You can send a ton of really small transactions (colloquially referred to as "crypto dust") for an insignificant amount of money to innocent wallets from a single tainted wallet. The "tainted wallet" in this case would be one tied to Tornado Cash. The Treasury, having sanctioned TornadoCash, now considers the targeted wallet as having done business with a sanctioned entity.
This is currently uncharted territory. Currently, you can get banned by exchanges if your account has any interaction with mixers like tornado. There's no precedent in regards to how the government views accounts tainted by attacks like this.
What is "your account"? There's no "first-last name, date of birth, ID number" attached to an ethereum account unless an account is on a centralized exchange.
Generating a new account is a matter of 2 seconds.
Ethereum wallets work like a bank account that anyone can deposit funds into. This dusting attack would be as if, say, Iran or North Korea decided to start depositing a few dollars into every American's checking accounts to try and implicate the entire country's citizenry in financial crime.
Bitcoin has one defense against this attack: coin control. The way Bitcoin works is as if every time you wrote a check, you had to also include a list of all the other checks that the money comes from. So you can technically avoid implicating yourself in financial crime by not writing "payable by Iran/NK super hackerz" on your checks.
> Bitcoin has one defense against this attack: coin control. The way Bitcoin works is as if every time you wrote a check, you had to also include a list of all the other checks that the money comes from. So you can technically avoid implicating yourself in financial crime by not writing "payable by Iran/NK super hackerz" on your checks.
Isn't this terrible for freedom? When I pay with fiat, I don't have to include a list of where that fiat came from.
Can you imagine having some savings in crypto and getting unknowingly dusted by this attack, only to find your Coinbase account and your bank account suddenly frozen a few weeks later and not having any idea why or what to do about it?
I can imagine Uber using different employment schemes in different countries, complying with local law. Maybe a gig based system is actually benefecial to society in some countries, like you claim, while it's not in others.
Assuming full information symmetry. Predatory voluntary employment like pyramid schemes exist where workers are coerced through misleading rather than force
Which is more relevant in an employment scenario, with higher friction and barriers of entry. In gig economy, worse case scenario is you stop doing it.
There should be legislation around this, same for music and games. If you "buy" it, you should be able to download it in a DRM-free, non-proprietary format.
I'd settle for "if they take it away from you, they have to refund it". But the problem with either regulation is the response will be just to stop selling things. Instead they will grant you a 99 year lease or some other such fiction.
Agreed. Part of the problem is digital goods pretty much never have a right of resale. That's bullshit, particularly for e-Books where the electronic copy often costs more than the resellable paper copy.
That and consolidate accounts. I "bought" movies with two different google accounts and there is no way to transfer from one to the other. You also cannot be logged in i to two differwnt accih t at the same time with an Android TV.
All this bad faith is doing is pushing people to pirate more, not less.
Happened to me with Bandcamp. Support was kind and helpful. After I gave them proof of my purchases, they just merged the collections to my current one. Excellent experience. I wish it was always like this.
You can try https://families.google.com/families which will share your purchases across accounts, however, it does not work for connecting a regular Gmail and Google Workspace account together.
As far as I know, only the family manager can share purchased content. If you have different content from two different accounts and join them in a group, only one of those accounts can share their content. Also, groups are limited to six members total only (managers + 5).
In the physical world, if I "buy" something, I can lend it, give it, or even sell it to somebody else.
Alos, the fact that the content is linked to an account rather than a biological person raises other issues about digital identity.
90% likely, the small print specifies that what was bought was the right to access that file provided that a couple of conditions remain met, and one of the conditions is "until 1. august 2022" or something like that.
You may assume that other streaming companies will do similar things. They're all squeezed between customers who want to pay low prices for the service and rights holders who want high prices for their concent. The rights holders offer a lower price for time-limited access than for permanent access, and the streaming companies take that offer. Film at 11.
> 90% likely, the small print specifies that what was bought was the right to access that file provided that a couple of conditions remain met, and one of the conditions is "until 1. august 2022" or something like that.
Note that this happened in Germany, where judges generally treat fineprint as "Whatever."* - the way something is communicated and customer's reasonable expectations matter a lot.
* Where fineprint contradicts more prominent text.
Moreover, in a world where advertising "purchase this cheese* (contains no actual milk)" is illegal, why would advertising "purchase* this movie (actually a time-limited rental)" be legal? How could that not be deception of the customer?
Note that this happened in Germany, where judges generally treat copyright owners as gods with greater rights than others, even when the copyright owners hurt themselves.
See, that's not how I remember the 90's. I remember getting offered floppy disks with every bit of software out there. Their overly restrictive copy protection often consisted of "what's the 5th word on the 10th page of the manual" or similar.
The prices were not really outlandish, though they were representative of catering to a new and niche market. It's just that the barrier to copying was so low and distribution was so easy and risk free.
Basically, it was the equivalent of a physical store with no employees, locks, or security systems. Thus everyone went in and got what they wanted without putting money in the "honor box".
I was thinking more about movies and music. I would agree with you on software, more or less, but I think adding DRM was inevitable once the capitalists got control away from the engineers and inventors.
They'll be ok because they're sitting in air conditioned offices telling the peasants to turn off their lights and air conditioners. If people don't comply they can send out the law enforcement, maybe one day will be robots. Already started happening [1]
I can't track it down in English but there are guidelines people need to follow, turning lights off during certain times and having air conditioners set to > 28c and not at unless required.
Japanese follow rules unlike many other cultures, they won't take these requests lightly and will be pretty uncomfortable doing what they're told.
I dislike this habit of blaming “leaders” in democratic countries. The problem is that the electorate either don’t care or won’t accept anything that might inconvenience them or require them to change their habits. Not much leaders can do in these circumstances.
The electorate's information is limited to what their rulers feed them. When elites decide they want to do something awful, the population starts 80% against it, and over time they're worn down.
You’re not wrong, but also: the electorate’s opinions are shaped by the media they consume. And media is easily bought by disinformation campaigns from oil companies to muddy the waters and convince voters that climate change isn’t a big deal, or is an outright hoax.
You only need to propagandize about 40% of the electorate to completely sink the chances of making real political action on an issue.
Add to that the fact that elected leaders don’t really represent the majority of their “constituents,” they represent the interests of whichever corporations fund them. Democracy has been bought and sold and is controlled by an unaccountable minority, at least in America.
majority of world leaders don't represent the majority of countries responsible for polluting this planet, it's completely irelevant what Europe does if India, China and Indonesia won't care
This ignores the influence Western markets and industry have. Western countries issuing the right kind of regulations would have a global effect. Most dirty industry in the West has been outsourced to those countries anyway.
I think you overestimate influence of Western politicians abroad, we can clearly see how on board is world with sanctioning Russia when it comes to their own interests (almost whole world DGAF about some silly Western sanctions), it's even funnier to think they would hurt their economy for some abstract changed in environment. Have you ever lived in developing Asian or African country?
I think you overestimate influence of Western populations on their own governments.
The point is that Western politicians don't care about the climate catastrophe. For a data point, my own government (Germany) magically conjured up a €100bn emergency defense budget for the Russian war in Ukraine in addition to a promise to boost its defense budget to the NATO recommendation of 2% of GDP (over €70bn in 2020[0]). In contrast, total government budget for "ecological protection" in 2019 was €79bn[1], but more than 2/3rds of that is just waste and water management -- less than €2bn ended up in research and development. The federal budget in 2021 only allocated €2.7bn[2] to the "Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection" either. Even the "The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action" only had a budget of €10.4bn (it was called "... and Energy" at the time).
If German politicans took the climate catastrophe as the world-ending threat serious that it is according to researchers, how come they haven't assigned a similar 2% of GDP or a similar "emergency budget" to preventing it? Instead solar subsidies have been cut, subsidies for sustainable private building development have been slashed and a conservative-led (not even the Greens!) coalition decided to shut down nuclear power in favour of coal and (Russian) gas.
There's no will to address the climate catastrophe among Western governments and there never has been. The only climate action you see are concessions to voter demographics that maintain minimal impact to the economy. Your mistake is to believe that the effects you're seeing are the consequence of politicans in power actually cracking down on something.
FWIW the effect of sanctions, since you mention them, are always delayed and always affect the weakest members of society first. We've already seen moderate capital flight in Russia (e.g. foreign companies extracting their local talent or simply shutting down their Russia offices with mass layoffs). The problem is that much like trickle down economics, "trickle up sanctions" have never been shown to work. Individual seizures of oligarch properties have been vastly more effective than blanket bans that mostly hit the middle and lower classes.
Plus, of course, the sanctions are ridiculous when the same countries enacting those sanctions still pay Russia billions of dollars for resources like gas that they depend on and can't just give up. And of course other countries like China take this opportunity to offer loans and cheap buyouts with zero competition.
A lab specialized in investigating Coronaviruses in the city where the first outbreak was, is at least suspicious imo. The fact that the Chinese authorities weren't exactly helpful (to my knowledge) in debunking the lab-leak hypothesis is extra suspicious. But then again, if they really would have wanted to cover it up, they might have looked for another city to point to as the source of the outbreak, I don't know how feasible that would have been though.
It is a little suspicious, but also not too far fetched: Where would you put a lab researching Coronaviruses? Somewhere near where it exists in the wild.
No. It’s not where they exist in the wild. The closest related virus (RATG-13) to n-cov-2 come from northern china (Yunnan), where they were imported to the Wuhan virology lab to study. What a coincidence!
Secondly, other Coronaviruses have appeared in southern China -- notably the original SARS' first known case was in November of 2002 in Guangdong.[1] Wuhan is well-placed (relatively centrally) to do that kind of research.
Thirdly, RaTG13 likely isn't the closest related known virus anymore.[2][3]
Quality comment. That person is confused about a couple things, but the main point that Wuhan is 1-2000km from the most likely places to find such a virus in the wild.
It could have been brought to Wuhan in a human, in an animal to eat, in an animal to study, or in a culture. I don't see how newer evidence eliminates any of those possibilities.
It's also confused about that - there are tons of horseshoe bats in Hubei Province including in caves 60 miles from Wuhan[1] and there are absolutely sars-like coronaviruses in the horseshoe bats in Hubei.
RM1 and RF1 in this paper are sars-like bat coronaviruses isolated from horseshoe bats in Hubei:
The horseshoe bat's range spans from Japan to Portugal. That doesn't change the fact that all the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 we've discovered have been found in the far south of China and Cambodia, 1-2k miles away, nor does the presence of more distantly related SARS-like coronaviruses.
If we find a closer relative near Wuhan, that will change the hypothesis. But we haven't.
That’s not especially convincing to me because the closest relatives we’ve found aren’t actually very close relatives. Ratg13 is decades removed from the SC2 lineage, so knowing that it was found closer to Laos is a very weak signal in my opinion about the origins of SC2.
As one of the parent comments has already noted, RaTG13 is no longer the closest known bat virus. BANAL-20-52's spike is only 16 AA substitutions away from SARS-CoV-2, and that was found in Laos.
No one expected spillover in Wuhan, including Dr. Shi, per the quote from her that I've replied with elsewhere. Even those very confident in natural zoonotic origin are typically proposing something like SARS-1's wildlife trafficking conduit, not spillover in Wuhan.
Well, the level of coincidence also depends on the number of coronavirus research facilities, and the number of cities. If there aren't very many coronavirus research facilities, and there are many cities, it becomes an unlikely coincidence.
Frankly that not too atypical to regular chartist's talk. Draw some lines on some charts and make up a whole story. To give the cryptoists some credit, there's no fundamentals in cryptos so they have to use the only other tools available aka tea leaves.
Plenty of idiots are happy to invest in crypto. A very common sentiment in crypto ads is "$100 invested into crypto in 2012 would be $zilliard today. Invest today, and tomorrow you'll be rich too!"
I mean, if color of skin, form of eyes and other visible, "mechanical" characteristics can be different it's not that big of a leap to observe that certain non-visible characteristics can differ too between humans.
