Personally, it has nothing to do with Musk. My Twitter feed is all things I haven't followed, constantly block similar posts, and am completely uninterested in.
My bsky feed is _explicitly_, 100%, only posts I've asked to see.
I do, it constantly shows ads and posts I do not follow. Hell it had a half-page Trump ad on election day and I'm not even American. It also periodically resets back to the For You tab.
Additionally, reply threads in Twitter make no sense. I'll be following a discussion about sports, and there would be a random (bot? ad?) off-topic post every 4th or 5th reply.
I can't help but see people who design social media algorithms to be complete sociopaths: they want to control people's communications and butt in with "recommendations" completely unwelcome, instead of just letting the participants drive the discussion themselves.
And hot replies was only added two days ago, and is simply giving newer comments a temporary boost so they don't end up unnoticed in long threads. Choice is nice!
The simple fact of the matter, IMO, is simply that my feed is mine. It's 100% only posts from OSS developers right now, with no garbage mixed in.
I'm not American. I do not care about American elections. I blocked every lunatic right-wing post that showed up on my Twitter feed from people I don't follow, and yet still almost every post in my feed is about American politics or a half-page Trump ad on election day.
So, almost every post that ends up on my bsky timeline is something I am _explicitly_ interested in, without having to ignore the feed and search for specific users or projects. Of course my engagement is going to be higher! It's basically an RSS feed with an article length limit.
You keep saying that. Just stop using the "For you" tab and stick to the "Following" tab. And if you don't want ads, pay up $15 or so a month and they stop, just like on Youtube. On the "For You", block the idiots - it works.
Both Canada and the US have restarted production specifically to produce RTGs for NASA, but the process takes time to scale up and automate. It's gone up 4x in 4 years and continues to increase, so this is a problem that will eventually be "fixed".
[py]yyjson is built around the fantastic yyjson library by Ibireme to offer a JSON parser that manages to be among the fastest out there while also offering flexible parsing for non-standard JSON and high portability (ANSI C89) without SIMD instructions.
Unique among Python JSON projects, you can also manipulate documents without de-serializing them into Python objects with fast JSON Patch (RFC 6902) and JSON Merge-Patch (RFC 7386) support.
This is the first release that's out of alpha with a stable API and ready for feedback and day-to-day usage.
There are plenty of companies whose stock is sought after but that never paid dividends (I think Tesla and Amazon are some example, or used to be at least)
It’s not really about dividends. If you buy a share of Amazon stock, you’re getting a cut of the value that a million+ people are producing every day by writing code or moving stuff around. The value most workers create for their employers’ shareholders is much bigger than their rent check, and capturing that value is even easier than being a landlord. Dividends are just moving money from one pocket to the other, the value created by people’s work is where the returns come from. Financial returns without value creation are an anomaly, though not necessarily a rare or short-lived one.
Never have isn’t never will, dividends and buybacks are a sign the company doesn’t have use for the money. Meta and Google both eventually started paying dividends because they’re essentially tapped out of internal investment ideas.
Telsa and Amazon on the other hand believe they have something meaningful to do with the money. But eventually successful companies just don’t have anything useful to do with their giant piles of cash.
I'm pretty sure you're not. Or at least, my grocery stores and the IRS/tax people take dollars, not SP500 or QQQ. If yours does I'd live to hear how that works (and where you are).
If you're referring to investing $1,000, having it be worth $1,500, and then selling off $300 to pay for groceries, which a Coinbase/whatever account would let you do with Bitcoin while it appreciates.
If there is someone who wants to start a dog walking service, but they don't have the capital to do so, I can lend them the money with a promise from them to pay me a share of any revenue. My money goes to create a service that real people get benefit from (their dogs are walked) and they pay for that service with a medium of exchange that represents their own labour (fiat money).
I get something in return for my capital, and the world gets a valuable service.
Bitcoin does not offer that. The only return it offers is the hope that tomorrow some other people will pay me more to take my bitcoin, in the hope that some other people will pay them more the day after to take the bitcoin, with the hope that .... you get it.
the entire ETF industry is based on either spending the distributions or reinvesting them, depending on which side of the curve your age lands on, so it's pretty much spending the index.
Oh, definitely. Those are, generally speaking, the places where it's most important that you can do so: the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Afghanistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cryptocurrency_by_.... But it's legal in almost all of the world, and fairly easy, while opening an account with a NASDAQ-listed broker is near impossible for most people.
Even in the literal sense of "owning" you don't need a majority, but yes - one share does have fractional power. I voted my 1000/<a very big number> just recently.
and how much of gold price is in your opinion value of material itself? Strip out that material price and you have speculation price. Price of Bitcoin is mostly that speculation price + instead of material some mathematical properties.
So, access to a permissionless SWIFT-like system from anywhere around the world has no economic value in your opinion? Go and ask people in African countries what it means to them.
> Go and ask people in African countries what it means to them.
Probably incredibly little. I have not in the slightest looked into it, but based on bitcoins properties, I'd guess that it doesn't suit 99.9% of Africa. They use cash and frequently use mobile phones for transferring cash etc.
Most paper money intrinsically has no value at all, even the paper it is printed on can't be used as toilet paper due to its lack of softness. It is only a medium of labor exchange. For me, Bitcoin is exactly the same, but in a very new form, backed by math instead of a government.
You're quite right that neither fiat money nor bitcoin have intrinsic value, though they both have exchange value (i.e. market value). This means there must be a demand that prevents the market value from falling to zero. In the case of fiat currency, the public demands fiat currency for transaction purposes and to pay taxes. In the case of bitcoin, the demand for transaction purposes is anecdotal, almost nonexistent. So the demand for bitcoin is almost entirely speculative. (There's no other possibility as far as I know, given no intrinsic value.) In other words, people demand bitcoin because they expect that the price of bitcoin will go up. Such a demand can be sustained as long as people continue to have the same expectations. When (or if) these expectations change, the demand can evaporate quite quickly, and the price will collapse dramatically as a result. So bitcoin is not backed by math. It's backed by a speculative demand.
Yes, but even speculative demand consists of many levels of speculation. For example, I speculate (based on history) that the world will always consist of corrupt governments printing money like crazy, so "digital gold" will be much better for their citizens than what they have to offer. How reasonable is my speculation? Other people speculate that Bitcoin will double in value, while others speculate it will increase tenfold. I believe their speculation has less merit than mine (at least, that's how I see it). I also speculate that a programmable, permissionless money system, similar to SWIFT, is a very interesting idea that opens up many research avenues and there is some non zero value in it. Another example: How many gatekeepers do you think someone in a poor country has to pass through to transfer dollars internationally using their bank account? You really think there is no value in avoiding all those proxies that charge you high fees? So yes, there is a pyramid of speculations, but some of those speculations are much more reasonable than others.
Speculation is always based on future price expectations. Whether such expectations are justified is a matter of debate of course. Personally I don't find any of the rationales convincing, quite the opposite. But, look, we already have examples of irrational behaviour such as in the case of lotteries. In principle, no rational person should buy a lottery ticket, since the expected value of a lottery ticket is negative. Yet many people buy lottery tickets. The world is full of gullible people who are willing to believe that they can get rich for free.
Crypto can be used as a store of wealth when crossing borders preventing search and seizure of your wealth against overzealous governments. See Russia in the early 90s which would regularly search and confiscate cash from people leaving. That alone makes it very valuable.
They would need 300 million wrenches, one for each citizen. That leaves society in a much better position than letting them do it at scale with an sql query.
Are wrenches single-use, or are you allocating individual attackers per-citizen? In the case of a successful wrench attacker, how are the stolen funds recovered?
This is the classic time-money tradeoff. Theoretically you only need one wrench and one attacker—but even if she attacks 100 people a day it would take thousands of years to reach everyone. And word of the attacks would spread, so later victims would take steps to safeguard their money and the attacks would become ineffective.
To be maximally effective you'd need to mobilize enough attackers and enough windowless white vans to reach the entire populace within probably a day, so let's say 3 million attackers and 3 million white vans. That's when things start getting more expensive than the sql query.
that is assuming every citizen has a crypto wallet, something is not even close to be true..
i would guess that percentage of people with wallets would be very small and a relative small team could with a relative small number of white vans and wrenches could get every single one in relative short time..
and for countries that heavily monitor internet usage, like china, i bet they could have a list with pretty good assumptions on who has crypto that they can target for further investigation before sending the wrenched goons..
> What's the scenario where the government can take the digital money from your bank accounts but can't take the digital money from your crypto wallet?
In cryptocurrency's defense (I am not a Bitcoiner), it not as easy for them to do that, because they can't just order a bank to transfer it/freeze it....assuming the owner is going through a lot of elaborate, inconvenient, and easy to footgun security measures. If you have a Coinbase wallet you're in exactly the same situation as if you had cash in the bank.
HOWEVER, the cost people pay to get that is stupidly high. For every suave international drug dealer who's kept their money out of the hands of the evil government with Bitcoin, you probably have 1,000 dudes or more, who lost the keys to their wallet somehow or got their Bitcoin stolen in a hack.
So you probably shouldn't be worrying to much about duh gubbament.
These threads always leave me baffled. Some people say that only drug dealers use bitcoin. Others say the ratio of normal dudes to drug dealers is 1,000:1 or more. I guess it depends what sounds convenient at the time.
If you worry about the government seizing your money like that, you really should be someone whose money the government wants to seize [1]. Those people aren't regular dude software engineers.
[1] Also, keeping your money in a bank account almost certainly product you from those controversial civil forfeiture situations.
I think the argument is that the drug dealers are actually using bitcoin for its utility, whereas the 1000 normal dudes are just buying it as an investment, not to use.
By head count maybe, but by value you gotta include the ransomware gangs, gambling rings, weapons dealers, human traffickers, money launderers, etc. too. And then it's probably not 1000:1 anymore.
Government cannot take money from a crypto wallet because of cryptography. They could only do it if they compelled you to hand over your secret keys against your will. They also may not even know you have a crypto wallet since it is not registered in your name and is very easy to hide.
On the other hand, government can sieze funds from your bank account by seeking a court order or whatever legal instrument is needed in your jurisdiction.
Exactly, and that's why in EU a transaction to a self-custody wallet from an exchange you need to declare that wallet as your own. Then when the government want to seize your BTC they can track from that wallet onwards all transactions.
The problem with crypto as a hedge against government overreach is with fiat exchanges. I hope more businesses start accepting crypto and you won't need to go trough an exchange that often.
What they can do is (in England & Wales, for example) is to impose a confiscation order on you so when you do end up liquidating your easily traceable crypto current, they will simply come after those assets.
no, while you are typing, there are senior finance legislators that are reviewing multi-hundred page reports where "the only legal way to trade is with a licensed broker" i.e. you Joe Citizen cannot hold your own keys. If you have not heard of this, welcome to old news in the USA and elsewhere. This is not fringe or conspiracy at all.. this is lawyers in the backroom for the last year(s).
There is no scenario where the government doesn't know it exist and the Bitcoin is useful in any way to your life. If you ever use it for any thing there's a bright line directly to you. The silk road guy was taken down for screwing up one time years before he even started the website. Maybe a criminal organization that forces their grand children into it can potentially hide a wallet.
The silk road guy pretty much had a government department trying to shut him down. They don't have the resources to do that for the average individual.
It's true that bank accounts are relatively secure from seizure when crossing borders, but literally everybody I know here in Argentina who's my age or older lost three quarters of the savings in their bank accounts 23 years ago, because the government took it by converting dollars to pesos at the 1:1 pegged exchange rate and then dropping the peg. In a cryptocurrency wallet (a real one, not an exchange like Mt.Gox, Coinbase, or Binance) they wouldn't have lost anything.
Another case is when a foreign government puts you on a sanctions list and freezes your assets in the banks under their jurisdiction. This has happened to a lot of Russians and Russian companies in the last few years. (It also happened to the foreign reserves of the Russian central bank, but Bitcoin is not liquid enough to be a significant international reserve asset.)
> In freezing the bank accounts of Freedom Convoy protesters, Finance Canada bureaucrats said they did not intend to hurt protesters’ families’ ability to buy groceries or pay child support, though they admitted that may have ultimately happened, the Emergencies Act inquiry heard Thursday. (...) Two weeks ago, some Freedom Convoy organizers testified their spouses were cut off from their money and couldn’t make vehicle payments or purchase groceries and medication because joint bank accounts were frozen.
> In pursuing this novel form of politically motivated financial censorship, Prime Minister Trudeau was following in the footsteps of Russian President Vladmir Putin, who in 2019 ordered his government to freeze bank accounts linked to opposition politician Alexei Navalny.
And of course it's well known that, when Wikileaks was targeted by the US government for their journalism, Visa and Mastercard cut off their donations despite apparently having no legal requirement to do so, while Bitcoin donations were able to continue. This was crucial in enabling Wikileaks to support Snowden's escape from the US when he revealed the extent of the US's illegal spying on its own citizens.
You made a subtle, but important, pivot from the topic of “Bitcoin” to the broader topic of “crypto”.
Bitcoin specifically, with its multi-trillion dollar market cap, is built up that high purely on speculation. It is a very fragile store of wealth, especially the higher its market cap becomes.
Let's revisit this again when we can melt bitcoins and sell them.
Gold is a finite resource that has to be extracted and processed, ecoins are made out of thin air (mining them is a superficial analogy) and speculation.
This is a fairly old article, but this has become a very common pattern. For 90% of projects that just need a task queue for sending email or generating reports, you're not going to be doing millions of messages a second and anything that simplifies your stack is worth looking at. I've used these patterns so often to work around issues encountered with Celery that I've split them into their own framework, https://github.com/TkTech/chancy (feedback appreciated ;)
There are lots of these, several of which are commercial ventures so there's definite interest behind it:
Thank you for sharing this. I’ve been trying to find a simple task queue and Huey is ok, but since I’m on Postgres and the tasks I’m queuing are like once an hour, anything redid based has always felt like overkill.
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