Waymo takes responsibility for all accidents and Tesla is able to drive autonomously at 40km/h on highways, but neither does both. Mercedes does. That's –I believe– the point that parent is making.
Now, I'd argue that Waymo has probably somewhat solved highways already as they're much simpler than city driving, they're just not offering it to the public yet.
Pure speculation but I bet Waymo doesn’t do highways because they can’t safely reconcile the speed limit with the speed of traffic. In CA and AZ (where Waymo is currently operating) typical highway limits are 55 or 65 mph while traffic speeds in light traffic are easily 70+. Speed differential is dangerous; having a Waymo going 55 while everyone else goes 70+ sounds like a terrible idea but they can’t exactly teach the robot to speed the way a human does either. I’d love to be a fly on the wall during that discussion, ethics, human factors, law, you’d have to tackle the whole shebang.
I don't understand the connection between these two events. Why would an IPO mean that Reddit has to crack down on adult content? We've seen this with many online platforms over the years, again and again, but I just don't understand it. Can somebody please explain?
It shines a brighter light on the platform, meaning advertisers may suddenly pull out because of their ads being shown next to "objectionable content". Reddit could preemptively crack down to avoid this.
publicly traded companies are swarmed with people watching them from every possible angle because they’re trying to profit off of seeing something thing before someone else does
> Why not automate cargo ships? There's far less to hit in the ocean and far fewer inputs required.
Maneuvering a ship is but a very small part of all that's needed to maintain a ship operational – engine maintenance, paperwork, dealing with port agents and customs, operating the radio, etc.. Much of that can be automated, I'm sure, but the return on investment is quite poor. Crew salaries are a small part of all operations costs, so you're not saving much by removing them from the equation. (Add to that the fact that large cargo ships can exceed $1B worth of cargo, so I'm not surprised that the economics don't make much sense.)
QUIC is not without defects, I'm with you there, but almost almost any "web-scale" company dealing with a lot of cellular connections would disagree with your statement. Uber, Verizon, Cloudflare, Meta, Fastly, among others, some of which have reported very significant latency reductions.
In heavy rain and snow too?
Because the few videos I saw had pretty easy weather conditions, and even there machines aren't as good as concentrated drivers.
I'll also convert to annual to get unlimited searches for a year. The search engine market is moving so fast now anyway that things may be well different a year from now.
Why would Bitcoin collapse as a consequence of Tether collapsing? I would expect to see a temporary drop due to market instability and low investors' confidence amid fear, but surely not a collapse.
Each Tether, on paper, represents a single US dollar locked into the crypto ecosystem.
It's kind of like a company's war chest bank account: no matter what happens, the value of the asset is worth at least that much.
But it's a little more pernicious than that. Tethers are typically emmited conveniently at times where the price of crypto is going down, propping the value up. If the current value of BTC exists because of artificial upwards pressure, it's likely that the value should settle back down to where it would have been if not for said pressure when released from it.
FYI - Tether stopped even pretending it actually represented that anymore, and NYAG dig up plenty of evidence that it was never actually even close to representing real money. They didn’t even have bank accounts back in ‘17!
I don't believe I've ever seen any such evidence. The only attempt I've seen about supporting that is a time series analysis that showed that the total tether issued increased at times when Bitcoin's price increased-- which is exactly what you'd expect to see happen without any funny business: 'crypto' mania fuels demand for both Bitcoin and tether.
I don't have any doubt that tether is up to all manner of funny business (e.g. printing unbacked coins and loaning them out for people to 'invest' in defi ponzis), but mostly its used to trade against varrious altcoins that are only traded on off-shore exchanges not used to trade against Bitcoin. The arguments that it plays some major role with bitcoin from what I see appear to be conjecture and logically unsound reasoning rather than clear and convincing evidence.
If you're aware of something better-- I'd love to see it.
Absent that kind of connection I wouldn't be surprised to see demand for Bitcoin _rise_ once the instability fear cleared: prior to tether being used to purchase sketch-coins at offshore exchanges Bitcoin was the exclusive option for that purpose.
So long as you can buy drugs with Bitcoin it will maintain a certain minimum value, regardless of what happens with these scam companies. If tether where to completely collapse I estimate Bitcoin would fall to to no less then 30% of it’s current value.
The price of bitcoin will never fall faster then the time it takes to login to a darknet market and update a listing.
Oh, yeah, bitcoin is actually quite transparent for the outside so most darknet exchange use Monero last time I checked. Bitcoin is a whole different beast at this point.
Theoretically…yes. In actuality governments can make it impossible to exchange Monero for USD/fiat which would render it fairly useless (at scale, anyways).
This is already being frameworked. “Coffee shop” sales of cryptocurrency (even BTC) is now de facto illegal in the USA. You can’t post a Craigslist ad saying “hey I have 100 BTC willing to exchange for USD”. The feds will (and have!!) arrest you for violating AML/KYC.
XMR is currently being considered for an “asset non-grata” classification where any exchange doing USD/XMR transactions would be held accountable for facilitating money laundering because participation in XMR inherently assists in laundering money.
Suppose I buy a bored ape or whatever, and then I sell it, and then the person I sold it to uses one of those non-KYC exchanges to buy XMR. How are the feds going to know whether it was me on both sides or not?
Are they going to correlate my IP to McDonalds wifi and subpoena the security footage and get me via facial recognition? At some point it's just too expensive to chase down.
The feds will simply sanction any institution which allows XMR to be converted to fiat. The US government has ultimate control over global finance for now, although that iron grip is being weakened with Russia/China's alternative to SWIFT/etc. However, China has already banned XMR domestically.
US financial sanctions are very intense. The bank/instution that is converting fiat to XMR would be a complete pariah, unable to participate in any global banking or have any transactions with any bank which needs to participate with other global banks.
If you are an institution selling XMR and taking peoples fiat, you would have nowhere to store the fiat. You would have no one (Stripe/Visa/SWIFT/ACH/PayPal/etc) who would process those payments. You would be unable to travel to any western country. Anyone who does business with you could also get similar sanctions.
You could perhaps trade XMR<->ETH or something like that...but eventually someone with the XMR will want to convert it to fiat, and that would not be possible. Anyone doing a lot of BTC/ETH<->XMR trades could be found via blockchain analysis, and similarly investigated and prosecuted for participating in XMR, because XMR facilitates money laundering.
They could easily ban any BTC traded by a DEX that offers BTC/XMR exchanges, and any BTC that comes from a pool that also contains money that participated in this etc.
If the US government wants to ban an XMR, it can ban XMR.
I don't think it would be so easy. How does the government figure out which addresses go with the DEX offering BTC/XMR?
I suppose if they could buy XMR with BTC and see which output addresses were involved with that transaction--those would be addresses controlled by users of the DEX. And then they could buy BTC with XMR, harvesting a few more addresses.
But if they run analysis like that continually they're going to end up paying a lot of money to the DEX in fees.
In fact, the exchange might not even need real users at all. They can just generate enough noise to attract the government's attention, and then soak up the government's money while letting the government spy on a bunch of robot activity.
It's gotta be one of these:
- ban crypto entirely
- give up on drug prohibition
- burden taxpayers with an endless game of whack-a-mole which slowly transfers value out of the US economy without achieving meaningful enforcement goals
Doesn't the DEX have a specific wallet (or several) that you send/receive crypto to/from, on the ETH or BTC chains? If so, then it's easy to ban anyone from interacting with a DEX which advertises XMR. You don't just ban those who traded XMR with the DEX (which is costly), you ban anyone interacting with it at all (which should be easy to check on the classical block chains).
A "wallet" is a client side concept, all the blockchain sees is "addresses" (we're talking BTC here, but it's common elsewhere too). Most wallet software will create many separate addresses for a user and the "wallet balance" will be their sum. Which addresses can be correlated with each other by an adversary will depend on usage patterns.
For instance if you receive $5 and then later send $5, your wallet can just send it from a single address, so none of the other addresses in your wallet can be correlated (via chain analysis) with that transaction. On the other hand, if you have addresses with $2 and $4 and you wand to send $5 then both will be involved in the transaction, plus you'll be getting a new address where you get the change ($1) back.
It would be the same for an exchange. A single address (or a hard-coded list of them) would be a centralizing feature, if it has that, it's not a DEX (because whoever controls the keys for those addresses controls the exchange). A DEX would have to make buy/sell orders happen based on some set of addresses that were not around for the founding of the exchange. Likely, those addresses would also not stay around for its lifetime. You'd generate them as needed and forget them when they no longer served you (I suppose "you" are a DEX node in this scenario).
What's uncertain is just how interconnected they'd have to be. On one hand, you want to keep the list of known associates small so that token taint doesn't spread to all users of the exchange (which is what you described in your previous post). On the other hand, maybe you want the list of participants to be large enough that it's not practical to send an agent to kick down each door in the list.
If anybody can find the maximally infuriating size here, I'd trust that it's the kind of person who would write a DEX.
Lol so if I send BTC to a friend overseas and they use it on their ancapworld exchange or whatever that is legal in their 3rd world shithole, then suddenly that BTC is banned from ever entering the first world again?
The only way I see this kind of works is if they ban crypto in general, and then ban cash in the mail too. Oh yeah and ban foreign trade, because as long as it's legal somewhere else you can spend XMR in THAT country in the form of importing goods to the US and then sell those goods for cash. We're talking about bits in the ether, and unlike with bitcoin at least to our knowledge the public ledger is not traceable. Seems like a tall order.
Yes, they could declare any exchange that offers XMR to customers as banned, and no financial institution that trades with that exchange would be allowed to trade with a US bank. That's how US sanctions typically work. Most likely, that exchange would quickly stop offering XMR trades itself.
And even if they didn't, that BTC could indeed no longer be allowed in the US controlled banking system (which is far larger than the West).
Of course, if your friend were able to redeem buy actual goods for XMR and send those back to you, great. But what goods vendor would want to own XMR in a world where no institution that does business with banks would want it?
Note that what I'm saying is not purely theoretical - this is the status of Tornado Cash - where they went so far as to arrest developers of that. And banned BTC also exist - there are BTC that are illegal to own, and wallet addresses that are illegal to trade with.
Your points are taken, may rebuttal would be that monero is only worth at most about $3B and that much value is easily captured outside the banking system. It seems like one of those scenarios that will require a gargantuan effort in practice and at best you end up with drug-war style penalties without even choking out the lions share of the value, and even if you do something else just takes its place. It would really pain me to see my country going down that path again, but history does have a way of repeating itself.
I mean, yeah this is already done. Over $10,000 requires you to file a FinCEN Form 105. The point isn't "you can't send money" its "The US government only wants to allow systems to exist in which it knows who/what/when/where about any non-trivial sized transaction."
If there's an auditable/subpoenable record, they're happy. If not, they're not. Right now they're "not happy" about XMR. Some day they'll ban it.
As for ETH/BTC<-> XMR they'll probably ban that too. Not from a technical perspective but more like "if we catch you sending ETH to that Russian XMR exchange we'll prosecute you."
Honestly banning cash would be one of the easier things to do, but I don't think what you've said is necessarily true.
I cannot offer legal advice here, but my understanding is if Bob in NY has the fantastically idiotic idea to send $100k through the mail to cousin Suzy in CA, he wouldn't be violating in laws by not filling out the 105 or IRS 8300. He's not engaging in a trade/business and the money is not leaving the borders.
I meant internationally, domestic cash transactions don't currently have reporting requirements per se. Most domestic cash mails would eventually reach a magnitude large enough to meet a reporting requirement for sales tax, 1099-MISC, gift tax, etc.
Sure, you've gotta have one exchange that knows your bank account, and then move it through a non-KYC exchange to XMR--which means you'll pay an extra fee or two--but unless something has changed in the last year or so that's not a difficult thing to do.
Way way back I had Chinese acquaintances who were using it to get their money out of China and to Canada. No longer in communication with those people and I know China has since come down hard on it but is that still part of it's use?
You're question is the correct one to ask. You are bring down voted because people want to pretend one possible crypto scam discredits all crypto and can't comprehend that crypto is more complex than that.
If you pay enough attention, you will notice that the same argument is used to push many political agendas (for better or worse):
- "You can't ban encrypted messaging. Terrorists will always find a way to communicate."
- "You can't outlaw abortions, just safe ones. Women will always find a way."
- "You can't uniformly enforce gun control. Dedicated criminals will keep buying weapons on the black market."
- "You can't ban cryptocurrencies. Enthusiasts will still trade on P2P exchanges."
All of these are half truth, and half lie.
Every policy introduces a certain amount of user friction, which is proven to discourage action. Some people will refrain from infringing the policy (e.g. using guns, performing abortions, using encrypted messaging apps), some others will comply. Percentages obviously vary depending on the specific policy, but it's never 0% nor 100% like "both" sides want you to believe.
The common theme of most of the above points is that the freedom of the innocent will be reduced or their suffering increased if the change is enacted, while less innocent people can continue to ignore the rules. It's oppression of the weakest.
In general, society should be very careful with the things it bans. Prohibition is a hammer best left for extreme situational outliers, not one that should be used for each and every thing someone happens to dislike.
I'm sure all of these examples (encryption, guns, abortion, crypto currencies) are considered by some people to be that extreme situational outlier, and needs to be banned yesterday.
Mine is proof-of-waste crypto currencies such as Bitcoin, or Ethereum before the PoS merge. Too much CO2 for too little gain.
(There's also the Ponzi aspect, but I don't think we need new laws to ban Ponzi schemes: if a crypto currency turns out to be a Ponzi scheme, just sue them for making a Ponzi scheme.)
Unfortunately, societal amnesia means we will never learn this lesson. We will continue to ban things too much, and be too oppressive, until it becomes too overwhelming and a revolution happens. Rinse and repeat.
It should be noted tho that the easiness of "finding a way", and the difficulty of enforcing the law, varies widely between these.
For example - and I say this as someone pro-gun - gun control would likely be the easiest to enforce since it necessarily involves physical things, and not easily obtainable ones at that, at least if you want efficient guns. E.g. black powder is not hard to make, but good luck trying to make it work in anything semi-auto without constant jamming. Sure, there's an active "gun hacker" scene where people come up with designs that can be made at home with readily available tools etc, and it's great as a counterbalance to heavy-handed attempts to regulate... but there are no from-scratch designs that are even close to just about any semi-auto rifle on the market in terms of firepower or reliability (the non-from-scratch designs involve making the regulated parts of the firearm at home, and buying everything that can go over the counter; in US, the latter is everything except for one part).
OTOH if you ban encrypted messaging, how would you enforce that? It's hard to detect on the wire if the protocol is specifically designed to withstand such scrutiny, so you'd have to go after distribution of software. You could force Apple and Google to scrub their app stores, but then people can still install directly on everything other than iOS, and they'd just download it from foreign websites. So now you need some kind of a national firewall to detect and block that etc. It's not that any of that is impossible, but it's certainly much harder, and it would affect a lot more people overall, resulting in more pushback.
A quicker way is to note that a given policy would be difficult to effectively enforce. People like to say unenforceable, which is rarely true given enough resources. But if there are two solutions to an issue, and one isn't as easy to enforce, that is a valid point. Using gun control as an example, restricting sale of ammunition instead of firearms might be difficult to enforce, because ammunition is easier to manufacture at home. Restricting sale of marijuana isn't effective because anyone can grow it in a closet, but testing at employment centers adds a lot more friction as you say, and you don't neednto monitor people's power usage or send around sniffer trucks.
Would it make your experience as a user better if the data was stored in a schema-less distributed database instead of saved to file? Would you browse it more often? If you had to pay for it, would you pay more money?
Because at the end of the day, none of those decisions matter, and sometimes the crappy, inelegant solution is cheaper and more understandable to the ones running it for almost two decades.
If it provides the correct features and runs correctly, simpler is better. To me, simpler to run, understand, backup, deploy, recover goes in the right direction.
In my opinion, yes. It's simple to run, simple to back up, simple to migrate to a new server, upgrade path is straightforward (find the fastest single core CPU).
Now, I'd argue that Waymo has probably somewhat solved highways already as they're much simpler than city driving, they're just not offering it to the public yet.