That's fine, good even. Afaik at least for some of these tasks dev teams are doing a lot of manual tuning of the model (rumored that "r in strawberry" had been "fixed" this way, as a general case of course). The more there are random standalone hacks in the model, the more likely it will start failing unpredictably somewhere else.
That (freedom of payments) may have been the idea. But there are two problems with it:
1. Payments which you can't make today inside a legal system are two types. And if you enable system you automatically enable both types. For libertarians that is a clear 100% positive. For regular centrist citizens, not so much. At minimum it's a topic for debate.
2. BTC and a few other tokens actually make this problem worse. Since blockchain is public, you can always trace "bad" or real bad payment to the source wallet. That i one issue, and another is that since BTCs are non-fungible, the tokens used in such payments are forever tainted. Even in the current anarchic and almost unregulated environment some exchanges are blacklisting some of the tokens, to limit own exposure.
> Payments which you can't make today inside a legal system are two types. And if you enable system you automatically enable both types. For libertarians that is a clear 100% positive. For regular centrist citizens, not so much.
The problem with this argument is that cryptocurrency now exists whether it's legal or not and using it for illegal things is already illegal. Drug dealers are committing a felony by selling drugs and if that hasn't deterred them then neither will making something else they're doing a crime too.
So all of the negative uses are going to happen regardless of whether you also ban the positive uses. At which point, what are you gaining by making it illegal or inconvenient for innocent people to use it for something that isn't otherwise illegal?
> Since blockchain is public, you can always trace "bad" or real bad payment to the source wallet. That i one issue, and another is that since BTCs are non-fungible, the tokens used in such payments are forever tainted.
People keep making this claim and it keeps not making sense.
You don't need someone's permission to send them Bitcoin. Meanwhile large exchanges keep billions of dollars in a single wallet and have single wallets that do billions of dollars in transactions over a short period of time.
So let's consider the two possible ways this can work: First, if you get coins directly from a tainted wallet then you get in trouble, but if it was several steps back then it doesn't matter. This is, of course, useless, because then people would just transfer the coins through a couple of other wallets first.
Second, any wallets that receive any tainted coins become tainted forever. Then immediately the vast majority of the chain is tainted because the coins have made the rounds through a large exchange at some point. Worse, it's pointless to try to defend against it by refusing tainted funds, because you can't actually refuse funds. Your billion dollar wallet or freshly mined Bitcoin can be tainted by any troll who sends you a dollar from a tainted wallet without your permission, and trying to treat coins as non-fungible is probably a good way to get someone to troll you like that.
Which gives you two alternatives again. The first is that all coins can be tainted by trolls, which will in practice cause exactly that to happen and thereby make the premise meaningless. The second is that you can try to say that it doesn't count if someone sent them without your permission, but now you can't tell if something is tainted by looking at the chain because it can't tell you which transactions were unauthorized by the recipient, and moreover you would then have a mechanism for getting dirty coins into a clean wallet.
In other words, when anyone can send you money without your permission, your options are "everything is dirty" or "everything is clean".
> At which point, what are you gaining by making it illegal or inconvenient for innocent people to use it for something that isn't otherwise illegal?
The problem is scale. The more widespread is such system, the lower is the barrier to entry and the higher is cost to actually prosecute users to their amount and rate of usage (which we already see today).
Also this whole legal/illegal divide is often presented as if there was approximately same order of magnitude of both users. While I guess that actually the illegal use is way way larger than the legal use, simply because it is so crude and slow and buggy and unsafe by design. (excluding gambling, since that use is kinda derivative, depending on the all other uses making up a base on which to gamble)
And this is why token systems by rights should be heavily restricted, since they are so disproportionate in impact. We can all legally buy a knife in any shop, despite the fact that if used for attack a knife almost inevitably produces at least one body. Small arms are also available almost anywhere but with a lot of restrictions. Big arms are almost never available for purchase, just like explosives. And then the stuff like a canister of zarin is totally out of the question. That's because of the disproportionate effect. Same with financial instruments. Tokens are an Abrams of the finance world, and currently we let anyone have one, which is mindboggling to me.
> In other words, when anyone can send you money without your permission, your options are "everything is dirty" or "everything is clean".
You are correct. Afaik all tries to ban Tornado laundered tokens were eventually dropped. But the mechanism and potential still remains.
Also, please correct me if I'm wrong, in the case of BTC specifically we can track tokens from the "dust" attack and separate them from the legal and nice tokens, since they will stay in the different UTXO in the same wallet. Though I'm not very familiar with that, if it possible to pick which UTXO to transfer selectively.
It is an amusing and potentially even good concept, but with one caveat - you only consider close enough exchanges with similar peers. To translate that into English - a fully libertarian self-sufficient settlement where people are exchanging home-made stuff between one another. Because everyone was the same and no one could abuse the system, it may even worked. We even seen it in the early criminal communities, when BTCs briefly were a medium of exchange for drugs. And then tokenbros made a leap of faith and magically scaled that to the whole world. Which obviously didn't work in practice. Their famous Lightening L2 is an abomination of hacks and centralization and it still doesn't scale.
The problem of BTC was at the same time overabundance of imagination in one area and a big gap in imagination how the world actually works. They only saw simple isolated scenarios and never a globalized economy.
In practice all tokens including BTC are massively used for law evasion. Criminal don't need any fancy Monero for that, they only need to break the chain once, or maybe a few times an that is enough. That usually happens at the entry points, a criminal backe exchanges of any size will happily take your cash or digital money and exchange then for any tokens you like and vice versa. A politician then declares that his several BTC worth a few millions were "fairly mined" and nothing to see there. Or a corrupt government pays with tokens for some sanctioned wares. The whole Axis of Losers trade is propped up by mafia's USDT, which are used to trade between Axis countries and willing collaborators like India, to buy oil/rockets/chips/soldiers/anything, with central exchange in Dubai and other petrocratias.
And other countries have freedom to scoff at that or even sanction trade with it (gasp, the horror!). Freedom works both ways, you know.
A fitting quote for the moment:
"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other." (c) George Orwell
Also regarding India and tokens, sure they are officially banned. But they are still a key link a in trade chain, that' why I mentioned Dubai and its neighbors. They act as a laundromat and a tumbler, obscuring financial flows. And one part of the Russia-India trade or Russia-Iran trade or even Russia-China trade involves tethers (USDT), without which exchanging rubles to rupee or to yuan directly would be highly problematic and risky. Tokens mitigate some of the risk by hiding financial flows through multiple jurisdictions.
By the grace of first past the post, winner takes all. This ancient system prevents people from picking shades of grey parties, since they simply don't exist in any significance. And from the other end it doesn't allow parties to split, since it will mean than the smaller block is immediately equal to zero (zero votes, zero seats). In when parties aren't allowed to split, they trend towards reactionism and radicalism, when radicals can hold the whole party "hostage". Applies to both sides btw.
The standard complaint is the opposite. In a generic first past the post two party system you should end up with two barely distinguishable centrist parties.
But the US system is far from generic. Instead it has several tweaks that make it tend towards extremism. The primary system is probably the biggest factor.
That if carries a lot of meaning here. In reality it is and was impossible to pay for all the stolen data. Also LLM corpos not only didn't pay for the data, but they never even asked. I know it may be a surprise, but some people would refuse to sell their data to a mechanical parrot.
Well, it's not like it's a simple black and white situation, universally applicable to every debate in human history. Sometimes it is relatively better to be open-minded and able to change own opinion. Sometimes it is relatively better to keep pushing a point if it is rational and/or morally correct.
The reason why the latter stance is often popularized and cheered is because it is often harder to do, especially in the adverse conditions, when not changing your opinion has a direct cost of money or time or sanity or in rare cases even freedom. Usually it involves small human group or individual against a faceless corporation, making it even harder. Of course we should respect people standing against corporation.
PS: this is not applicable if they are "clearly wrong" of course.
Consider the plight of a policy-maker who changes their stance on some issue. They may have changed their mind in light of new information, or evolved their position as a result of deeper reflection, personal experience, or maturation. Opponents will accuse them of "waffling" or "flip-flopping", indicating a lack of reliability or principles (if not straight-up bribery). Elected officials are responsible for expressing the will of the people they represent, so if they're elected largely by proponents of issue X, it is arguably a betrayal of sorts for them to be as dynamic as private citizens.
This is tangential to the original topic of insider trading, where the corruption is structural / systemic -- akin to how "conflict of interest" objectively describes a scenario, not an individual's behavior.
The demonization of "flip-flopping" is so stupid. Bro, I want my politicians to change their minds when new facts arise or when public sentiment changes. The last thing we need is more dogmatic my-way-or-the-highway politicians that refuse to change their minds about anything.
Reminds me of Stephen Colbert's roast of George W. Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner:
> The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will.
1) People don't really vote based on logic and sound reasoning. They vote based on what sounds right to them. If they're unhappy with something, they vote for somebody who also claims to be unhappy about it, regardless if he has any actual solutions.
2) Even for the minority who wants to vote based on sound principles, it's very hard to push information back to them. If the politician changes his mind, he has to explain it to his voters. Are there really platforms which allow in-depth conversations in political debates?
Every university classroom has a whiteboard and a projector. Because you need to draw graphs, diagrams, etc. You need to explain the general structure and then focus on the details without losing track of the whole.
Is there a single country where politicians use either when talking to each other or voters?
While I agree with you, I find it hard to argue against the view that politicians are elected for the views they held during their campaign. They may change their mind after being elected, but their constituents that voted for them will not all change their mind simultaneously. To the ones that don't change their mind, it does appear to be a betrayal of their principles. A rational politician would not want to gain that kind of reputation out of pure self-interest.
I would be much more inclined to continue voting for a politician who could explain their policy position as it changes in an open and sensible way. Politicians putting on a speech that sounds truthful and honest and like a discussion is happening between adults is so rare - it seems that very few people want that. I do though.
There is ZERO evidence for such a civilization. Especially because there are no resilient megalithic traces in the first place. Megaliths we see are only 5-6 thousand years old and have a lot of matching real evidence about people who built them and how they did it.
There is no way to detect our civilization bio signatures and technology signatures from more than a few closest stars range at most. None at all. Not even with magic.
There is likely hundreds or thousands of isolated alien worlds in the galaxy, the is no point in getting to them just because they they are alive, because of the next problem - it is absolutely mind boggling what amount of energy and technological advances are mandatory to even short interstellar travel. If you can solve them all, your civilization are practically gods. Why would they concern themselves with some early stage civilization, to which they must travel for millennia in an iron box? This would also mean they have solve immortality btw, or they would all die in transit.
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