"With Bitcoin you do not get government bailouts" -- yeah maybe not yet? Is it beyond belief that a government with leadership deeply invested in crypto currencies might take action if something super disruptive happens?
Possible. But Bitcoin is hard capped at 21 million coins. The government can peint more paper money to bail a company out if it makes stupid decisions, but they cannot print more Bitcoin. This will devalue the paper currency even more and also increase the value of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is called a hedge against inflation for a reason.
Bitcoin is not an immutable law of nature. If the coin minting cap is reached, all that needs to happen is for miners to start running a fork with a higher cap. Tada, more coins conjured out of the ether, just like all the previous ones. If you want enforced scarcity, you need to be tied to something physically scarce.
The miners can totally start mining a fork, in fact they can start doing so today, but it doesn't matter because nobody will use their fork and then they will have lost out on their hundreds of millions of dollars of investments into mining equipment.
The node operators play just as critical of a role in Bitcoin as the miners.
It's not the node operators either, it's the people who transact on the chain that determine the value of the coins. The miners can disrupt the ability of the chain to transact to some degree, but they can't make people think their fork is worthwhile (why anyone still thinks BTC has much long-term value is beyond me, but...).
In fact they already have. There are 10s of thousands of forks of Bitcoin. Only a handful ever got significant attention. And, the original is still much larger than all of the forks combined.
Right, but a counter point is the etherium fork. Only a handful of people stayed on the “classic” chain after that first DAO turned out to have a massive extraction bug in it.
It would require the market to move as well to consider those new coins worth anything, though. Miners do not have enough control of the chain to make such changes on their own.
all that needs to happen is for countries to destroy their nuclear weapons
all that needs to happen is for governments to stop burning fossil fuels
all that needs to happen is for researchers to publish boring papers replicating others results
all that needs to happen is for fishermen to stop overfishing
Coordination problems seem easy but never really are. The chance of all the miners just suddenly agreeing to do something all at once is pretty low to impossible.
The point of a hypothetical suggestion is to direct a specific course of action. I am simultaneously amazed at how complex the 'hypothetical' construct is, and also how many people aren't able to reason around them... since this is basically what our big brains are for.
If you assume everybody involved just stops responding to their current incentives, you can solve any coordination problem, in a manner of speaking. But it's useless as a battle plan. Operationalizing a change demands that you pick a party you're talking to, and with full view of their capabilities and limitations, modify their current course of action in the smallest possible way that accomplishes a change.
You say "devalue the paper currency even more" but if bitcoin holders need to be bailed in any given country aren't we talking about a scenario where bitcoin is the thing that's lost a bunch of value? Some sort of "it turns out shady bitcoin holders or companies were artificially pumping up the value in a sneaky way and then someone connected the dots" situation?
First thing that comes to mind off the top of my head as a US-Govt option here would be something like: bail out US people/companies of bitcoin holdings in USD in conjunction with banning bitcoin in the US going forward. So that would be quite the string of events at that point for non-US bitcoin holders: first a crash that caused all these US bitcoin holders to go screaming to the government for help. Then the overnight removal of a huge chunk of the bitcoin market, coupled with either a firesale to comply with the ban or US gov seizure of a bunch of the coins, which will push the price lower for anyone who hasn't sold yet since their buyer pool is now much lower.
I wouldn't be surprised if the US government doesn't attempt something just like this in the next 3-5 years. There are a lot of people fleeing the very inflationary US dollar for BTC.
I think at this point it would be too late though. There are too many countries, individuals and corporations around the world that own BTC for it to be successful.
There was a long term holder that dumped 24,000BTC onto the market in August and the price dropped down about 5% for maybe half a day before recovering, and it's not going to be long until other countries follow El Salvador's lead and invite Bitcoin owners to live there tax free.
If the USA bans Bitcoin there will be a massive brain drain of very intelligent people who will just move to those countries.
At present BTC is usually denominated in USD. Until I start to see BTC used as the cross-rate I'm sceptical. Presuming it occurs, it would occur relatively quickly?
Sure, I agree, I guess what I’m trying to understand is why don’t they have even higher rates of skilled worker immigration?
Think back to what the person I replied to said about the economic benefits of immigration in general (again which I believe are true based on what I understand).
For that matter we can just say the United States offers temporary work visas for skilled workers through the H1B program. Case closed! In the case of maybe New Zealand or Switzerland they represent less than 1% of the global population, most of the talent lives outside of those two countries. Are they importing enough high skilled foreign workers? I’m not sure. Switzerland for examples seems very expensive to immigrate to and get citizenship. But I’m not an expert there, just what I’ve skimmed through online.
I think I'm not understanding what comparison you're trying to make. I thought you were expressing some doubt about whether H1B, or temporary skilled worker visas generally, were beneficial for the host country. You asked, "why don't other countries encourage this specific type of immigration" and I pointed out that they do have similar programs. Now you ask "why don't they have even higher rates of skilled worker immigration?"
Japan's SSW program has close to 300k workers. The U.S. H1B program has about 700k workers, so by population, Japan's program appears to be a bit larger. New Zealand's AEWV program has 80k workers with a population of 5 million so proportionally that's much larger.
> They cheated because their cars didn't meet new emissions standards. They were fine by the standards of the year before.
> So a bureaucracy just declared that a legal level of emissions was now illegal.
That is not at all what happened and not how emissions standards are deployed. The EPA's Tier 2 standards were finalized in 2000 to phase in during the 2004-2008 model years [1].
The terminations so far focus on anything with any mention of a DEI related objective and that may seem "fine", but these don't constitute a lot of the NSF's budget (the terminated grants total < $1 billion and if you click through them you'll see that for many, that's 5 years of funding). The planned cuts are much deeper[1], DEI is just not where the "big bucks" are.
This is false, we've sold data with PII to no one. Or it is misleading: the page you linked to even says, "It is selling de-identified, aggregate data for research, if you give them consent."
To what extent and using what method is it "de-identified"? Plenty of such schemes are very easy to circumvent, especially with a large enough pool of data. Given the nature of genetics in particular positively identifying a single case can be used to unmask whole families. In particular depending on the anonymization this would be a task suited to 'AI' very well.
Basically, if you imagine this as a table of "user's name, date of birth, and address" keys mapping to genomic and other data, the key was replaced with a random identifier that could not be trivially joined to recover the user name, date of birth, and address.
These systems are not robust against motivated and capitalized adversaries.
I can go to a data broker and purchase access to de-identified EMR data for most of the U.S. population. There are much more useful de-identified datasets around than ours, if someone is motivated to try to re-identify those datasets. That data is all bought and sold without anyone's consent and this is all fine under HIPAA.
I wasn't trying to convince anybody otherwise. I think the noise about 23&Me's data to be pretty uninteresting. I published my own genome (through PGP) for anybody to download, and I know that people have identified me from my post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641201 and other comments.
That's more or less what I expected. Ah well, the odds that this becomes something of significance to most people seems remote, but either way you can't unring the bell.
Here "de-identified" means stripped of PII (name, address, phone number, email, etc). You are correct that genetic information is intrinsically identifiABLE (in the sense that it is stable and uniquely distinguishing for individuals). When we've shared individual-level data with a partner, it was with consent of the participants involved, and under a contract that prohibits re-identification.
I would not argue with you on that it is "selling your data". But I also think there are meaningful differences in harm levels for different kinds of "selling your data", and fully identified data has more potential harms than de-identified data where you have to assume that an adversary is willing to violate contracts and/or the law to learn about particular individuals.
There is considerable confusion about the distinction between aggregated data and de-identified individual-level data. I would say that I don't consider sufficiently aggregated data to be "your data" in a particularly meaningful personal sense of "your", even though there are still some re-identification risks from these types of datasets.
I was contesting the statement that "The data has already been sold... [and] the damage is already done" which I still think is highly misleading.
I don't think 23andme has been casual or callous with people's data; they are probably a step above the average firm that handles this sort of data. The consent process is well-documented.
My complaint has always been about 23&Me has always been Anne Wojciki's naivete about the utility of genomic data for health treatment, as well as whether her company needed to work with the government (she wrote a useful retrospective that helped shed light: https://hbr.org/2020/09/23andmes-ceo-on-the-struggle-to-get-...).
Most of us who worked in genomics at the time were sort of dumbfounded by her approach and wanted to know what magic she had that let her get as far as she did with the company and its product.
I don't have any problem with the family history side of the product; that's how my dad found out that he had a number of unexpected children (IVF through donated sperm) who were able to connect with him years after their conception. And I really wish disease genetics had turned out to be far more straightforward as I've long been fascinated with how complex phenotypes arise from genomes.
The top-of-thread linked to an article that was specifically about aggregated data sharing, not individual-level data sharing. The consent document you're linking to did not exist when that article was written; our general research consent only covers aggregated data sharing. It was only in 2018 that we added the second-level consent for individual-level data sharing.
I think we've generally been pretty careful to present only scientifically well supported results, which has not helped the perceived utility of our health product. There are certainly valid arguments to be had about the business model.
Indeed, but here "re-identification" generally means the sort of attack where you have an aggregated genomic dataset, and you already have access to full genomic data for a target individual, and you use the genomic dataset to infer something about that target that you didn't know, like whether or not they participated in that study. Not to entirely minimize this sort of attack, but the NIH decided it was a sufficiently low risk that most of the sorts of datasets it applies to (like GWAS) are routinely shared with no access controls.
are you asking about methods to improve privacy of aggregated datasets? They seem to be not super popular with people in the field, I think because they sharply curtail how data can be used compared to having access to datasets with no strong privacy guarantees. I think the maybe more impactful recent shift is toward "trusted research environments" where you get to work with a particular dataset only in a controlled setting with actively monitored egress.
Homomorphic encryption enables standard GWAS workflows (not just summary stats) while “sharing” all genotypes and phenotypes. Richard Mott and colleagues have a paper and colleagues on this method;
Yes this is a wildly misrepresented statistic that has nothing to do with DEI and everything to do with demographic shifts in the U.S. population (specifically, that the "non Hispanic white" segment of the U.S. population is shrinking).
Thats true, and enhanced in places that reward that characteristic. Hispanic origin is tied to lineage, nationality, or country of birth for an individual or ancestors.
It’s a vague definition that is impossible to verify. Spain itself is a multicultural and multiethnic state. How do you prove that I don’t have deep affiliation with my basque ancestor who settled in Ireland after a shipwreck?
affirmative action for hispanic people has always been uniquely absurd and exploited by effectively white europeans for as long as it has existed. my college counselor told me to mark "hispanic" on my college applications because I'm of Iberian descent, which I refused to do - but I know of multiple others who did and went to Harvard/MIT.
There are gaps in Medicare coverage. There's long term care that isn't covered by Medicare; people can self insure, or purchase separate coverage, or many rely on Medicaid which requires exhausting assets first.
I've watched both my parents go through this, with significant chronic health issues. They had good private insurance on top of Medicare, they routinely had $10-30K annual itemized deductions for health related expenses that were not covered by their insurance. And that was with a daughter who is an MD who invested a massive amount of time and effort to get insurance to cover as much as possible.
