People who buy drugs "in the streets" generally aren't versed in how to acquire and manage cryptocurrency. Most people buying drugs have a personal relationship with a dealer and don't do transactions "in the streets". Additionally, actually acquiring cryptocurrency requires a bank account in good standing and a ton of invasive KYC paperwork which will raise suspicions and alienate "street buyers". Finally, in my personal opinion, a street transaction would be preferable to giving out my address to anonymous dealers on the internet, but I know some may agree on that point.
> Additionally, actually acquiring cryptocurrency requires a bank account in good standing and a ton of invasive KYC paperwork which will raise suspicions and alienate "street buyers".
This is false. You can acquire cryptocurrency just as easily as you can acquire cash: sell things for it, exchange currency with friends, exchange currency with people you find on LocalBitcoins, steal it, run a business taking payment in it, ...
> You can acquire cryptocurrency just as easily as you can acquire cash:
This is obviously untrue. Cash is ubiquitous throughout every corner of society, while cryptocurrency is extremely niche to the point of practical obscurity.
> sell things for it
The overwhelming majority of potential buyers will not have even heard of crypto.
> exchange currency with friends
Very few people have friends who dabble in cryptocurrency.
> exchange currency with people you find on LocalBitcoins
Risky, time-consuming and impractical, especially for someone that's only looking to buy some weed. Additionally, localbitcoins puts you back "in the streets", you're better off just exchanging cash for drugs in the streets rather than exchanging cash for crypto in the streets so you can go back online to buy the drugs.
> steal it, run a business taking payment in it, ...
That is absurd. You're not making a very convincing case.
Bitcoin ATMs are very popular and easy. I know a guy who runs some and I know what kind of clientele use it... A lot are in rough shape to say the least. And he does very large volume that is growing fast.
Not disagreeing, but just to test this a bit. I'm in San Francisco. What's the safest and easiest way for me to go acquire Bitcoin or Ethereum right now? Note, I don't have a credit card.
Probably a LocalBitcoins in-person cash trader. In a city like SF there should be a decent number to choose from.
It gets harder if you're somewhere more rural, and many of the LocalBitcoins online traders (at least in the UK) require a lot of KYC information, but you should be able to find somebody if you look for long enough.
I unfortunately submit stuff for peer-review and do case study work, so I know a lot about both sides of the garbage aisles. Lot of crap makes it through peer-review, and a lot of good work never does because of cronyism and single-blind review.
It is a currency. You can trade it for goods or services. The idea of moving it into a national currency is what we do now because we are in the early stages. I see a future where you just pay in coin.
It's a currency that can't buy much of anything, so it's close to useless as far as paying for the needs of a typical person. You can speculate about the future of crpyotcurrencies all you like, but the future you imagine is not inevitable and certainly not the reality of today or the foreseeable future.
Beyond that, if we're speculating, a world where all transactions live on a blockchain is an ideal one for a government bent on tyrannical control of the economy. It is likely that governments of the future will have advanced methods of associating wallet activity with real-life activity, especially for citizens who intend to interact with the larger law-abiding economy (if you ask me, blockchain money is the ideal currency for a tyrant). Of course, you can just continue to speculate about future crpytocurrencies that will solve all these issues and that is the reason why this type of speculation gets us nowhere.
And when faced with competition from legitimized currencies, that somewhere is black market goods and services.
Eventually, someone asks the question, "Why can I buy weed with Bitcoin, but not pizza and chips?" And delivery of munchies is a legit business that can be advertised. Once recognized as a viable model, it can then be poached by major corporate players as part of a local pilot program, which can then be rolled out to larger jurisdictions.
The problem, as usual, isn't that you can't buy anything with it--it's that you can't buy everything with it. As long as you can't pay your electric bill with cryptocoins, the business that accepts one as payment can't also pay its employees with that same cryptocoin.
Honestly, would you even apply to a job posting if it said salary to be paid exclusively in Floopcoins?
Keep in mind that usage of "legitimized" currencies is being actively constrained, there are limits on cash transactions, they are/can be easily seized.. every time this happens crypto looks better in comaprison.
And in Europe one already can pay electric bill and pizza with crypto. While only few utilities already accept them directly, many more enterprises want to establish themselves on this emerging market by mediating these transactions.
So the only option is to arrange an in-person meetup with a random stranger from the internet so that they can gouge me with a gigantic markup or just rob me. This sounds terrible even if I have no beef with the government, but totally absurd if I am actually trying to hide money from authorities; for all I know, the person I meet up with is a federal agent or works with them.
I think you are trying to hard to make it seem infeasible or not worth it. The not-worth-it part may be true for most people but it is definitely feasible, especially with decentralized exchanges and websites that let you get gift cards with crypto or even dash which has a debit card. As long as you aren't in jail of course ;)
It's possible to create a self-executing contract on Ethereum that will automatically send a pre-agreed amount of ether when you make a pre-agreed online bank transfer. In other words, it's possible to have exchange between fiat currencies and cryptocurrency without any need for trust, except in relation to whatever risk there is for each counter-party to report the other for participating in that particular transaction.
You would use trusted hardware like Intel SGX to provide proof of untampered processing of a set of data. Town Crier already has a proof of concept on the Ethereum blockchain. This allows one to prove to a smart contract that a webpage served by a particular PKI certificate holder contains some set of data.
The government is involved. The CFAA and similar laws allow Facebook et al to crush anyone who attempts to break their stranglehold. That's exactly the problem. Alternatives to Facebook that may have otherwise been wildly successful were sued out of existence this way.
The government has given Facebook offensive weapons against competitors. They either need to respond by giving the consumer defensive weapons against corporations whose zeal for intellectual property seeks to block or subsume the consumer's access to the marketplace, or they need to remove their interference all together.
It's a double-edged sword. The code's behavior is apparent in that simple example, but things get considerably more difficult to understand when you're dealing with monkey patched methods and dangerously clever method_missing magic in non standard library code.
Yeah, I had to deal with a perl port from a ruby library that had kept most the rubyisms in. The really disturbing thing about it was the Frankenstein levels of autovivification involved. Fortunately someone (not me) is going to get paid deal with that soon.
Rails was designed at a time before angular brought the SPA into fashion. SPAs manage state and template rendering on the front-end, so much of the Rails machinery becomes unnecessary. You can still use Rails to implement your JSON API backend, but the simplicity of something like Sinatra is often preferable since you're increasing the complexity on the front.
The node+react+webpack combo gave web devs the power to process application states and render the UI on the front-end and the back-end using the same code; a feat that is not possible at all with Rails pushing it a little further out of fashion.
Of course, the SPA suffers plenty of criticism, and Rails is still a popular choice with and without an SPA on the front-end, but I think it's fair to say that Rails is no longer the "fun" way to do things (though the most fun doesn't mean the best business or engineering solution).
I agree with all of the major points of your comment, but I have a quibble:
> Rails was designed at a time before angular brought the SPA into fashion
I dunno that Angular is the relevant point here. Rails (late 2005? I think?) post-dates the public existence of Gmail (public April 2004), a wildly popular SPA. It also post-dates the existence of Google Maps (early 2005). The famous blog post by Jesse James Garrett that coined the acronym "AJAX" is also from early 2005.
The thing that Rails does well was already largely-obsolete before Rails was open-sourced. (Though that is one state-of-the-art buggy whip! Very impressive!)
I absolutely agree that the SPA was already a thing before angular, in fact, angular was specifically designed to wrangle the general design concerns related to building SPAs and doing so sold the distinct concept of the SPA to many developers.
> I disagree with your assessment that it's any blinder of a process than your own will is.
I understand what you're saying, but the two concepts cannot be effectively compared. An organism's "will" is a label for the reactive tendencies we observe in physical systems that exhibit homeostasis, whereas evolution is the description of a physical process that is perpetually ongoing and has no physically discrete meaning.
Your commemt is no more insightful than "I understand how to draw a box around one of them".
"You" as an entity are really just a process emergent from chemical reactions on some area, and your "will" is just the result of feedback between many regions of that process and outside stimuli.
Biological evolution is a process happening in more dispersed reactions, but still has all manner of internal feedback mechanisms and responds to external stimuli.
I don't see how you've drawn a meaningful distinction between them, except to say that one os easy to observe in total (eg, you can draw a box around it) and is sort of like you, so you feel you can understand it.
Homeostasis and physical locality don't seem partocularly germane traits when discussing whether or not something has a will.
Further, you (just as evolution) are ongoing until you're not, and "physically discrete meaning" sounds like a dressed up "well, I just know it when I see it".
> You" as an entity are really just a process emergent from chemical reactions on some area, and your "will" is just the result of feedback between many regions of that process and outside stimuli.
Agreed.
> Biological evolution is a process happening in more dispersed reactions, but still has all manner of internal feedback mechanisms and responds to external stimuli.
Disagree. Evolution does not "respond to external stimuli", there is no "internal" or "external" as far as evolution is concerned, that's like saying "erosion responds to external stimuli"; "it" does not respond, "it" is a description of a process.
> I don't see how you've drawn a meaningful distinction between them, except to say that one os easy to observe in total (eg, you can draw a box around it) and is sort of like you, so you feel you can understand it.
I can't draw a box around it because it is not a thing with a position in space unlike "you" which is.
> Homeostasis and physical locality don't seem partocularly germane traits when discussing whether or not something has a will.
Of course it does, if words are to have any meaning at all. Whatever it is you're trying to describe that is common between an organism and the description of physical process is not called "will" by any useful definition of the word. It's like if I said "evolution has no guiding principles" and you replied "well neither do humans really because our 'guiding principles' are just the result of a deterministic evolutionary process", but that's not true because "guiding principles" is a human concept that applies to beings that reason about their environment, even if the foundation of that reasoning is determined by constituent factors.
> There isn't really a threshold beyond that pattern or object somehow communicating to you that it does indeed possess a will or some form of consciousness
I agree. It is a further anthropomorphism to even assume that the integrated sensory and memory perception phenomenon that we apparently experience as consciousness is inherently "human" in its quality rather than something more qualitatively similar to the bending of space-time by matter. An incidental consequence of homeostasis is that arbitrary pieces of matter are somehow a "self" and a cluster of sensory signals are somehow an "experience". The animist view isn't even necessary if we do not insist that "consciousness" be "a state of existence" for thinking creatures to "have" or not.
Your analogy doesn't really say much except that you endorse the idea that bits and atoms are comparable with regard to the "realness" of what they compose, but that assumption is the crux of the debate. One could just as easily say "letters are letters, regardless of how advanced they are, they're still letters. 'Killing' people (if you can call it that) is fine", yet the analogy on it's own fails to enlighten the argument if one already rejects the idea that people composed of text in a work of fiction are real.
I think you're correct to point out the inaccuracies of the image, however I disagree with the cavalier use of the term "fake news" to describe arbitrary instances of false or misleading information. The problem of "fake news" is actively perpetuated in part by the impulse to use the term as a catch-all pejorative for information we deem to be specious.
Fake news is when a media source that claims to report an accurate account of events deliberately peddles stories they know (or can safely assume) are false. Random images floating around the internet are not fake news.
like CNN, you don't get to define fake news. Fake news is as simple as it sounds: articles that are factually incorrect. Sadly, from random images to all major media, everyone is guilty of it.
> you don't get to define fake news. Fake news is as simple as it sounds: articles that are factually incorrect.
I'm happy to debate the nuance of the term fake news, but I think it's ironic that you presume to glibly assert your own definition of fake news right after exclaiming that one cannot do so (unless you're suggesting that CNN and myself, in particular, are forbidden from doing so).
Anyway, fake news is not simply "articles that are factually incorrect", otherwise every misreported fact or journalistic error could be classified as fake news which any intellectually honest person will admit is not what is intended to be described by the term fake news. Further, something cannot be fake news if it is not "news". Random images floating around the internet is not news. People posting memes and rumors on social media is not news. Honestly, even partisan bias and selective reporting by news organizations is not "fake news", and the terms "bias and selective reporting" accurately convey those qualities. Fake news is a loaded pejorative that carries the baggage of the 2016-2017 zeitgeist, so if you're going to use it at all, stick to the definition that common sense would have given us prior to 2016: reporting of current events that is deliberately presented as true when the authors know it is false.
and tell me again, based on your own definition, how all news isn't fake news? Fake news was pushed heavily as a term by the 'liberal media' until it was pushed back against them and they threw a fit and tried to redefine it. In reality, all modern news is fake news. Every outlet has a left or right agenda, and shapes the news in that way based on clever editing, lies, and omissions. Let's call a spade a spade, and admit that all factually incorrect articles, infographics, and stories are what they are...fake news.
edit:
these comments are mostly made out of frustration with news today. Maybe I'm old, i know that i'm older than the median here now. News was different as a kid. There's always been biases, but less subtle. And 'news' used to be the gold standard in editing and investigating. Now, I see error prone articles that seem to have no editing at all, and swings toward propoganda on both sides. Maybe it's a reflection of our own ignorance and biases. But to me, it's the great fall of media, debasing the term 'news'
This is the correct answer. Surely there must be a blog out there that deconstructs "news" articles from highly respected sources pointing out what people think is news is actually propaganda....anyone?
> and tell me again, based on your own definition, how all news isn't fake news?
That's a pretty disingenuous response. Obviously, "all news" is not deliberate fabrication presented as truth, and to suggest as much is worthless cynical hyperbole or willful ignorance or both.
For example, if I load up CNN.com right now, the tag-line for the front-page story reads "Another blow to Trump's travel ban". Clicking through to the article yields the headline "Appeals court upholds block on Trump's travel ban". You can read the article here:
This is not fake news. The 4th Circuit court really did uphold the block on Trump's travel ban. Here is an excerpt FTA:
> Judge Paul Niemeyer, one of the three dissenters, said the majority "looks past the face" of the executive order.
The approach "adopts a new rule of law that uses campaign statements to recast the plain, unambiguous, and religiously neutral text," Niemeyer, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote. "Opening the door to the use of campaign statements to inform the text of later executive orders has no rational limits."
I will reiterate: this is not fake news, Judge Paul Niemeyer really is a 4th circuit judge and those really are his words. Do you understand what I'm saying here? This is a thing that happened in the real world, it is not a fabrication created by CNN to defame Trump, this is reporting of a noteworthy current event that merits news coverage. A critic of CNN might claim "CNN always reports negative stories about Trump". Fine. Selective reporting meets the definition of bias, but bias, once again, is not fake news.
We can perform the same exercise with Fox News. The front-page tag-line reads "TWISTED TREACHERY - ISIS tricked US into bombing building where 100 innocents held captive". Clicking through to the article yields the headline "ISIS rigged explosives to home where 100 civilians died in US-led airstrike, military says". You can read the article here:
This is not fake news. The military really did report that ISIS tricked them into bombing civilians. Here is an excerpt FTA:
> An investigation into the March bombing found that the terror groups rigged a house with over 1,000 pounds of explosives, put civilians in the basement, and employed two ISIS snipers on the roof to bait the U.S.-led coalition to attack.
U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Matthew Isler, the investigating officer for US Central Command, told Pentagon reporters that the bomb used by the American jet, a GBU-38 (500-lb bomb), would not have caused the type of damage associated with the destruction of the building.
I will reiterate: this is not fake news, Air Force Brig. Gen Matthew Isler really is a U.S. Air Force Brigadier General, and those really are his words. Am I making myself crystal clear? This is a thing that happened in the real world, even if civilians are not in a position to corroborate the findings of a military investigation, this is the official report from the military and not a fabrication created by Fox to excuse or justify the U.S. bombing of civilians. A critic of Fox might claim "Fox News always defends the military, even when they kill innocent civilians". Fine. Publishing stories with a tone favorable to one's predefined narrative meets the definition of bias, but bias, once again, is not fake news.
You see what I'm getting at here?
> Let's call a spade a spade, and admit that all factually incorrect articles, infographics, and stories are what they are...fake news.
Simply posting something on the internet does not make it news and you are actually contributing to the "debasing of the term news" that you complain about by refusing to acknowledge the distinction between memes posted to facebook, factual errors in reporting, institutional bias, and deliberate fabrications with no basis in reality. I mean, you're argument is literally "all news is fake". If more people would abandon your cynical defeatist attitude that encourages labeling literally everything as fake news and actually judged individual stories based on their own merit, political discourse in the USA would be a lot more productive.
If it was random, you'd be right, But that image wasn't arbitrary, it was deliberately misleading and created to generate hype/outrage, and the numbers in it now come up as fact. It would be like taking a particular 5 year snapshot of temperatures that were declining, graphing it and labeling it "Climate Change Debunked."
I'm open to it being in some other category of fake, but then we need a label for it.
> I'm open to it being in some other category of fake, but then we need a label for it.
I agree with you. I think "deliberately misleading", "factually inaccurate", even "complete bullshit" are applicable, I just disagree with the overloading of the term "fake news" to describe all manner of falsehood. The word fake followed by the word news in an english sentence is supposed to mean something very specific and when the term is blithely abused to suit the egos of warring partisans it diminishes society's ability to hold the influential news media organizations responsible for accuracy in reporting. In today's world everything is fake news to somebody and that wasn't true in 2014.
