Some additional downers:
- The Roosevelt Institute growth numbers are based on this initiative being 100% funded by increasing the federal deficit. The same report deduced that if the initiative is paid for by increasing taxes on the remaining population, the net effect on GDP, prices, and wages will be closer to zero, just money changing hands. Yang's proposal will fit somewhere in the middle, with roughly one third to half of the cost coming from VAT. The study's model also relies on the following assumptions, both of which I personally do not believe will hold, especially if the main revenue source will be a VAT:
"1. Unconditional cash transfers do not reduce household labor supply.
2. Increasing government revenue by increasing taxes levied on households does not change household behavior."
[1, page 5,12]
- Over half of means-tested welfare (including Medicaid) goes to people under the age of 18, so these costs won't be touched. "In an average month during 2012, 39.2% of children received some type of means-tested benefit, compared with 16.6% of people aged 18 to 64 and 12.6% of people 65 years and older." The median monthly benefit for these groups was $447, $393, and $303 respectively. The only means tested program that isn't dominated by minors is SSI, the vast majority of which goes to the elderly and people 18 to 64 with disabilities who would not re-enter the workforce. [2, p16, 24]
That's only useful as a hedge for ETH. A mortgage where you have to put down 373% of the value of the house in liquid currency as collateral is not competitive in the slightest.
This method appears to just measure the Tx and Rx paths on an off-the-shelf modem, so you'd have to physically check the router, or I'm sure this could be handled in firmware. They're measuring phase and amplitude differences from unmodified traffic on 2.4GHz so you can't detect it as an outsider.
Proof of work mining is just a bunch of computers trying to brute force the password for the next block so they can get the mining bounty and fees from the transactions they include, so the vast majority of the results are thrown away. For bitcoin in particular, the difficulty is a sliding scale based on how quickly the most recent blocks have been mined, so increasing the number of miners leads to more energy being required to mine a block while the transaction capacity stays relatively constant.
I can say at least that the Xbox 360's standard ban for pirated games that failed verification checks was a console level ban, as in, you can take your hard drive and plug it into a new console and you're gaming again. There were also several times account bans were applied as well, like when Forza 3 dropped several weeks early and people tried playing online.
But the knowledge that he's stealing others' work comes from sources other than the blockchain record, if you don't count the fact that it's internally invalid for a living person to claim a work created in 1506. So the immutable ledger provides no value.
Regardless, taking a picture of a painting doesn't verify that you painted, or even currently own that painting. Adding a timestamp doesn't change that.
Proof of work is intentionally useless to the miner to increase the cost of attacking the network. There are initiatives like curecoin and foldingcoin which integrate folding@home into their proof of work, but the output of that is still "useless" to the miner and relies on the folding@home team not manipulating the process, which becomes a bigger risk once hard rewards for folding are introduced.
