You can run Chinese models locally without Internet, while with US models you need to have Internet connection. Guess where it is easier to hide a backdoor.
Why do you people love over-engineering and bad architectures so much? Do you have any sense of engineering beauty? Modern CPUs already run every application in an isolated sandbox under "protected mode". There is no need to emulate a machine with hardware devices, run a separate kernel, drivers and services. The only problem is that the OS kernel and privileged system services usually grant too much ways to bypass the sandbox. So the proper architecture would be to re-design and fix the existing OS instead of using ugly hacks like VM.
I also use VM to run code editors and AI. One must be crazy to run third-party software (including package managers like npm) unrestricted. The overhead is significant, and VS Code UI is lagging heavily without a GPU.
This was reasonable advice 12 months ago, but at the rate kernel exploitation is going it's less of a security boundary than ever. Hypervisors aren't much better, but it helps.
CPU and memory are not the only concerns,
file system and network access are dangerous as well,
and they tend to be less instrumented in terms of hardware isolation.
On Android many things available on Desktop Linux are disabled by selinux. For example, af_alg algorithm (encryption kernel module writes out of bounds) is not accessible by user using ADB.
Pensions in Finland are not "indexed to inflation" in the sense that you mean. Our pensions are wildly underfunded and people of working age generally expect to get back LESS than the NOMINAL VALUE of what they've paid towards their pensions during their working life (*when we count "employer contribution" into "employee contribution", which is what it is in reality).
Pensions in finland are indexed to inflation. Employee pension fund is not underfunded and actually grew a few years ago. It is predicted to start growing again on 2030.
Yes but you can calculate inflation using different means. DRAM price grew many-fold, did pensions increased the same way? Or, to be more realistic, they may calculate inflation using cheapest and barely edible food and not account for fresh vegetables and cheese.
USDT is implemented as a contract written in Solidity, working over other network like ETH, and it has a blacklist managed by admins. Once address is added to a blacklist, you cannot spend anything from it.
It's literally in USDT contract [1], see line 264. USDT is implemented as a contract in several other networks like ETH and has a blacklist. So every USDT operation is a record in ETH blockchain that calls one of the methods (like "transfer" or "add to blacklist").
Probably not everyone knows, but USDT has a "black list", and admins can prevent any address holding USDT from spending. The black list is implemented in USDT contract.
So USDT is not truly decentralized and your money can be frozen for any reason or no reason at all.
USDT is created by a super shady company and is not at all decentralized or censorship-free. You could have made the argument for Bitcoin (and still can to a certain level) but most cryptos that propped up after that or stablecoins do not follow the hacker philosophy and more the banker one. Ironic that the whole crypto movement got co-opted by the likes of JPM which it seeked to replace.
Recently I tried to donate to a project using their preferred crypto payment processor flow, which purported to support "Coinbase Wallet" integration. So thinking that was just like, Coinbase, I said "sure why not" thinking it'd save me the effort of copy/pasting long strings back and forth.
Turns out, Coinbase "Wallet" is a completely separate thing from Coinbase, and long story short, ultimately ended up accidentally converting some spare ETH I transfered into some kind of garbage Binance "wrapped" Litecoin. Which had zero indication/warnings in the app other than a like 4 pixel Binance logo superimposed on the 16 pixel Litecoin logo that it wasn't the real thing.
Once I gave up on this Wallet experiment I ended up needing Gemini to walk me through all the Binance "gas" nonsense to finally manage to swap into a real coin I could transfer out (like 80% of what I started with after subtracting gas fees and miscellaneous leftover change I was stuck with). And while transferring I had to avoid like a dozen alternative networks consisting of seemingly random strings and a scary red banner saying "yo don't fuck this up".
My first red flag should have been that Coinbase Wallet's Play Store name literally advertised betting on prediction apps. Second red flag was while looking for "Litecoin" in the list of coins, there were literally about 5000 different spam/meme coins with dozens of near identical clones that were all name squatting on top of each other.
As someone who came of age in the Crypto 1.0 "Bitcoin is for buying drugs" era the entire exercise was utterly baffling and somehow significantly less usable than crypto was a decade ago for actual payments. I guess for a young person looking to illegally gamble their paychecks at some unlicensed offshore prediction market it provides some utility I'm missing but man, the experience just made the post-Web 3.0 crypto scene look .... grim.
That technically true for any coin where miners are organized enough, see the ethereum fork where bad contract made wrong people lose money so they forked entire chain to get the money back
Until someone robs you. I've seen teams of burglars target asian households around weddings, because they know that all the family gold will be in the house. Fastest way to lose 100k.
i'll have to recommend "practical doomsday" here - https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/ (edit: because it spends a lot of time on the topic on how to secure your wealth). or ask lcamtuf himself.
Off topic. It seems to me that "preping" became less popular after covid. Perhaps, people realized how ineffective it was when we encountered a doomsday scenario in real life?
US government seized all citizens' gold in 1933 (see Executive Order 6102) [1]. I thought in US the private property is sacred, it turned out US is no different from communists which would seize multi-apartment buildings owned by private persons.
I don't doubt what you're saying. But as someone who is really not buying into cryptocurrencies, this is exactly what someone who holds a big amount of some obscure cryptocurrency would say.
I've heard good things about monero from a friend. This is not an attack on monero, rather a reflection on the general tone of the message.
That's a terrible argument, the IRS taking an interest in obscure finances is usual. Can't escape from the tax office by trading in obscure things.
Monero is, time of writing, #12 on the coinmarketcap leaderboard [0] and less than 1% of the crypto space by market cap. It's hard to complain about that being called obscure; anyone who gets a feel for crypto by looking at a top 10 coins list isn't going to see it.
Although it is a technological miracle. That coin specifically might do poorly in the long term so I'm not about to call it an investment, but I think it's quite possible that Monero holds a probable entry in the history books in 150 years time.
To add ^,
Remember this is fairly early still. We still have people walking around thinking that bitcoin sent by aliens of some sort. The adoption of understanding is still in progress, the correct definition of the technology needs to be better understood by the public. You don't have to agree with it or use it, only associating crypto with cybercriminals and " China " arsenal of spy tools; is only prolonging better uses for the technology and more of a use case for criminals to remain imminent.
The contrast isn't that great between transactions by Visa Mastercard: codes that tell a software - + and what balance is already there. A billionaire does not have a billion in cash at the bank, sorry. They have to request that and I'm not even sure what the policies are for large cash sums. The billion is written on a paper 1mm thick and signed and stamped from the bank "check" The idea is not far from crypto.
Rhetoric is still out and with that it hinders adoption and lets people with no knowledge of the technology have a voice in governing the use and widespread adoption.
I think how easy it is depends on the country and state of things. I would not want to move or share even small amount of gold outside of first world countries even in good times.
Not sure about this, isn't it hard to convert to fiat currency for real-world spending? Since it is often used for illegal activities, Coinbase (and I guess other big exchanges as well) don't trade it.
Yes, it’s a currency swap. You need to find another person (such as a bank, or in crypto parlance, a “defi”) willing to take what you have and trade you what you want.
Yes, there are even semi-decentralized exchanges based on smart contracts, where you can find trade offers posted by others and execute them in a zero-trust way.
It's very easy to pick it up, put it in a car or van, and move it to a different location.
It's much less easy to convert it to something you can actually spend. Even if you can get it to a buyer, they'll always offer you less than you expect/want.
Reputable dealers have KYC reporting duties of their own. Disreputable dealers... may have other ideas.
Of course dealers have KYC (you generally need to give your id) but this thread was about having one's own gold in a safe, not about shady dealings or stealing gold.
Gold sells at about 1% less than the current market price of the gold content of your item which I find fair. It might be easier here in Antwerp than in other places to deal with gold because it's kind of a gold trading hub. You can basically show unannounced (I suggest going by bike rather than by car because there is little street parking) and trade your gold for cash at the -1% rate, obviously if you get to the million euros range it's going to be a bit different, but for a few tens of thousands it's business as usual. And it's not like it's a difficult place to reach from anywhere else in the EU.
Talk to airport security people. The number of travelers, particularly from India and the middle east, with gold bars is nuts. It isn't loose bricks in a sock bag, but piles of one-ounce bars in plastic wrappers, stacked like playing cards, is not unusual. The Canada mint has a reputation for excellent gold/silver. Middle eastern tourists regularly return home carrying stacks of canadian gold/silver bars.
I love monero but then you have the problem that very few exchanges support it and if you need to convert big amounts of it in common currency it gets quite hard to do compared to eth/btc
Well, nobody said that the true anarchy would be easy. No government actually wants to approve the original spirit of crypto, everything they allow is either a toy or a scam they can take advantage of.
Then people get into shitty casino tokens that are widely available because the state doesn't care about a little gambling and got surprised that they are in the casino in the first place.
Not the case at all. True anarchy is community governance where a very local group of people start working together. Anarchist meetings are not restricted to, but include, looking like a bunch of people in a room, voicing their problems with this week's chief speaker as moderator, and then everyone in the room splitting off into working groups to address each problem. The chief speakers rotate around the group each week to avoid moderator bias, and each working group might reach out to other anarchist groups to exchange information and resources freely.
This is but one model developed within academia for an entirely anarchist organisation, there are dozens of others and they have been both studied for efficacy (they tend to work better than a more hierarchical structure), as well as put into practice in real life within certain organisations. To this date there are a number of non-profit organisations and coöperatives that use this governance system to improve the situation where they are locally and achieve their goals — whether that's "everyone working to improve the local community" or "make good products for a client".
The entire point of anarchism is that there isn't One Big Guy, it's that it's people, deciding on a system and working together on a small scale — this then translates to the big scale through cross-group meetings, information sharing, and resource sharing. There is a lot of evidence within the social sciences to back these methodologies up as being very efficacious compared to traditional methods of group organisation, as well as being more democratic than traditional alternatives.
This additionally tends to be how some kinds of open mic nights work, as well as some kinds of modern speakeasys.
It’s a bit antithetical to anarchy to start defining true and untrue configurations. It’s more accurate to say that while anarchy permits chaos, it also permits self-organization, one mode of which is hierarchy-free community governance. Most of us have experienced this among friends when e.g. deciding where to go to dinner.
This is one of these circular relationships. You and your friends can experience true, free, cooperation exactly because you don't have to be on guard 24/7 against enemies, because you live in a civil society that has rules, and people to enforce those rules - ultimately by coercion through violence.
Peaceful anarchy evaporates when bad actors arrive. I wish it wasn't so. A structured civil society is the nearest we've managed to get to being able to live in relative freedom almost all of the time. It's the least violent, least coerced option we've been able to find.
The other way would be to go live in a group by yourselves off the grid, and as long as every one of you is good and decent that will be fine, but the moment one of you goes bad, you either have to choose violence or they will do whatever they want to you.
"A structured civil society is the nearest we've managed to get to being able to live in relative freedom almost all of the time. It's the least violent, least coerced option we've been able to find."
Can you source these claims?
Civil society only seems to be getting LESS free and MORE violent all of the time. And in America, I constantly have to protect myself against enemies be it scammers or the thug who tried to mug me for my wallet.
The term anarchy is used in academia for all kinds of non-hierarchical civil societies. Academia being academia, they chose to stick with a dumb label. But the set I think OP is describing is more intuitively understood as non-hierarchical social systems.
I have said this many times, and will probably have to say it many more: Stablecoins are nothing but a face-saving measure for the US government.
It is politically impossible to go back on KYC/AML measures in the traditional financial system, even if some of them were perhaps a bit too ill-advised. It's much easier to say "this is shiny new tech, very different from that old tech over there; we support innovation so we won't impose KYC requirements on it", even if there's no logical reason to do that.
As it stands, stablecoins let you make a keypair in the privacy of your own home (or your own agent sandbox, as it were) and immediately start transacting. They're allowed-by-default instead of blocked-by-default, with the US government still able to block you if they have a specific reason. No traditional bank I know of, in any country, works like this. This is a valuable capability to have, technologically, even if there's no technical reason why a Postgres database and a REST API couldn't provide the same service, but faster and more easily.
if its bannable by a centralized place please explain how it is decentral? i thought that was the kind of controls a decentral system was specifically designed against. is that understanding of mine flawed?
It might be decentralized in terms of infrastructure, but the more precise property is that it is permissioned. Permissionless stablecoin exist - see DAI, etc, but USDT is absolutely not one of them. It is the worst parts of cash and the worst parts of crypto put together into one unholy pile of suck.
Well actually, no. The Tether T&C says that they can basically do whatever they want with your wallet, all disputes have to be resolved via arbitration, and you waive your right to a jury trial.
Sure, you _can_ still sue them anyway and maybe get around the T&C, but you can sue the government to, the important question is if you can actually win.
But the company can just turn around and say, soz we don’t have your deposit. We invested it in Labubu dolls and they crashed in values. Also we lost them. Next time, DYOR.
If a bank collapses, you get your money back from the Fed, no questions asked.
You get up to the amounts insured by the FDIC, plus whatever is recoverable from the residual assets of the bank and anything else the FDIC decides to award.
Tether's entire business model, providing an almost-unregulated USD cryptocurrency, relies on them not arbitrarily banning people. They don't do it frequently or without thought. You're far less likely to get banned from USDT than just about any non-cryptocurrency financial institution.
> Tether's entire business model, providing an almost-unregulated USD cryptocurrency, relies on them not arbitrarily banning people
No, their entire business model relies on bank/CC providers don't ban them. Somehow, they treat all crypto related transactions as iffy but USDT, bought to buy crypto, got under much less scrutiny. The entire problem their solver was that new users couldn't move cash to exchanges fast enough to join bull runs.
Not practical for ordinary people. No regular person is holding their own wallet, and even the technically sophisticated who do get their keys stolen or lose them to faulty backups or technical snafus.
Calling/implying that it's technically sophisticated is not really reasonable. Having a BTC (or other currency) wallet is utterly trivial, let alone from a technical standpoint, it's much easier than setting up an e.g. Coinbase account. The only issue, outside of choice of course, is people being ignorant of what needs to be done and I think that can largely be explained by the fact that centralized providers spend billions on marketing while decentralized wallets spend nothing on it.
I want to get into self-managed. I know nothing about it.
As soon as I start to look for information, I will be drowned in automated criminal attacks trying to trick me into create a vulnerability in my setup process.
This is absurd. I literally just looked up 'BTC wallet' on multiple search engines and all link to https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet . From there there's literally a wizard that clicks you through based on your knowledge/desires, and then links to exactly where to get a wallet that fits best with what you're after.
The intention of bitcoin was to have a digital medium with similar properties as cash: no need to trust anyone else, and you can exchange it with whoever you want. Cash can also be stolen if someone takes your wallet, leaving you no recourse except the law
Imho Bitcoins being stolen is not at all Bitcoin being "bent, broken, or subverted", it's just a natural consequence of the design goals. If an unrelated third party could block my bitcoins by accusing me of terrorism that would be subverting the system, and such things have not happened to bitcoin-core (but have happened in other parts of the bitcoin ecosystem)
> Cash can also be stolen if someone takes your wallet, leaving you no recourse except the law
The issue that is often raised with Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies is that not even the law can help you in case of theft. Now, it's true that the police wouldn't bother helping me recover a wallet with 100€ into it, but things change if someone steals millions or even billions like in this case.
Most people don't carry their entire finance in wallet tho. If someone steals my wallet and CC PIN, the most I'm out is the few thousands of limit on those, not my entire financial portfolio.
The argument for bitcoin being secure is more along the lines of "if you store your own bitcoins securely nobody can take them from you". Storing them securely is easy in principle (just keep them on an airgapped computer, or write the key down on paper, then "just" do physical security well) but hard in practice (major security-convenience tradeoffs). However, storing your bitcoins with a major provider like binance has a terrible track record and not something the hardcore bitcoin advocates actually recommend
Huh? You can trace bitcoins forever, and people would probably pay extra for some vanity bitcoins; and probably pay less or nothing for some bitcoins that are legally questionable.
Your answer does not answer anything. The discussion is about whether or not to have the trusted third-party. Pro-ttp said that ttp protects from criminals. Anti-ttp said that ttp can make your own money dissappear because ttp is bending the rules. You said nonsence, your examples are not showing any rules or contracts about digital property which are being bent. Why any bitcoin criticism from anyone is always so weak?
OK. But many countries have also outlawed being gay; that doesn't make it legally questionable in general.
On a tangent:
Funnily the Algerian law they quote would not actually apply to bitcoin (but I doubt Algerian judges would see it that way):
> Art. 117. — The purchase, sale, use, and holding of so-called virtual currency is prohibited. Virtual currency is that used by internet users via the web.
Bitcoins have their own protocol independent of the world wide web.
> It is characterized by the absence of physical support such as coins, notes, payments by cheque or credit card.
People have made physical bitcoin coins, and there's plenty of payment cards etc floating around that you can use with bitcoins.
Compare with eg the Brazilian Plano Real which was sort of a virtual currency for quite a while, but I doubt the Algerian law was meant to outlaw that one.
Turns out the reason crypto was invented isn't "decentralization" at all, it was nerds feeling left out and wanting their own financial instrument grift.
Well sure, but the average consumer needs and/or wants some protections, safeguards and insurances. If my bank gets hacked or even if I get skimmed it's considered their fault and I'll get my money back.
If it's stolen from a bank, it's their obligation to recuperate you.
FWIW, most countries have a type of insurance if a legally operating bank goes under, at least some of your savings are protected (eg. in Serbia that's up to 50kEUR).
While I can't speak for other places, in the UK, if you haven't been careless and report quickly enough, your refund is not dependent on anyone being caught.
Arguably any fiat-collateralised stablecoin is ipso facto centralised and trusted (someone needs to 1) issue the coins only against fiat collateral and then 2) hold onto that collateral reliably and 3) return it upon presentation of the coin), and at step 3 they can always say "no, we won't give it to you".
However, it does not necessarily apply to algorithmic stable coins (Terra) or crypto-backed overcollateralised coins (DAI). That's why I said "fiat-backed".
Btw, backing and promises of redemption are two different things.
Deposits at a regular bank aren't backed by fiat. The bank promises to pay you back in fiat, but they don't keep dollar bills in a vault. The promise is backed with all the bank's assets. Ideally, they have a think equity cushion, so that even if the assets take a hit, the promises don't.
Probably the founders/employees of the company issuing/redeeming the token would be arrested very quickly. Tornado Cash people got arrested for much less.
Decentralized is a great concept but it’s 99.9% rug pulls and you can’t get any safety unless you centralize. As an investor there is no way to protect yourself because the rug pulls are several orders of magnitude more sophisticated than most people’s understanding.
> As an investor there is no way to protect yourself
Why? BTC is pretty stable longterm and nobody is going to touch your cold wallet. Anything that has an owner or legal entity is not decentralized, subject to either rug pull or censorship and shouldn't be touched, sounds very easy.
Everything that promises you any return is a scam in crypto, simple as that.
The U.S. government is the largest beneficiary of this service. More than $2.1 billion in USDT connected to or requested by U.S. authorities out of over $4.4 billion in total illicit USDT freezes globally.
The financial system has evolved over 5000+ years and is like an endless series of Chesterton's Fences at this point. Here we find another: the ability for a regulator or a bank to freeze assets is once again proven to be a feature not a bug.
Managing a wallet where there is no recourse if your wallet is compromised is simply too difficult when even crypto exchanges get hacked and otherwise sophisticated people get compromised when taking cautious measures (eg [1]).
Crypto really is and always was a race to the rug pull.
The payment processors don't object to you. They usually object to the store or the platform you're getting things from.
It's invisible, insidious censorship. They don't hit your hands with a ruler and say "stop, no buying that, bad". They make it so that what they don't like doesn't get to be on the store shelves in the first place. Hard to buy what isn't being sold, isn't it?
As for why they do it - it's unclear, but there's speculation that payment processor leadership might be in part ideologically captured by the usual "think of the children" moralizers and puritans. The same types that used to spurn moral panics, rally against D&D and later GTA, and are the first in line to propose sacrificing freedoms for imaginary safety - now allowed to wield covert influence over most of the payments that happen online.
If you mean Visa's porn jihad, that's most likely a saudi dude threatening to pull a large investment, it obviously has nothing to do with children, but any haram.
The usual given reason is that porn/adult stuff tends to generate a relatively large number of chargebacks, due to factors like (1) predatory/dark patterns by porn providers (2) guys’ partners seeing porn charges on the credit card statement and freaking out, and guys claiming they were “hacked” or whatever and then following through and disputing the charges.
Even if the absolute number of chargebacks is small, in relative terms it’s still several times larger than it is for non-“adult” charges, and that kinda destroys profit margins — more support calls, more work, etc.
Or so they say.
I’m not in the industry, so I don’t know. I can certainly believe that many of the oligarchs in charge are weird shitheads with bizarro conservative views, but payment processor leadership doesn’t seem to give a fuck about morals in any other manner, so it’s also kind of weird to me that they’d pick porn and porn only (a seemingly passé target for most conservatives these days) as the one and only target of a uh, decades-long distributed lowkey conspiracy that spans multiple generations of payment processor leadership. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> It’s invisible, insidious censorship
Absolutely agree 100%. Even if they’re not trying to be puritans, this is absolutely the outcome.
Because they own and control their own smart contracts but do not own the network that the contracts are deployed to.
Plus, freezing funds and waiting for US law enforcement to weigh in rather than being the proverbial judge, jury and executioner is now likely to keep you on the right side of said law enforcement.
> Because they own and control their own smart contracts but do not own the network that the contracts are deployed to.
I assume they call a method on the contract to freeze the coins (with some superuser kind of signature), so they could easily write a method that moves the coins back, too. This should be similar in terms of gas costs.
The law enforcement theory seems more likely, yeah.
Did they ever show proof that they actually hold $1 for every tether? This was big a few years ago but never heard anything about it since. (I could Google it but others here probably want to know)
Indeed! And Elon Musk just gave the entire world a lesson in not trusting someone else's technology, by shutting down Ukraine's Starlink/Starshield used to defend against Russian jet-powered drones, cutting down the speed to near-stationary, and for no evident reason, blaming the President, and then it turns out it was likely a ploy to "upgrade their subscription". [0]
No matter what the reason or the situation, shutting off your access to the technology is their option and it will likely happen at the moment it is a greatest problem to you.
This goes so far beyond "Not your keys, not your coin", it is "Not your stack, not your sovereignty".
Obviously in this case, there is are truly solid rational and moral reasons to shut down those USDT transfers: to cut off the theft which is funding NK's aggressive nuclear weapons program. But that changes nothing about the structure of everyone's vulnerability in using technologies controlled by others such as USDT.
Why are they using weird key combinations instead of traditional Ctrl + S, Ctrl + A, Ctrl + C used in desktop applications? Why every console program wants to be a special snowflake and not use standard key combinations, please explain. I do not care that 40 years ago someone used Ctrl + C to send SIGINT, it is 2026 now.
For many, it is indeed about what they call "muscle memory". Almost impossible to change after so many years. And therefore I hope everyone would provide keybinding alternatives generally (shouldn't be that hard).
UNIX doesn't exist anymore, and C has lot of negative points (easy to create buffer overflows, integer overflows, use-after-free, and other vulnerabilities).
These key combinations have been used for 50 years, so I'm not sure why you call them non-standard. They're just a different standard from what you're used to.
Honestly after VSCode ate a good chunk of vim and emacs users I am not sure why something with similar UX but in terminal is not the standard yet in every *nix. Talk about sunken cost fallacy.
I read that Chinese found a way to upgrade DRAM on GPUs, for example, making RTX 2080 Ti with 22 Gb DRAM, or RTX 4090 with 48 Gb. The modded cards are better (by price and RAM size) than the new ones manufactured by NVIDIA, although some say they are not reliable.
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