It's the dumbest technology to try to buy illegal stuff now. Most coins have touched an exchange and everything you do is public. Once deanonymized, it's the opposite of private.
Monero & Zcash are exceptions and the only parts of crypto I'm bullish about (including some new upcoming chains like Ironfish & Aleo). I think private p2p cash has a lot of value. BTC & ETH are the opposite of private.
It's still useful as a means of transferring money for those in jurisdictions that don't care about their illegal activity. Like the countries that tolerate cybercrime as long as it is directed outside of their own borders. Or dictators themselves trying to avoid sanctions.
It's still useful for now, but it will get less and less so. The tornado cash dev is in jail for writing code that made such efforts easier. Since coins can be marked by "good" actors as having been involved in illegal activity, they can't ever be used again.
Let's say a US company gets ransomware attacked by a Russian national and demands payment in bitcoin. US company pays in bitcoin and later reports crime. All accounts get flagged. Anyone helping that address offramp the money will be in trouble. So there has to be a Russian exchange dealing with Russian banks that's creating a track record of provably aiding in crime. It's either going to be such a small amount no one cares or the Russian companies involved will be sanctioned.
Because of the public permanent record, the utility of ETH and BTC are decreasingly useful. Things like instant international settlement, fast payments, and the alike can always be better done with tradfi. Privacy and avoiding regulation was the only real utility ever.
For now it seems the agencies with the technical expertise to prosecute arnt going after the occasional drug buyers, it's pretty safe. Of course, nothing stopping future better police from taking through old records
Monero & Zcash are the best examples right now but like bitcoin, they are volatile and not practical for actual commerce outside of use-cases (like crime) where it's worth the cost.
Stablecoins are a large use case in crypto now but there isn't a private stablecoin yet (I'm ignoring all SGX based technology). A private stablecoin, fully backed by audited bank reserves would enable something like a private Venmo. This private Venmo would know how much you brought in and took out but would have no idea what your transaction history looks like. I think in the next few years we'll see a private Venmo.
Not too much longer. I think the big difference is now there are private chains coming out like Aleo, Aztec, and Espresso that use zero knowledge proofs. You can think of them as private Ethereum much like Monero is a private Bitcoin. They've only been possible to build in the last couple of years.
Honestly, I think 98% of Web3 is garbage. It's a worse system than our current financial system. I founded a web3 company in early 2022 based on a new way to put data onchain in a permissionless & trustless way to make smart contracts more useful. People don't actually care about decentralization so we pivoted a couple months after our raise.
Our team explored the space in depth by speaking with established founders and execs of many protocols and companies in the space. It's almost all driven by speculation for imaginary use cases. We went back to basics and asked, "Really, what is the point of this tech existing?" IMHO, the only reason for this tech to exist is privacy.
Right now, there's no private digital cash. I believe the ability to purchase things anonymously is a fundamental right. To me it's the same as private communication. Right now there's no private way to digitally send money. BTC & ETH seek to make this worse by making every transaction public instead of concealed by a trusted third party. I personally believe it's socially important that we figure out stable private digital cash.
Monero/Zcash don't solve the problem because they fluctuate wildly and are largely driven by speculation. Our long term goal is to create a private p2p venmo using a stablecoin. There are definitely up and downsides of privacy as there are with any freedom. Scientology wouldn't exist without freedom of religion, neo-nazi marches wouldn't exist without freedom of speech. All of the illegal activity on the internet wouldn't exist without encrypted communication. Nonetheless, I think the social benefits of empowering individuals outweigh the costs and I don't see any other technology capable of delivering private digital payments.
You should just make the right npm package. You could call it: "probably_correct_time" and it'd just add 137 to the year if it was less than 1937 or so. Then raise some money to fund AI research to decipher if it's about the great depression or something to guess the right year. I joke but honestly someone is going to build this and then get acquired by Grammarly.
Some companies used this approach for Y2K, deciding to use a pivot similar to the above to decide whether to prefix 19 or 20 (or 21 or 22). It made the fix easy, but they didn't expand the field size from YY to CCYY, so all kinds of stupid errors await us in the future.
I was young at the time, and I did what management told me to do but felt icky about it because I knew it was hugely inferior and they didn't know what they were doing, and I was just a tiny cog in the team doing all the changes, most of which thought it was fine... Left that place long ago.
What you recommend is an easy fix, and might work most of the time, but its wrong and will cause infuriating problems, probably making others suffer your past deeds. Just do it properly once, first time.
I think your read on the parent is right but despite that, I'd encourage you to check it out. IMHO, the most interesting developments in computer science are happening right now in web3. Stay away from the NFTs/DEFI and just learn about the new systems being built. If you look into the technical details of these new distributed systems, game theory applications, and zero-knowledge proofs, I have a hard timing believing any programmer can't see the new features unlocked in how we build things.
It's also socially important for well intentioned people to join the system right now. Web3 is a thing, it will happen. Mobile happened and now two companies worth roughly a trillion each control it entirely. Web3 is roughly on the same path. It's being built right now to gate keep and capture value. If you don't want to the internet to continue to dwindle down to a privatized button pushing consumption app, the battle ground is web3.
If you actually read the article, most of the scams of all types start on social media. Why is it so easy for a scammer to talk to my nephew on the same places he talks to his friends? If you look at actually consumer fraud (1) according to the FTC, crypto isn't even mentioned.
The abundance of crypto hate is confusing to me as one hand HN believes it's a pointless & worthless technology but also somehow this unstoppable force giving criminals limitless power to burn all the trees and rob the youth.
Why do you think that is some kind of contradiction? It is technology that is largely useless for legitimate projects, as other solutions are always better and less inefficient. And it is inefficient, because it does use 0.5% of the electricity of the entire planet, which is not something people imagine, it is very real. The only benefits it has are mainly useful for criminal purposes, thus it does help criminals.
All of this is consistent, factual, and a huge problem.
Okay, that's a change in the narrative. It's not useless. It's only useless if you're not a criminal. But that's sort of backwards. Technology is just a tool. It doesn't decide how it's going to be used. Humans decide the ways in which tools are used, adding morality & legality.
What about this tool makes it criminal by nature?
It's censorship-resistant, private (if you want it to be), and very inefficient energy-wise. It's the logical extension of encryption. Encryption is also useful for criminal purposes and internet crime wouldn't really exist without it. Privacy != criminal. Also, do you know how much energy it would save if nothing was encrypted?
Every government in the history of the world has eventually collapsed causing devastation for its people. Money printers go wild. Corruption everywhere. People cannot afford basic necessities. If we can figure out a money that cannot be messed with, maybe that's not such a bad thing.
I don't think Vulcanoes usually produce an EMP, however, we did record quite a number of lightning strikes around the vulcano. If memory serves, the area around the vulcano was struck in excess of 200'000 times per minute at the height of the ejecta's activity.
It's more complicated than that. A few of the considerations:
* DNA/RNA are not the only options. Other nucleobases potentially exist and artificial ones have certainly been created (1)
* A completely unique sequence would indicate no shared ancestor even if it was DNA.
* We're not sure how life started on Earth either. It could've been more than once in more than one way. We don't know.
* Earth and Mars shared material as asteroid impacts ejected material that eventually landed on the other. Some microorganisms could potentially survive the journey.
Why is this DNA/RNA/polynucleotide chauvinism so prevalent? It's one complex molecule in an infinite space of complex molecules, some of which might be more suitable as basis of life on other planets with other chemistries. Life does not equal chain of heterocycle-sugar-phosphates.
Based on the current sample size of one life bearing planet, DNA/RNA is the most durable example we have that produces results at this time. As soon as a second nucleotide is discovered as functional, this will be up for discussion.
"Based on the current sample size of one writing system having civilization, hieroglyphs are the most durable example we have that produces results at this time. As soon as a second way of record keeping is discovered as functional, this will be up for discussion."
But we can infer that life could exist without DNA. It could be similar to our machines, made of different materials and replicating through other ways.
There is a definition of life that comprises any mechanism that controls its own entropy. Maybe there are energy-based interactions that fit this description like systems with no matter involved, or very high-scale/long-term systems.
Maybe I'm a DNA chauvinist, but I think this is one of the most important questions in the universe, but incredibly difficult to answer without massive-scale space travel.
It's different from culture. A culture makes everyone think in a similar way, there is one role: a participant of it. A corporation doesn't have to make everyone think the same, because it has many roles and written processes and KPIs which modulate anyone taking a role into a gear that rotates accordingly to the big schema. Corporations may have culture and it may be definitive, but it's not only that.
You should just google the definition of culture. Lots of work has been done to study culture at numerous levels from nations to corporations to small communities. It's called anthropology.
If you're actually curious, you should actually read papers and studies. This HN trend of ignorantly waxing philosophically about some topic adds no value to anyone's mind.
I'm not actually curious about definitions out there. And it's not HN trend, it's me. I see and experience both everyday cultures and everyday corporations, whatever meaning these words have for me, and compare them to each other. It doesn't require anything special beyond comparison skills. If you don't agree, fine, if you don't want to message a key mistake I maybe made, okay. If you want to take a complex definition and stretch it over a non-phd one to get my non-phd answer, okay. But you should know that patronizingly referencing to "lots of work" never works in a discussion or as an explanation. Maybe there is a work on such discussions, if you actually care.
But anyway, I just googled it:
- the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively
- the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society
- all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation
- an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups
It has little in common with what I described, namely written (managed, on purpose, situational) processes and KPIs, which force people to act as they do, and are not inherent to them.
If you have a specific interest, you should just research it. The world is a very big place and lots of smart people have already gathered evidence to answer questions about pretty much anything. Talking on a forum is fun but collectively, we're idiots and we're not going to teach you much of anything.
It's great that you have questions, but you actually have to follow it up with research and learning if you care. From the comments you posted, I get the impression you haven't spent 1 hour googling answers to your questions. That sends me the impression, you don't really care, you just like hearing yourself think.
Maybe, but it's more complicated than that. I was pissed off yesterday, sorry if my tone sounded worse than it should have been.
My reluctance against your suggestion is based not on my interest or lack thereof^. I've had this sort of discussions many times before, and usually people split into two categories: those who correct or argue directly, in short and precise argument, and those who refer to unnamed sources throughout the thread. From the first group you learn quickly, and consistently, and they leave no aftertaste, even if you feel "defeated", because their argument sends a strong educational message. The second is a potential time spoil. I've read "some works" before, and in most cases (or it's perceived as such) it turned out that that guy meant just a slightly different meaning, or an interpretation of that author, which is different from a common sense around a specific term, or simply they missed a big chunk of a message and pressed on a non- point, or were primarily just a narcissist troll. I can remember the last time I constructively "just went" and read a book on some Buddhism downstream, after an argument with one guy who claimed that it's very rational and isn't just a cool story (the topic was that one of their prophets arrived in my country). I downloaded it, read a preface and 20 minutes later it already narrated magic forest experiences and spirits who messaged truth to the prophet. Same story with Islam followers, sometimes they are talking nonsense and refer to Qur'an, which I've already read in seven translations, including interpreting one, with cancelled ayat remarks, and often I know surah and ayat range they're talking about right away. (Edit: I just noticed that both cases are about religion, which is known to be "hot", but it doesn't end with religion, it just happens to bring brightest examples.)
I'm not saying that you're not right, but it's statistically nonsensical to follow your vague suggestions to go read on a field. That is why it will never work, and you will think that these lazy careless STEM guys portray some trend. It's a trust issue, not an issue with my desire (or lack of it, which is the case) to learn something regardless of who my opponent is. I simply can't trust few hours of my life to every other guy on the internet, if they don't provide a good enough argument to do that.
^ which I already claimed non-existent, it feels like you don't like to read comments at all
Monero & Zcash are exceptions and the only parts of crypto I'm bullish about (including some new upcoming chains like Ironfish & Aleo). I think private p2p cash has a lot of value. BTC & ETH are the opposite of private.