It is plausible that an attack could be made by renting cpus for a couple hours for a few million bucks. Don't you think someone could scoop up 10X that by shorting a coin?
It all comes down to the numbers. The ability to rent large amounts of cpus changes the game. Whether this is actually practical is not known, but it seems within the realm of plausible.
I am a little confused. When one or more cryptocurrencies are under attack, what does "withdraw Bitcoins mean exactly"? You can sell Bitcoins immediately for USD easily enough on some exchange, I suppose. But unlike normal currencies where enormous banks/countries have adequate trust to make monster loans in an emergency based on politics and handshakes in the proverbial smoke-filled backroom, a cryptocurrency may not be able to make any transactions. In theory, that could apply to Bitcoin, too, BTW.
I think there are mafia organizations that a sophisticated enough to spend a couple million to make an attack, pump up the panic that will shock the price of the coin, gain a little lucre on the side from double spending, and scoop up tens of millions from selling the coin short before the attack.
The main potential gains from a 51% attack are (1) trashing of a blockchain, primarily reducing its credibility, or (2) double (triple?) spending.
Basic theory assumes that the financial advantage of playing nice and mining is greater than can be achieved from the above.
I would like to see the math on that. Because, in theory, I could get a loan of a bunch coin, rent enough computing power for a 51% attack with that coin, short the coin, double (triple?) spend the coin, and then buy the coin I need at a reduced price after the market responds to the shock. Bitcoin itself may be too big to attack in this manner at this moment in time, but...
I cannot speak to all blockchains, but the basic theory makes assumptions that hardware is a sticky and expensive thing, so the weight of many servers already dedicated to a blockchain will be too high a barrier to scale.
The new world may utterly crush those assumptions because: (1) there is a large and growing ecosystem of efficient blockchain mining machines that will happily and quickly work on another blockchain for the right fee, (2) that ecosystem is rapidly growing and well beyond the scope of any one blockchain, (3) the ability to simply rent one thousand servers for an hour is getting easier and easier, and cheaper and cheaper.
On the nose. In fact, the economy usually booms when energy prices go down. There is no kind of economic stimulus quite like it. It puts money in the pockets of average consumers AND money in the pockets of most productive businesses. (Not all, of course.)
As one factor analysis goes, I do not think you can do better than look at the correlation between average energy prices one year to economic growth in the following year. Better than tax cuts/rises, military spending increases/decreases, which party controls which branch of gov't, etc.
Mind you, correlations and one factor analysis in a complex economy should be taken with a grain of salt.
Your point is correct, but I would suggest the underlying problem is that companies are unwilling to figure out how to train up people to these jobs. In the short term, it is quite expensive to train up 5 people when there is a good chance 3 will be poached. But not having key necessary skills can potentially be even more expensive.
Then, on top of that cost, you have to assume that the least reputable businesses won't actually follow their privacy policy, or will deliberately carve out exceptions that don't sound bad until you see how they use them. If you assume that everyone is behaving ethically, then privacy policies aren't needed, and if you assume that everyone is behaving unethically, then privacy policies do no good.
This. One big reason I gave up on FB is I realized that properly managing my ever changing privacy options would not matter at all. It was inevitable that the most crooked app/integration used by my least wise friend would scoop up everything about me and sell it to evil people for lucre. I did not anticipate that "my least wise friend" would be FB itself, but that is an unimportant detail. FB's recent 'eff up is just the breach we know about.
There is a deeper strategy here. (1) Get information with the suit (and make a little publicity along the way) (2) With hard facts, be able to demonstrate that this private company selling information to ICE is dependent on local law enforcement feeding data into the system (3) Put the squeeze on local politicians about whether voters will support them helping ICE officials raid within their city
In a lot of cities in California, this strategy could easily work, cutting down these surveillance providers at the knees. They have nothing useful to sell to ICE if city police departments do not give them the license plate reader information.
What if there were some huge undocumented caves somewhere off the depths of the lake that contained something essential for the Pleiosaurs to survive. They don't normally leave the caves, but occasionally one does... they get sick, rise to the surface and get spotted by tourists before dying and sink to the bottom where they are eaten by fish and other organisms.
Yeah, nonsense I know... but theoretically possible
Pleiosaurs breath air. Sure, they might hang out in caves a lot of the time for a food supply, but underwater caves make for uncomfortable breathing conditions for a large animal, even if a few happen to have air.
There is an actual good explanation for the legends, which boil down to credible reports of surprising waves on apparently windless days. The loch is basically a very long and very straight lake. If there were a very gentle and steady breeze, the entire lake could be "tilted" by the wind -- imperceptible to the observer, but there would be some amount of energy stored by gravity. What happens if the wind suddenly stops? You can get unexpectedly large waves propagating down miles of lake, waves that might be difficult to perceive one place but easy to see a mile down. From the observers point of view, the wind change from nothing to nothing, and, lo and behold! big waves appeared over there. Waves so big and sudden that the "only" explanation is a large animal.
So right now we have a decent idea for how life could have started, primordial soup and all that. And it seems fairly plausible, but it's also a result of us saying "life began on Earth, this is the most plausible life-forming process that could work on Earth, therefore this is how life started."
But that's not necessarily the case, there might be other places in the Universe where for some reason it was much easier to life to form, if so panspermia becomes more likely.
It is quite plausible that Earth is a near optimal location for creating life. Protolife is probably just slime that clings to surfaces and has chemistry that encourages the formation of more and similar slimes, in the particular conditions where there is organic chemistry floating about. Porous rock with warm water, rich with various compounds, nearish volcanic sources that push water and dissolve minerals, what more do you need?
It is very plausible that there is vastly more bacteria seeping through the crust than life on the surface, when measured by weight. While distribution in the present does prove anything about the origin of life, it does tell you something important about what all places where life might first have appeared really look like. Once you look at it that way, what exactly do non-Earth location really offer?
While not utterly provably impossible, the Venus hypothesis does not provide us with anything useful. It basically presumes that life could have developed on Earth and maybe conditions were good enough over on Venus earlier, and life hitchhiked over with that billion year head start. Well, if we already are presuming that life could have developed here, then why complicate things without an iota of actual evidence pointing towards the more convoluted path?
Some of the productivity as measured by GDP is phoney, so reducing that may not hurt at all. If both parents work full time jobs, unless grandparents are available, they end up spending a lot on childcare and afterschool activities. Working hard to pay for someone else to take care of the children you love is a losing proposition to everyone but the taxman, until you hit a pretty high income level.
(A) Forking is a kind of "printing" on a whim. It is obviously true about any soft fork. It is arguably true about a hard fork, too. (B) New cryptocurrencies can very easily be printed, and all can potentially directly compete with Bitcoin (in a way that Mexican pesos will never directly compete with the USD).
I thought you were kidding, but I think, no, I think you are correct. The word "snowflake" seems like the popular insult to drop into every even slightly right-of-center post, so they can whine about how they get modded down.
The entire industrialized world saw a drop in violent crime, regardless of their incarceration policies. The best explanatory theory is the drop in childhood lead poisoning -- a toxin that is known to be very dangerous to childhood brain development. The nice thing about this theory is it is testable. Different cities, different states within the US, and different countries have had somewhat different timing in the lead poisoning abatement efforts, and the violence rates do track with similar looking time lags, just as would be expected.
The incarceration rates do not. You can find individual cities or states that show correlation, but it is easy to show contradictory data.
Cars could be plugged in while at work. And obviously an individual who is in the car commuting and off grid is probably not using all that much power from the grid, until they reach their destination, and then they could be plugged back into the grid.
Of course, that presumes that there is enough power left on the car battery to matter. But half a full charge is probably pretty common, and counts for something.
The main contention justifying action was that there were active nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs -- all three. That programs to create new weapons were active, right in the then-present moment, so doing something about it now before it was too late was necessary. Finding a crate or two with leaking, unusable mustard gas artillery shells, a crate that was probably just plain forgotten about by everyone in the back of some warehouse, was not what Powell was talking about to the UN.
While it is technically true that any military stockpile of chemical weapons violated the UN resolutions, Bush did not put that front and center because everyone would have yawned and said "Hey, when you spies figure out where it is, grab some actual evidence and we will do something about it." It is the alleged active programs that were the key argument.
Once again, you are making stuff up to support your dumb ideas. I am perfectly capable of meeting that bar, and you know it. I choose not to because it is tangential to your main contention, so you obviously are not going to budge an inch if I comply. You are displaying the classic troll gambit of making a fantastic claim, and then asserting that somebody else has to jump through hoops with evidence before you will deign to display a little honesty.
tl;dr -- If you actually have an evidence-based argument, the burden is on you to provide it. Adults understand that.
Depends what "did the best" really means, doesn't it? We know what kind of results Powell is capable of when he really wants to, e.g. his amazing ability to not notice My Lai.
I am not interested in racing with your moving goalposts. You talk about wanting three examples but leave yourself a giant loophole to claim sites are building nuclear weapons by just handwaving. I noticed what you did there.
I believe Hussein's point of view was (1) that it was a bunch of show business by US politicians -- that the CIA really understood what he had, but Hussein himself did not dare come clean publicly for fear of Iran, (2) the US would ultimately not remove him, for it would unleash Iran on the whole region, and the House of Saud and Israel would help Washington see the light behind closed doors.
There are multiple levels of unintended irony here.
Here we are, dancing around whether to go to war to prove Hussein right, when a little country like Iraq was too big a bite for us to chew.
Slashdot Mirror
It is plausible that an attack could be made by renting cpus for a couple hours for a few million bucks. Don't you think someone could scoop up 10X that by shorting a coin?
It all comes down to the numbers. The ability to rent large amounts of cpus changes the game. Whether this is actually practical is not known, but it seems within the realm of plausible.
Shadowy Russian cybermafias or AWS, computer cycles are available for a price. It is a commodity.
I am a little confused. When one or more cryptocurrencies are under attack, what does "withdraw Bitcoins mean exactly"? You can sell Bitcoins immediately for USD easily enough on some exchange, I suppose. But unlike normal currencies where enormous banks/countries have adequate trust to make monster loans in an emergency based on politics and handshakes in the proverbial smoke-filled backroom, a cryptocurrency may not be able to make any transactions. In theory, that could apply to Bitcoin, too, BTW.
Seems to be.
I think there are mafia organizations that a sophisticated enough to spend a couple million to make an attack, pump up the panic that will shock the price of the coin, gain a little lucre on the side from double spending, and scoop up tens of millions from selling the coin short before the attack.
The main potential gains from a 51% attack are (1) trashing of a blockchain, primarily reducing its credibility, or (2) double (triple?) spending.
Basic theory assumes that the financial advantage of playing nice and mining is greater than can be achieved from the above.
I would like to see the math on that. Because, in theory, I could get a loan of a bunch coin, rent enough computing power for a 51% attack with that coin, short the coin, double (triple?) spend the coin, and then buy the coin I need at a reduced price after the market responds to the shock. Bitcoin itself may be too big to attack in this manner at this moment in time, but...
I cannot speak to all blockchains, but the basic theory makes assumptions that hardware is a sticky and expensive thing, so the weight of many servers already dedicated to a blockchain will be too high a barrier to scale.
The new world may utterly crush those assumptions because: (1) there is a large and growing ecosystem of efficient blockchain mining machines that will happily and quickly work on another blockchain for the right fee, (2) that ecosystem is rapidly growing and well beyond the scope of any one blockchain, (3) the ability to simply rent one thousand servers for an hour is getting easier and easier, and cheaper and cheaper.
On the nose. In fact, the economy usually booms when energy prices go down. There is no kind of economic stimulus quite like it. It puts money in the pockets of average consumers AND money in the pockets of most productive businesses. (Not all, of course.)
As one factor analysis goes, I do not think you can do better than look at the correlation between average energy prices one year to economic growth in the following year. Better than tax cuts/rises, military spending increases/decreases, which party controls which branch of gov't, etc.
Mind you, correlations and one factor analysis in a complex economy should be taken with a grain of salt.
Your point is correct, but I would suggest the underlying problem is that companies are unwilling to figure out how to train up people to these jobs. In the short term, it is quite expensive to train up 5 people when there is a good chance 3 will be poached. But not having key necessary skills can potentially be even more expensive.
Then, on top of that cost, you have to assume that the least reputable businesses won't actually follow their privacy policy, or will deliberately carve out exceptions that don't sound bad until you see how they use them. If you assume that everyone is behaving ethically, then privacy policies aren't needed, and if you assume that everyone is behaving unethically, then privacy policies do no good.
This. One big reason I gave up on FB is I realized that properly managing my ever changing privacy options would not matter at all. It was inevitable that the most crooked app/integration used by my least wise friend would scoop up everything about me and sell it to evil people for lucre. I did not anticipate that "my least wise friend" would be FB itself, but that is an unimportant detail. FB's recent 'eff up is just the breach we know about.
Sounds like a first world problem I would like to have.
There is a deeper strategy here.
(1) Get information with the suit (and make a little publicity along the way)
(2) With hard facts, be able to demonstrate that this private company selling information to ICE is dependent on local law enforcement feeding data into the system
(3) Put the squeeze on local politicians about whether voters will support them helping ICE officials raid within their city
In a lot of cities in California, this strategy could easily work, cutting down these surveillance providers at the knees. They have nothing useful to sell to ICE if city police departments do not give them the license plate reader information.
What if there were some huge undocumented caves somewhere off the depths of the lake that contained something essential for the Pleiosaurs to survive. They don't normally leave the caves, but occasionally one does... they get sick, rise to the surface and get spotted by tourists before dying and sink to the bottom where they are eaten by fish and other organisms.
Yeah, nonsense I know... but theoretically possible
Pleiosaurs breath air. Sure, they might hang out in caves a lot of the time for a food supply, but underwater caves make for uncomfortable breathing conditions for a large animal, even if a few happen to have air.
There is an actual good explanation for the legends, which boil down to credible reports of surprising waves on apparently windless days. The loch is basically a very long and very straight lake. If there were a very gentle and steady breeze, the entire lake could be "tilted" by the wind -- imperceptible to the observer, but there would be some amount of energy stored by gravity. What happens if the wind suddenly stops? You can get unexpectedly large waves propagating down miles of lake, waves that might be difficult to perceive one place but easy to see a mile down. From the observers point of view, the wind change from nothing to nothing, and, lo and behold! big waves appeared over there. Waves so big and sudden that the "only" explanation is a large animal.
So right now we have a decent idea for how life could have started, primordial soup and all that. And it seems fairly plausible, but it's also a result of us saying "life began on Earth, this is the most plausible life-forming process that could work on Earth, therefore this is how life started."
But that's not necessarily the case, there might be other places in the Universe where for some reason it was much easier to life to form, if so panspermia becomes more likely.
It is quite plausible that Earth is a near optimal location for creating life. Protolife is probably just slime that clings to surfaces and has chemistry that encourages the formation of more and similar slimes, in the particular conditions where there is organic chemistry floating about. Porous rock with warm water, rich with various compounds, nearish volcanic sources that push water and dissolve minerals, what more do you need?
It is very plausible that there is vastly more bacteria seeping through the crust than life on the surface, when measured by weight. While distribution in the present does prove anything about the origin of life, it does tell you something important about what all places where life might first have appeared really look like. Once you look at it that way, what exactly do non-Earth location really offer?
While not utterly provably impossible, the Venus hypothesis does not provide us with anything useful. It basically presumes that life could have developed on Earth and maybe conditions were good enough over on Venus earlier, and life hitchhiked over with that billion year head start. Well, if we already are presuming that life could have developed here, then why complicate things without an iota of actual evidence pointing towards the more convoluted path?
Some of the productivity as measured by GDP is phoney, so reducing that may not hurt at all. If both parents work full time jobs, unless grandparents are available, they end up spending a lot on childcare and afterschool activities. Working hard to pay for someone else to take care of the children you love is a losing proposition to everyone but the taxman, until you hit a pretty high income level.
"They can't be printed at a whim."
Nope.
(A) Forking is a kind of "printing" on a whim. It is obviously true about any soft fork. It is arguably true about a hard fork, too.
(B) New cryptocurrencies can very easily be printed, and all can potentially directly compete with Bitcoin (in a way that Mexican pesos will never directly compete with the USD).
I thought you were kidding, but I think, no, I think you are correct. The word "snowflake" seems like the popular insult to drop into every even slightly right-of-center post, so they can whine about how they get modded down.
The entire industrialized world saw a drop in violent crime, regardless of their incarceration policies. The best explanatory theory is the drop in childhood lead poisoning -- a toxin that is known to be very dangerous to childhood brain development. The nice thing about this theory is it is testable. Different cities, different states within the US, and different countries have had somewhat different timing in the lead poisoning abatement efforts, and the violence rates do track with similar looking time lags, just as would be expected.
The incarceration rates do not. You can find individual cities or states that show correlation, but it is easy to show contradictory data.
Cars could be plugged in while at work. And obviously an individual who is in the car commuting and off grid is probably not using all that much power from the grid, until they reach their destination, and then they could be plugged back into the grid.
Of course, that presumes that there is enough power left on the car battery to matter. But half a full charge is probably pretty common, and counts for something.
"because they're totally not doing shit over there, nope, nosiree."
What's this? Oh, it is a claim that you claim you never made. You have just been proven wrong.
But, of course, you are too cowardly to even think about your own words, just like I expected.
Clarification: I presume backwardsposter shifted the discussion to 2003. (Or perhaps I misunderstood his point.)
You are also partaking of a kind of revisionism.
The main contention justifying action was that there were active nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs -- all three. That programs to create new weapons were active, right in the then-present moment, so doing something about it now before it was too late was necessary. Finding a crate or two with leaking, unusable mustard gas artillery shells, a crate that was probably just plain forgotten about by everyone in the back of some warehouse, was not what Powell was talking about to the UN.
While it is technically true that any military stockpile of chemical weapons violated the UN resolutions, Bush did not put that front and center because everyone would have yawned and said "Hey, when you spies figure out where it is, grab some actual evidence and we will do something about it." It is the alleged active programs that were the key argument.
Once again, you are making stuff up to support your dumb ideas. I am perfectly capable of meeting that bar, and you know it. I choose not to because it is tangential to your main contention, so you obviously are not going to budge an inch if I comply. You are displaying the classic troll gambit of making a fantastic claim, and then asserting that somebody else has to jump through hoops with evidence before you will deign to display a little honesty.
tl;dr -- If you actually have an evidence-based argument, the burden is on you to provide it. Adults understand that.
Depends what "did the best" really means, doesn't it? We know what kind of results Powell is capable of when he really wants to, e.g. his amazing ability to not notice My Lai.
I am not interested in racing with your moving goalposts. You talk about wanting three examples but leave yourself a giant loophole to claim sites are building nuclear weapons by just handwaving. I noticed what you did there.
I believe Hussein's point of view was (1) that it was a bunch of show business by US politicians -- that the CIA really understood what he had, but Hussein himself did not dare come clean publicly for fear of Iran, (2) the US would ultimately not remove him, for it would unleash Iran on the whole region, and the House of Saud and Israel would help Washington see the light behind closed doors.
There are multiple levels of unintended irony here.
Here we are, dancing around whether to go to war to prove Hussein right, when a little country like Iraq was too big a bite for us to chew.