Ethereum is a great utility token. Smart contracts absolutely have utility in the digital economy. It's just not a cryptocurrency, is all. It had a massive premine, there's no supply cap, it's subject to OFAC censorship, and has effectively demonstrated that just ~4.8% of the total ETH supply can vote to cause rollout and widespread adoption of a fork that reverses transactions.
We need different words for these fundamentally different things, because conflating them causes real confusion, as this very hack demonstrates. People are surprised that an admin can lock transactions precisely because the word "cryptocurrency" led them to assume properties that don't exist in stablecoins.
Where did the 4.8% number come from? Is it based on the validator stake? How does that compare to the number required to fork Bitcoin as a function of it's supply?
There was a vote after the DAO incident to roll back. 87% of those that voted voted yes (for the rollback), but only 5.5% of the total supply voted at all.
To be pedantic: I think the actual story is about V1 drones. They did not have a navigation system as such, they were just aimed in a certain direction and with the right amount of fuel to fall out of the sky over the target.
The British noticed that V1s aimed at London tended to fall a little short. This would have been to the South and East of London since that's the direction they were coming from. They reported more hits on the North West of the city, expecting correctly that Nazi spies in Britain would let the Luftwaffe know about this.
So the range was decremented further, meaning even more hits on the southern and eastern suburbs, but statistically fewer people killed and buildings destroyed as the mean moved to less populated areas.
I'm a little torn on this one. On the one hand, people are bad epistemologists and lots of countries manage with similarly limited jury trials. On the other, we're doing it for cost reasons, which I think is the worst basis imaginable for such a move
I'm not quite clear on the how of it, but Stockfish works pretty well outside the normal bounds of chess. There are toy chess variants on chess.com with "dragons" (knight + bishop) and stockfish can use those very effectively
Bartenders from other countries don't get locked up the moment they enter the US because they served alcohol to someone (a US citizen?) between 18 and 21. The US does not have jurisdiction over alcohol sales in other countries.
In this scenario, what's more likely to be illegal is bringing the item into the country.
It's difficult to make physical analogies to these types of internet laws. What makes them 'tricky' is how they are not physical.
If they pack the alcohol up in a crate, and then ship it to the person after they make the order in person? Less clear yes?
If the consumer goes to a place it is legal, and consumes it there without bringing any back, most people would say ‘meh’. Depending on the product. Hard drugs and sex work, being two common exceptions that some countries get more worked up about even traveling to ‘enjoy’ it.
But ship it back (especially hard drugs or sex workers!), and almost all people get more concerned.
The issue here is exactly why customs typically is a mandatory ‘gate’ for packages AND passengers entering a country.
Similar, one could say, to a giant country level firewall?
And why it is so lucrative for smugglers, which are defacto performing a type of arbitrage eh?
Which insinuations do you think are ludicrous? Is it not a matter of public record at this point that the NSA and NIST have lied to weaken cryptography standards?
The entirely unsupported insinuation that the customer Cisco is describing is the NSA. What's even supposed to be the motivation there? The NSA want weak crypto so they're going to buy a big pile of Ciscos that they'll never use but which will make people think it's secure? There are others, but on its own that should already be a red flag.
The article links a statement from an NSA official that explicitly says the NSA has been asking vendors for this, which seems like fairly strong support to me.
Coffee is inherently not a consistent drink. The only brewing methods that don't vary significantly with brewer skill and chance are immersion brews, which aren't broadly used in modern coffee shops. It's surely better to not burn the beans to ash and accept some inconsistency than ruin the drink every time
Not at all - consistency is what they sell. It's like going to Japan from the US and eating McDonalds. Or eating McDonalds in Mexico. Same food, more or less.
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