If we both join set up accounts at a regular bank like RBC, we can exchange $1B for free.
The point I'm making is that fees are not bitcoin's strong point. Any financial network can undercut it. What is unique about bitcoin is that not everyone can get an account at RBC, but anyone can join the more expensive bitcoin network.
If somebody breaches your Canadian bank account you get your money back. If somebody steals your money from your bitcoin wallet you start all over again.
Let me give you an example which I know exists: EU airliner buys an airplane at Boeing. How do you transfer the money?
This is how they do it today: They are at Boeing where the transfer needs to go through. The money needs to be transferred then and there. So airliner calls their bank to transfer the money. But there is a 9 hour difference, so they need to wait when EU bank opens, but before the US bank closes. Call the bank, transfer first to UK bank (I can't remember why they had to do this :(), confirm money is there. Then transfer from UK to US, confirm that the money is there. This all before the US bank closes of course. Very cumbersome and James Bond like.
And I'm not an expert in international money transfers, but I'm guessing it's not 0.
As for the transfers themselves, they are typically free. You’re such a big customer to the bank, and so is the recipient to their bank, that the banks are earning their money without taking transfer fees.
The most important part, and the reason things like bitcoin will never replace old school banking, is that you can roll the money back or cancel if you decide to walk away from the deal like Norwegian just did for 90something Boeing aircraft that they can no longer afford because of corona. Sure you’ll spend a few years in legal, but that’s besides the point.
When you buy a plane, perhaps you have already payed months ahead, perhaps you'll pay five years later, perhaps you pay on a monthly basis, perhaps you don't pay at all but transfer the rights do to something
it is all contractual obligations, sometimes money does not even trade hands
etc.
the idea that you would need to wait for a bank to open to transfer money while watching the timezones is completely unrealistic
$50 + a few basis point spread if using a different currency, but you don't know exactly what that spread will be from the sending bank and what the spread will be at the receiving bank, so you can lose anywhere from .001% to 4% with major currencies.
Do have any proof of this claim or is it extrapolated from the fees for sending $200 to another RBC account?
Source: I've worked in banking and seen this even on the personal level (not at the $1B level of course).
I mean if I transferred a billion and my bank made a mistake, I would not lose any money. Make a typo in your bitcoin transaction, and you're screwed.
I think that they are making the point that they actually are free of charge. Fees for moving money at banks are negligible. They might not actually be entirely free, but wire transfer fees are ~$20, and I've moved a million dollars this way before. I don't know if there's much of a difference between a million and a billion in this context.
Not really, bitcoin addresses have checksums.
And, barring a collusion of miners, virtually noone could have prevented or reverted that transaction.
Now if you're trying to avoid income tax or something like that that's a different question, but then using Bitcoin doesn't magically make that disappear either.
Cryptocurrency's obsession with fees is baffling. Fees are not why moving money is hard.
Satoshi intended for bitcoin to scale to hundreds of millions of transactions, all paying sub cent fees. All those fees would add up to millions of dollars per day. The fees are what secure the chain when the block reward runs out. Around 2014/2015 some devs who worked with blockstream started campaigning to keep the block size limit at 1mb. They succeeded and now bitcoin can only process an average of 350k transactions per day.
In order to provide the same financial incentive to miners when the block reward gets too small to matter, the minimum fee on the network will need to be $25 per transaction.
But ye, horray, this whale got to send big cash for a "low fee"
Running a full node is the only way to assure the integrity of the currency. Increasing the block size decreases the number of people that run full nodes. It's obvious to anyone who works on Bitcoin that a linear increase to blocksize can never scale, while maintaining an open and decentralized environment.
The fun bit is that the signer can backdoor transactions, and that part isn't something that can be verified by anybody who doesn't have the private keys.
Can you explain this? This is contrary to my knowledge of reviewing the details of a pre-signed transaction.
And if you fat-fingered the transaction, you could have transferred $0.48 for $1B in fees with no way to reverse that.
2. In all likelihood this is someone manually crafting a transaction. It's not going to happen to your typical user (eg. your granny). A better analogy to this situation would be someone's trading bot going awry and losing thousands/millions on the market.
https://learnmeabitcoin.com/guide/checksum
The thing to be really aware about is insidious malware that detects valid bitcoin addresses being copied and modifies them in place, sometimes even to the point of including the same first/last alphanumerics to a certain degree.
You'd hopefully be using a bootable linux distro and multisig for transferring such amounts.
But, bitcoin is free of oversight or centralized control, which was the exact point of the system.
Yeah I’d rather have bitcoin. Bitcoin removes the need for banks altogether. I don’t want the banks and government in control of my money.
High fees are, in fact, part of the security model. The reward for "mining" a block will eventually dry up, so "miners" will be funded more and more by fees. Unless people are paying billions of dollars a year in fees, the financial incentive for "miners" will be too small to protect from bad actors.
Bitcoin can only have low fees if it both remains unpopular and dies before the block rewards dry up. Recommending Bitcoin because of its low fees is trying to sell it by predicting its failure.
Now if they can hammer out the volatility, figure out a simple UX, encourage adoption at most places of business, and increase trust in exchanges for USD conversions, I'm on board.
Maybe it's different for higher amounts of money, but it doesn't matter.
Bitcoin is a solution to a problem nobody has figured out yet.
We have a rough idea of which coins belong to Satoshi, based on when and how they were mined.
Satoshi's coins are continuously monitored and have never moved.
Edit: A lot of people here are saying "I do not pay for it so it is free". Just because you don't pay does not mean it is free for everyone. The law just states that fees must be the same for domestic and EU transfers, not that the transfer is free and, there are countless examples of regions where there are no banks that charge nothing (especially regions where a lot of intra-EU immigrants come from).
If your bank is charging differently for transfers to euro denominated accounts in other countries, complain to the regulator. This isn't allowed.
If it was an efficient way to cut on fees, everyone would do it. Yet almost nobody does.
Making capital transfers easy while restricting the movement of real people ghettoizes and traps people for corporate convenience and cost savings.
Capital doesn't put a drain on the social welfare systems of the country you're sending it to.
And I'm definitely not saying that the current generation of crypto has figured this problem out, but I am hopeful for the sake of SMB that they won't always have to pay 3% fees on cashless transactions.
Want to order food online? That’ll be 30% on top of your order, please.
Oh, you wanted to pay for some bits through our app on your iPhone? Apple will take 30% of that too, thank you very much.
We just switched HOA management companies and they had the audacity to charge a three dollar convenience fee if you pay your bill online! So I will just continue to pay via paper check and make life miserable for them because that incurs no fee.
All I see is hypocrisy and more hands in my pocket wanting my money, not less.
Filecoin (the currency) exists on top but is completely independent and unnecessary to make use of the underlying utility of IPFS.
While bitcoin is a bit of a monolith even it has utility beyond currency as you can write information along with your transactions. An example is [ION][1] an identity service pegging state to transactions wiring to the blockchain and so long as bitcoin holds value you can have high certainty this information will not go away or be modified.
There are trade-offs to everything but often the benefit of crypto projects is lost when they’re viewed as currency rather than utility. Look at the forest not the trees.
[1]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-active-director...
Rich people don't have to care about a 20$ fee. Poor people do though.
So stop caring and move on to whatever it is you want to do with your life.
Doesn't completely de-anonymize you but it does reduce the set of people who have uniquely identifiable information to 1
Anonymity - the quality of the user being unknown
Privacy - the quality of the user's actions being unobserved
Authenticity- the quality of the user's actions being certainly the user's
Bitcoin provides pseudonymous transactions, which may approach anonymity if the user is careful. It does not provide true privacy as all transactions are public. But the purpose of the transactions is not communicated, though may be inferred if the parties are identified. If I transfer $20 in BTC to a pizza joint, you can guess that I bought a pizza, but it's just a (well-founded) guess. It provides a high degree of authenticity in that it is a hard problem (in the mathematical sense, unless your keys have been obtained by an adversary) to fake a transaction.
We're having a discussion about an unknown account - which may or may not be an individual person - moving specific amounts of money around anonymously, not privately.
I get what you mean, the transaction is public, but that's the point of bitcoin / cryptocurrencies.
Your house has to be registered to someone and you have to declare who lives in it, if it's yours.
Anonymity is not about being a private person.
Yes, miners can read the metadata of a transaction, in transfers that includes the amount being moved, miners do not care about that.
It is important to understand that "transactions" in this context is the same as a database transaction. There are many kind of transactions, some of which include the movement of bitcoin from one address to another.
(Seems I need to review bitcoin transaction mining. Suggestions for a good resource on that?)
The transaction fee isn't set by the amount but the size (a large and small number take the same space). A larger transaction can for example be created by combining many inputs (spending from multiple addresses in a single transaction).
The fee isn't set by miners, but by the user who makes the transaction. If there's competition in the block, which there usually is in Bitoin, then you need to guess a large enough fee and if you get it wrong your transaction can get stuck and not confirm for a while.
Transaction value is known to everyone, which is one of the whole primary points of Bitcoin.
Well, that depends. If there is extra space in blocks, then yes the fees tend towards zero (or very low costs, at least, zero is not exactly accurate, even in cases where there is extra block space)
If blocks are "full" and there is more demand for this space, than there is extra space, then they do not tend towards zero, as transactors are bidding on a limited supply of space.
So you are in the airline industry? You know first hand how airliners buy airplanes. Please explain to me how it happens at your end.
Because what I explained is first hand knowledge on how it actually works (this was a Boeing 787 Dreamliner)
You assume, I know.
Except for the fact that this is exactly how it works today.
So you are in the airline industry? You know first hand how airliners buy airplanes. Please explain to me how it happens at your end.
Because what I explained is first hand knowledge on how it actually works. (Boeing 787 Dreamliner)
You assume, I know.
Another method is to use cryptographic proofs to demonstrate the validity of a blockchain state. A lot of newer projects are taking this approach, such as the project I work on, Mir Protocol.
Granted, it doesn't seem like a realistic option for Bitcoin. The community doesn't seem very open to major protocol changes, and even if it were, cryptographic proofs for Bitcoin might be prohibitively expensive since the protocol wasn't designed with that in mind.
where is the evidence for this? complete bullshit. How much fewer people would run a full node if the block size was increased from 1mb to 2mb?
That's right.
An "on-us" transaction, one that simply requires RBC to update its database by debiting funds from RBC customer A and crediting them to RBC customer B, is free. (If your bank is charging you for that, switch banks!).
A wire transfer is more complex than an "on-us" transfer because it involves two bank database. RBC has to debit its database, and Bank of Montreal has to credit its database, and the central bank is usually involved as an intermediary. This often involves a wire transfer fee.
There's a billion dollars difference between a million and a billion. You can't just plop a billion dollars into your checking account. It's part of a hugely complex context (how would you even accumulate a billion dollars to deposit?)
1k transactions and even 1k * 1k transactions are so small relative to this amount that the GP’s point still stands. This is not a very useful way of storing the value.
Also, even the fact that we're discussing the existence of this transaction implies that Bitcoin is not anonymous.
There’s no way it’s then suddenly a cost effective way for normal currency billionaires to move money around. Converting that amount to BTC would require serious fees and resources.
So this point is largely moot to any wider discussion.
In India and Australia, the banks just use the account number not the name. If you screw that up its completely your fault. The bank might help but its not obligated to do so since you accepted these terms and conditions.
But for reference, in today's market you could expect to be able to negotiate a 1-2% spread in converting $1Bn in bitcoin to US Dollars. It would have to be multiple orders throughout the day as an OTC dealer will quote on price for $100m and a different price for $1bn.
Block orders in the bitcoin OTC market often has more daily volume than the lit market on exchanges. Similar to other commodities markets.
I was trying to see which is cheaper for the use case of "I hold USD in the US, I want to spend it locally as HKD in Hong Kong", which I think is what pbhjpbhj is asking.
It exactly matches the spot FX rate that I would see on my broker's terminals.
Transferwise has not been better for me, except to easily allow me to have Euro bank accounts as an American.
This is only detectable if you have multiple signers signing the same transaction using the same private key and the same method for generating the nonce, and you compare them before broadcasting. So perhaps using hardware wallets from 3 manufacturers which all implement bit-identical implementations of the signer (with RFC6070 deterministic signatures), and treating the signed transaction as a private key leak until you've verified they all match.
For ECDSA a single bit bias in the nonce, or a single bit leakage of the nonce through other methods is enough to completely break the cryptography. So we could have hardware wallets that produce otherwise impeccable transactions and signatures, but leak a bit of the nonce in the ordering of the outputs, the lock time, the sequence numbers, and that would still be enough to steal all of the funds.
This stuff is trickier to get right than most people imagine.
Regardless, whatever job you have where what you've said is a legitimate threat model sounds like the most interesting job in the space.
Canada’s banking industry avoided the Great Recession only because Canada did not have a housing market reset. Prices continued upward unabated, along with household debt which is now among the highest in the world. They kicked the can down the road, but didn’t avoid the issue permanently.
If a Canadian bank runs off with your money you have an actual entity to pursue in court. With Bitcoin you're pretty much SOL.
The CDIC insured limit is not money to be reimbursed by the bank, it's by the CDIC in case of bank failure. There are other avenues to take first to recover your funds.
Canadian banks are stable because our regulators do not allow them to assume as much risk as banks in other jurisdictions.
Want a mortgage at the current rate? Great you must qualify at 2% points higher.
Canada has some of the highest banking fees.
Them being visible seems to raise interesting attacks, such as an individual being doxed and then unable to have their transaction verified/accepted.
A sibling comment suggests Monero have addressed this.
Edit: If 51% agree not to process any transactions for accounts holding >$1M worth of Btc can they steal financial value? Like a stock buyback but you pay zero to the holder and get the stock anyway.
You have some fundamental misunderstandings in how bitcoin and bitcoin mining work. I'd suggest reading up on one of the links a sibling comment posted.
1) Those processing transactions know which wallet they belong to before they choose to process it (this was the surprise to me presented here).
2) Wallets can be linked to people as the blockchain shows wallet holding value and transactions. (State actors can probably correlate with bank transactions; people in general can learn 'oh John Doe bought pizza from me using that wallet').
Appreciated.
B) The "target" bank can still charge you independently of your bank.
E.g. (and I do this kind of transfer very very often so I am 100% sure it is so and I am also 100% sure this is legal): A transfer from Germany to Germany is free. A transfer from Germany to Greece is not as the Greek bank charges a fee.
Plenty of people regularly do cross-border SEPA transfers for free. I do, and I'm not even in the EU/Eurozone.
the cost is 100% tied to liquidity of that market. the bigger and deeper the market, the lower the transaction cost.
It is more likely that HKD's bitcoin market would be less liquid than USD's bitcoin market, so you would want your bank in Hong Kong to accept a USD deposit from a local OTC broker, and then convert to HKD at that point if you wanted or needed it.
Is that a good idea? I'm not sure, and apparently enough EU states weren't sure that this never got past Council.
But even if it's a great idea and gets implemented it doesn't care about moving money from one account to another itself which is all we're talking about here.
Sales or gift taxes could apply. So could import /export taxes depending on the endpoints. Could it appear as income/gains to one party or another? etc...
of course it can often be structured to avoid such taxes, but it requires forethought.
I wouldn't even think of making a $multi-million move without first consulting a very high end attorney in the appropriate field.
But that is off-topic - the topic is anonymous transfer for unspecified reasons.
Even transferring between two accounts of different businesses you own can generate SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports) at $5K level. Even multiple deposits of a few $thousand in cash will draw attention & be subject to confiscation if you don't have a solid & documented explanation, such as running a big & legitimate cash business.
I don't think this is true in every jurisdiction. You can certainly have a property registered under a corporate entity, and there are jurisdictions in the US that allow for anonymous corporate ownership. Further, I'm not aware of any requirement where you must declare who is residing in a property. I've had family members from abroad reside in my house for over a year without informing any authorities, for example.
I'm not from US. I don't know the technicalities, in Italy for example you should declare who's residing in your house, even if it's a no paying guest
Many don't, but it's still a requirement
BTW the point was anonymity is not about being anti social, it's about hiding your true identity
If you stay home and never talk to anybody you're being secretive, but probably are not anonymous (police can still come and knock at your door because neighbors called then since you came in and never went out, for example)
If you have tons of illegal money it's not the worst thing to live in a ~~ 'moldy' apartment and eat SCSI every day and know that you _really_ have a __ton__ ___of___ ____money____
Learn to be a criminal, theoretically of course
They are gangsters
I'm sure it's one of those tasks that'll cost a lot more than all the available energy in the universe kinda scale though.
I just looked it up but I couldn't find anything saying as much... only that sparkpool kept it aside in case the owner comes forward?
>In short, the researchers claim that the hackers have gained access to an exchange’s funds. They are able to send money to certain whitelisted accounts that are marked as reliable in the exchange’s database to—but not to their own. So, they are sending the funds with excessively high transaction fees to sap the exchange’s accounts, and they’re demanding a ransom if it’s going to stop.
Typically I will begin placing an order with two OTC desks at the same time, while also looking at exchange order books. I game the brokers against each other.
If it is a smaller order (5 - 6 figures) I will compare Coinbase Pro's fees with whatever my OTC desk is telling me. OTC has to be less than Coinbase Pro.
So thats how I pretty much guarantee a less than 1% fee.
$1bn = multiple OTC desks and multiple orders. The bitcoin market is much deeper than people think and gets deeper every day.
Try sending $1B around the world to your Nigerian uncle and seeing what happens.
Nothing they can do to stop that.
I'm sad that I have to inform you that the emails you've been getting aren't actually real
The need to move such funds anonymously is usually due to illegal activities, money laundering, or at least tax evasion (evasion, not avoidance).
This leaves every average person at the very least, on the hook to pay for those taxes evaded, or lacking the services they would have provided.
If the need is due to criminality beyond tax evasion, every average person suffers the corrosive effect of that criminal activity (e.g., while I'm for most drug legalization, I can't begin to argue that organized criminal drug distribution is anything but a massive destructive tax on society - & in fact, a main point of legalization is to eliminate that corrosive costs of gangs).
So, the average person is definitely worse off with the existence of an ability to move & billions anonymously.
(edit: avoided/evaded)
2013 called and wants its arguments back
And bank adoption hasn’t been exactly smooth so far either: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockchain-ripple-idUSKBN...
Thanks for the link!
The issue is that these two can’t be filled by the same instrument effectively. Currencies need to be stable and predictable, nobody wants to discover that their paycheck has suddenly halved in value. They can inflate, but they should do that in a slow and steady manner so wages can keep up. On the other hand you want some volatility in your speculative instruments, as without volatility there’s no real opportunity to earn a profit and grow your net worth.
If something tries to be both, the results are disappointing. Either there’s no enough volatility to make traders happy, or there’s enough volatility to expose laborers or payment processors (depending on use case) to purchasing power shocks or conversion rate risks.
Unfortunately, it’s my belief that bitcoin maintains a lot of its value by trying to continually bring in new suckers (sorry, investors) in order to keep demand high without significant use cases. This kind of continual recruitment process is both fascinating, and really ruins bitcoin for anyone who wanted to use it for non-speculative purposes.
I'm not too upset it's harder to qualify for a mortgage here because it saved us from getting hit even harder ten years ago.
I've been banking for about 15 years and never had much to complain about. Sometimes I get an NSF fee from TD, I just call them and they reverse it as a 'one-time courtesy.' I've lost count of how many times I've done that and they've never said no. My credit card has no yearly fee and I pay $15 a month for my chequing account with unlimited transactions and E-transfers. You can go cheaper but I use debit and e-Transfer a lot. That's the sum of my personal banking fees.
For my business account I use FirstOntario's eChequing account with no monthly fee. Only thing I ever pay on this account is a $1.50 e-Transfer fee when I pay myself or others. I did have to buy shares when I opened the account as it's a credit union but they were only $25. The shares have appreciated by $10 in the few years I've had the account so I'm not complaining.
Really not that bad for me. What's your situation?
English has so many words that depend on context. Polish? An act or cleaning or a people..
Context matters...
Many have speculated he may be a time traveler, although they don't give any reason. The only thing I can think of is he possibly traveled back in time after witnessing a massive economic downturn that had people eating rats off the street and an even further (much more serious) dichotomy of rich and poor. Bitcoin could level the playing field stopping banks from having nearly full monopoly of your money.
What stops you from doing day-to-day banking in Greece using a German account? That's kinda the whole point of the Euro.
Besides that, this is not the point of the conversation. The original comment compared SEPA to Bitcoin, saying that SEPA is better since it is free. It is not. There is no law that mandates it to be free and it is de facto not free everywhere (it might be for your use case but not for everyone). It is many times a lot more expensive than Bitcoin. If I also elect to not transact with Greek bank accounts, I exclude 99.9% of the Greek economy since I have no influence on what kind of account my counterpart has.
Of course you are! Have you never heard of N26? And even some traditional banks will happily have you as a non-resident customer.
I fall into that category.
Most people I know, and they aren't rich tax avoiders would also fall into that category.
Cryptocurrency liberates everyone in so many ways. And yes it liberates criminals as well. But hey are know how to dodge the system anyway.
Other than small-scale tax evasion or nefarious activities, what use cases are you advocating?
I also used to be pretty excited about the potential for crypto currencies, still think it may have some, but the security overhead, value volatility, & scalability issues have pretty much rendered it less useful than cash or (ugh) ACH-based services like Venmo, Google Pay, etc., ir just credit cards.
Also, you're not addressing losses of tax evasion - one tax evader failing to pay $1B in taxes means a million people need to pay an extra $1000 to make up for his crime. Not victimless.
the escrow service would be one party of the multisignature transaction. no party can move the funds on their own. you are moving an arbiter to the point of transaction, instead of after a transaction doesn't go as planned.
The border was controlled by corrupt Russian guards that would steal things of value. You could pass the border occasionally to visit family on the other side, but it was risky to take anything.
He put all his wealth into bitcoin, memorized his wallet seed words like his life depended on it, crossed the border with nothing, and then regenerated his wallet on the other side.
I thought that was pretty cool.
I.e. to use an exchange like binance or coinbase, I have to link my US ID. So if a government actor were after me, they could easily find out about my cold wallet by viewing my transactions, no?. I guess I could -not- divulge the seed words, but that's assuming I'm not being accosted/tortured either.
I would have to use a btc atm (none near me...), swap a visa gift card for btc (and take a ~10-20% haircut...) or find someone to trade cash for coins, which is its own issue.
You're not always able to do that with the traditional banking system. Scammers were able to steal millions from corporations using wire transfers, and they weren't able to reverse them.
If you have a billion dollars, you have very little incentive to work outside the system. The system will work for you.
Insurance in this example has two functions:
1. Protecting you from losses
2. Applying standards to Bitcoin exchanges etc to help prevent losses. A good example of this is fire insurance. An insurance company will require a potential customer to have fire alarms, use specific materials etc before they decide to cover that company's building.
Then the insurance is really cheap... Either the insurance companies systems stay secure and there are no losses, or the insurance company is breached, and they claim bankruptcy...
Deutsche Bank is well known for offering accounts to non-residents. Pretty much any Sparkasse will open an account for you if you walk in even without a German address.
The list of banks that don't offer accounts to non-residents is probably shorter than the other. Granted, these are mostly the ones with the best offers.
I’m all for avoiding nationalistic dog whistles when discussing things, but both China and Russia have rightfully earned their places as bad actors on the internet.
They just compromised a bunch of random computers in China and Russia, running an old copy of Windows XP, and built themselves a botnet.
What further evidence do you have, other than an IP address?
Image the following comment: "You better buy a good bike lock, else you're at risk of having it stolen by a black man."
A comment like the one above would spark near universal outrage at the commenter, and with good reason. It's racist, and the original comment here is the same. Unnecessarily racist.
That's not flavor.
Example: https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2018/05/24/central-florida...
I'm more highlighting that both crypto and traditional banking are similar in the transfer mechanism than saying banks should be held liable.
To be fair, debit cards and wire transfers have a similar issue. However there are still ways to get your money back in some situations.
Your coins have been transfered to Mr Evil in block number 6000.
Simply publish a transaction which pays your $1B in bitcoins to another address you control with a $200M transaction fee.
Any rational miner who sees this will decide to 'undo' Mr Evils transaction and all that occur after it by acting as if those transactions don't exist. They will mine your new transaction as part of a new block number 6000, and pocket the $200M for themselves. However, they will need to make sure their block number 6000 remains part of the chain.
By the time they've done this, block number 6001 and 6002 have been mined on top of Mr Evils transaction in block 6000. That means someone must mine block 6001 and 6002 again, at significant computatonal cost. To do that, the miner who mined the new block 6000 can incentivise others to work on top of their block by paying the 200M to themselves, but again with a big fee.
The above only works if all miners are rational, and have coded this strategy into their mining pools. Are there examples of this happening in practice? (There will be public evidence of it in the blockchain).
If you think that a bank transfer has less risk, you are not looking in all the right places :)
That's why the total "hash rate" (the computational effort spent by all the participating miners) is in direct relation to the perceived value of the currency.
Personally, given that the Chinese will likely dominate the world over the course of the next century, I'd be less worried about insults for ethical/antiracism reasons (they're going to be the ascendant ethnicity and culture soon, don't worry- they'll be fine!) and more worried about insulting them or the PRC for reasons of self-preservation.
Whiiiiich of course assume that that's homogeneous, which, obviously, it isn't. Just like "Western morals" aren't (I'm trying to be good faith in parsing that and I can't figure out what you mean by western morals).
So when you say "The Chinese will be the ascendant ethnicity and culture," do you mean the rural American scapegoat? Aka, chopsticks, epicanthic folds, and Simplified Chinese? I could see how that could be the meat and potatoes of the argument, because even if what that actually ends up meaning in reality is that though a separatist Democratic movement overthrows the CCP, the (future) USA populist government successfully redefines the Chinese Threat to include this completely different political structure to fall under the umbrella of "Chinese," which society has allowed to mean what I'm arguing we should prevent it to mean.
I can say where you're completely wrong - it's not mildly humorous to find me in this position. It's fucking hilarious. Of all political considerations on earth nothing heats my blood more than the evils of Xi Jinping and the tyrannical PRC regime. They are bullies, they violate human rights, and they should be overthrown. I have to balance this against my love of all the good things that Chinese culture brings to the table, just by nature of being a bunch of humans with a rich ancestral background forming their language, food, traditions, etc. And by Chinese I again refer to that concept vague even in any of the languages that adopted the Chinese writing system.
As such, a more accurate comparison than "black man stealing a bike" would be to something like a "Nigerian scammer," which is an archetype I don't think most of us have a problem with. Other examples I never see complaints about: "Russian hacker," "American imperialist," etc.
This isn't really true on it's own, and besides, isn't even a good faith interpretation. In an America where rural Asian-ethnicity people are facing discrimination because of covid being called "Chinese Virus," I think it's bold to claim that the concept of China as a country and Chinese as a racial heritage are not conflated.
How is this not true? Genuinely curious.
> In an America where rural Asian-ethnicity people are facing discrimination because of covid being called "Chinese Virus…"
That's because of the specific context of who is saying "Chinese Virus," who their audience is, and why they're saying it.
This context is different. Nobody on Hacker News who encounters the phrase "Chinese hacker" is going to suddenly start discriminating against Chinese people, any more than we discriminate against Nigerians despite the fact that "Nigerian scammer" is a cliche in tech circles.
IMO, if one can't make the point that something shouldn't be said without inaccurately labeling it as racism, then one shouldn't make the point. The only thing they're accomplishing is watering down the negative connotations of racism.
Add that to the fact that there are of course bad actors in countries including the US who happen to have proxies in other countries. Geolocating the IP address tells us nothing.
The largest botnets came from a variety of nationalities and are rarely Chinese. Conficker was allegedly from the Ukraine, and a Swede plead guilty. Alureon came from Estonia. Mariposa from spain.
Stop with the emotionally-charged flame baiting based on shallow data and anecdotal information.
Geolocating the origination points of an exploit is extremely useful. Your point of other countries using proxies being the prime reason. The simple fact is if China and Russia wanted to limit the number of attacks originating from their IP blocks they could do so. Since they more or less allow it to continue they are a common source of malicious traffic, and geo blocking will significantly reduce the number of attempted exploits you experience.
The crime is hacking, and your attempts to “expose” Chinese hackers is more like an agenda to prejudice Chinese even if statistically many Chinese-originated traffic is attempting to hack you.
In the chance that the hacking is actually caused by American hackers routing their traffic through China, then what purpose does your Chinese assumption serve except to encourage others to profile and prejudice Chinese?
In a more realistic example of how your comments may incite racial prejudice for no good reason is that it is actually very likely the biggest botnets have Chinese victims (because they are poor, run Windows XP still, and generally have very poor internet security practices). Oh, and also they happen to have the most people on Earth, so statistically any given thing would be mostly Chinese.
So, unless you are absolutely certain that being Chinese makes you a criminal hacker I would recommend leaving race or nationality out of the discussion.
These are archetypes, i.e. popularly associated examples of particular actions. But I'm not sure if they're full-blown stereotypes, where they get over-applied to members of that group. People don't believe that all Chinese and Russians are hackers, that all Nigerians are email scammers, that all Mexicans are drug overlords, etc.
Stereotypes tend to be more insidious. Many people (in America) do believe that Blacks and Mexicans are criminals, that Chinese are great at math, etc., to the degree that it changes how they actually treat people. So I think these are much worse and shouldn't be equated.
That said, despite the above analysis, I can see how being Chinese you would still cringe when you see the phrase "Chinese hacker" being used casually. I'm an ethnic minority and have felt similarly in similar situations.
So if that is true then the viewpoint of blaming it on Chinese becomes nonsensical and also wrong. So given that there is reasonable doubt, is it right to attribute this "being a hacker" to having anything to do with being Chinese in any way?
"Black" refers to an ethnicity of a given group of people. Or their skin color, if you want things simple.
These are non-interchangeable terms, so by asking to switch them you are indicating they are interchangeable. You are doing this because you think it's important to keep people from blaming an individual based on group membership.
Yet, it remains that the CPC is something else beyond a person, a culture or a people. Defending it is irrational, but maybe people want to stand up for something important to them and think that defending everything's right to exist and speak its mind is more important than existence itself.
That being said, see my other replies on how the OP's assumptions may very likely be wrong, and attributing hackers to China has the same effect as calling the coronavirus "China virus" in that for all intents and purposes it has the effect of associating Chinese people with hackers in the same way that calling the coronavirus is an attempt to deflect blame to a particular group of people.
We also shouldn't shout down people who are hit everyday by this as rascist or emotionally charged. It's completely logical for them to want to ban these groups. Instead we should educate on exactly what kind of a very dark and hellish place banning leads to.
If anyone living in China doesn't like that they have the power through the government to regulate that traffic.
People can decide in China too.
I'd delve deeper beyond my comment because there's a lot of reasons I'm not the greatest source, not the least of which I'm just some white american dude with a comically terrible grasp of ONE dialect/language of Chinese and a wikipedia sourced knowledge of Chinese history.
Here's my understanding: Chinese can refer to many things that have their origin in what we call Mainland China these days. Chinese Language. Chinese History. Chinese Food. Chinese territory. Chinese government. Chinese people (citizens). Chinese people (ethnicity). The word is super-descriptive in that way, because that region, for three thousand years, was "homogenous" in a convenient way for propagandists and the history writers throughout time.
But if you delve in, you can see that it's truly absurd to refer to anything as Chinese. Chinese language - well, sure, Mandarin, right? But only because the seat of government is in Beijing, and it just picked that flavor. Nearly every city in the borders of the PRC have their own distinct dialect, or straight up separate language. The written system was invented in the 1950s based off a historical system that didn't just write Chinese, it wrote Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and also every language in between (Guangzhounese aka Cantonese, Shanghainese, Japanese sub-languages, etc). Which is "Chinese writing?" Which language is "Chinese language?" And what about when the Huns were around? What about when the Mongolians ruled it all? Was that "Chinese?" (a PRC censor would say ABSOLUTELY NOT and probably say you were treasonous to the harmony of Chinese culture for even suggesting it).
Chinese food - different in every city.
Chinese government - which one, the Democratic one that is seated in Taiwan, or the Autocratic one seated in Beijing? Or the City State of Hong Kong? Or the dead kingdoms?
I'm trying to indicate here why trying to say "Chinese is a nationality, not race" is a silly thing to say when Chinese can mean so many things that so say it's "not" something is a hard thing to prove. On top of all this, walk up to your average American and say "Chinese" and these subtleties are completely lost - EVERYONE knows what you mean by Chinese, well, it's Orange Chicken and Communism! That's what the American education system teaches us, after all, or at least, what it taught me growing up in rural America.
Ask Chinese people, or Taiwanese people (which I have done), what it means to be a Chinese person, and you'll likely get a very careful separation of the concept of Chinese person from the PRC. Many Taiwanese people would consider themselves Chinese if they had the opportunity to ensure the distinction was being made that this didn't mean they were pro-Beijing, simply that their history and culture shared or was identical to many people that happened to be born in Beijing.
> Nobody on Hacker News who encounters the phrase "Chinese hacker" is going to suddenly start discriminating against Chinese people,
Yesterday there was a thread about the experience of Black programmers in tech and I got into some discussions there that have destroyed my ability to believe in a sentence like this. There are avowed racists on this site. I went through the history of one who danced the blade well enough to occasionally fire off comments about how African people are genetically predisposed to lower IQ, without getting flagged/banned. This is a website like any other, a good one with better rules and moderation, yes, but an internet breeding ground anyway.
The original point was Chinese are not a race they are a nationality.
You both are wrong.
Chinese are not a race. Chinese are not a nationality.
The Han Chinese are a nationality. China is made up of many nationalities.
The important story now is the government of China is forcing birth control on a minority population called the Uighurs.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia...
Save your outrage for something meanful. Real minority populations are being oppressed and your worried about your fellow Americans insulting them more by blocking ip ranges that China owns that military style hacking is coming from? If that's the case I would suggest you care more about trying to make yourself look a certain way (by putting other Americans in their place) than helping minority populations in great need. The next generation is watching, they will demand real action vs virtual signaling.
Deplatforming racists isn't censorship.
> Save your outrage for something meanful.
Big words coming from someone that didn't mention that Black Lives Matter even once in their comment, and also didn't do anything to bring more attention to North Korean concentration camps, and hasn't even provided a donation link to an African farming initiative. See where I'm going with this?
> Real minority populations are being oppressed
Like ethnically Chinese people in the USA, or really just Asian people in American in general that get lumped under a random Chinese umbrella, for example?
> they will demand real action vs virtual signaling.
What's your point? What is anybody on this website doing besides "virtue signalling?" We're talking. That involves our virtues being put on display. Despite what conservative detractors might think, saying "you're virtue signalling" doesn't automatically win a debate any more than calling someone an SJW does. Yup, I have virtues, yup, I'm telling you what they are. Yup, I like social justice. You don't?
Isn't deplatforming racist because it creates a segregated society. Do you really want to separate society based on race? Soon we'll have schools for racist only. People will complain they when they get higher marks.
You think you like the idea of social justice? What you are doing is social judgement. Bullying.. using your power over someone less powerful to make yourself feel better.
Many causes need attention. Ignoring them all and pretending to care when people are around doesn't help anyone. The next generation is going to call you fake.
Unsurprising.
"Free speech activists" inevitably show off their actual value system.
> Isn't deplatforming racist because it creates a segregated society.
Racism is a choice, race isn't. Racists segregate themselves from society by believing that some humans are subhuman. Can't exactly share a well with someone that believes you're an animal, can you? Certainly can't have them in a jury.
> Do you really want to separate society based on race?
Transparent strawman argument lobbed at me most times I engage an "all lives matter" type. Black lives matter = white lives don't matter, right?
> People will complain they when they get higher marks.
Why would racists get higher marks? As racists they disproportionately fail to correct for cognitive biases - they are therefore either stupid or have a mental disorder.
> You think you like the idea of social justice? What you are doing is social judgement.
The SJW bit was fairly obvious bait that you bit straight onto. Something wrong with shaming racists? Bullying the bully? And today I learned, asking a bully to leave, is apparently bullying.
> Many causes need attention.
Again, you fail to address why you are spending time commenting on this instead of solving world hunger. Why are you spending time virtue signalling at me? Don't you care about starving children?
> The next generation is going to call you fake.
No, because bigots are losing the culture war.
'No, because bigots are losing the culture war'
Culture war.. everyone is winning their own mono-culture war. All of your facebook friends agree? Twitter echoing back similiar opinions. The software is working if you think you are winning something.
You will hear shut up grandpa move over. When you had your chance you just talked but made no real gain in the world. You won't understand.. why does real change matter? You will say we got everyone to bully racism underground. They will shake their head you fools you made racism worse and now it's more secretive and powerful.
Is it a choice? Is it a choice when someone joins a gang when they are born into poverty?
Everyone is a product of their environment.
> They will shake their head you fools you made racism worse and now it's more secretive and powerful.
Smacks of (((they))) control the Deep State.
Nothing real is being said here. Have a good weekend.
If you didn't believe in free will at all, why are you trying to convince me of anything?