Used US banks, maybe a US based corp was bidding and was harmed by the bribe, the crime was committed /planed in USA...etc etc.
But they pass a law and they get you. And the law is legal in USA because the bribe affected commerce, even if you bought a harddrive that crossed state lines while coming to you (not a lawyer, but I think that's FBI's golden goose http://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/report/commerce-com... )
Bribes are the greatest investment in third world countries, or almost as profitable as lobbying in USA :).
The corrupt PM that demands $50 million for that wireless license or $1 Billion road doesn't care much about the equipment or prices, after all you paid him and he knows you have to make it back. He will remove all your troubles.
Most doctors tend to specialize anyway so why should a heart surgeon spend so much time learning about other organs which they're never going to sink their scalpels into?
That makes sense and it's the same as software engineering. That's why you have a product manager/generalist to coordinate the different domain experts.
Most surgeries these days require a team of doctors already so doctors are already capable of working together with divergent skillets... Maybe there is no harm if these skillets diverged just a little bit more.
Maybe if there was more focus on communication skills as part of training, it would be better.
PHILIP G. POTTER, who develops investment products for high-net-worth clients of Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter, Discover & Company, likes to think of himself as an ''uberconsumer.''
Last year, he spent his bonus on a 50-inch TV and a $3,500 Rolex watch. He wears custom-made $800 suits, custom-made $80 shirts -- always with white collars and white French cuffs -- and $200 shoes. He is ''totally wired,'' as he puts it: His home phone forwards messages to his pager; he answers them over a tiny $800 cellular phone."
...'I can continue to come up with new products, to add value, [in a downturn market]'' he said. ''I'm not responsible for getting money. Getting it's hard when the market goes down. But there will still be products to sell. It'll just force me to be a little more creative.''
In a somewhat matter of his defense, in 1997 he was 25 years old... that was 20 years ago. I know my ideals and opinions have changed from 25 to 30, I can only hope he has grown a bit in those 20 years and only to take that article as a small matter of his personality.
Sorry to go OT, but ten years ago we needed five guys and a truck to move my friend's $2000 55" rear-projection TV. It weighed as much as a small piano and we almost dropped it off the deck. I just got a 55" 4k LED TV for $400 and it weighs as much as my dog. The mind reels.
eh, just 100 bitcoins (stop whining, back then).... $800K today. Damn!
It's still the wild, wild west in that world. Those few that saw it 6-7 years ago, made bets that were relatively small, sorta buying lottery tickets. It takes a lot of "faith," for a lack of better term to invest serious money now.
It's not quite that simple. I sold 5 BTC at the $32 peak and felt smart. It crashed right after, and I paid a phone bill.
The temptation to sell was far stronger in the early days, mostly because people were unprepared for the sheer volatility of BTC. It's been the most lucrative tulip farm in history, and unlike tulips BTC is useful. It's hard to know where it will top out.
I disagree. I don’t want to play the smartass, but I’ve been into Bitcoin since late 2012 and I just started to sell very recently, when a small investment (low 4 figures) and some lucky events like particiating in early ICOs (for ex. Ethereum in August 2014)became a life changing amount of money (high 7 figures).
This is not entirely true because I sold a little (very little) in November 2013 just to be able to “touch” those paper profits. I needed to see they were real and could impact my life. Anyhow 95% of my stash remained untouched until very recently.
The rationale for me was crystal clear: this technology has the potential to change the world forever (yes, I’m a true believer). This shit can be the biggest revolution since the internet. Sure, it can go to 0, but the downside is clear: I could just lose everything that i invested, which definitely was money I could comfortably afford to lose. On the contrary the potential upside is enormous, 1 dollar could easy become 10k.
Therefore I simply decided I was not going to sell unless I could comfortably retire on the profits. And that I would leave a little btc for my kids, no matter what.
I really can’t understand how anyone could buy Bitcoin early on with a different mindset.
I bought at $4 with the knowledge that it could hit $50k a coin in a relatively short period. But I sold most of it anyway. In my mind the odds of bitcoin being banned go up every day. People on HN underestimate how much we rely on the financial system to enforce regulations. Governments are not going to just give that up. It’s lasted longer than I though it would, and it might last forever if there is a way to get regulators involved, but 7 years ago I estimated that at 5% odds.
But the thing about Bitcoin is that it’s made to be censorship-resistant. It is resilient. If you read Satoshi’s posts on Bitcointalk he simply assumed Bitcoin would have been banned at some point, and that’s why he made the design choices he made. Bitcoin is designed not only to survive but to thrive in an adversarial environment.
But then, even if a government ban could really destroy Bitcoin (i’m certain it wouldn’t, I remind you that Russia banned it for a while and 0 fucks were given... what about sharing films on Bittorent? Did the ban do something?) you say there’s a 5% chance the ban will not happen.
I will take any day a bet that gives me a 5% chance that every dollar i bet becomes $10k. And I won’t exit that bet unless i’ve made enough money to retire comfortably, which is what is happening to me now.
No, they can’t. And even if they could the network would just fork to a different hashing algorithm, which means that the attacker would have had burnt hundreds, if not thosaunds, of millions for nothing.
China can take console of all of their miners in the country which would all for a 51% attack to be profitable ignoring opportunity costs.
In this case forking does not help as they maintain control of the equipment and have access to massive CPU and GPU resources to swap to alternative architectures.
Now, if you think bitcoin maintains value if there are zero transactions for ~6+ months you are clearly mistaken.
There's a ton more infrastructure behind Bitcoin, like ATMs, hardware wallets, point-of-sale systems, exchanges, and more physical and online stores accept it.
And the ability for cryptocurrencies to evolve and update over time means that the network effect could be the single largest factor in determining it's worth.
Right now you can use bitcoin's network effects to some degree with altcoins. eg. You use xmr.to to buy anything that you can buy with bitcoin with Monero.
This is a band-aid of sorts for the time being but I don't see why services that currently allow you to use bitcoin could not upgrade to include a better currency/currencies?
Well, the security of a cryptocurrency (assuming Proof-of-work based) comes from the total amount of work that has happened in the chain since your transaction.
Because of that, the largest cryptocurrencies with the most work behind them will naturally be the most secure the quickest.
Monero might have some very good benefits, but the much smaller size of the network means it's a magnitude easier to attack from a state level adversary.
And the fact that Bitcoin can (and will) evolve over time means that the benefits from other cryptocurrencies can be put into Bitcoin as they become useful or proven.
This is already happening with Bitcoin, and it's not going to stop.
That being said, I don't think that other cryptocurrencies are pointless, and I do believe that they can continue to happily coexist. Ethereum is focused on the "smart contract" side of things. Monero is focused on privacy. They can all have their uses and specializations, and they can all exist together in the same ecosystem.
Even if Bitcoin ends up not being able to adapt and evolve for whatever reason, being a "store of value", your cryptocurrency savings account, is still a valid use case, and can continue to be one even if there are cryptocurrencies that do everything else objectively better.
Bitcoin radically gimped their VM at the start, destroying the inherent value of the coin.
BTC is going to die to a gen 3 VM that learns from the ETH mess of gen 2 and just ungimps the BTC VM.
I don't believe BTC has the political leadership to fix that poor decision, given that a) they've demonstrated poor leadership until now and b) some of the people involved in the gimping are still in positions of influence.
I can't find a single reference on them that contains actual details on the computational model because the internet is full of vapid circular search bait, particularly about cryptocurrencies.
The last I checked, the BTC VM disabled most useful opcodes, which meant you couldn't actually make money automatically redeemable for a large number of constraints you would want to impose.
How do you verify 3-SAT? Just plug in the values and check if it evaluates to TRUE? I assume the idea is to pay people to solve NP-hard problems via TX's, which is a kinda neat idea imo.
It's just asking if many 3 term clauses ANDed together are true for a given input set, so you'd give the inputs to spend it to your wallet. Automatic bounties on optimization (sub)problems, yep.
For various reasons, you probably want to use arithmetic and string operations for encoding certain problens. You could do it in bit operations, but efficiency.
I can't take credit for it -- it's one of those things that was floating around as a usage early on, but the features were killed.
Which features? Looks like (arithmetic, not bitwise) AND/OR/NOT are supported, I'm not an expert but it seems like this could be do-able. I'll have to think about this more maybe I'm missing something.
Liquidity is the most important property of the cryptocurrency. Faster transactions, anonymity or lower fees hardly matter if there are no places where I can spend the currency. Or if I sell services with it, there are no customers willing to pay.
It is a huge chicken-and-egg problem, but looks like Bitcoin has solved it at least some level, since it is accepted on quite many places. We might start seeing services and merchants adopting other cryptocurrencies as well, but currently those alternatives don't seem that widely adopted.
A few of us in my office bought several years ago. It went up 50% and then dropped dramatically. We've talked about how seeing it drop and then forgetting about it for a few years probably stopped us from bailing whenever it's peaked and trough-ed since.
I sold a fair number of bitcoin early on (30-50 IIRC) for a few dollars a piece. I feel like it was the right call at the time (paid for a new graphics card and a few nights out, and a few economics students with whom I was friends and I expected it to bubble and crash completely -- which it mostly did, then has repeatedly rallied after that), but the feeling of "What could have been" comes on every now and again.
eh, i sold my 250btc at the hugely inflated price of $20, made out like a bandit i did (bought at $4)! even got my cash out of mtgox before it imploded. a regular uncle moneybags i am!
For what its worth, if you tried to cash out $800k today I think it would take some time to clear. The paper value of Bitcoins is grossly inflated over the actual market cap. It's a natural reaction to the inherently deflationary nature of the currency, everybody wants to hold on to them because they're only going up! This restricts supply and causes the prices to go up even more. Unless you can buy goods and services (more than drugs and burritos) with Bitcoin directly the wealth is a fantasy.
I’ve never cleared that amount of money on an exchange. For ~1M and above you use OTC a brokers. You have brokers in the US that can transfer you $20M per day without impacting the market in the short term. That’s how big ICOs liquidate their crypto millions.
Only governments can tame this beast now, way too big and too rich for any startup.
I noticed several chrome instances running on "Task manager" almost all the time. Used Chrome maybe months ago. So I uninstalled. Who knows what they were doing, collecting. I trust them as much as I (would) trust a hustler on the old 42nd street
yeah. I decided to avoid chrome at all costs when noticed that when you install chrome and have firefox already installed , chrome automatically without user’s acknowledgement installs some mysterious google plugin which does not sure what. To verify it , I reproduced same scenario again and plugin was installed again. After that I uninstalled chrome and avoid google products as much as possible.
You better back that up with additional data, because for now it sounds unbelievable. When was this, what OS, which Chrome version, were you able to replicate on a clean install, what was the name and version of the Google plugin, and put a few screenshots on imgur too.
This is interesting. Could you share more information about your setup: What operating system you use, Order of browser installation, and the name/id of the plugin would be a good start.
It would be even greater if you could upload a zip archive of the plugin.
to reply to subcomments: I will try to reproduce it soon, meanwhile read this thread [1]. I don't remember exact plugin name, so cannot say this is identical to my situation but still it proves that Google installs Firefox plugins without user's acknowledgement and should not be related with Firefox in any way.
Or rather, because people can't be trusted to update their browsers and turn their machines into a danger to themselves and others. No need for assuming malice.
But then, maybe, that's the price we pay for convenience.