we also don't know how many men felt encouraged in their sexism upon encountering this image.
while the image didn't make men sexist, it undoubtedly helped normalize that view among those coming across it during their work.
context matters. if you read playboy at home, that's on you, but if it is found in the breakroom at an office then it has an effect on everyone working there.
I just don't see your point at all.
Was numbers.pdf not enough to accomplish what they wanted?
My opinion: I understand the OS is a big multi-team effort but this just not cool. It's not about the contents of the file or that it's about bitcoin.
Plain and simple: Don't ship files that don't need to be shipped.
All these files, if they are test files, should be in unit/integration test resources.
This should have never been allowed on macOS, an endorsement of a pyramid scheme, borderline ponzi scheme, incinerating the planet and evading sanctions.
I use Linux and macOS and the former would never allow this to happen ever.
Not sure what you mean here. There are many Linux distros...?
By adding it into the main macOS, a sentient being at Apple deliberately chose that file to place it into a major operating system. I consider it an blantant endorsement.
I'm questioning Apple's review process because of this. At worst this is akin to malware.
> evading sanctions
The horror
It’s not even relevant, though. You can make your claims about the supposed endorsement without making a reference to Linux at all, or even if you did, appeal to the freedom aspect of it - you can probably remove it and compile it yourself. To claim that none of them are even ideologically supportive of it? An absurd claim
https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-2.3/source...
You just don't find this kind of insane overreaction over esoteric matters anywhere else. Love HN.
Though... I suppose this isn't exactly the venue to encourage people to do things simply for the joy of it.
[Also... you kids get off my lawn!]
Huh? Just because some person A somewhere builds something for cash, doesn't mean that there's no person B somewhere else building something for fun.
You state this as a fact but it's just your opinion.
You state this as a fact but it's just your opinion.
The part that was cropped looks like a normal portrait photo.
how about if someone recognized the phto as coming from playboy and making a remark about that and some men laugh about it. a women knowing why they are laughing could feel uncomfortable about that.
https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of...
> In her view, the photograph is an immense accomplishment that just happened to take on a life of its own. “I’m really proud of that picture,” she said.
Probably more harm has been done by the internet mob demanding she feel a certain way about her picture, than any harm done by the image itself.
To be fair, very few other racy pictures of women have been canonicalized like that, either; about the only pictures I can think of are paintings, specifically the Mona Lisa, which is hardly racy, and Boticelli’s Birth of Venus, which I suppose you might look at as racy, though I wouldn’t particularly. There’s a couple other non-picture works of art that are canonicalized in that way, but aren’t themselves pictures – Michaelangelo’s David as mentioned in a sibling comment is a good example. But then, even though the canonicalization makes them into something else, it is usually based on upon perceived artistic importance, the Lenna is a different and arguably sui generis phenomenon.
If you had a point, you wouldn't need to behave this way. (As opposed to some other people who disagree with me in this thread, who do have a point, and don't feel compelled to do this.)
(Not arguing for using a photo of someone who minds it.)
The full image from which it is clipped is, at a minimum, erotic photography (where the boundary with pornography is…well, opinions differ considerably.)
But, yeah, the crop that has become known as “the Lenna” isn’t (considered on its own) even that.
A manufacturer doesn't need to test anything like this. They already have physical access to the devices before they are even set up.
A theory: they needed an existing PDF to test PDF rendering. The Bitcoin paper was (1) handy, and (2) has a diverse variety of content in it, including images and math symbols.
(I personally think there's zero chance that they are the same person, but it's fun to entertain this fantasy.)
Steve Jobs death: October 5, 2011
Steven Jobs marketed himself, Satoshi did not.
Not to say Jobs wasn't a great guy but I know many great guys who never could have invented bitcoin.
2019? Nah.
If I were Thomas Hawk, I’d be sending Apple a bill for the use of my photograph.
Further, Satoshi explicitly reassigned copyright over the entirety of Bitcoin essentially to posterity by rewriting the licensing. That, similarly, includes the bitcoin whitepaper.
https://cryptobriefing.com/us-grants-craig-wright-copyright-...
https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-creator-craig-s-wright-satoshi-...
That explains the temporal issue. Then, for the connection, I remember a lot of people on the internet reacted negatively on that news given that they don't agree that he should have ownership for that document as he never proved to be satoshi. I could see Apple or an employee inject that document in a way to "challenge" or "protest".
Wait, that's not what you meant. Right.
A more objective viewpoint is directly available from the US copyright office at https://www.copyright.gov/press-media-info/press-updates.htm... - see the entry with the title "May 22, 2019: Questions about Certain Bitcoin Registrations".
Basically he registered a copyright, but this does not mean that he "got" the copyright, as the copyright office does not verify authorship and as it's possible for multiple adverse claims to exist.
E.g., Dogecoin.
Rest assured there is a gaggle of Bitcoin zealots hitting up reddit et al to spread the word about how good this discovery is for Bitcoin's bottom line!
I'd make a joke about Kind Midas here, but in light of BSIL I'm afraid someone here would use the premise as an idea for a startup and end up hurting themselves (or others).
[0] a scan of the full centerfold is included in this piece (NSFW, obviously): https://kevinrye.net/index_files/1972_playboy_magazine_the_l...
If you asked me for a famous modern formatted document generally, I might say the screenplay for The Godfather would be a good candidate. But there's no canonical PDF for that. :P Plus, copyright would prevent that.
A while back we figured that the system we work on technically allows loading nigh anything as a texture, including stuff like SVG and PDF. So we also ended up with a bitcoin whitepaper textured surface used as a test, even though the actual project formed in part around opposition to cryptocurrency.
The darn thing is just that famous.
IRS Tax Form 1040
The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The US Constitution and Declaration of Independence
The Treaty of Versailles
The Paris Treaty
The Kyoto Protocol
The Bible, King James Version
Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech
Martin Luther's 95 Theses
The Communist Manifesto
"Smashing the stack for fun and profit" by aleph1??
Is it though? The whitepaper wasn't released with any license. The original author still holds the copyright.
I'm going to guess someone from Apple's legal team is pretty pissed right about now.
I recently upgraded to 1GB internet, a 600mb game update took under 10 seconds. I wonder what 20 years will bring?
Probably not much. At least advancements wont be like the difference between going from 1.5 mbps to 1 gbps. It's the same reason why 10gbe ethernet has not become a common thing for consumer level desktop hardware. While 1gbe ethernet has been the standard offering since the mid-2000s. Recently lot of manufacturers have started supporting 2.5gbe. But low cost switching/routing hardware that fully supports 2.5gbe isn't quite there yet.
btc_wp() {
open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
}Another favorite of mine were the super-high-resolution touch pad gestures that the corresponding System Preferences pane would display in a loop to illustrate how to perform them. Must have been a few hundreds of megabytes at least.
[0] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/b1674191a88ec5cdd733e424...
[1]b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553
Vannevar Bush‘s essay “As We May Think” in 1945 is a visionary document that describes technologies we take for granted today more than 70 years ago.
It’s possible the Bitcoin white paper will be looked at in similar ways, especially if Bitcoin ends up being one mankind’s most important inventions in addition to being a critically important financial asset.
Do we really think the Bitcoin white paper is more impactful than, say, the Magna Carta or Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses? I think you might be inadvertently succumbing to recency bias.
2. Bitcoin white paper
3. US Constitution
It's possible that the test file is for an end user to verify function, not an Apple dev, I guess, but then in that case Id expect Apple to provide something much more clear (say, Apple logo with "if u can read this, great" rendered in multiple languages") that supported their aims of branding, lack of legal encumbrance, and international support.
What an absolutely foolish way to broadcast to your employer that you’re willing to leak information.
Doesn’t seem like a huge problem. Basically no different to “we’re aware of it”
Also interesting that it led to the sort of related Brenton Woods system, and all the effects of that and it's de facto ending in the 70s under Nixon
6+1+2=(9)0.
Oh how strange the machine elves churn.
April 5th is also 9. (Month 4 day 5) and guess what…
Cool.
So it was added some time between 10.10 and 10.14.
I love the comments here all so awe struck by this that they don't realize how stupid it is. Literally any PDF document would have served the same purpose, the printer test page could have been enough. But this just reveals that even deep inside Apple development there are cryptobros who don't mind all the millions of dollars that the whole crypto movement has scammed from hard working gullible people.
imagine doing that to the rest of the tech industry. "my friend lost money in an email! duh 'puters r scam!" come to think of it, there were people in the 90s like that.
Only insofar as it made the image slightly larger, making it slower to distribute an ISO image of the CD online. I don't think the installer actually checks its presence or anything like that.
I think macOS has tried something like that though with "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext" back in the day (which actually did contain a human-readable poem), but I don't really get the point of all of these attempts – surely the entire operating system is already copyrighted, even if it doesn't rhyme?
The article linked from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35461474 says that the installer checked.
I don't understand this reference and Google leaves me totally blank here. I could ask you to clarify, but there is the chance you don't see it or dont reply so … ChatGPT to the rescue?
-----------
Prompt: What was the Paula Abdul office background poster controversy?
ChatCPT: The Paula Abdul office background poster controversy refers to a incident that occurred during a live episode of "American Idol" in 2009, when fans noticed a poster hanging on the wall behind Paula Abdul's desk during her pre-taped video segments. The poster, which appeared to be of a semi-nude woman, caused a stir among viewers and led to accusations that Abdul was promoting sexual objectification.
Abdul and the show's producers initially denied that the poster existed, but later issued a statement acknowledging its presence and stating that it was not intentionally visible during the broadcast. They also apologized to viewers who may have been offended by the poster.
-----------
This does sound plausible … But wait! Is this truly true or just hallucinated?
Googling "Paula Abdul American Idol" just finds countless gossip posts about an alleged affaire with ex-contestant Corey Clark, but nothing about a poster.
Why would you expect that to return results about a specific controversy from 2009? She was a judge on American Idol for years, it's the only reason I know who she is.
And Apple will bury him.
$ wget https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
[...]
$ openssl sha256 bitcoin.pdf
SHA256(bitcoin.pdf)= b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553
$ openssl sha256 /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
SHA256(/System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf)= b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553
md5: d56d71ecadf2137be09d8b1d35c6c042
sha1: 8de2fdb04edce612738eb51e14ecc426381f8ed8
sha256: b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553
size: 184292 bytes
openssl sha256 /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
SHA256(/System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf)= b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553sha256: b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553
sha512: 2ac531ee521cf93f8419c2018f770fbb42c65396178e079a416e7038d3f9ab9fc2c35c4d838bc8b5dd68f4c13759fe9cdf90a46528412fefe1294cb26beabf4e
crc32 (lol): 13af7d06
md5: d56d71ecadf2137be09d8b1d35c6c042
sha1: 8de2fdb04edce612738eb51e14ecc426381f8ed8
Source: https://waxy.org/2023/04/the-bitcoin-whitepaper-is-hidden-in...
Not much else. Been using ‘find’ in ‘/System’ and haven’t found anything else that interesting.
(Also implementing money on it does seem pretty intelligent -- its a scarcity device -- peoble just seem to do stupid stuff with it)
a) single one time cost.
b) no list of approved or unapproved uses
c) unlimited free read bandwidth
d) all my users pay to change the application
I've looked at AWS, GCP, Firebase, bare metal and none of their offerings have the same pricing structure of blockchain nodes. Additionally, the target audience for non-blockchain applications require a much larger funnel and friction to get users to for anything, while the overhead costs of getting them into the funnel soar. Free tiers are okay but can't handle a spike in traffic. Whereas audiences in the blockchain space have already crossed all the friction and have an insatiable demand for 1-click payment funnels.
This perspective doesn't really seem to arise in these conversations. But perhaps there is a counterpoint that I missed about some other cloud platform? This is very high impact for me and I can see many developers continuing to bring their audiences to this development platform.
I sold the car and even had to start iTunes to remove the album.
Excerpt...
“No,” I said, “I don’t think we give it away free. I think you pay us for it, and then you give it away free, as a gift to people. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
Tim Cook raised an eyebrow. “You mean we pay for the album and then just distribute it?”
I said, “Yeah, like when Netflix buys the movie and gives it away to subscribers.”
Tim looked at me as if I was explaining the alphabet to an English professor. “But we’re not a subscription organisation.”
“Not yet,” I said. “Let ours be the first.”
Tim was not convinced. “There’s something not right about giving your art away for free,” he said. “And this is just to people who like U2?”
“Well,” I replied, “I think we should give it away to everybody. I mean, it’s their choice whether they want to listen to it.”
See what just happened? You might call it vaunting ambition. Or vaulting. Critics might accuse me of overreach. It is.
If just getting our music to people who like our music was the idea, that was a good idea. But if the idea was getting our music to people who might not have had a remote interest in our music, maybe there might be some pushback. But what was the worst that could happen? It would be like junk mail. Wouldn’t it? Like taking our bottle of milk and leaving it on the doorstep of every house in the neighbourhood.
Not. Quite. True.
On 9 September 2014, we didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town. In some cases we poured it on to the good people’s cornflakes. And some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose intolerant.
I take full responsibility. Not Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddy Cue. I’d thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite. As one social media wisecracker put it, “Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen, drinking my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading my paper.” Or, less kind, “The free U2 album is overpriced.” Mea culpa.
At first I thought this was just an internet squall. We were Santa Claus and we’d knocked a few bricks out as we went down the chimney with our bag of songs. But quite quickly we realised we’d bumped into a serious discussion about the access of big tech to our lives. The part of me that will always be punk rock thought this was exactly what the Clash would do. Subversive. But subversive is hard to claim when you’re working with a company that’s about to be the biggest on Earth.
Dang. That's just an arrangement for voice and one guitar (or ukulele?). The song pretty clearly includes accompaniment from a cymbal and some kind of metallic pitched percussion too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic
[2] Check my math: ( (15 PB) / (100,000 PB monthly traffic in 2017) ) * 30 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes = 6.5 minutes.
> How are you implementing the recent Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decision on the right to be forgotten?
I don't think that is really the issue though, I think there is just too much noise around the signal. But I am struck that GPT could answer my question (I guess?) and Google not.
I also wonder when demands are done for a "right to be forgotten" in the training data for AI.
My main problem is that wifi is slower than that. So to benefit from faster speeds, I'd either have to upgrade to wifi 6 or lay cables throughout the house.
The ISPs here are happy to sell you faster broadband, though.
http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/agbkb/lehre/programmiers...
I think you're underestimating the colossal, compounding effect that these have had over the centuries. It would be very surprising to me if, say, Germans did not learn about the Ninety-Five Theses, considering that it was a seminal event in German history. Just because it's not obviously affecting your life right now does not mean it was not impactful in dramatically changing the course of history.
You might be looking for quantum computing. They're right down the hall, second door on the left.
That's why many symmetric systems have moved to a 256 bit key. It makes them quantum safe because 2^128 operations are considered impossible. (According to some physicsists it is guaranteed to boil the oceans).
Or maybe it’ll become their messiah, the one true God in the AI religion known as Bobism.
The justice system is broken, with enough money you can make a mockery of it. The guy has filed so many lawsuits and sometimes they do go to trial. He's sued Bitcoin devs to change BTC Core code to unlock "his" lost Bitcoins that he says he doesn't have the keys to anymore. This was not admitted in the past but then his lawyers found a gullible British judge and they actually heard the case - although he ultimately lost.
He's also tried to sue Coinbase and Kraken for violating his supposed IP. Then he sued Peter McCormack for calling him a liar and "a moron". Although the court noted there's no evidence that he is Satoshi, the court still awared him £1 for his tarnished reputation. He's fabricated a story and lies to the entire world, then sues anyone who calls him out.
(Whatever past "proof" signatures from faketoshis have been verifiable false)
Anyway as it's already released under MIT license, this is moot.
I'm as cynical as the next guy, but if they wanted to fill up storage space, they wouldn't have picked a 184,292 byte pdf.
- Copernic's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium enabled the copernician revolution, which had profound impacts on how people thought about their place in the universe.
- Darwin's On the Origin of Species had more or less the same kind of impact, and provoked a strong reaction in the society, especially within churches.
I'm sure with more research we could find other scientific work that had a profound impact not only on our understanding of ourselves and our surroundings, but also on the way we think about ourselves.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
"In today’s age of high-resolution digital image technology, it seems difficult to argue that a 512 × 512 image produced with a 1970s-era analog scanner is the best we have to offer as an image quality test standard".[2]
And I’m sorry but I just can’t fathom the controversy. The cropped version is the only one I’ve ever seen used in the context of a sample image. It is utterly unremarkable unless you’re aware of the image’s provenance, (which I bet most people didn’t). Even the uncropped version, which I have only ever saw because of the controversy, isn’t any more racy than many historically important paintings hanging in art galleries.
I’m not saying this is an appropriate canonical test image. But I am saying that it’s disingenuous to single it out as a problem. There is so much of mainstream culture that is orders of magnitude more degrading of women than this image.
I am certainly not equating the two, but I do see parallels in the hysterics around “Lenna” and hysterics around David of Michelangelo’s little noodle.
the thing that lets us communicate like this :)
And really, the RFC comment is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. The idea that the bitcoin whitepaper is some holy document, or even anywhere near the "top 100 non-literary" documents created by humans is profoundly stupid.
If someone genuinely believes that, I need to talk with them synchronously to try and figure out where, exactly, it ranks. Obviously ahead of the Rosetta Stone and the Treaty of Versailles, but does it beat out the Magna Carta?
Controlling who gets to put things in it in a decentralized way isn’t as important as many people think, at the end of the day almost all applications (other than currency) can just use a central authority to publish hashes.
Thats why the word "and" is there in my sentence
It is impossible (without finding a SHA collision) to rewrite a commit in git.
And before you say “yeah but how do you know which SHA sums are the right one if you don’t trust branch names”, please reread the final paragraph of the post you replied to.
The vast majority of cryptocurrencies are undeniably "malinvestments".
So 2019 was a good time to buy but maybe the mind share moment for bitcoin was 2017, when even TV news were talking about it every night.
Waiters in the exurbs were giving me opinions on bitcoin in 2015
It works for most cases, but I can see why changing every year might be a deal breaker for some.
I was trying to make a document for work, using Apple Pages for the first time. Pages had a template that seemed good for the kind of document I had to make so I used that.
The template included "Lorem Ipsum" text. But since I hadn't heard of it before I thought it was some sort of sample document showing how to use the template but in a language I didn't recognize.
I figured that I'd somehow gotten Pages configured to default to a foreign language and spent the next couple of hours trying to figure out how to set it to English. Eventually it occurred to me to search for some of the exact text from the template, hoping to find someone else had already dealt with this problem, and found the Wikipedia article that explained what "Lorem Ipsum" is.
* holoalphabetic sentences like "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." or "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs."
* Etaoin shrdlu
* Hamburgevons
* New Petitions Against Tax. Building Code Under Fire.
* foo, bar, baz, qux, quux, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, and thud
* famous texts like Alice in Wonderland, Kafka, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, etc
* Postmodernism generator, snarXiv, Chomskybot, etc
> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
If not, in what way is this image being singled out?
Bringing mainstream attention to it was an extreme example of the Streisand Effect.
e.g. see the final quote in this piece https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/arts-entertainment/ho...
Forsén was interviewed in a documentary that featured the image. The entire point of which was to bring more attention to the fact the image existed and how it had been/was being used. Claiming this is an example of the Streisand effect is nonsense.
I'd be interested to hear what other specific images you feel should be getting a similar amount of discussion.
I like bwok quook more.
Actually I just wnat the card information and text as per isotropic plus the statistics generated e.g. how good or bad were you if a particular card was in the kingdom.
(I was actually shocked the mobile app is so poorly optimized that I needed a new phone to run it at full speed...)
Amazing site, even if it was only targeted at the true enthusiasts!
That seems unlikely.
You're going to claim you're certain that a solution to the Byzantine generals problem will have no useful consequences?
> one mankind’s most important inventions
to merely
> useful consequences
Sure, maybe there are useful consequences, especially if you need to defy governments or whatever. But surely not something in the same league of importance as, say, fire, the wheel, writing, powered flight, the hammer, steel, math, or even Quicksort.
Based on the simple reality that bitcoin wouldn't exist without them, we can find a couple seminal papers of cryptography that had way more impact than this white paper. To name a few :
Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication: https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...
Rivest, Shamir and Adelman's Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Rsapaper.pdf
Diffie and Hellman's New Direction in Cryptography: https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/publications/24.pdf
And that's the first three that come to my mind.
Yes.
For absolutely everything else, blockchain is a worse solution than technology that already existed before.
The interesting part of bitcoin was the “permission-less BFT algorithm” (because other algorithm at the time required to know the list of nodes up-front) through proof of work and game theory”.
The game theory part is only applicable to Austrian-style (scarce money) crypto-“currencies”, not to other cases of byzantine generals problem (it only works because everybody has financial incentives in the robustness of the system), and even in that specific niche, the proof of work scheme has been abandoned by pretty much everybody else in favor of proof of stakes (which isn't really a permission-less system anymore).
It's like building a bridge that can withstand the earth being swallowed by the sun. Sure the bridge will survive but that's pointless, and the energy and material being spent on that bridge has a billion better uses.
Even in the very-unlikely world where some sort of decentralized cryptocurrency is used for anything other than scams and drugs, it's not going to be bitcoin, and blockchains existed for decades before bitcoin did.
> blockchains existed for decades before bitcoin did
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto
Satoshi combined them together in a novel form, for sure, but it’s still largely useless.
The supposedly "deeper" part of their argument is even more pathetic, maternalistic, infantilising nonsense. Are they seriously claiming that women are so fragile that they will forego pursuit of their intellectual passion because sometimes, some academic papers use the image of a women wearing a fancy hat and bare shoulders? What a low view of women these documentarians have. What a vile insult to half the population.
I can only imagine that the movie was made by freak puritanical zealots who would literally explode if they ever saw a television advertisement for shampoo. And these zealots seem to have zero concept of how technology works. The movie's tagline falsely claims that "There's a secret hidden in almost every website and every digital image you've ever seen." The fact that anyone took it seriously is itself a sick joke.
https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_log...
"The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations. This new identity manifests itself in an authentic geometry that is to become proprietary to the Pepsi culture."
In the US*. The Bitcoin paper has surely been distributed far wider than any US-specific tax forms.
Though those governments would love people like you who paint all the use cases as "organized crime, terrorism" etc
Every cryptocurrency-related post here in HN is flooded with extremely negative comments, even if the post itself does not promote cryptocurrencies. These people have seen countless examples of cryptocurrency scams, but they cannot understand what life under an economically oppressed or unstable country is because they never experienced it.
- People living abroad who are completely debanked because local banks refuse to open banks accounts for people who are merely suspected of being US citizns, despite them not being US citizns, with no path to resolve their predicament. This is a real problem that is effecting real people right now.
- Any legal activity that the banks and payment processors don't like for one reason or another; onlyfans, "right-wing" websites (whether actual or merely alleged), ...etc.
We no longer live in a world where you can live a dignified life with cash alone. Cryptocurrecy is a net positive to humanity, even if the technologies behind it may currently be more wasteful and make the lives of criminals a bit easier. There is simply no alternative for a lot of honest people in financial dead-ends the government can't or won't help.
Thank you Satoshi and anyone who works to support this technology for making the world a slightly better place.
"We use bitcoin because it’s a good legal means of payment. The fact that we have bitcoin payments as an alternative helps to defend us from the Russian authorities. They see if they close down other more traditional channels, we will still have bitcoin. It’s like insurance."
They even use Paypal and card transfers for donations... Bitcoin is just another payment they accept in the hope it will be hard for the government to block funds... but they don't say it anywhere that's been the only way, or the best way to do that, it's just one of the ways they're looking and so far has not been shown to be more government-resilient as I am sure getting the money out from the blockchain is not going to be easy if the Government doesn't like the idea... you make it look like Bitcoin is their saviour or something which is a gross misrepresentation.
Sure but if it wasn't significant, they wouldn't have mentioned it.
> so far has not been shown to be more government-resilient as I am sure getting the money out from the blockchain is not going to be easy if the Government doesn't like the idea
It seems you have no idea how bitcoin works then. All you have to do is memorize 12 words. You can then take your wealth to many corners of the world, some of which will be free from the tyranny of your government and still have an ecosystem which will let you cash out your bitcoin for the local currency. A good example - Dubai, where a lot of real estate is being purchased in crypto by the Russians fleeing the war.
Every time you cheer for sanctions, you're cheering for the suffering and death of the most vulnerable people in the world under the guise that somehow a miracle will arise and the malnourished and starving will topple an already oppressive regime. Bitcoin has saved countless many from ruin from within these totalitarian states, despite their attempts at enforcing bans. It also doesn't help that marionettes echo propaganda created by media organizations, and those companies are owned by billionaire elites that benefit the most from Western sanctions.
Anyone supporting this is the enemy of the people and deserves everything that comes of them.
> For example, illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume.
Though it’s not small amounts.
wait you can't
No, most are not. (I'd go as far to argue that even monero is not specifically designed to evade regulation.)
The crime trope is ancient, old, and has been repeatedly debunked. The evidence for its prevalence simply isn't there—because Bitcoin is not anonymous.
I mean just think about it. A FULL 3%* of all cryptocurrency transactions are related to criminal activities! If we ban those 3% (and the other 97% because why not), we will stop all human trafficking or at least make a noticeable dent in it because most traffickers rely on cryptocurrency and absolutely don't use traditional currency as the main way to transact.
Perhaps if cryptocurrencies do finally get banned, it would at least help certain individuals to think more critically, or perhaps start thinking at all. One can only wish.
[*]: 3% because it's the most extreme reputable statistic out there. Most reputable studies place transactions related to illicit activities well bellow 1%.
And it's a pandora's box anyways. So who cares.
Note that I'm talking about private property not personal property. Variations of the latter exist and have existed in almost every society but the concept of the former has increasingly been maximized to the point that patches of land, ways to do things, ideas in your head and sincere promises are now things you can own and exchange and people refusing to suffer hunger or lack of shelter are seen as unreasonable if they want to use what isn't eaten or isn't lived in.
Abolishing the state as long as other organizations (or individuals) are allowed to hoard resources/wealth/power seems as catastrophic a suggestion as abolishing the police as long as other gangs exist. You're just substituting one evil for another without affecting any material change.
https://medium.com/@nic__carter/comments-on-the-white-house-...
Edit: Now that I think about it, the W-2 probably is even larger than 1040, because you get one from each employer, plus families can file jointly, and not everyone has to file taxes if they make below a certain amount. So a household with 4 people working 2 jobs each generates one 1040 but 8 W-2s per year.
For Google search numbers, that would be different considering PDF searches in China wouldn't be done using Google. But perhaps taxes aren't done using PDFs either, that important detail I don't know.
The number of people filing taxes on a computer in India rounds to zero. For example, a quarter of India is illiterate. And 97+% of them don't make enough money to owe tax. And of the final 3%, many have someone else file for them. https://www.ibtimes.com/how-many-people-india-pay-income-tax....
Well, no, because each is more than double the US population, and only half the US population files tax forms (2021 had 165 million individual filers, on 332 million US population.)
Basically anyone who ever opened investment account know about it.
Tax evasion as I know it, and as has been informed to me by many financial consultants I've talked to, is now increasingly difficult. You really need to have back-channel contacts with the right people and spectacular know-how of the loopholes to pull it off. I'm talking about large-scale evasion here, but much of it stands true for small-scale as well.
I believe the actual situation is 3% file for income tax and the majority of the rest don’t need to, but tax evasion is quite common there.
If you open investment account to buy any US stock, index funds or a some other US-based financial instruments you have to fill W-8BEN. Otherwise you might be charged 30% tax on your investment income by IRS.
So even if you open brokerage account in UK, EU, India, Russia or any other country you'll surely know about this form.
> If you open investment account to buy any US stock, index funds or a some other US-based financial instruments you have to fill W-8BEN
You seem to directly contradict yourself. Dealing with any US-based financial instrument obviously has to do with dealing with something US related.
In contrast, if I only invest in any non-US financial instruments, I don't have to deal with W-8BEN.
In 2007 we had Combating Double-Spending Using Cooperative P2P Systems[0]. Prior to both the whitepaper and the genesis block, we had Distributed Double Spending Prevention[1].
These are all particular subsets of distributed consensus problems, which have been studied in the context of CS for at least 30+ years (Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony[2]).
[0] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4268195
Do you have a pet theory on why bitcoin was the first such system to take off? Why not earlier?
> We had DHTs, we had blockchains, and double spending was solved at least 2 years before the bitcoin white paper.
- Bitcoin doesn't use DHTs.
- The term blockchain was coined after the Bitcoin white paper was published, to describe the mechanism used in Bitcoin.
- Bitcoin was the first system to solve the double spending problem in a decentralized way.
> Satoshi combined them together in a novel form, for sure, but it’s still largely useless.
The network is actively used. Just yesterday, there were 345K on chain Bitcoin transactions totaling a value of around 4 billion USD.
The earliest ones I personally recall using were Liberty Reserve and E-Gold, which were basically fine, I guess. It was a good way to send money around with less eyes on it. Before that there were things like DigiCash, but I don't know much about that one. There was a whole bunch of random ones during the 90s, but most of them were ponzis and rugpulls (some things never change).
In my opinion, BTC took off in a way that others didn't for a bunch of reasons:
1) It was the first usable system that was decentralized, AFAIK. This is a pretty desirable characteristic, of course.
2) It had (and has) flaws, but there was no obvious means of it being a rug-pull or complete scam. E.g., it wasn't supposedly backed by gold/silver/whatever that didn't really exist.
3) You were able to get some bitcoin to use for 'free' by mining. Prior systems you had to buy into. The threshold to participate and profit was much lower.
4) The protocol is simple enough for those first few points to be trivial to verify.
5) It entered a sort of 'spiral' relationship with darknet markets and more general cybercrime. As those surged in popularity, the demand for bitcoin surged, which fueled interest in bitcoin, which fueled interested in markets, which.. etc.
If in another 10 years it continues it’s success and we have widespread point of sale usage and micropayments etc, and value is, maybe $200K/coin. Then these people might require some type of specialized psychological therapy to handle their disbelief.
On the other hand, Bitcoiners even if it crashes to zero somehow, will be saying at least we tried, oh well.
Bitcoin opinions are some type of strange personality litmus test. I find it very curious as the test result feels very unpredictable for me when applied to people I know well.
More than naive cryptobros?
> Bitcoin triggers a deep psychological anxiety in some people and their reaction is to construct these defensive arguments in their heads about why Bitcoin is stupid, a scam, useless, etc.
It is obviously stupid, slow, and wasteful. Ignoring all the other problems with cryptocurrencies, just on those three axes ETH is superior.
> If in another 10 years it continues it’s success and we have widespread point of sale usage and micropayments etc, and value is, maybe $200K/coin. Then these people might require some type of specialized psychological therapy to handle their disbelief.
You love to monologue, huh?
> On the other hand, Bitcoiners even if it crashes to zero somehow, will be saying at least we tried, oh well.
A great sign of a moron is that they attach themselves to non-falsifiable ideas so they can't be wrong.
> Bitcoin opinions are some type of strange personality litmus test. I find it very curious as the test result feels very unpredictable for me when applied to people I know well.
It's very predictable. Is someone naive to the point of being borderline childlike? Wants to get-rich-quick? Hates the government? Bitcoin fan.
I didn't say it did. But the idea of distributing data in a P2P fashion is not novel.
> - The term blockchain was coined after the Bitcoin white paper was published, to describe the mechanism used in Bitcoin.
I'm not very interested in the particular etymology. The fundamental ideas of a blockchain, regardless of what you call it, had been laid out by multiple people years before the bitcoin whitepaper[0].
> - Bitcoin was the first system to solve the double spending problem in a decentralized way.
No, it wasn't[1][2].
> The network is actively used. Just yesterday, there were 345K on chain Bitcoin transactions totaling a value of around 4 billion USD.
..Ok? That's about the level of activity I would expect between speculation, scams, and drugs, sure.
[0]https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.06130.pdf
I think that's revolutionary.
- The KYC of your exchange, and any exchange in the coins path
- The wallet you're using
- The recipient to provide the correct address
- The exchange rate
And you're trusting all of that hasn't been tampered with, which involves even more trusted parties.
It requires an order of magnitude less trust to send cash in the mail. It's cheaper, too.
This is the level of discourse adults experience from cryptobros, and it's why no-one except other cryptobros actually take you seriously.
I’ve bought Bitcoin many times without any KYC. In old days localbitcoins and these days ATMs in many countries.
There aren’t any “exchange in the coins path”. I’ve exchanged paper fiat currency at Starbucks, in a hotel lobby.
The wallets I use are open source 100%. In fact I’ve personally written a python script to manually generate a transaction to broadcast. There is no third party. only your operating system, the internet connection and the source code. In that particular case I was using NixOS linux and so my operating system was also open source. I also broadcast my transaction over the ToR network so my internet provider and the Bitcoin network has no visibility.
Now onto usefulness. By holding Bitcoin I’ve preserved and grown my wealth. But how has it been used practically. Lets see.
- yesterday I bought my lunch for my wife and I, $21 using by Bitpay debit card. I loaded the card 2 mins before with those dollars by sending Litecoin which was auto exchanged by Bitpay at exactly the current exchange rate and with no fee. I exchange Bitcoin for small amounts Litecoin periodically as Litecoin is fast and cheap to send for small payments. Savings vs Checking.
- Years ago I met an artist from Argentina on an internet forum. She was painting what I thought were nice paintings. She was selling professional prints of those. I sent her Bitcoin and she sent me the prints. I’ve framed them and they hang in my home. I get many compliments on them.
- I’ve hired a developer in Crimea to work on a security software and he was paid for his work in Bitcoin
- When my sister in law had a baby shower I bought all the gifts at Buy Buy Baby using a digital gift card purchased 30 mins earlier using Bitcoin.
I could actually go on and on and on. But clearly you don’t have experience or understanding of what you are discussing as you proposed sending cash in the mail, which I don’t know anyone who would do that.
Bitcoin is revolutionary and has a decent shot at bringing fiat government currencies to their knees so they are forced to act responsibly and not brr brr money print.
Oh lord.
> I’ve bought Bitcoin many times without any KYC. In old days localbitcoins and these days ATMs in many countries ... There aren’t any “exchange in the coins path”. I’ve exchanged paper fiat currency at Starbucks, in a hotel lobby.
Sure, ok. Now take just one tiny step forward. Think about what happens next. Those coins have extremely high odds of passing through a KYC system in the near future. That can, will, and frequently has been used to trace users who are dumb enough to think "I paid for bitcoin for cash, I'm now anonymous".
> The wallets I use are open source 100%.
And nothing nefarious has ever slipped into open source software, right? Do you have no idea what a supply chain attack is?
You use NPM, you really ought to.
> There is no third party. only your operating system, the internet connection and the source code.
And, of course, your OS and the internet can be trusted. This is a great example of the level of critical thinking cryptobros achieve.
> I also broadcast my transaction over the ToR network so my internet provider and the Bitcoin network has no visibility.
Ok, so you mitigate the announce IP, which is one of the least useful ways to do analysis. Cool.
> yesterday I bought my lunch for my wife and I, $21 using by Bitpay debit card. I loaded the card 2 mins before with those dollars by sending Litecoin ...
So it has objectively worse utility, UX, and more dependencies than fiat?
This is not a good example.
> Years ago I met an artist from Argentina on an internet forum. She was painting what I thought were nice paintings. She was selling professional prints of those. I sent her Bitcoin and she sent me the prints.
Ok. This is still not useful. Western Union, Paypal, SWIFT, all cheaper and in some cases faster.
> I’ve hired a developer in Crimea to work on a security software and he was paid for his work in Bitcoin
Protip: if someone is willing to be paid in bitcoin, they are not worth the bitcoin you're sending.
> When my sister in law had a baby shower I bought all the gifts at Buy Buy Baby using a digital gift card purchased 30 mins earlier using Bitcoin.
As above: "So it has objectively worse utility, UX, and more dependencies than fiat?"
> Bitcoin is revolutionary and has a decent shot at bringing fiat government currencies to their knees so they are forced to act responsibly and not brr brr money print.
You have absolutely no idea what a central bank does, do you? Well, I mean, you obviously think you do. But you really don't. A basic class on economics would do you a world of good.
This is no way to talk to other human beings.
However it’s seems doubtful you will even be willing to acknowledge your flawed understanding and perhaps even unlikely you will see my response give how HN works.
If this poster actually knew how much experience I have with all the topics they profess such knowledge about I’d hope in that case they could be more mature.
Probably one of the must outrageous statements was to try and lecture me on the function of central banks. I’m intimately familiar with the US financial system and the function of central banks. I’ve extensively discussed Bitcoin with a very senior researcher of the Fed and was also directly involved in preparing private presentation to the ECB in Frankfurt. The central banks themselves are very concerned about how competitive Bitcoin is with fiat currency.
Bitcoin has more utility nowadays than dollar funds. It can be converted to almost any currency anywhere almost instantly and can be used by consumers with no friction via instant funded prepaid debit cards worldwide.
This poster brings up legacy payment systems that can’t even remotely compete with Bitcoin on the technical merits.