Apparently he took out a "Flash Loan" and borrowed the tokens. Once he executed his trades to grab the money he bought up enough tokens to repay the loan and all was fine.
It seems it is totally normal for 18-year-olds to take out multi-million dollar loans with no collateral to back them in the crypto world? I feel like this points to a whole lot of other potential problems in the crypto/DeFi world.
You only need a something over 50% of the mining power -- as long as they can add new blocks with no Assange transactions at a faster pace than than the rest of the mining pool they can keep the longest chain Assange donation free. A 51% attack isn't just for double spending, and simply blocking particular transactions is the kind of thing you might be able to get tacit agreement for; and it does only have to be tacit if you are fine with a few transactions getting through every now and then (which also helps hide any collusion).
Hell, he is polling at less than half of Rick Lynn Perry, who is not the former Governor Rick Perry but a "senior desktop technician" currently contracted out by a staffing agency to work for Lockheed-Martin.
It solves the problem of "where do I go if Powers That Be decide to boot me off traditional wire transfer systems". Like has already happened in case of Julian Assange and his legal defense fund.
It swaps in some different powers that be. If Wikileaks published something that embarrassed people behind a bunch of the major miner consortiums and they decided to just not include any bitcoin transfers to Assange or Wikileaks in blocks they mined that could severely limit or completely stop such transfers, depending on how big a proportion of the mining pool they pissed off. And let's be clear, there are a very small number of mining consortiums that control a very large fraction of the total hashing power; this is a lot more possible than it may appear at first blush.
Hell, even the old school powers that be could put a severe crimp in things if they were sufficiently motivated. If such a power decided to lean on the mining consortiums they could likely get the result they want with either enough bribes or a big enough stick (and they would have both).
There is real innovation happening in the space, and as it all transforms from pure speculation into tangible, useful applications and assets, prices rise.
The biggest current (last couple of years) price rises have been in Bitcoin, which is over a decade old now. Since it has been around so long, but the price is still going up a lot, presumably that is happening because of "tangible useful applications". So what are those applications? As a currency it has stalled, not least due to price volatility. Despite occasional bursts of announcements of retailers accepting Bitcoin, the number of retailers actually accepting Bitcoin remains very small, and often quite niche. Bit coin is not taking over as a currency. How about Bitcoin as a means of fast, easy, cross border money transfer (remittances). In the early days of Bitcoin is was widely touted that Western Union was going to get crushed by Bitcoin. It turns out Western Union is doing just fine. And over the major money transfer corridors WU fees are often lower than Bitcoin. Other major remittance agencies are also doing just fine using traditional methods. If any service is getting squeezed out of the remittance industry it is crypto
Bitcoin is cheap: It's worthless as a currency!
Bitcoin is expensive: It's a bubble!
Bitcoin prices are volatile: It's useless as a currency, it's too volatile!
Bitcoin prices are stable: It's dead! Nobody is buying!
The first mistake is evaluating bitcoin by its "price". Assuming the key is that it is a currency the real question is the volume of actual transactions going on in bitcoin.
What is the amount of good purchased with bitcoin? It certainly isn't huge. How about remittances? Money transfer was one of the big use cases. It turns out that, despite a lot of hype and years to make a difference, bitcoin in particular and crypto-currencies in general, have made practically no dent in the remittances market. How about total volume of transactions? That's certainly higher, but how much of that is speculation trading based on the price of bitcoin? Hard to say, but surely we would see higher amounts of goods purchases and remittances if it really mattered.
So, instead of looking at prices, if we look at utility how is bitcoin doing? It's been a decade and it still hasn't had any significant uptake as currency -- not on any scale that justifies the hype anyway. Might it still be useful and gain traction in the future? Sure, it's possible. But the outlook isn't that great.
There are all sorts of restrictions to keep small players from taking money from the big players. They're always touted as tools to keep the ignorant safe, or to keep the market stable.
To be fair many of the rules and regulations did develop to make investors safer, or keep stability (just look at the fraud, shading messes and instability that has occurred on some of the crypto exchanges, especially in the early says, when there were few if any rules or regulations).
The problem comes from the fact that the big players have full time jobs and and billions of dollars to pick apart the rule book, split hairs, find loopholes, and dodge enforcement, so that, one way or another, the rules don't apply to them. The little guys, well they have actual jobs, no time, and little money, so they have to just follow the rules.
The other part of the lag in death figures is reporting lag -- it takes a while for death certificates to be filed, numbers to be collated at the county and then state level, and finally passed up to the CDC and other organisations tracking such things. In practice that can be anywhere from several days, to a couple of weeks and varies state to state. All up that probably adds another week of so to the lag, but with pretty high variance.
From what I've read about this, and I've read a lot, there are numerous documented cases where it (paired with zinc or other treatments) has absolutely been a successful treatment.
If we can manage to have options of Chloroquine, Hydroxycloroquine, AZ, Zinc, and one other treatment then I pretty sure I can put together a full controlled trial of the various combinations and find at least one that comes back as helping with a statistically significant p=0.05. This assumes, of course, that one skips the slightly more subtle multiple-trials Bonferroni statistical corrections, but that would be easy to do (its subtle math, and who really knows that much about stats anyway). If we can manage successfully produce a wide-scale controlled trial with positive results (and with 5 options and all combinations thereof, odds are that we can), I would be unsurprised to find a large amount of anecdotal evidence in favour of it, especially if you add in a little subjective validation, and extra attention paid to these particular drugs.
While it is nice to see an article discussing real issues in mathematics, it is a little sensationalist in places. While formalized proofs amenable to computer proof checkers are definitely a good thing, it isn't really the case that math is going to fall apart or turn out to be wrong any time soon. For starters a surprisingly large amount of mathematics has actually been fully formalized to that level: check out metamath for example. Second, while complex theorems at the edge of current research may potentially have an issue (it was issues with some of his proofs in very abstract homotopy theory and motives that made Voevodsky a convert to computer formalizable proofs), the vast majority of math is used routinely enough by enough mathematicians (and verified by students as exercises) that errors are at this point vanishingly unlikely. Finally, if by some bizarre circumstance something did go wrong, the result would be a patching of axioms assumptions to make most of the mathematics we have true again -- at the end of the day math has to be useful; as Russell said in Introduction Mathematical Philosophy:
We want our numbers not merely to verify mathematical formulæ, but to apply in the right way to common objects. We want to have ten fingers and two eyes and one nose. A system in which âoe1â meant 100, and âoe2â meant 101, and so on, might be all right for pure mathematics, but would not suit daily life. We want âoe0â and âoenumberâ and âoesuccessorâ to have meanings which will give us the right allowance of fingers and eyes and noses. We have already some knowledge (though not sufficiently articulate or analytic) of what we mean by âoe1â and âoe2â and so on, and our use of numbers in arithmetic must conform to this knowledge.
The practical applications of mathematics to science and engineering have been so rich and so effective that any new "corrected" theory of mathematics that didn't recapitulate the same results would simply be ignored or rejected. We would instead modify axioms, or logic itself until we could regenerate much of the mathematics we have.
That's the good case where you just have to move a factory. For many industries it is all about complicated supply chains, which you can't just move wholesale because you likely don't control a large portion of. Unentangling a supply chain enough to make it tractable to move the parts of it you can control to the US could easily take many years in and of itself, if it is really possible at all. What do your contracts look like? What do the other companies tangled up in your supply chain have in the way of contracts?
These two yutzes cause a crash on the freeway and they don't even bother to stop and check if the other people are injured?
They don't even bother reporting the crash to the authorities, they just driiive on back to HQ and hush it up?
"Former Top Waymo Engineer Altered Code To Go On Forbidden Routes" is not the headline I would have chosen for this story, folks.
So, if four people were stabbed, would you want fewer knives in this country? No, I am not being sarcastic. In England, they have "sane" gun laws, but now they are cracking down on knife ownership. You can't make this stuff up!
Gracious me, that sounds like an Orwellian nightmare. You should definitely keep this one at the top of your talking points, as ordinary people will undoubtedly share your horror at the thought of living in a society that tries to minimize the number randos carrying deadly weapons.
I'll say it again:
Eventually, there'll be too many people with a personal stake in this for you to beat.
I learned about this when my mom texted me to let me know that she and my dad were both safe, her being out of town, dad being at home and hearing but not thinking much about the sirens down the way. My nephew's school was still on lockdown (despite it being miles away, better safe than sorry, I suppose.)
My parents live right near this place. They ride their bikes past it regularly. Middleton ain't a big place.
I can't decide if I'm relieved, livid, or just numb to it. Probably a bit of all three.
All you folks who get red in the face at the thought that maybe, just maybe, we could stand to have fewer guns in this country:
Eventually, there'll be too many people with a personal stake in this for you to beat.
Even if you decide to 'exercise your second amendment rights.'
I think a big part of it is how the rest of society keeps showering bonkers amounts of adulation and money on them. Why try to be a better person if it seems like everybody loves you? Heck, you probably are the better person, and all these SJW whiners who say otherwise are a) jealous of your awesomeness and b) can't comprehend the very unique and not-at-all-applicable-to-any-other-industry-out-there challenges and pressures of the tech world.
I'd imagine medicine faces similar pressures–I'm thinking particularly about the 'rockstar' surgical positions–and I know that science has similar issues, but neither of these disciplines seems to suffer from nearly the same degree of fandom as the tech world does...
The trouble with the rat-race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. -- Lily Tomlin
