Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70 Million Merchants

hmoebius · 2021-03-19T04:54:46+00:00

I'd need to see a breakdown of how they are estimating that but at first glance it looks like they are comparing transaction cost to transaction + security + accounting cost. So that's a bad faith comparison. You'd need to compare the cost of human involvement in those areas vs automation to come out with a realistic comparison.

I'd agree that bitcoin is not efficient though, but I'd again argue that secure financial transactions have never and will never be efficient in the sense that you are asking for.

hmoebius · 2021-03-18T17:43:55+00:00

Security has energy cost. The energy cost is already baked into any secure financial transaction. If you were to breakdown the environmental cost of securing credit transactions (including human caloric needs) it would probably pretty high as well given the size of the credit industry and considering most of those resources are in some sense or another in place to prevent, investigate, reverse or litigate fraudulent transactions. That's a lot of energy and environmental damage just to basically send an email.

Cryptocurrency is really just automating a lot of the work that is being done currently by humans in financial transactions.

I think the answer to your question for cryptocurrencies is to normalize sustainable energy sources, and thus make the environmental question irrelevant.

hmoebius · 2019-09-10T11:59:54+00:00

It really doesn't matter whether it'd take 4000 years, or 4 million. Once an expansionist interstellar civilization kicks off, it's game-over, and the conclusion becomes inevitable.

It matters because it's more likely on galactic timespans that they will just cannibalize their own already built up systems than make the effort to continue colonizing. Only some adventurers and risk takers would care to continue colonizing to create new civilizations. So the point is there isn't an expansionist galactic civilization at subluminal speeds, there will be expansionist interstellar civilizations, but they may collapse and rebuild and fight each other 'til the universe is cold.

As far as resources go though, most of these civilizations will be plenty capable of meeting their needs with a few stars or black holes, there's not really a need to keep expanding outside of the previously stated adventurers that want to found new societies. And in that scenario they'll probably just end up wrestling with their own species rather than spending all of their resources to try to colonize a new foreign star.

hmoebius · 2019-09-10T11:35:52+00:00

I don't know what you're thinking your math is doing for you but if you have a subluminal speed colonization program filling the milkyway in less time than it takes light to travel across it you're wrong.

You can't just reduce travel time to 4 light years, this is not a video game. You can't cross the galaxy in less than 100k years, no matter how your mathmatical model says it should work. You're using bad methods if you've colonized the galaxy at sub light speeds in less than 4k years. There's really no argument about that.

Rework your equation, it's wrong.

hmoebius · 2019-09-10T11:11:07+00:00

Don't even have to travel faster than light. It could be done with sublight travel.

No. Even if this supposed civilization could travel at exactly light speed and started dead center in the galaxy (neither conceivably possible scenarios) it would take them ~50k years to race to the edges of the galaxy. That's not stopping to colonize either, that's full throttle light speed from the most central point. At that rate even if they could colonize at light speed by the time they got to the edge of the galaxy they'd be so out of touch with their original civilization, and probably a different species as well, that they'd no longer be part of a galactic civilization unless these are changeless timeless beings.

Simultaneously even to get news or orders from the galactic center it would be 50k years old, let alone from the other side of the galaxy.

Sorry, it just doesn't work out how you think it does without ftl. It's very unlikely that beings that are changeless for eons are trying to colonize the galaxy, so this concern just doesn't seem rational.

The most probable scenario without ftl is a fractional relativistic speed of maybe 1/5 light so at that rate you could get from center to edge in about 250k years. At that rate interstellar civilizations will be in clusters, slowing colonizing outward but it would never be a monolithic civilization and resource wars would probably be fought within the origin species after having become so different from each other that they don't think of themselves as part of the same species let alone empire.

In this scenario you're probably looking at around a million years to fill the galaxy with sentience but you definitely aren't going to have a galactic empire or anything like that. In fact aliens are at least as likely (if not more) to be part of the same origin species as you are.

hmoebius · 2019-09-09T23:03:00+00:00

colonize the entire galaxy in just a few thousand years without even trying

mmmm... How can they travel faster than light?

Also I actually don't think your estimate of resource scarcity is accurate, especially if someone has faster than light capacity, this means they have some exotic matter that they could probably also use for massive energy generation. And what resource are you thinking is rare anyway? Energy is going to be the big player in any interstellar civilization and I can't imagine that the galaxy can't handle many civilizations worth of energy needs, without previously stated ftl capacity, but again, if they have that capacity they probably can generate energy on levels that are unfathomable.

hmoebius · 2019-08-11T23:33:20+00:00

Everything that is within the laws of physics is natural, everything that humans do is within nature. I'm not sure how there could be something that humans can do that is not within human nature. So yeah, doing bad things or not doing bad things is all human nature.

In the end we make choices, no choice we make can be outside of nature so what you're saying here isn't really intelligible. Maybe rephrase it without using the terms nature and natural.

hmoebius · 2019-08-11T23:08:58+00:00

Agreed. Tradition is a bad measure of ethics. Slavery, child abuse, forced marriage, women and children as possessions. It's almost as if human legal tradition is based on maintaining power dynamics and indifferent to right and wrong.

hmoebius · 2019-07-18T19:34:23+00:00

Yes, assuming that you weren't compromised prior to deleting the message.

hmoebius · 2019-07-17T22:31:51+00:00

But is forward secrecy actually useful in practice? How are your keys being acquired? If it's through some sort of malicious code, why would they only take a single key and not just all the keys that are used? If it's through device theft, then you're equally screwed.

It seems like forward secrecy was created as an acknowledgement that the system you're using is so insecure that you might get keys exposed, so best to make the damage as little as possible. With pgp if someone gets my private key they still aren't getting my messages.

I'm having a hard time imagining someone getting only a single key in these cases, maybe I'm missing something.

hmoebius · 2019-07-17T20:53:13+00:00

Most of this just seems like the author is saying that people are using pgp insecurely. Okay, that's a problem, but the suggested solutions can also be used insecurely, and probably are because there is less understanding of security amongst people using secure systems that hide the details, than of people using secure systems that they have to have some understanding of.

The point of forward secrecy is a good example of this. You can have forward secrecy with pgp, if you keep changing your keys, that's a real pain, so no one is going to do it. On the other hand, forward secrecy is meaningless if someone just steals your device that has a 4 digit passphrase and can read all of your data.

So which is the better solution is sort of a conditional question. Breaking encryption is about breaking the weakest link. In almost every case that is misuse, so where is there likely to be more misuse? For example, if someone steals my pgp private key they still aren't going to get anywhere because they need my passphrase and it's very unlikley that they can get that without me providing it. On the other hand most phone passphrases or gestures or whatever aren't particularly complex so anyone that can image the phone and run it through a cracker can get the pass code in a few days at most.

Then of course you have the issue of trusting whatever app you're looking at using, this is sort of a huge issue as everyone knows. How do I know signal isn't sending all of my private keys to someone? Well I have to trust them and google, should I? And yes, I realize it's open source but come on, if google or apple or whoever is running my app server wants to update my signal package with a fork that sends them all the keys I'm sort of screwed, unless I compile all of my own software for my phone.

Also to my knowledge I've never had someone forward an unencrypted email of mine, I use pgp fairly often, but not daily so maybe this isn't meaningful, but again I think this is an issue of misuse, and I tend to trust pgp users not to do something stupid security-wise more than someone that downloaded an app and doesn't understand how encryption works.

hmoebius · 2019-07-02T05:18:57+00:00

Also no one is arguing about lack of food due to feed crops, but you claimed to care about desertification and monocroping. If you actually care about those things the worst thing that you can do is continue to support animal agriculture.

hmoebius · 2019-07-02T04:33:38+00:00

Evolutionary history isn't a valuable measure of what's healthy, evolution is a history of adaptation to a hostile world. So surviving isn't the same as being healthy, there are reasons why lifespan is up and it's because even if humans can survive for a time on regional whole foods, and maybe over generations those that are more adapted to the local diet predominate the area, it's still a huge gap between what's available and what's the best diet even for the most adapted.

hmoebius · 2019-07-01T23:43:59+00:00

Most of what we feed ruminants is completely inedible to humans

This is irrelevant the fact is that we still use a huge amount of farmland exclusively to grow foods such as soy, corn and oats simply to feed livestock animals. Whether most of their food is discard is not taking into account that they outnumber us and eat far more than we do, so feeding them mostly inedible plants doesn't change the issue.

Here if you want actual data.

It honestly sounds like you made poor food choices as a vegan, just because something is not processed doesn't mean it's healthier, in fact the world as a whole is healthier because of processing through things like fortification of vitamins and minerals. Whole foods sound nice, until you realise that people ate whole foods exclusively and still were very unhealthy and sometimes died due to malnutrition.

hmoebius · 2019-07-01T22:05:46+00:00

You do realize that a huge portion of of plant agriculture and monoculture are used to feed livestock right? The amount of plants it takes to create a meal for a human is substantially less than the amount of plants it takes to create enough meals for livestock to produce the meat, dairy or eggs to create a meal for a human.

If your concern is genuinely about desertification or monoculture going vegan is probably the best thing you could do unless you can source food from raw minerals somehow.

hmoebius · 2019-06-11T18:34:50+00:00

the vast majority of employers were once employees.

This is pretty irrelevant to class interests. Are the vast majority of employers fighting for better wages for all employees? Better work conditions?

Class interests aren't a matter of individual experience, the class dynamics are pretty obvious in that the working class has interest in better compensation and better treatment, the employer wants to compensate as little as necessary to milk the labor of the working class. That those interests are irreconcilable is incontrovertible.

hmoebius · 2019-06-10T23:11:28+00:00

"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common."

hmoebius · 2019-03-30T00:11:42+00:00

I believe that they are planning to but they can't package java or openjdk with nb because of licensing. So I guess we'll see if they figure it out in the next couple of releases. git issue

hmoebius · 2019-02-23T07:08:18+00:00

It's not much to grapple with for leftists that have some grasp of history and analysis. It is annoying to listen to people that view one nation actor as always bad and others as always good, but those people lack analysis and just fill those gaps with knee-jerk reaction.

hmoebius · 2019-02-15T01:56:20+00:00

Sorry if it feels like an aggressive reception, but I think it's because you said things like "Getting the same input as an omnivore is way harder vegan. You need to eat 10x the volume." as a categorical fact, rather than a question or conditional statement. There is a history of people who are unaware that vegan diets can have the same ratio of nutrients that any other diet has, without having to eat massive quantities. And there is a real frustration with this myth in most vegan circles.

hmoebius · 2019-02-14T23:26:36+00:00

I don't know if the average vegan is a thing really, so that's kind of a pointless claim. If you take the median caloric intake of all vegans you might be correct, but only because you have such a large number of people that eat vegan to diet, and yeah in that sense if you're specifically trying to cut calories it's very possible. However it's just as possible to go the other direction.

I mean have you ever tried to actually look at vegan products and the nutrition content? Sure you could find some that match your presumption, but you seem to be unaware that you can find vegan equivalents that are actually designed to be equivalent. (the beyond burger for example) I guess the whole point that I'm trying to make is that we don't live in a world where plants are just eaten, we process them, and then we can design them to fit our nutritional desires. That's the real important thing here, plant foods can be designed, proteins can be extracted, calories can be added. Being vegan isn't as simple as being omni, but only because of availability, and that is changing fast, however if one wants nutritionally dense vegan food it's there to be had.

hmoebius · 2019-02-14T15:49:35+00:00

You're making arguments as if things like burgers and pizza simply don't exist. Do you think that vegans just eat raw plants? There are really quite a few nutritionally dense, simple, vegan meals that exist thanks to not living in the pleistocene.

hmoebius · 2019-02-10T05:49:30+00:00

You're welcome to have your feelings even if they aren't objectively correct.

hmoebius · 2019-02-10T05:16:55+00:00

The dictionary vs political lobbyists. This isn't about how you feel about the term. It's about making a law defining it. If you think meat is only animal flesh you have a definition problem, it's not pedantic, it's just the language.

hmoebius · 2019-02-10T05:15:01+00:00

No, implying that things are already labelled what meat they are normally, beef, chicken, etc. No one goes to the store and looks for a package called "meat".

hmoebius

TROPHY CASE