Given that tax was invented to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, I don't think it is surprising that taxation is ineffective at transferring wealth from the rich to the poor.
Ok, so I think I can understand Tether. A token represents a share of a bank account balance. So the organization that controls Tether buys and sells the coins to keep the balances balanced. So the value of the token is predicated on the existence and continued support of the company. The on-blockchain nature is valued for transaction processing, and allowing it to be wired into other contracts (I presume), not for decentralization, because you have to trust the Tether organization, N=1. Otherwise Tether would just be a database and a website, backed up by some bank accounts, i.e. a bank.
Are you aware of any tokens that don't rely on some kind of managing external organization's voluntary continued support? Or at least anything run like an ETF, where someone can deliver a basket of assets and get them tokenized? Or the inverse?
I just realized, I'm severely confused about what Filecoin is, and possibly ICOs in general. I assumed "ICO" was analogous to IPO. If a token is essentially a bearer share that is coupled to the payment system. No reason you couldn't create the coin, run it privately until you get some revenue, and then offer it, as IPOs are usually done.
But when I search Filecoin's website for "revenue" and "profit", I only see references to the participants in the system, and not the token holders.
I did a quick search of the top 5 tokens on https://coinmarketcap.com/tokens/ and I'm not immediately finding any clear statements on how profit is made and distributed.
A question for people who are better informed, is there any kind of list or tracking on tokens payouts? Something like this (https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.03779# ), but for non-ponzis?
It depends what your goal is. If you're trying to get a specific person to say a certain thing, then it works well. If I wanted you to confess to a conspiracy with my political enemies so I could execute them, the fingernail removal strategy works fine.
If you're trying to figure out the truth in a fluid and confusing environment, then it doesn't work well because it motivates the victim to do whatever they can do to end the conversation as quickly as possible.
Shortly before the first field test (you realize that no small scale experiment can be done—either you have a critical mass or you do not), a man asked me to check some arithmetic he had done, and I agreed, thinking to fob it off on some subordinate. When I asked what it was, he said, "It is the probability that the test bomb will ignite the whole atmosphere." I decided I would check it myself! The next day when he came for the answers I remarked to him, "The arithmetic was apparently correct but I do not know about the formulas for the capture cross sections for oxygen and nitrogen—after all, there could be no experiments at the needed energy levels." He replied, like a physicist talking to a mathematician, that he wanted me to check the arithmetic not the physics, and left. I said to myself, "What have you done, Hamming, you are involved in risking all of life that is known in the Universe, and you do not know much of an essential part?" I was pacing up and down the corridor when a friend asked me what was bothering me. I told him. His reply was, "Never mind, Hamming, no one will ever blame you.
Watching Heartbleed and Cloudbleed happen really drove it home for me. Given that routine programming errors can cause private data to be transmitted unintentionally, I have to question the sanity of writing networking software handling private data in C.
Question for anyone who is knowledgeable about California elections: If Mark wanted to run for governor 2018, when would he have to take an observable action? (i.e. register as a candidate or similar.) At what point would we know for sure? And would winning Governor block a presidential run in 2020? And would losing it would indicate a candidate too weak to win POTUS 2020?
I think a key factor has to be whether Trump will survive through 2020. If Trump is weak in 2020 that is the best time to run, because if a Democrat beats Trump is 2020 and it isn't Mark, he'd have to wait until 2028, and he'd be running for re-election after 8 years of a Dem executive. It will partly depend on the who is the challenger in 2020 was well. I wonder if there is a chance Hillary takes another shot?
Hysterical notifications are why I deleted the app from my phone. I was getting notified about stuff that I didn't care about, that no sane person would ever care about, and I lost patience with their whack-a-mole settings system.
They say they are putting them on the roads of CA in a matter of weeks. I believe miles driven and disengagements must be reported around the end of 2017. So it should be easy enough to determine is four months or so if they're doing significant autonomous miles.
As it escalates in intent of violence and specificity, it becomes more of an issue for any service provider. And you can imagine imagine replacing "fascists" with different groups might get a stronger response earlier, i.e. "animal hurting medical researchers", "illegal aliens", "zionists", "catholics", and so on. But by the time you get to advocating specific illegal actions against specific people, I think you're pretty certain to get cut off.
I don't know if this is true for the daily stormer, but I think generally troll-right groups are going to keep getting cut off because they are doing targeted online harassment. When there are specific victims and things are clearly being coordinated on a certain site that gives service providers a strong motive to cut them off. Versus if someone is publishing some kind of racist newsletter that is only being seen by other racists no one is really going to know enough about that has a motive to cut them off.
Yeah, I think that is the right way to think about it. I had always considered that in terms of mining power, not in term s of network control, but it is effectively the same incentives and consequences, just with different players.
I'm wondering if it would benefit them to be cut off from the world, but not each other.
Lets say China creates a partition in the bitcoin network between inside China and outside China. My understanding is that when they remove the partition, the longest blockchain "wins". If there is more mining power inside China than outside, that gives them the power to deny everyone outside China the ability to do transactions for the duration of the partition.
The network could be divided other ways, but I believe China is the only one who has the ability and incentive to do it. Although maybe you're right that the miners are connected enough to prevent it (I'm sure it would create chaos that would hurt them in the end). Although I don't know if the firewall is administered at the provincial level or the national level? I think it is much less likely for them to have national level connections since I believe the Chinese political system is controlled by ~100 people.
This is something I've been wondering about. Maybe someone with more bitcoin expertise could answer.
Is there more mining capacity inside China than outside China?
If so, and the Chinese government used their well-known firewall against Bitcoin for a matter of days to weeks, would Chinese miners have the longer chain? And thus the chain?
I guess what I'm wondering is if the government of China has the ability to DOS Bitcoin as a payment system outside China at will.
