seriously. Ecuador is a country in the world, and as any nation has real-world responsibilities to support truth, freedom and justice. They didn't keep him out of prison - they kept him in THEIR prison to use as a political pawn. Diplomatically, they COULD have transferred him to Ecuador a long time ago.
The guy spent 7 years confined in a room. All visitors monitored and reported, conversations logged. No access to the internet or news. Unable to use the bathroom without being watched. What kind of shape would YOU be in by this point?
Fark the British Bullshit Corporation for this article. Fark everyone trying to shame him and distract the world from understanding what this action truly means to press freedom and the first amendment.
Fark the yellow media for supporting this Russiagate stuff based on nothing, spreading black propaganda and repeating dogma to deflect blame and excuse the US leadership from war crimes and internal election tampering. Fark Hillary and the DNC for being lying, cheating, two-faced shits in the first place.
Fark the US military leadership for not prosecuting their own war crimes - I guess military discipline is long gone and the org is just mercs and assassins for hire.
Fark Ecuador for not doing anything to get him out, or helping resolve the issue through diplomatic means. They just sat on their hands, then gave him up in exchange for a $4.5B loan from the IMF. Traitors. This bullshit is just a smoke screen.
Fark the gutless UK judiciary for not throwing out the bail-skipping charge when farking Sweden was exposed for being the US's bitch and building the bogus rape case in the first place.
Fark the UK politicians for being the US's little bitch, and for their ineptitude at pretty much anything. Ex: Brexit.
Fark that misogynist racist nepotistic asshole Trump for flip-flopping and hanging Julian out to dry.
Fark Australia for being the UK's little lap-dog and doing nothing to help their own citizen.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" someone said. Empty words I guess.
Rant over, the general public may now turn off their brains and return to watching the farking Kardashians.
Remember the story of a guy with GG who went into a bar (in Seattle I think) wearing them and got punched out, glasses broken. Why?
Theory: People HATE being recorded all the time, and REALLY hate being recorded in the bar. Maybe they're meeting someone they shouldn't be seeing. Maybe they are making a deal with someone. Whatever. Bars had always been the last bastion of private socialization.
Yeah cell phones can do it but video recording is obvious when they are doing it so you can defend yourself by shutting up and getting out of the camera eye. Some people use their cells to record audio but that's considered dirty. Prepare to be hated if you get caught.
The difference with GG is it made surveillance easy and obvious and personal. It became a focal point for society's brewing anger around being watched all the time. Knowledge is power, data-gathering is bullying.
How nice that big companies can effectively cheat on taxes using dodgy accounting, and pass some of the loot along to C-levels and shareholders, while screwing everyone, the environment and the very economy we rely on to stay alive. Thanks Google.
Tracking zCash will be easier as most people will be lazy and just use t-addresses. Monero tracking would be hard. DHS may need resort to social attacks, malicious wallet code, network timing attacks and data sweeps.
True - as bitcoin crashes then miners leave, causing the difficulty to drop which means the blockchain overall requires less hash power. This is good as long as a 51% attack is impossible.
But look at bitcoin's carbon footprint compared to the systems it could replace. Computers flipping bits has a far lower footprint than the sum of the carbon emitted for gold mining, minting, transport, storage and trade plus the carbon from the world's financial system running on paper. Think of all the carbon from having armored trucks, bank vaults, ATMs, and all those financial paper-pushing-professionals commuting into their cubicle farms each day. In this context, lack of crypto adoption is worse for pollution than the increase in miners that comes from adoption.
Of course greedy speculators are trying to take advantage of cryptos. It's an open and free market after all. Without speculators, there would be no interest, no markets and no adoption.
People need a reason to use cryptos. Speculating is one of the primary reasons. Without a reason then fiat always wins because even the simplest person can use it.
The big difference between cryptos and banking is freedom of choice. You can choose to speculate on bitcoin, or not. You can choose to use it, or not. Choose to mine it, or not. And you can change your mind at any time.
Greedy bankers, on the other hand, have a legislated monopoly enforced by the barrel of a gun. Bankers and their masters have the ability to do whatever they want with the products of your labor. They can inflate the money supply and force you into poverty. They decide what you pay in interest. They bribe politicians to get laws in their favor. They make reckless investments and their losses are covered by your tax dollars.
Eventually all of these Social Media platforms adopt each other's features, blend, get overused/abused and then "suck".
It used to be Facebook was the 'white-pages', and LinkedIn was the 'yellow-pages', by analogy to those huge wastes of trees called "phone books"?
Then everyone tried to share their own ideas, socialize, share pictures of their lunch. Twitter, Instagram and all provided the same features: news-feed, personal linkages, sharing pictures/videos, chat, and so on and all the use-cases all blended together.
Now web 3.0 is here, someone is probably building the next "thing" to capture society's need to socialize by playing with new toys, and maybe FB and LI will go back to being the online global phone book.
Ethereum smart contracts can automate most banking services. Its amazing how fast its happening. World feels like its a month before August 1, 1981 when MTV went live. Cryptocurrency is like video and traditional banks are like the Radio Stars.
> "... part of the reason China is now refusing to process American and European plastic is that so many people tossed waste into the wrong bin, resulting in a contaminated mix difficult or impossible to recycle"
Baloney - it's about their costs based on how they set up their operations. Take plastic bags for example - these CAN be recycled but they have so much trapped air it makes the process less efficient and less profitable. So they throw it in the dump and this is why only something like 10% of all plastic is recycled.
Suggestion: dump it all into a pyrolytic chamber and boil off the plastic to oil. Leftovers are carbon black plus whatever really was not recyclable.
I guess I agree with the OP - consumers can't/won't solve this. Bring on the garbage-sorting robots!
> Actually it already has been seized. Seize a wallet and the coins are seized. The FBI seized 40% (?) of the bitcoin wallets at the Russian exchange BTC-e.
The keys in a personal wallet, on a cellphone for example. are encrypted with a PIN/passhphrase and can be backed up. So even if someone loses the phone, s/he can restore the keys on a different device.
What we still have is a citizen who is responsible for paying taxes [on taxable items] and a government that is constitutionally authorized to collect taxes [within the scope of the law].
Nope. Bitcoin/etc is definitely new, a way of storing value that can't be seized. It's better than burying gold in the back yard.
And the fishing expedition is still illegal whether or not capital gains taxes are lawful.
There are legally-valid regulations in force on the use of *fiat* as granted by constitutional amendment. Crypto is not issued by any central bank and not controllable by any government. In short: They didn't create it, they don't own it and they don't control it.
The Ninth Amendment says the government does not automatically get control over new things. Here we have a new thing: not currency, not stocks, not real property. I haven't heard of any recent constitutional amendments granting the govt new power.
And TBH I personally dont care about tax evasion and money laundering because I dont do those things or know how they work. Besides, crypto erases those problems precisely *because* govt can't control it.
And $20k is nothing in the great scheme of things.
Actually it *is* unreasonable because the net would identify the business operators who use Coinbase to cash out to fiat every night. And it would catch investors who simply moved their bitcoins off of coinbase into mobile wallets or cold storage and still have them. No capital gains to report, but identified anyway. Though they did nothing wrong, those folks who are cleared remain on some list and somehow get a higher chance than others at being audited or detained crossing a border or something. They will be the first people threatened and abused if the law changes and makes bitcoin/etc illegal. And there will be false-positives on the list who get similar treatment.
Just because transactions up to $20k are routinely monitored doesnt make that practice right, necessarily. If we fail to speak up for Coinbase and its users now, then we will be sorry when regulatory creep later lowers the bar and everybody will bear the burden of recording and reporting every single transaction. The same burden won't apply to fiat of course.
The IRS is clearly (to my mind) overstepping its bounds and if unchecked it will lead to worse things.
All gun owners must be murderers because why else would someone need a gun All Italians must be affiliated with the Sicilian mafia because Sicily is part of Italy All beautiful women must be promiscuous because why else would they be beautiful All coinbase users must be tax evaders simply because... uh... uh... Okay well not ALL users just the ones who bought more than $20k because that sounds like a really big number to [edited] people who are afraid of spooky numbers and computers and stuff
1. If your vehicle in not FLEX-fuel and has EFI (every car after 2006, some before) you can purchase a specialized computer for a couple hundred dollars so you can run on any blend of ethanol and gasoline. 2. Run on alcohol. Burning a gallon of ethanol produces 1/2 the CO2 that burning gasoline produces. Yes alcohol gets 25% less range so you need to burn more but you're still cutting vehicle emissions by approx 25% Burning alcohol is better for the engine too. 3. Find a source of cheaply-produced ethanol or make your own.
B. Energy from Wasted Oil-Based Plastic
Build a pyrolytic converter to break down waste plastic into oil. This is a cheap and simple process that can break down all waste plastic even the stuff the recyclers wont take like plastic grocery-shopping bags. It can be profitable too.
C. Energy Recovery from Poop
Thanks to good living standard, human waste is very rich in energy. Anyone could build a biodigester for the home to break down solids into methane which can then be burned for heat/hot water etc. and reduce the homes energy needs. Some cities are doing this at scale already.
D. Habit of Accumulation
Look at the average home and notice how the basement and attic are filling up with cheap crap that was used once or once every ten years. Do we really need all that stuff? Could we rent more? It would be cheap and easy to set up a 'flea market' in every major city so people could exchange crap for crap directly.
E. Air Travel Habits
With Facetime/Hangouts/Skype etc do we REALLY need to fly so much? A few years ago a volcano erupted in Iceland and the resulting ash/CO2 cloud shut down air travel in Europe for a week. It was the first carbon-neutral eruption in history
F. Stupid Business Models
Someone was shipping ice cubes to Iceland. Seriously. How many business models currently only work because oil is "cheap". Including military ops around the world in that.
G. Electricity Generation
Gas-fired power plants ought to be replaced with 4th-gen nuclear (or Thorium or whatever). Yes horrifically expensive but compared to the Billions we spend every month on war for oil its a long-term bargain.
Of course none of this will happen as long as the fossil-fuel industry remains in charge of the government and industry, and has the deep pockets to finance FUD campaigns and prevent the people from agreeing to change.
Yes you can short bitcoin: - by placing orders on a crypto exchange - by investing in regulated financial instruments (depending where you live) - by trading bitcoin for any alt currency - by trading bitcoin for goods and services - by trading bitcoin for fiat (the worst option) or gold
No crisis here... merely the culmination of 25 years of technological and social change finally overwhelming an industry that couldnt or wouldnt change its business model.
Slashdot Mirror
seriously. Ecuador is a country in the world, and as any nation has real-world responsibilities to support truth, freedom and justice. They didn't keep him out of prison - they kept him in THEIR prison to use as a political pawn. Diplomatically, they COULD have transferred him to Ecuador a long time ago.
Thanks for modding this way down so I couldn't see the responses in time to reply while the post is hot.
Everyone pull your heads out and watch this before saying anything more in public:
https://youtu.be/_xSRS5YpiQM
The guy spent 7 years confined in a room. All visitors monitored and reported, conversations logged. No access to the internet or news. Unable to use the bathroom without being watched. What kind of shape would YOU be in by this point?
Fark the British Bullshit Corporation for this article. Fark everyone trying to shame him and distract the world from understanding what this action truly means to press freedom and the first amendment.
Fark the yellow media for supporting this Russiagate stuff based on nothing, spreading black propaganda and repeating dogma to deflect blame and excuse the US leadership from war crimes and internal election tampering. Fark Hillary and the DNC for being lying, cheating, two-faced shits in the first place.
Fark the US military leadership for not prosecuting their own war crimes - I guess military discipline is long gone and the org is just mercs and assassins for hire.
Fark Ecuador for not doing anything to get him out, or helping resolve the issue through diplomatic means. They just sat on their hands, then gave him up in exchange for a $4.5B loan from the IMF. Traitors. This bullshit is just a smoke screen.
Fark the gutless UK judiciary for not throwing out the bail-skipping charge when farking Sweden was exposed for being the US's bitch and building the bogus rape case in the first place.
Fark the UK politicians for being the US's little bitch, and for their ineptitude at pretty much anything. Ex: Brexit.
Fark that misogynist racist nepotistic asshole Trump for flip-flopping and hanging Julian out to dry.
Fark Australia for being the UK's little lap-dog and doing nothing to help their own citizen.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" someone said. Empty words I guess.
Rant over, the general public may now turn off their brains and return to watching the farking Kardashians.
a sub-human
Life begins simply - send the space station to Mars and colonize it, with fungi
Remember the story of a guy with GG who went into a bar (in Seattle I think) wearing them and got punched out, glasses broken. Why?
Theory: People HATE being recorded all the time, and REALLY hate being recorded in the bar. Maybe they're meeting someone they shouldn't be seeing. Maybe they are making a deal with someone. Whatever. Bars had always been the last bastion of private socialization.
Yeah cell phones can do it but video recording is obvious when they are doing it so you can defend yourself by shutting up and getting out of the camera eye. Some people use their cells to record audio but that's considered dirty. Prepare to be hated if you get caught.
The difference with GG is it made surveillance easy and obvious and personal. It became a focal point for society's brewing anger around being watched all the time. Knowledge is power, data-gathering is bullying.
How nice that big companies can effectively cheat on taxes using dodgy accounting, and pass some of the loot along to C-levels and shareholders, while screwing everyone, the environment and the very economy we rely on to stay alive. Thanks Google.
Tracking zCash will be easier as most people will be lazy and just use t-addresses. Monero tracking would be hard. DHS may need resort to social attacks, malicious wallet code, network timing attacks and data sweeps.
True - as bitcoin crashes then miners leave, causing the difficulty to drop which means the blockchain overall requires less hash power. This is good as long as a 51% attack is impossible.
But look at bitcoin's carbon footprint compared to the systems it could replace. Computers flipping bits has a far lower footprint than the sum of the carbon emitted for gold mining, minting, transport, storage and trade plus the carbon from the world's financial system running on paper. Think of all the carbon from having armored trucks, bank vaults, ATMs, and all those financial paper-pushing-professionals commuting into their cubicle farms each day. In this context, lack of crypto adoption is worse for pollution than the increase in miners that comes from adoption.
Of course greedy speculators are trying to take advantage of cryptos. It's an open and free market after all. Without speculators, there would be no interest, no markets and no adoption.
People need a reason to use cryptos. Speculating is one of the primary reasons. Without a reason then fiat always wins because even the simplest person can use it.
The big difference between cryptos and banking is freedom of choice. You can choose to speculate on bitcoin, or not. You can choose to use it, or not. Choose to mine it, or not. And you can change your mind at any time.
Greedy bankers, on the other hand, have a legislated monopoly enforced by the barrel of a gun. Bankers and their masters have the ability to do whatever they want with the products of your labor. They can inflate the money supply and force you into poverty. They decide what you pay in interest. They bribe politicians to get laws in their favor. They make reckless investments and their losses are covered by your tax dollars.
Choose which system you want.
We all know it will be porn somehow.
Eventually all of these Social Media platforms adopt each other's features, blend, get overused/abused and then "suck".
It used to be Facebook was the 'white-pages', and LinkedIn was the 'yellow-pages', by analogy to those huge wastes of trees called "phone books"?
Then everyone tried to share their own ideas, socialize, share pictures of their lunch. Twitter, Instagram and all provided the same features: news-feed, personal linkages, sharing pictures/videos, chat, and so on and all the use-cases all blended together.
Now web 3.0 is here, someone is probably building the next "thing" to capture society's need to socialize by playing with new toys, and maybe FB and LI will go back to being the online global phone book.
Wow I feed old now. Have installed, configured and used:
Slackware 96
RedHat
Gentoo (I did the Mom experiment - she used it for years)
Ubuntu
Debian/Raspbian
Special mention to cygwin for keeping me sane whenever I was forced to use Windows.
Ethereum smart contracts can automate most banking services. Its amazing how fast its happening. World feels like its a month before August 1, 1981 when MTV went live. Cryptocurrency is like video and traditional banks are like the Radio Stars.
Fare is fare, after all.
> "... part of the reason China is now refusing to process American and European plastic is that so many people tossed waste into the wrong bin, resulting in a contaminated mix difficult or impossible to recycle"
Baloney - it's about their costs based on how they set up their operations. Take plastic bags for example - these CAN be recycled but they have so much trapped air it makes the process less efficient and less profitable. So they throw it in the dump and this is why only something like 10% of all plastic is recycled.
Suggestion: dump it all into a pyrolytic chamber and boil off the plastic to oil. Leftovers are carbon black plus whatever really was not recyclable.
I guess I agree with the OP - consumers can't/won't solve this. Bring on the garbage-sorting robots!
can't argue with the barrel of a gun, for sure, nor should one try
> Actually it already has been seized. Seize a wallet and the coins are seized. The FBI seized 40% (?) of the bitcoin wallets at the Russian exchange BTC-e.
The keys in a personal wallet, on a cellphone for example. are encrypted with a PIN/passhphrase and can be backed up. So even if someone loses the phone, s/he can restore the keys on a different device.
What we still have is a citizen who is responsible for paying taxes [on taxable items] and a government that is constitutionally authorized to collect taxes [within the scope of the law].
Nope. Bitcoin/etc is definitely new, a way of storing value that can't be seized. It's better than burying gold in the back yard.
And the fishing expedition is still illegal whether or not capital gains taxes are lawful.
There are legally-valid regulations in force on the use of *fiat* as granted by constitutional amendment. Crypto is not issued by any central bank and not controllable by any government. In short: They didn't create it, they don't own it and they don't control it.
The Ninth Amendment says the government does not automatically get control over new things. Here we have a new thing: not currency, not stocks, not real property. I haven't heard of any recent constitutional amendments granting the govt new power.
And TBH I personally dont care about tax evasion and money laundering because I dont do those things or know how they work. Besides, crypto erases those problems precisely *because* govt can't control it.
And $20k is nothing in the great scheme of things.
Actually it *is* unreasonable because the net would identify the business operators who use Coinbase to cash out to fiat every night. And it would catch investors who simply moved their bitcoins off of coinbase into mobile wallets or cold storage and still have them. No capital gains to report, but identified anyway. Though they did nothing wrong, those folks who are cleared remain on some list and somehow get a higher chance than others at being audited or detained crossing a border or something. They will be the first people threatened and abused if the law changes and makes bitcoin/etc illegal. And there will be false-positives on the list who get similar treatment.
Just because transactions up to $20k are routinely monitored doesnt make that practice right, necessarily. If we fail to speak up for Coinbase and its users now, then we will be sorry when regulatory creep later lowers the bar and everybody will bear the burden of recording and reporting every single transaction. The same burden won't apply to fiat of course.
The IRS is clearly (to my mind) overstepping its bounds and if unchecked it will lead to worse things.
All gun owners must be murderers because why else would someone need a gun ... uh ... uh ... Okay well not ALL users just the ones who bought more than $20k because that sounds like a really big number to [edited] people who are afraid of spooky numbers and computers and stuff
All Italians must be affiliated with the Sicilian mafia because Sicily is part of Italy
All beautiful women must be promiscuous because why else would they be beautiful
All coinbase users must be tax evaders simply because
A. Gasohol
1. If your vehicle in not FLEX-fuel and has EFI (every car after 2006, some before) you can purchase a specialized computer for a couple hundred dollars so you can run on any blend of ethanol and gasoline.
2. Run on alcohol. Burning a gallon of ethanol produces 1/2 the CO2 that burning gasoline produces. Yes alcohol gets 25% less range so you need to burn more but you're still cutting vehicle emissions by approx 25% Burning alcohol is better for the engine too.
3. Find a source of cheaply-produced ethanol or make your own.
B. Energy from Wasted Oil-Based Plastic
Build a pyrolytic converter to break down waste plastic into oil. This is a cheap and simple process that can break down all waste plastic even the stuff the recyclers wont take like plastic grocery-shopping bags. It can be profitable too.
C. Energy Recovery from Poop
Thanks to good living standard, human waste is very rich in energy. Anyone could build a biodigester for the home to break down solids into methane which can then be burned for heat/hot water etc. and reduce the homes energy needs. Some cities are doing this at scale already.
D. Habit of Accumulation
Look at the average home and notice how the basement and attic are filling up with cheap crap that was used once or once every ten years. Do we really need all that stuff? Could we rent more? It would be cheap and easy to set up a 'flea market' in every major city so people could exchange crap for crap directly.
E. Air Travel Habits
With Facetime/Hangouts/Skype etc do we REALLY need to fly so much? A few years ago a volcano erupted in Iceland and the resulting ash/CO2 cloud shut down air travel in Europe for a week. It was the first carbon-neutral eruption in history
F. Stupid Business Models
Someone was shipping ice cubes to Iceland. Seriously. How many business models currently only work because oil is "cheap". Including military ops around the world in that.
G. Electricity Generation
Gas-fired power plants ought to be replaced with 4th-gen nuclear (or Thorium or whatever). Yes horrifically expensive but compared to the Billions we spend every month on war for oil its a long-term bargain.
Of course none of this will happen as long as the fossil-fuel industry remains in charge of the government and industry, and has the deep pockets to finance FUD campaigns and prevent the people from agreeing to change.
Yes you can short bitcoin:
- by placing orders on a crypto exchange
- by investing in regulated financial instruments (depending where you live)
- by trading bitcoin for any alt currency
- by trading bitcoin for goods and services
- by trading bitcoin for fiat (the worst option) or gold
No crisis here ... merely the culmination of 25 years of technological and social change finally overwhelming an industry that couldnt or wouldnt change its business model.
newspapers, meet reddit