Does it? Bitcoin just says anyone can transact. But that doesn't really solve the problem. The problem is that legal businesses should be able to transact. Illegal businesses should not.
Bitcoin just removes all the limitations. But that creates new problems, quite frankly. Plus, it's very difficult for businesses to utilize Bitcoin. Fiat onboards have similar limitations to Visa/MC. Many legitimate business models will be denied accounts at reputable exchanges.
For me it solves the problem. I provide advertisment for a visa forbidden area. In Switzerland I can exchange directly to SWIFT up to $1000/day and whatever it is per year without even KYC.
Crypto is the only common factor for payment I get these days. Every region/niche has their own weird alternatives with their own weird limits (Payeer, perfect money, ...)
Point is nobody can deny anything as I am 'processing payments myself'
This is the reality. Payment processing is a utility. Small businesses literally cannot operate online without payment processing. On first glance there appears to be many third party providers, but ultimately they are all processing Visa/MC, and are selecting customers on the same criteria.
Such as what happened in 2018-19? Bitcoin never goes "bankrupt". Bitcoin never ceases to exist. The price can do whatever it wants, but the lower it goes, the more momentum it can build on the way back up.
Most cyber criminals have a script. They don't deviate from the script unless they think they have a potential home run. Even then, going from this to sending out fake mail correspondence... That's a whole different toolbox. 99%+ of the time they will not even consider it. Especially since it's not scalable.
I remember that scammers got in touch with my wife, trying to get personal info. It was fairly elaborate. She got a call from a man that she said had “a golden voice,” followed by official-looking mail correspondence (very quickly, which was suspicious, in itself -it can take many days for my bank to get me correspondence). They had our home phone number, her name (not mine), and address; either through public records, or via a breach (which is why “they didn’t get customer credit card info” is a worthless reassurance).
It was “Synchrony Bank,” telling her she was victim of a fraud. I contacted the real Synchrony Bank, and let them know about the fraud. The contacts stopped.
They have people voting over 3% tax increases and gay marriage, not surveillance. Doesn't matter who you vote for, every party is in favor of increasing their power.
We never had a vote on same sex marriage. It was more a completely optional mail in survey whose results the govt. was completely welcome and within its rights to ignore.
On that one, at least, the politicians were too spineless to take a stand.
Another example on how tech giants control the livelihoods of millions of people. They can press one button and put thousands of people out of a job at any time. Workers rights? How about an automated reply and no specific reason for the death of your company/application/income.
These companies need to be regulated ASAP. Especially when it comes to terminating users.
In Eastern Europe, Viber is pretty popular. Also, many telecoms in Bulgaria, for example, don't account Viber data usage towards your quota, so, even people on the lowest tiers get unlimited free video and audio calls. But some offer this for WhatsApp traffic and many mix and match it with Facebook. So, Microsoft really doesn't pay much attention to Skype - it was the most popular service in Bulgaria, but now almost nobody uses it due to these promos.
I assume those data waivers are set up through deals between the telcos and the companies behind those applications. Microsoft certainly has the resources to arrange similar deals, but they seem to have given up on Skype years ago. Absolutely baffling, especially with the recent valuation of Zoom.
The problem is that discussing this hypothesis in any form is often labeled as "offensive" and "racist". The generally accepted theory even in the West is the lab leak was somehow disproved. It's always baffled me, because the only way you could really disprove the lab leak theory would be by finding the original source of the virus.
Instead, the media often attempts to disprove the lab leak by pointing out that COVID-19 differs from the viruses that were being worked on in the Wuhan Lab. But that in itself implies that China is being transparent. To the contrary, we know that China would take every measure to obfuscate the lab leak if they believed it was the origin of the virus.
The lab leak theory originally came from netizens in China, and then it gained traction in the West. There was some sketchy stuff going on at the WIV, personnel disappearing from their website, etc.
Regarding the accusations of racism, it's really annoying to be someone somewhat in the know after living in China having my firsthand experience discounted because it doesn't line up with the SJW perspective. I really like China. However, if I say that sanitary conditions there are abhorrent, it seems like pointing that out here gets me in trouble. It's just really frustrating seeing lots of people regurgitate what they've read or seen on tv from shoddy or biased reporting.
You’re exaggerating. I’ve seen plenty of valid and serious coverage of this from big outlets (NPR, Economist) explaining the plausibility of the scenario, not “disproving” in any manner. Which “the media” are you referring to?
I’ve also seen plenty of valid conversations about this on various web forums where it didn’t come to name calling.
I’ve also seen plenty of aggressive and disingenuous arguments by angry people, who proclaim their suspicions are true facts instead of probability assessments, and then perch their discussions on the assumed truth of those suspicions.
For that very reason, we cannot accept their narrative at face value. We certainly don't have enough information to confidently eliminate the lab escape theory. The media has largely suggested that the lab escape theory has been disproved.
The smoking gun is that labs in Wuhan were studying different coronaviruses in bats at the time the virus emerged. One of those labs was right near the seafood market which had one of the first documented outbreaks.
It's all circumstantial evidence of course, but that's really all you're going to get with a country like China. We can be damn well sure that they would never admit to the virus originating from a lab leak. To me, this is the clearest and most likely source of the outbreak.
> The smoking gun is that labs in Wuhan were studying different coronaviruses in bats at the time the virus emerged.
As far as I know, those labs always study coronaviruses in bats -- it's a large part of what they do. That makes it less of a suspicious coincidence than your way of putting it implies.
By which I don't mean it didn't happen. There's just not enough information one way or the other.
If anything, it makes it inevitable. The probability of a coronavirus from a bat eventually escaping a lab that regularly studies coronaviruses in bats almost certainly approaches 100% over time.
Also, it's not like they can actually find out what happened now, a year later. Not without a time-machine or perfect recordings showing some sort of ridiculously straightforward sequence of events. E.g. They find a recording showing a bat biting someone in a lab and that person hiding it and then later showing him touching fish at the market. Come on, who thinks it'd be that easy?
What they'd most likely output is a "report" with "findings" that "point to" or "suggest" certain things like bad protocols or insecure procedures or disconnected safety sensors etc. Hardly evidence, and not really actionable even if they were allowed to get there and eventually publish it.
This is the same kind of crap as with the "election" report in the US. They couldn't find hard-evidence because despite this being 2020, camera's aren't everywhere, evidence isn't readily available, and not everyone is keep ridiculous-level audit logs and collating as much info as we want. All they eventually put in their report were discrepancies, not-installed windows updates, internet-connected machines, etc. No smoking gun, and understandably so because even if it did happen, there is no easy and straightforward way to prove it.
> What they'd most likely output is a "report" with "findings" that "point to" or "suggest" certain things like bad protocols or insecure procedures or disconnected safety sensors etc. Hardly evidence, and not really actionable even if they were allowed to get there and eventually publish it
The WHO team wasn't even allowed near the labs, much less enter it. They got a very curated tour of Wuhan (which isn't surprising).
This article, and some top comments, are shifting the narrative to how we must not "demonize" China, and must work to deal with lab leaks in future, in effect, presuming the assumption that China is unequivocally to blame, covering it with the mere color of reasonableness and fairness. So with such careful narrative massaging, we get to hold onto our desire to pretend China is 100% to blame, but frame it reasonably.
This sort of bias, or propaganda, or narrative massaging, under the guise of reasonableness, and non-demoization is pernicious.
These sentiments are like, we can frame our China-blaming as reasonable, via pretending the assumption[0], so under the guise of "not demonizing China", "giving credit were due but still holding to account" we can hold onto our excuse to blame China, we can pretend the assumption that China is unequivocally to blame.
Bullshit. Unhelpful, bs. If you want to pretend that you are doing this under the guise of actually discovering the cause, you can to satisfy your own need to pretend that, but it's dishonest, and not actually helpful to discovering the cause.
Blaming the enemy of the day for the pestilence of the season is as old as the hills, and makes boring, and biased, history. And makes you all propagating such cant, useful idiots, manipulated puppets.
Also, how is everyone forgetting the childhood lesson that the one so eager to point the finger of blame is often the one with something to hide, so desperate to deflect suspicion away from themselves?
Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC) is 300 m from the market.
Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), with the more highly classified work, is 14 km away, but linked to the PLA Hospital, WHCDC and seafood market on Line 2 of the Wuhan metro:
The idea it spread via the seafood market has been largely debunked even by CCP and WHO -- there were cases before those occurred, there were no traces found there, etc...
This will be an interesting case study in what happens when a government goes head on against cryptocurrencies. This will lead to some interesting innovation in the space. There are too many cryptocurrency users and believers in India at this point.
We will see some interesting P2P exchange platforms where anonymity becomes paramount.
Bitcoin just removes all the limitations. But that creates new problems, quite frankly. Plus, it's very difficult for businesses to utilize Bitcoin. Fiat onboards have similar limitations to Visa/MC. Many legitimate business models will be denied accounts at reputable exchanges.