That you've received so many downvotes is indicative of HN's perpetual Musk boner.
Musk is a state-sponsored winner, a Jack Ma, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or Bill Gates. He is an undeserving, decade-long recipient of government grants and contracts obtained through relationships to politicians and career bureaucrats. His sole talent is finessing the work of skilled engineers and marketing that as his personal brand. He's not even a particularly good manager, as reflected in the varied outcomes of his businesses.
If the government gave a dozen fresh MBA graduates the same amount of money and influence, maybe one of them will build an incredible business that stands on its own merit like SpaceX. Another might build something like Tesla, which takes on ten billion dollars of debt and fails to turn an annual profit over fourteen years of operation. A full half, like SolarCity, will lose money for years and reach bankruptcy proceedings. And none of them will have a cousin of loose ethics that is willing to rescue a business that failed on its merits.
Your class warfare demagoguery is entertaining. The entirety of notable human civilization is defined by exploitation, and nobody who matters will ever care. Except politicians who will use your whining and vote to do whatever they were planning to do anyways. Vast inequality is, and always has been, the mark of a great civilization.
Precisely. Why does Apple run an operation in Ireland instead of Illinois or California? It isn't the result of some sense of corporate generosity. It is pure fantasy to imagine capital will not flee the state when burdened with anticompetitive taxation.
The parent is attempting to 'teach the controversy', by trying to convince others that there -even is- reasonable debate among informed people on this subject (that government policy creates cultural norms, and these norms are suppressed creativity and intellectual conformity). The lie then becomes a kind of half-truth, automagically. These accusations aren't exclusively associated with race (the same was said of the Japanese, Soviets before them, Americans circa 1800s, etc), but that is merely cover when you accuse China of IP theft and the very concept is an intellectually deficient product of trade protectionism.
Deriding culture on the basis of tenuous claims is a deceptive way to evade accusations of racism.
You must have the funds to borrow. Shorting is risky, even more so going naked. Which is why its been illegal since 2008. In practice, professionals use covered call options to manage their risk.
You do not have much life experience outside of the west, or professional experience in China, but you feel some kind of cultural superiority that roused you to suggest that democratic traditions encourage creativity and authoritarian government discourages it.
Your priors are wrong. I work in the US, public and private grants are shrinking year over year, and anti-intellectualism is rampant. Meanwhile my Chinese colleagues, at the same place in their career, are practically local celebrities and receive unprecedented (in the US) resources to do decade longitudinal research and increase headcount. In reality, China is on the bleeding edge in AI because their government and private industry has the social cohesion to focus on scientific advancement. Besides the vast intellectual capital at their disposal, they can cheaply afford to iterate quickly as the means of manufacturing and production are local.
The natural order of human civilization derides IP. In the absence of a supremely powerful, globe-spanning government, enforcement is impossible. In the presence of honest intellectuals, it is impossible to deny that all progress is gained by standing on the shoulders of giants. Yesterday's Nobel is today's homework. Attempts to embargo knowledge are not just backwards, but thermodynamically futile.
Intellectual property management is archaic. And your other claims are borderline racist.
When you remove accountability, incentives to keep the system performing as intended become distorted. This is basic game theory. It is dangerous to imagine a human engineered item can be infallible.
All of this holds up until you remember that Bitcoin is fungible and take these items into consideration:
1. There is no logical relationship between address A that spends to address B.
2. A could be part of the same wallet as B, or not.
3. A or B could be undisclosed addresses of merchants, or unrelated parties entirely. You may have to ask, and they may choose to tell you.
Defeating your inferences is trivial. A blockchain analysis may reveal that A sent to B, who sent to C, but there is no logical relationship between A and C based on this transmission alone. Moreover, A can send to B, B' sends to C. You derive no information.
You are talking about behavior- and inference-based traffic analysis. What you're talking about is definitionally not inspection.
It is trivial for a defender to 1) enforce whitelists, 2) defeat analysis with arbitrary use of Nagle's algo, 3) put bitcoind or other node services on non-standard ports with non-standard sender-receiver behavior, 4) enable other services with similarly non-standard configurations, 5) setup multi-homed constellations, where nodes transmit on one channel and receive on another, 6) do I really need to go on? There are dozens of things that can be done here to defeat traffic analysis.
There's billions of USD-equivalents invested in this thing. Hand-wavey claims like 'Cryptanalysis has been able to reliably identify traffic despite encryption for quite some time' evidently do not take into account competent defenders. Bitcoiners will buy time on, or even launch, their own satellites, if public nodes begin getting stomped on and there is in fact some usability issue preventing miners from relaying transactions.