"The intelligence agency, called the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) discovered that some calls on Air Force One were unencrypted and it was able to tap into radio frequencies that were used for those calls, according to the book, "
No hacking or deployment of listening devices, just passive listening. Unless you have other sources?
Your post comes off strongly as cultish/MLMish. Sorry I don't know how to phrase it so it doesn't come as a personal attack. Most of the crypto posts sound like it.
> This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database
I think it's crazy that you feel this way, I can only speak for myself and a few others, but we do in fact fully understand it and why it works this way.
Satoshi is not some god that has come to save us. He saw something that fraction of people in society consider to be a problem and attempted to solve it. He did not consider complex ways that his solution would interact with the society. A lot of us think that crypto causes more problems than it solves.
That's because I strongly believe in its ability to have positive change on our civilisation... environmentally, economically, politically, and sociologically.
Any belief held strongly enough appears cultish. Ultimately, I don't really care how it appears.
But hey, I could be wrong about Bitcoin, I just hope I'm not.
If I'm wrong I look foolish and have lost thousands of dollars saved in Bitcoin. If I'm right... well, I guess we'll see.
But this is why Bitcoin works though. It's why it's important. Because it solves a problem most people have no idea even exists. That's why they get angry when people talk about it, because it seems like people are lying to them or trying to wind them up.
Did they ask you to explain it? Did you talk about shortcomings of it?
Most of the crypto related posts feels like advertising/preaching. Issues with their proposed solutions are rarely focused on and when they're brought up, hand waving begins.
I think this is a consequence of crypto proponents using mostly same talking points, usually decentralization/some libertarian dream. Technical discussions are rarely initiated. I've been following this since early days of BTC and I'm so tired of it. I don't see anything in it that would help our society. Maybe due to your political leanings you do.
No, they didn't. Most people just make inflammatory comments or make extremely complex "gotcha" claims that aren't true, which need both parties to be cooperative to resolve. I was busy trying to make arguments against wild claims, and ended up saying dumb things like "Amazon Alexas burn more energy in a year by sitting idle in people's homes than the entire Bitcoin network does"; things that are technically true but don't resolve the attacker's underlying unease - and so are unhelpful.
Crypto has a lot of real problems like the current markets which seem to just be re-enforcing the worst aspects of capitalism; and other issues like: costs, scalability, lack of connection to physical objects/systems (the NFT problem), dispute resolution, etc.
These problems are huge, especially if blockchain tech ever becomes mainstream. The problem is that discussion of these topics - in casual discussions at least - gets derailed by ideological flag waving. To me it's like Occupy Wall Street being derailed by wokeists; they weren't able to mobilize anything meaningful because they were bogged down by delusional anxieties.
I actually looked into it and got the quote wrong, it's not Amazon Alexas globally, it's all "always on devices" in America; including computers, gaming consoles, etc.
That is almost 630 watts per person (250 million people, 24*365 hours per year)... That seems like a lot...
As a north european techie spending power on quite a few always on things (respberry pis, a nas, a router, wifi, ps5 etc)- but also freezer, fridge, cooking - and lightning for half the year and a little extra heating, I have used around 2500 kWh year to date, which is roughly 320 watts in total (or half that stated figure for always on devices alone...)
EDIT: I remembered the american population size wrong, the right figure is 475 watts @330 Mln people, but my point stands..
I would say less technically savvy people probably use more electricity, not less. And you're assuming that you're the average American consumer. There are probably old toasters and electrical heaters that contribute significantly to that figure. In any case, the conservative estimate is still several times that of Bitcoin's usage.
I'd also say cruise ships are more egregious, which no one seems to care about despite them definitely not using clean energy or being remotely useful, using 2.5x the amount of energy as Bitcoin - or as much as Spain!
It's not proving anything. It's VERY hard to make the right picks. Easy in hindsight.
But you're invested crypto so it's profitable for you to push this narrative in order to keep building the pyramid and cash out. Love MLM/pyramid vibes coming out of the crypto investors, because that's what it is.
It's an amazing spin, attempting to move away from the point of contention which you can't defend. This type of rhetoric hooks poor unhappy/angry people right in. All just so you can make some quick cash.
Don't pretend that crypto will even attempt to solve any of those issues. It's yet another method to transfer wealth out of poor people's pockets.
Defend crypto? Dude the blockchain database is what's going to change things. The coins aren't the technological revolution happening. The storage of information and its reliability is what is important here. You're just mad because it's replacing your old ways which you cannot defend.
While there are many issues surrounding our banking industry, the way it manages currencies is far superior to how any of the crypto currencies work.
Fraud prevention, fraud reversibility, low fees, transaction rate, simplicity. Reliability is fine as well, I don't get the issue?
Keeping transactions publicly in the blockchain is probably one of the worst things that could happen to privacy.
I've read Bitcoin's paper back in ~2011, played with it's implementation a bit, so I'm well aware of what the blockchain is. It does NOT solve anything meaningful, it's not nearly as special as layman make it out to be.
Once again you're using one coin to represent the entire industry. You don't understand the technology and how it will penetrate every sector of society. Bitcoin is the KittyHawk of aviation. Yah no one flies the original plane anymore but it started an industrial revolution. And you are very much wrong on your assumptions on our current international money moving system. The benefits will be tremendous and is very much in play, go ask the central banks of France or Japan. You're missing out on what is happening right in front of your eyes.
> You don't understand the technology and how it will penetrate every sector of society. Bitcoin is the KittyHawk of aviation. Yah no one flies the original plane anymore but it started an industrial revolution.
I feel like you're about five years late to the blockchain-will-change-everything bandwagon.
Also your chronology is all wrong. The industrial revolution started well before 1903.
Sounds like you were five years too early. And prepandemic I would agree with you. Today I can't.
I also said "an industrial revolution" and not "The Industrial Revolution". But I'm glad you could no longer argue the validity of crypto currencies and the implications of mass adoption and use.
You don't work in finance, blockchain can solve a lot just look at Amazon QLDB, looks like it can solve quite a bit. And now you just sound jealous and very regretful.
It's interesting to look at wealth distribution of Bitcoin:
http://imgur.com/Vt7PvbW (source: http://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.h...).
4% of users own 95.09% of currently available Bitcoins. I think that as the number of users increases so will value of Bitcoin in USD, wealth distribution will only get worse while making top even richer.
Even if wealth distribution doesn’t bother you, consider that part of these users(4%) mined/gathered it in questionable ways(mining via compromised systems). Early adopters gaining large part of Bitcoin for little effort seems silly too. I personally consider this unacceptable.
That might be the most important reason to dislike bitcoin right now. It is obvious why people who have a public ledger that claims they have a bunch of money would be fanatical about wanting other people to recognize that claimed wealth but not at all obvious what is in it for others.
However, even if that is fixed (e.g. some other similar cryptocurrency without that issue) I would add two more issues: 1) The system as a whole, for any possible system similar to bitcoin, seems vulnerable to being disrupted by anyone with enough money (at best this would still cost a fair amount of money, but I'm fairly sure it would cost a lot less and be less recoverable than trying to similarly disrupt (at least most) other currencies). 2) The estimates I've seen suggest that a huge amount of power is going into cryptocurrencies for no good reason. This seems like both a horrible response to global warming and (per point 1) is making the same cryptographic mistake that hashcash made on a much smaller scale. Hashcash seemed like a good idea at the time, but I'm not sure why it seems like a good idea to anyone now.
I would love to see more work done on various ways to implement robust local currencies rather than all this effort on trying to create fragile global currencies that suck huge amounts of power. Last I looked there were a few things available but it seems like a lot more can be done.
Both Dollar and Bitcoin are un-evenly distributed, but with Bitcoin the creation of new currency is fair, unlike the creation of new dollars by the people who have fractional reserve banking license.
those stats are skewed because a huge part of the bottom are people who have zero or very little bitcoin at all. If you only consider the "people who have at least 1 bitcoin" as a serious user, it's not that bad. Moreover, look at the barrier of entry to the top 20%: $600. So for one month's salary (at the low end of salaries) you can be in the top 20% of this economy.
Indeed there are some serious issues with Twitch in Europe. For about a year streams were crystal clear with no issues. Then they started to mess with stream qualities, I guess they had to do some interesting optimizations in order to deal with increasing userbase.
So since this summer I've only been able to watch streams on highest quality a couple of times. Problem with second highest quality is that whenever there's movement in-game, stream looks pixelated, some games look especially bad:
[ARMA: DayZ on Twitch High quality] http://imgur.com/a/x2Ahr
Another interesting thing is that even if stream lags on highest quality, I'm still able launch multiple concurrent streams of second highest quality and none of them lag (I launched 5 streams, after which CPU usage maxes out, so I didn't try more). But watching a SINGLE stream on highest quality? Nop, not going to happen, while audio is fine, video stutters every 5-10sec, freezes for 2sec, rinse&repeat.
As per the article linked above (https://archive.ph/kCxNw)
"The intelligence agency, called the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) discovered that some calls on Air Force One were unencrypted and it was able to tap into radio frequencies that were used for those calls, according to the book, "
No hacking or deployment of listening devices, just passive listening. Unless you have other sources?