What could possibly go wrong….
“With long-duration debt securities, money isn’t lost in the case of rising interest rates as long as the bond is held to maturity (and not defaulted upon), but in the case of Silvergate, fleeing deposits forced the firm to realize the unrealized losses on their securities portfolio — a nightmare for a fractionally reserved institution.”
Not your keys….
"We will continue to use every tool we can to maximize recoveries for FTX customers and creditors,” stated John J. Ray III, CEO and Chief Restructuring Officer of the FTX Debtors. “Our goal is to unlock value that we believe is currently being suppressed by Grayscale's self-dealing and improper redemption ban. FTX customers and creditors will benefit from additional recoveries, along with other Grayscale Trust investors that are being harmed by Grayscale's actions.”
“…every energy source has tradeoffs between environmental footprint, reliability and capital and operating costs…”
Yes, but some people work really hard to make things worse….#[2]
“What are the incentives that will lead pools to adopt Stratum V2? What will lead them to voluntarily choose to lose control over block construction?
“The other two fundamental characteristics of the Stratum V2 protocol: security and performance,” answered Vernetti.
“Security: unlike Stratum V1, Stratum V2 is an encrypted protocol. It does not allow the hash-rate-hijacking attacks that are possible today. In these attacks, the hacker gets in the way of communication between the miner and the mining pool, takes the proof of work that the miner produces and pretends to be the author of those proofs, instructing the pool to send the reward to him. This cannot happen with Stratum V2 because the communication is encrypted and therefore the proof of work provided by the miner to the pool is not visible to outside observers. This is the first incentive: with such security, the pool can attract more miners than those that do not offer this guarantee.
“Performance: the communication between miner and mining pool in Stratum V1 is human readable, it is in ASCII code. In Stratum V2, on the other hand, communication is completely in binary code. This small factor increases performance because the conversion time from human readable character to binary is saved, so more packets of information can be transmitted in a given time frame than in Stratum V1. This is important because being able to provide more proof of work can be decisive in winning the race to write the block. Improved performance is a competitive advantage.””
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Stories From Tomorrow: exploring new technology through useful fiction
“Introduction
Dstl provides the science inside UK defence and security and creates generation after next technology.
It is vital in this endeavour to look beyond the horizon at the threats and opportunities that various futures may present.
The world-class teams at Dstl work with the top minds from across military, academia, industry … and now science fiction.
The writers of this genre have been years ahead of their time in predicting the modern world around us from the internet and mobile phones to the electric submarine and driverless cars.
Defence needs to harness the creativity and vision of this sector to further stimulate foresight and innovation to develop agile and resilient solutions for the future.
Thinking the unimaginable is simply a day in the office for these talented sci-fi writers … who wouldn’t want to hear what people like that have to say?
I am sure you will find their stories enthralling and inspirational.
Professor Dame Angela McLean - Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence”
“Going forward, if a meaningful portion of the economy shifts towards peer-to-peer global gig work, and money and information in general become more encrypted and private, and money is able to be self-custodied and moved around globally, then what does that mean for governments' ability to audit incomes and impose taxation on those incomes at the individual level? Such auditing and assessment could become much more expensive, and for sophisticated users, potentially becomes impossible.
One perspective would be that governments simply have to change their patterns of taxation over time, if indeed bottom-up open-source distributed privacy technology and open monetary/information networks become more widespread.”
“Last year, a young Saudi woman and mother of two children, who was a student at Leeds University in the UK, was arrested when she returned home to Saudi Arabia and sentenced to 34 years in prison. Her crime was that she followed and retweeted various activists on Twitter, while she was in the UK. A coupled of months later, a 72-year-old Saudi-American dual citizen living in the United States was arrested and sentenced to 16 years in prison when he returned to Saudi Arabia for what was supposed to be a brief trip. His crime was that he tweeted critically about the Saudi regime while in the United States.”
“In 2013, a U.S. National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden leaked information to journalists that revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance capabilities extended far beyond what was previously known to the public. Specifically, the NSA was revealed to be able to directly tap into the systems of major telecommunications providers and large corporate software platforms to continually harvest information.
In one of the original reports on the leak, the Guardian revealed:
“The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple, and other US internet giants, according to a top-secret document obtained by the Guardian.
The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.””
“The combination of an open monetary network and an open information network is pretty interesting. Programmable bearer asset money can move around frictionlessly across borders, and between platforms. Platforms can be interoperable with each other without directly working with each other to make it happen, simply because they are interfacing with the same underlying protocols. Server operators can be incentivized to maintain and enhance an information network via microtransactions.
A set of protocols that globally connect people in terms of identity, information, and value can reduce a lot of frictions and create a lot of new opportunities.”
“Bitcoin is like a big decentralized spreadsheet that the world comes to an agreement on every ten minutes, using energy from miners and the rules enforced by the user-run node network as its arbiters of truth. This is an expensive process, but a valuable one that isn’t solved by other means.”
“A nice attribute of this model is that if someone has a really good idea for a new type of social media platform, they don’t have to worry about network effects. They can create a new experience, meaning a new client interface, connect it right into the Nostr protocol, and make it interoperable right from the start with every other Nostr user across existing clients. They can make use of the existing network effect, in a similar way that any new browser or new email provider makes use of the extensive network effect that already exists for those protocols.”
“India, as a very large but relatively mild example, has established a track record of telling Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms to remove information that is unfavorable to their current administration, and those platforms comply. In many countries that are more restrictive, social media platforms are completely controlled or banned, leaving their population in the dark and disconnected from the rest of the world.”
https://www.swanbitcoin.com/the-implications-of-open-monetary-and-information-networks/
“A middle-ground method that seems to be beginning to work at scale is the idea of distributed servers or “relays”. In this model, not every user has to run a server, but individual servers are relatively easy to run, are financially incentivized to be run, and are therefore numerous enough that there is no way to control or censor the network. The result is a rather decentralized web of servers that connect to each other, and users that connect to them.
A good example of this is Nostr.”
“India, as a very large but relatively mild example, has established a track record of telling Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms to remove information that is unfavorable to their current administration, and those platforms comply. In many countries that are more restrictive, social media platforms are completely controlled or banned, leaving their population in the dark and disconnected from the rest of the world.”
https://www.swanbitcoin.com/the-implications-of-open-monetary-and-information-networks/
“Propaganda is the one thing governments tend to be good at because that's how those in power got into power in the first place.”
“Taking away bank accounts is a relatively cheap way for governments to defund their opposition. Many human rights activists around the world have felt the choking hand of government constriction over their money.”