A plain old database also has ways of dealing with theft.
If someone steals your crypto keys and sends your assets to themselves, they have no legal ownership over those assets but they’re listed as the owner in the blockchain, so blockchain isn’t even any good at being an accurate, verifiable record of ownership.
Yes, you can’t make changes to the blockchain, but that also means you can never fix anything. So you actually can’t rely on the blockchain to be accurate.
"Intellectual Property[sic]" is dishonest loaded language, but yes, I agree with you that blockchain could be a good way for a copyright holder to prove their monopoly. 'Course, that’s also what registering your copyright with the Library of Congress is for, so…
I don’t know the value in a decentralized IP rights system. If the key holder gets phished, you can lose your rights to a TV series you’ve been working on. (Like Seth Greene)
He wouldn’t have lost it and had to pay back the ransom in a traditional contract. Having a contract centralized and enforced by the legal system has many perks and I can’t ever see how a decentralized rights platform can enforce itself.
There are other uses. Like making a system that is interconnected and resistant to hacking. For example an interconnected traffic light system that can prioritize transit/emergency vehicles could be managed by a block chain to ensure the system stays in sync with itself for traffic flow/prioirty while being resistant to hacking or malicious activity.
Because it’s a trustless system. In order to override the system you have to take over 50% of the nodes, and in large enough systems it’s infeasible to get that much compute power. This means that no one person or organization can actually control the destiny of the system, only the consensus can.
I can’t believe that here, in the fediverse of all places, we need to have a discussion about the benefits of having a system that corporations can’t control.
Who controls the streetlight blockchain in your idea? You think the government is going to responsibly manage a system that is large enough to be impractical to alter? My local government is barely responsibly enough to manage basic utility maintenance, we’ve had 3 water main bursts in a month and it hasn’t even been below freezing that whole time.
I can’t believe a human being living in the world doesn’t see that any implementation of a secure blockchain requires massive funding for infrastructure. That money comes from 1 of 2 places, illegal enterprises that maintain control for security and manipulation, and legal corporations that will maintain control for financial security and manipulation. Modern governments don’t run projects like this anymore, they contract them out to corporations.
Keep in mind that the only practical use of blockchain that anyone has found so far, has been as a currency that requires no ID. The most famous use of these currencies was by John Mccaffee, who used crypto currencies to help him evade authorities for nearly a decade. So I don’t have much faith in a technology that has only shown a benefit to criminals with so much money that cash becomes impractical. Nor do I have to remind you that wealthy private individuals have been able to manipulate crypto markets with hilarious ease, like how Musk pumped and dumped Doge Coin years ago with a single tweet and most likely made millions in private, untraceable money.
Just because something sounds cool on paper, and makes it seem like it skirts governments and corporations, doesn’t mean it works in practice. Large entities inherently have more resources, and are primed to steal new technologies for their own use, especially when implementing that technology requires huge funding for infrastructure.
Yeah I realize now I responded to a thread about traffic lights instead of systems in general. Obviously centralized systems are far superior for that.
Ok explain to me the advantages of a decentralized traffic light system that controls public traffic on public streets?
What advantages does a blockchain traffic light system have over a centralized server controlled by those who are responsible for maintaining the physical hardware?
It’s almost like different types of systems have different requirements, and a communication platform benefits from decentralization, where traffic lights and vehicle routing does not.
This is a classic solution in search of a problem. The problem with stop lights isn’t that corporations control them, the problem with stop lights is that the general population thinks that cars are the only way to get around and demand that city officials optimize street and roads for cars. Adding a bunch of crazy verification steps will not solve this problem.
This is another social problem that technology just can’t solve.
Reminds me of a device I heard about that just copies a music file and then deletes the copy and counts how many times that file has been copied as a commentary on the dialogue surrounding piracy
Digital ownership on one (1) blockchain. Not really that great when you put it like that. What makes one Blockchain more authoritative than another? Even in a closed system, if you think the admins of these chains don’t keep a kill switch in their back pocket specifically for their advantage in ownership conflicts then you should probably read about Ethereum Classic. Even if they don’t want to hard fork, if a chain is controlled entirely by a company, then they can edit it however they want regardless since it’s not really decentralized. The idea that Blockchains will empower the customer with digital ownership is silly to me.
No, I’m referring to how ETC came about as the result of a huge scam that caused the whole Ethereum project to be forked. The original Ethereum was supposed to be immutable, but this conflict clearly showed that wasn’t true, and there were still people pulling the strings who were too big to fail.
Not anything new to someone who’s very familiar with the project, but emblematic of the promise of crypto vs the actual product.
Then I guess you misunderstand that the hard fork resulting from the DAO hack was the result of consensus of the network participants, not a unilateral action taken by the Ethereum foundation. Indeed, the protocol facilitated that’s the only way it could happen.
The historic source code is still hosted, if you think ETH devs have the ability to ‘edit whatever they want’ then you should be able to point to the lines of code where that ability is afforded to them. Or someone should, 8 years should have been enough time to have a flick through.
Your anti-ETH comment came across as an anti-ETC comment to me, that’s why I responded. I stand with you in disagreement with the 2016 hard fork. Mostly because many people would lose money anyway, and did. ETH corrected 50+%.
ETC is literally the original chain, sans Ethereum foundation’s branding (which is why your reference to it confused me). Founding members left and continued to support ETC, and went on to found other foundations with a basis in academic rigor, which formed the fundamental basis of the ideological disagreement between participants.
You said this showed ETH/ETC devs have a ‘kill switch in their back pocket’, but the part of Ethereum that was ‘killed’ is alive and much larger than it was in 2016.
My point wasn’t for or against any particular chain. It was just pointing out that crypto isn’t really immutable when applied to real use cases, and is only as decentralized and democratic as power brokers in the space want it to be.
I’m pointing out that the DAO hack transactions are not muted on ETC, they still exist as transactions in a validated block on that chain. Whether its state of mutability exists in binary or on a spectrum, ETC is shown to be immutable using your criteria, further showing that it’s not as simple as “crypto isn’t really immutable”. Different chains, even directly originating from the same project, have different characteristics with respect to mutability. It’s not to say that ETH is worse and/or better than ETC, or that either of them are good, it’s just what’s been observed as a matter of record, contrary to your depiction
My point is that in a mass-adoption scenario where blockchains are controlled by large entities, they will absolutely use these characteristics to their advantage, and because of how crypto is structured it will be much more oppressive and favored towards existing powers than more traditional methods that allow for greater flexibility and a more diverse set of use cases. That’s why some of the biggest holders of crypto are the same corporations that caused the '08 subprime loan crash.
Agreed, but consider this: centralisation in this context is intended to refer to the distribution of power and control toward any authority or party, including entrenchment of VC. It’s definitely a valid point for something like Solana, less so for Ethereum I feel. At a certain point, the sum of involved interests are simply too disparate to be utilised together toward some nefarious end. Of course, robust on-chain community governance is critical for anything that wants to push beyond the microcap experiment stage that Ethereum was in during 2016.
IMO, blockchain technology is good for one use case: illegal transactions.
I think all else can be achieved more efficiently by using a trusted third party write-only database, such as the ones available on AWS, and you’d also have the benefit of being able to go to court to seek relief. Some blockchain markets are basically reinventing banking systems and preexisting financial law - systems that have been built over centuries and have quite a bit of knowledge baked in.
I do like the shift to proof of stake from proof of work, but this tech is silly to me.
Proof of stake, while better for the environment compared to electricity-guzzling proof of work, actually shift the power of consensus to capital owners. In proof of work, any bloke with some computing power can participate in the swarm even if they don’t own any crypto. In proof of stake, only those who own some crypto can participate in the swarm, and those who own more have more say.
You can say that proof of works also requires capital to buy computing power, but with the shift to proof of stake, the bar to participate has been raised. If can’t just use a spare computer to join now, you actually need some capital to buy some stake before you can participate. It’s a big boy club now, a tool to help the rich get richer.
I know of one use case that seems viable, there is a digital housing market service in my country (called Dias). It uses blockchain to verify transactions related to selling and buying houses. That includes proof of sales, ownership, bank transaction status etc. The blockchain is operated by all the major banks. Their incentive is that it increases the security of the transactions thanks to the immutable digital trail, and also the fact that no single entity owns the “database” so no entity can alter it, or skim service fees etc from the others.
But if you have any conflict with it, you have to get a lawyer involved right? It doesn’t seem like it provides value to a real estate transaction, just seems like a use case for block chain
IMO, blockchain technology is good for one use case: illegal transactions.
YES!!!
The only thing you’re not getting quite right is what it means to be “illegal” and whether the groups making this decision have anyone’s interest in mind except their own.
When doing right is or becomes illegal because our country is run by a fascist, that “illegal” money will save lives.
IMO, blockchain technology is good for one use case: illegal transactions.
If the friction of translating your fiat money into cryptocurrencies and back is low enough it can be a very good method for collecting digital donations. Potentially no fees to send/receive money, no real national restrictions to speak of and then its stored as a value that the recipient can use however they want, plus donors can trace where the money goes if the person they donated to then turns around and donates a portion to another person receiving donations on the blockchain.
Basically the exact same benefits as the use case of illegal transactions, but at least for good rather than usually-not-good
actual, verifiable digital ownership... using a distributed database technology that is designed to require a massive amount of computing resources to update.
I think where some of us who work in spaces using databases to verify something in critical business processes get stuck in accepting that blockchain has value is that our jobs have always been to verify "ownership" as quickly and efficiently as possible. We typically do this by defining a canonical source of truth and our success is judged on how many milliseconds transactions take and the datacener or cloud costs.
Saying that everything about blockchain is "dumb" isn't a very nuanced analysis... but it's a understandable reaction to hearing the hype that blockchain is going to change everything for years.
I've never seen anyone argue that the massively distributed nature or the public read access of blockchain technologies aren't interesting. It's the tradeoff that has to be made in speed and costs that make it hard for many of us to see any value in the approach for most applications.
Imagine if you will… the dollar (cash) was invented today, up until now all there was was long-established crypto currency.
Suddenly there’s all sorts of scams where crooks trick people out of their dollars. Others are getting straight robbed and have no recourse to get their cash back. Cops often don’t believe you as you have little evidence of the $1000 you just had. Yet others are getting scammed by “banks” that disappear soon after accepting deposits as there is no state regulation.
What you’re seeing is not a problem inherent in crypto-currency or blockchains, it’s a new tool. Many new tools are used most effectively by “the bad guys” first. Even look at Mp3s, the first 5 years of their existence their purpose was basically to rob record companies. Are mp3s a scam?
Don’t let banks and authorities convince you that one of the most effective weapons against them is a scam against you. You don’t think the banks are telling you the truth… this time… right?
Of course! You have access to actual evidence and not articles directly or indirectly funded by those who would be harmed by moving away from the current system. And of course you’ve considered it without bias or influence from that group. You are not being propagandized to, no way.
In which cases is this actually useful, as opposed to having a centralized database? Blockchain doesn’t provide the enforcement of ownership, which is the real problem.
the problem that bitcoin “solves” is mathematically unsolvable. The only reason it kind of works is because participants are human, and therefore are able to assign arbitrary value to the currency, and therefore can act greedily to try to maximize (and protect) their coins. Participants are only incentivized to participate in mining because the thing they’re rewarded with is a “currency” (something they value, as humans).
For anything but a currency, what is the incentive of miners using their resources to handle your transactions?
A blockchain is only as secure as the amount of work (= processing power) that goes into it. Anyone with 51% of the processing power invested in a blockchain can attack it and essentially steal from other people. For cryptocurrencies it’s a problem that solves itself, because every person that possesses some of the cryptocurrency is incentivized to mine to keep it secure (and to earn some at the same time). The more your cryptocurrency is valuable, the more people will want to mine it and the more secure it will be.
For anything other than cryptocurrencies, you can’t incentivize a huge number of people to commit computing power to secure your blockchain. So you have to protect it some other way, for example only allowing you and some trusted people to write on it. But then it doesn’t really need to be a blockchain anymore, just a write-only database (which will perform better and occupy less space).
If it requires no work to generate a block at the end of your blockchain, any attacker can generate malicious ones.
Humans are rationalizing creatures, much more than rational ones. Our first gut reaction is trying to make sense of why we think what we think and why we behave how we behave, rather than trying to figure out if it does actually make sense. If this natural tendency could be changed, the world would be far less of a shithole.
This is why, rather than slapping people in the face with a mountain of research, I try to ask them questions that lead them to the conclusion I want them to reach. Oh we discuss along the way, but you get a lot less of the black and white thinking bold statements that someone entrenched in their beliefs tends to make
The research backs up your statement. Especially if you yourself are genuinely interested in the conversation, and also willing to update your own thinking, along with helping get everyone in the conversation to start understanding the real answers.
In case you haven’t listened to it, the You Are Not So Smart podcast covers the topic of how to get people to change on a pretty regular basis. It’s a great podcast that talks a lot about conspiracies, misinformation, and how to combat them.
My favorite part of this podcast is that if you listen to it from the start (nearly 300 episodes at this point), you can hear him slowly become very jaded and pessimistic, but then as the podcast goes on, he starts turning around his opinion and gets exited and optimistic about all the progress that is made. It’s a really great podcast and makes me excited for the future.
I don’t think so? The Socratic method wasn’t necessarily a strategy intended to carefully persuade someone by bypassing psychological blockers. If anything, Socrates’ counterparts were often antagonized and angered by his questions because he exposed contradictions.
I think the ethos behind it was that Socrates presumed he knew nothing, other people seemed like they knew things, so he asked them what they knew, since others were so bold as to make knowledge claims.
We’re also to some extent innately combative creatures. People will say “Oh, I showed people the facts and they still didn’t change their mind. They’re just idiots stuck in their ways.” Okay, cool. When you tried to present these facts, did you do it in such a way as to treat them courteously or as an equal, or did you do it in such a way that you got to feel like you were dunking on them rhetorically? Because it’s not as simple as presenting someone with facts. It’s doing so in a way that doesn’t make it feel like you’re trying to establish some kind of superiority over them. Because then they’re not presenting facts to you, they’re just attacking you and your position. And these are very different things, conceptually and emotionally.
That is - IMO - what critical thinking is meant to be … thinking about alternative explanations and evaluating their viability or probability.
Unfortunately a lot of people use the term “critical thinking” as just another way to rationalize why they are against something, without actually weighing the options.
I think Americans in general don't see it as a difficult choice to support Ukraine
Politicians find it difficult because Republicans are pro-russian, and both parties are heavily aligned with Israel. So Ukraines the only one really seeing any push back.
I was about to call you neive but then I thought, maybe your right. What if the politicians arnt pro Russia, they are just pro money.
So they are taking bribes from anyone, be it Russia, isis, pharmaceutical companies or big oil. We just catch them out as Russia are the worst right now
I think that’s worse than them “just” being pro Russia 😔
Of course politicians are pro-money. You don’t get to be a politician in a capitalist country without being pro-money, wealthy, and well connected to others who are wealthy.
Bribery is in most cases legal in the US. It’s called lobbying, or campaign donations, or the revolving door between public service and private industry. It’s also an unsolvable problem given the current economic paradigm. The capitalist class will determine government policy in one way or another, as the government is designed to protect the interests of the capitalist class. The will of the working people is completely irrelevant.
Russian money, insofar as it does exist in US politics (there’s astonishingly little of it compared to other sources) is drawn to attention by a media that is owned by the same companies and people that are bribing in a much larger way. They call attention to the few thousand dollars a Russian immigrant may or may not have donated to the NRA or a Republican candidate to distract from the billions of dollars Wall Street spends on candidates and kickbacks to make sure they’re the ones who control US economic, financial, and foreign policy. It’s easy to call attention to Russian money because the same media has created an environment in which anything Russian is pure evil, so people don’t even question the content of the story being told. This has its roots in Cold War anti-Soviet propaganda, which has been dug up and repackaged to use against a post-2008 “non-aligned” modern Russia.
I never said these two things were related nor mutually exclusive.
I’ll be more explicit.
Russiagate was a work of fantasy telling a story about a supposed Manchurian candidate, rather than admitting that the Democratic campaign made mistakes and that Trump spoke to genuine issues the US population has (of course without solutions but that’s not the point here).
Bribes Campaign donations and favours are given to candidates and office holders all the time by interest groups, companies, and wealthy individuals. A donation by JP Morgan or a Koch has nothing to do with the Russiagate fairytale.
No it shouldn’t. It should never have existed. Palestine should exist and yank settlers can fuck off home. Jewish people can live in Palestine. Zionists should get the same treatment as Nazis.
Yeah let me know when anyone actually poses an existential threat to Israel and then we can talk. Until then, they deserve zero aid while perpetuating genocide.
Conflating genocide with “defense” is zionist talk.
Honestly surprised that I hear this so much. For context, I am not a Republican, so I’m not defending them, but every Republican I’ve talked to has been anti Russia to the max. They might disagree on the amount of money that we send Ukraine (“Why are we sending billions over there when we can’t even figure out our own country” comes up a lot) but I’ve never heard a single one say anything in the support of Russia. It’s so confusing when I hear people say conservatives are pro-Russia… Different ecosystems I guess
I do believe they were referring quite specifically to the politicians, since on every side it seems politicians are disconnected from their constituents and do things those constituents absolutely wouldn’t (this isn’t some bizarre both-sides argument btw, just general frustration at the state of things)
Every 1 minute, 3L of water gets heated by 50K. With a specific heat capacity of 4200 J / kg / C and density of 1 g / mL, it takes 3 x 4200 x 50 = 630000J per minute.
With a rate of 4.0 x 10^4 J / g for the heater, we can get the rate of combustion with 630000 / 40000 = 15.75 g per minute.
I read in this book that there’s a restaurant just before that happens where you can bounce back and forth between the death of the universe and the hours before it. So that sounds cool.
It’s another spin on the aforementioned restaurant. It’s from a hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. In said restaurant (Milliways) the cows have been bred to wanting to be eaten and expressing said wish directly to the customers.
Shh!" said Ford. “It’s conical. So what you do is, you see, you fill it with fine white sand, alright? Or sugar. Fine white sand, and/or sugar. Anything. Doesn’t matter. Sugar’s fine. And when it’s full, you pull the plug out… are you listening?” “I’m listening.” "You pull the plug out, and it all just twirls away, twirls away you see, out of the plughole. “Clever.” “That’s not the clever bit. This is the clever bit, I remember now that this is the clever bit. The clever bit is that you then thread the film in the projector… backwards!” “Backwards?” “Yes. Threading it backwards is definitely the clever bit. So then, you just sit and watch it, and everything just appears to spiral upwards out of the plughole and fill the bath. See?” “And that’s how the Universe began is it?” said Arthur. “No,” said Ford, "but it’s a marvelous way to relax.
Realistically speaking, any of the major changes that happen near the end of a star’s life will make their planets uninhabitable on a time scale that seems pretty long from a human perspective. Imagine the last 100 years of climate change, but it just keeps getting worse at the same pace for a million years. By the time a star swells into a giant or explodes in a supernova, there won’t be anyone around to notice.
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