Unfortunately, pointing out the fact that this sort of faux scaling will lead to centralization is never going to be popular among the tech illiterates at this site who believe Roger Ver over listening to people who actually work on the bitcoin code.
LOL! I wasn't talking about guns, and no, guns are not safe, every year more and more guns are banned in this country. T he idea that guns are not being banned is just a lie that is told to pretend like not banning all of them outright isn't banning them.
But my point was that just because you have responsibility for inebriated people doesn't mean that drunk driving can't happen-- we should ban bars.
OF course the thing is, most people who go to bars don't drive drunk. They have the freedom of choice.
That's what's scary to HN people... who have been brought up to worship government and believe tyranny is a good thing.
I'm not being sarcastic in the least. I'm being downvoted because this is a site where critical thinking is not tolerated and it's overrun with millennials who have never had to use their brains.
People are already leaving the country, and at an increasing rate. The rate of renouncements of US citizenship has been rising for the past 20 years but sharply under Obama. They have started making it HARDER to renounce, as some sort of attempt to keep people in-- one of the pieces of advice you will see often regarding renunciation is to never tell them you are renouncing for tax reasons.
That's one of the reasons they will refuse (yes, you have to beg permission to be let out of your slavery, er, citizenship)..... so the old saw of "you owe taxes because you choose to be here" is false..
More and more americans are leaving without renouncing, just going off the grid in asia or wherever, showing up only to renew their passports.
Once some country is smart enough to offer citizenship to educated americans, the trend will become a tide.
One of the great things about bitcoin is it gives libertarianism a business model... and it's right out of SEK3's New Libertarian Manifesto--which was written in the 1970s-- SEK game theorized out what would happen with the Soviet Union, and proved to be correct 20 years later... now we are seeing the exact same game plan here in the USA with bitcoin and this law. But they are too late. Most likely outcome is this will get reversed or widely ignored.... but if they are successful, everyone smart will start leaving the country... or they will create an arab spring like response here, eroding respect for the government and police.
Gay rights couldn't be resisted in the age of the internet when everyone knew their cousin or that guy they went to work with was gay.... will be the same thing with bitcoin.
Question is, just how violent and authoritarian the tyrants in DC want to get.
I suspect money laundering is already there.... they don't care, its all selective prosecution anyway. The purpose of the laws is not to stop crimes, but to make so many things a crime that if you resist tyranny they can discredit you and jail you.
Your grandpa dies and you inherit his estate. There's a bunch of boxes and you go thru a lot of them until you get to one of his war stuff. It is too much and you put it aside.
Years later, you are prosecuted under this law because it turns out he had a hardware wallet in that box.
That's the problem, and it doesn't matter if you think it's not something that is likely.
Truth of the matter is, you committed no crime. This law would be the crime.
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I've been slow banned. Apparently HN has detected my opinions are not sufficiently marxist. I know how this goes. I was once shadow banned here for relating how I had met Grace Hopper. Another time for merely linking to a PDF of a scientific paper in response to someone elses scientific claim. (over 10 years that's about how many times I've tried to give this site another chance... this was the third one, and I'm done now. Thinking is not tolerated here, clearly.)
It was nice being on HN for awhile... but of course, the anti-intellectual snowflakes who run this site cannot abide actual critical thinking.
A shame, this could be a good site if discussions were allowed, instead it is a filter bubble of only one ideological viewpoint.
The bay area is quickly losing creditability-- as you advocate for "net neutrality" (which contains government censorship powers) on the argument that without it we will get government censorship, yet twitter and facebook and google are full scale censoring any viewpoint other than hard core militant marxist SJW... not to mention, HN does this as well. You guys reject thinking and the concept of diversity while justifying your sexism, racism and general bigotry with the #diversity hash tag.
The thing is, you know you're hypocrites, but instead of learning or thinking you just make your wall 10 feet higher.
By the way 850 points of karma proves I'm a good contributor here.... but one moderator disagrees with me and they take arbitrary action, without cause, without warning and without justification.
Don't ever pretend like you believe in the rule of law, you're criminals under your own rules!
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So to respond to the guy below:
These "laws" (which are unconstitutional, by the way) make a mockery of the rule of law. They erode our rights until we are purely at the mercy of the whim of tyrants. You assume the rule of law is there to protect you and you would have recourse, but you're wrong. There are many examples similar to your buried gold one-- people having their life savings simply stolen by the government under asset forfeiture, or going to jail for "money laundering" etc when they did nothing actually criminal.
And currently, bitcoin is too hard to use for terrorists or most criminals. You have to be relatively sophisticated. Yah, you may have gotten your grandma a wallet, but that's not the same as mastering the level of opsec to fund a clandestine organization using cryptocurrencies...
And further, since every transaction is recorded forever in the blockchain if any future address is compromised, the entire network can be compromised instantaneously....
Bitcoin is really worse for terrorist financing than good old USD.
And we "lost" trillions of USD on Pallets in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
To the downvoters: Seriously it is. For example: Can you imagine what would happen if we allowed people to have bars? People are expected to DRIVE to a BAR and DRINK! Can you imagine what people would do then, if we legalized the existence of bars? People would drive home drunk!
There are lots of reasons to be concerned about Tethers, formost of which is that they are centralized.
But with the massive on boarding of new customers (coinbase releases customer stats regularly and are having record new accounts created) ... you would expect that the number of tethers in circulation would go up as some people decide to adopt the tether for whatever purpose and more need to be created.
Not quite sure whether they are all backed or not. (and I don't know how to tell at this point.)
This is a great policy, all exchanges should adopt it. If you can only buy bitcoin and only miners can sell it, everyone will make a lot of money!
I’m kidding, of course.
BTW- it takes about ten days for a new account to buy bitcoin in Coinbase— we are having a post thanksgiving rally... it may continue for another 5 days.
This repo is the financial institutions and "CEOs" pushing for an arbitrary change over the objections of the engineers, and in many cases their very own CTOs, and the travesty of how terribly poorly it was written and non-tested shows that bitcoin should never again entertain this kind of nonsense.
This was never about scalability-- the actual on chain capacity more than quadrupled in August and Lightning ads a nearly infinite increase in theoretical capacity.
This was always about the self important CEOs wanting to take over the project and force the engineers into their will.
Remember at this time the block size has already been increased up to a maximum of 3.7mb physical blocks. This is a large part of why there's discussion about what 2X means-- as commonly people think that the bitcoin block size is only 1mb but it's a 1mb "weight".
The 2x project would have doubled this to a 2mb weight but a 7.4mb physical block theoretical max.
Interesting, this resonated with me. I'm a "conservative" from the view of modern liberals (strictly speaking I'm a classical liberal or libertarian- I support gay marriage, the end of war, the end of drug wars, the elimination of income taxes, hard money, open borders freedom of speech and gun rights) ... and I will openly admit that the primary motivation for many of these beliefs is a feeling of a lack of safety.
I don't like humans being abused, physically or mentally, and I feel that happens way too much in our society, and all of those positions in one way or another are attempting to end abuse.
I know many liberals feel their positions are based on similarly wanting freedom (at least when I was a liberal that was my motivation)... which is why I think the great divide is largely due to wedge issues being shoved down our throats.
Way too many startup “CEOs” want to sit on their ass watching TV and drinking beer (eg going to conferences and drinking beer) while their partner builds the product based on their incoherent and ever changing whims.
This is great advice. Any decent CTO will immediately be put off by this kind of interview for a “co-founder” and be spared working with someone who doesn’t know his circle of competence.
I don't think so... it slungshot around the sun, which implies that its in a very large sun oriented orbit. (eg: some random object passing bit for the first time would be likely only slightly disturbed by the suns gravity, not coming so close to it... the latter seems to imply it has been caught by the suns gravity.... or just happened to be aimed nearly directly at the sun.)