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Comment Re:So I've read the article now (Score 2) 119

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.

Comment Re:Texas (Score 1) 284

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).

Comment Re:Texas (Score 1) 284

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).

Comment Re: We abandoned real value (Score 1) 231

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 ... fees can be larger, money often still needs to be exchanged from Crypto to local currency with all kinds of associated other costs, and so on. How about "digital gold", a hedge against inflation? It is not clear Bitcoin is really doing any better here, and assets and investments to hedge against inflation is a pretty huge market; Bitcoin has very limited appeal over all the other options available. So again, what are the magical tangible useful applications that make Bitcoin so very valuable? It's been a decade, but there still isn't anything to show ...

Comment Re:Critcism (Score 1) 169

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.

Comment Re: Ass biting regulation (Score 1) 251

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.

Comment Re:In other words (Score 2) 276

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.

Comment Re:Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't (Score 1) 548

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.

Comment A little overhyped (Score 4, Insightful) 123

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.

Comment Re:Why? They'll just increase cost to consumers (Score 1) 473

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?

Comment Re:The $110 million painting (Score 1) 214

No, the thing you have to understand is that contemporary art is basically just the ultimate speculator's market in arbitrary status-signalling symbols for the mega-wealthy, dressed in a thin veneer of faux-intellectualism and pretend-philosophy; it didn't sell for this much because there's something special going on with colors here, it sold for that much because Basquiat got famous because of the movie made about him, and therefore dealers pushed his work into the artificially-created market for in-demand rare pieces by famous artists, a market serviced by either people like billionaire oil tycoons who want something to show off to the women they bring home, or by collectors who invest speculatively on the (historically largely correct assumption) that there will continue to be people buying into the upward cycle of speculation on rare pieces in future (and that they can therefore potentially sell them later for more). If they can convince a few gullible people there's something magical going on re the 'colors in the piece', all the better, but the market would exist regardless, because that's neither why rich people buy such pieces, nor why speculative collectors buy them.

Comment Re:Research like this is why software is crap (Score 1) 101

It does, by associating the 'negative emotional experience' of reading a manual (aka learning) with so-called "over-featuring", whatever "over" is supposed to mean. Of course reading a manual is unpleasant, for the same reason studying anything is unpleasant - e.g. engineers study advanced calculus (which tends to create a 'negative emotional experience') because it helps them later do useful things like build bridges that don't collapse.

Likewise, studying a user manual (unpleasant learning/studying) helps you later do useful things with the software - it's an investment, that pays off later, once you are able to get more power out of the software. It doesn't mean advanced calculus is "over-featured".

You don't read user guides because it's fun, just like most people don't study advanced calculus for fun. Most people don't study accounting for fun, but studying accounting has huge benefits later if you run a business.

The basics of software should usable by the average user with minimal studying, sure, but there is an inherent point at which you must invest in doing some unpleasant learning if you want to get the full power and return on investment from the software product.

Comment Re:Serves 'em RIGHT! (Score 0) 81

Wine no longer stands for 'Wine Is Not an Emulator', it's just "Wine":

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.winehq.org%2Fabout "Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") "

and in fact it originally stood for "Windows Emulator":

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

"The name Wine initially was an abbreviation for Windows Emulator.[16] Wine later shifted to the recursive backronym Wine Is Not an Emulator in order to differentiate the software from CPU emulators.[17] No code emulation or virtualization occurs when running a Windows application under Wine.[18] "Emulation" usually would refer to execution of compiled code intended for one processor (such as x86) by interpreting/recompiling software running on a different processor (such as PowerPC). While the name sometimes appears in the forms WINE and wine, the project developers have agreed to standardize on the form Wine"

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