Two federal agents tampered with important evidence, likely fabricated the entire “murder for hire” fiction, abused their law enforcement positions to steal millions of dollars worth of bitcoins, and carefully framed other people.
The literally corrupt federal agents got a slap on the wrist. They’ll both be out of prison soon.
But the young man who built a website for weed is to remain in prison for life.
> Some worry that censorship-resistant prediction markets will be used to encourage assassinations (and other crimes); this concern does not hold up to a sober examination. “Assassination markets” (AMs), as originally proposed by Jim Bell, are irreconcilably different from Prediction Markets (PMs). My experimental method for funding public goods with PMs has features which render it incompatible with crime. Furthermore, markets would generally present an excessively-complex, risky, and convoluted form of criminal financing. Truthcoin presents a (peaceful) alternative for accomplishing ideological goals, which features greater persuasiveness as well as lower cost. I conclude with a short discussion covering [1] recourse for those affected by AMs (of any kind), [2] features of Truthcoin designed to amplify the inherent impracticalities of AMs, and [3] the (necessarily relevant) total net effect of Truthcoin on political assassinations, general crime and general human welfare.
The linked paper does a thorough job of explaining this scenario, but to summarize: yes, in the absence of other market participants you might try to bet on low-probability events and make them happen. But because it's a public market, anyone can see the anomalous "predictions" you have made, and "free ride" on or even "front run" your position, including your accomplices (who can also sabotage you). On net, your position will be mostly consumed by arbitrage, your payout will be inconsequential compared to the capital required, and the probability "returned" by the market will remain accurate.
Having reliable, auditable, public protocols which can operate without the blessing of the world’s existing governments is precisely the point.
Killer examples include any products or services which would provide a net positive value to society but are currently outlawed within various geographic territories for superstitious reasons and/or to protect existing industries from competition.
Prediction markets are an excellent example here: a substantial body of research now indicates that 1) prediction markets are superior to all other strategies in predicting any quantifiable event (because they are “meta tools” which inherently incorporate the best information from all strategies) and 2) non-private markets can’t be used for manipulating elections, sponsoring assassinations, or incentivizing real-world action of any sort. (In any prediction market with a public order book, any attempted “action-incentivizing position” can be consumed by arbitrage until all that remains is a measure of the event’s real probability). For several decades, researchers from dozens of universities have lobbied for relaxing the ban on prediction markets in USA, with little progress to show. Until that ban is lifted (which could take decades longer), blockchain-based prediction markets will have no domestic competition.
Also worth noting: even in the presence of legal, centralized prediction markets, decentralized prediction market protocols may still be competitive because they require far less counterparty-risk, allowing them to safely support higher volumes and larger positions.
What is the ongoing performance cost of using the official TypeScript compiler for long-running applications? Or is this primarily a concern of startup time for scripts and short-lived programs like CLIs?
Congratulations on the 1.0 release! I've been using Deno as my primary "hacking" runtime for several months now, I appreciate how quickly I can throw together a simple script and get something working. (It's even easier than ts-node, which I primarily used previously.)
I would love to see more focus in the future on the REPL in Deno. I still find myself trying things in the Node.js REPL for the autocomplete support. I'm excited to see how Deno can take advantage of native TypeScript support to make a REPL more productive: subtle type hinting, integrated tsdocs, and type-aware autocomplete (especially for a future pipeline operator).
The “inflation protection” provided by TIPS relies on the good-faith reporting of the same government which creates and benefits from the inflation.
If inflation as measured by the CPI picks up beyond the single-digit numbers of normal years, do you really expect TIPS to remain honestly valued? Even if that means they outperform all other assets “risk free?”