It's a way of communicating his age; it's standard phrasing for American english. No disrespect is implied or intended. There are generally no holds barred when it comes to dunking on people that are truly disliked, and when newspapers want to disrespect someone, they will leave no room for doubt (there are some awfully hilarious examples of such obituaries throughout American history.)
"Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, dead at 56"
It's meant for headline brevity, replacing things like "has died at age 97" and is standard practice.
Claude Achille Debussy, Died, 1918.
Christophe Willebald Gluck, Died, 1787.
Carl Maria von Weber, Not at all well, 1825. Died, 1826.
Giacomo Meyerbeer, Still alive, 1863. Not still alive, 1864.
Modeste Mussorgsky, 1880, going to parties. No fun anymore, 1881.
Johan Nepomuk Hummel, Chatting away nineteen to the dozen with his mates down the pub every evening, 1836. 1837, nothing.
-- Michael Palin
Its not always included. I think they added it to highlight how old he was.97 years is quite the accomplishment, so I don't interpret it as disrespectful.
I work in this area and to me, the tech is still super interesting. In particular, things like zero knowledge proof and related scaling/privacy solutions are at the forefront of cryptography in my opinion.
I gave the "industry" a pretty thorough deep dive; I learned Solidity, wrote a bunch of smart contracts, tried a lot of DeFi, and listened to ~100 episodes of the Zero Knowledge podcast.
My impression on the other end of it is that the "tech" is interesting in a purely academic sense but most of the participants are building things they know have no use and engaging in a lot of motivated reasoning about the future to justify drawing money in from the outside.
Like, it can all be a lot of fun! And some techniques, like all ZK folding schemes, are mathematical magic. But, no one wants code to be law and pretty much no one should be managing private keys tied to money.
Cryptocurrencies have not actually invented much new technology, they mostly combined existing ideas in new ways. Merkel trees, for example, are an almost 50 year old idea, zero-knowledge proofs are almost 40 years old, proof of work predates Bitcoin by 15 years which makes it 30 years old.
I think the initial impractical prototypes for the core techniques were in the literature for a while but there's really no comparison between eg interactive ZK protocols and the succinct non-interactive proofs used by the cryptocurrency folks. The latter are computationally general (you don't have to roll a new one for each program) and many orders of magnitude more efficient.
I think it's important to give the cryptocurrency industry credit for the few corners in which it makes real (theory/tooling) contributions even if they're motivated by nonsense
I did not want to say that they invented or improved nothing, just that a lot of the building blocks already existed. I just looked this up, non-interactive zero-knowledge proof also seem to have a history back to the late 80s, but if cryptocurrencies gave us some improvements and new ideas that made them more practical, fine, I am not going to complain about that.
You can do general purpose programming in all kinds of DSLs and Rust libraries that compiles down to big-but-practical arithmetic circuits and then generate proofs that y=f(x) without revealing x for arbitrary f. That really wasn't possible until a few years ago and emerged almost exclusively within the sphere of cryptocurrency-adjacent research. You can also use the succinctness of SNARKs to batch these proofs and shrink the verifier costs to almost nothing
It's a cool model for asymmetric computing, with low capacity verifiers collecting results from high capacity provers. It'll probably find uses outside deranged gambling...
> I think you'll see people picking those techniques
Those techniques were already invented and in-use long beforehand though.
I think that needs emphasizing, because sometimes it feels like... Imagine that fans of the Segway claimed it will replace all other forms of transportation, and a worrying number of them are still out there crediting the (failing) product for inventing the wheel.
The way I see it, "blockchain" (NFTs, etc) are less technologies and more business-plans to make money--perhaps in a slightly more-literal sense than usual--from available tools.
It's kind of like ride-share services: They didn't invent cars or databases or dispatching systems or phone-apps, and while their investment might have spurred some new tools/libraries/algorithms they use, the broader usefulness of those inventions doesn't flow backward to mean they have a good/sustainable business.
There are even cases like "private blockchain" where the fad-marketing is getting used to mislabel what is actually just a regular old distributed database of yesteryear.
A solution in search of a problem? Maybe they could apply it to something like protecting a person's online identity rather than a digital coin/currency. Or something along the lines of Distributed Apps instead of DeFi.
There aren't any use cases for crypto technology except crypto. It relies on so many specific assumptions that none of the components make sense when taken out of context.
Cheap and safe payments are of tremendous utility.
The problem is that anonymous payments are essentially illegal under current regulations designed to protect the large incumbent businesses.
Cryptocurrencies could render paywalls and signupwalls a thing of the past, allowing you to pay a fraction of a penny for a page view automatically in browser without an account.
There are some pretty big, obvious reason why true anonymous payments are illegal under a lot of regulations in different countries. Supporting current big businesses is pretty damn far down the list.
I was with you until "pay a fraction of a penny for a page view". Trying to push the web back into the closed pay for access model is something that leaves a bad taste in many people's mouths. I'd say it's only a positive thing if it's funding new nodes working to route around existing attempts at artificial scarcity (to drive the price to within an epsilon of zero). But given the way the legal shakedown regime works we know it won't actually play out that way.
It's a different type of primitive, which can be used safely or unsafely. For example if you're selling something on craigslist, then it's unsafe to accept any form of payment that can be reversed after the item leaves.
I want to make this random off-topic comment: For years I've been collecting various audio clips, where "environmental" sound (voice, noise, etc.) transitions into music, or vise versa, in songs, movies and TV shows. I've searched the web and the closest term I can find is "diegetic switch", but not quite. Here's the (short) list:
Wow, growing up in the 80s and thoroughly indoctrinated with musical theatre by my parents... how have I never heard of the Brave Little Toaster until now?
I'm not sure whether I should thank you or curse you. Let's see what my 6yo says.
The article reminds me of Pepe's Burningman operas from the mid 90s... "Devil's Delight, The Fire Tonight" blended into "Devils Do Light The Fire Tonight""
The Brace Little Toaster is a great film, but you might want to preview it yourself before watching it with your kid. There are some scenes of peril and (machine) death that are surprisingly intense for a kids' film and your kid might not handle them well.
Oh man, you're bringing the flashbacks. My siblings watched that movie constantly when I was a kid, and some of those scenes traumatized me for years (I was a sensitive kid).
It's a video game, but Yoshi's Island's title screen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkbxyPl83yI) has sound effects which fade out into a musical theme (which adds instruments after the noises stop). It fits cleverly into the SNES's 8 channels of audio which might not have been able to play ocean spray, birdsong, and multiple overlapping xylophone/melody lines at once.
Waves on the shore transitioning into song: Luke the calf - Iona https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLx2bKdQIJA - though I'm not sure that one counts as the waves are all through to the end.
I had learned a saying recently "cars for the poor, watches for the rich". The idea is that cars have higher utilities so even though cars are higher price in general, watchers show higher status signal.
As it turns out, this was an old Chinese saying a couple decades ago, where "cars" really meant bicycles.
I wish that were true. But sadly I think crypto's gravitational pull has yanked in plenty of folks that could have accomplished great things (for themselves or others).
The potent mix of greed, exclusivity, and novelty applied at the right time someone's life can ruin just about anyone.
Nothing wrong with taking a caution first approach.
However to me most articles about FTX seem like "panic first, research after". Yes SBF's investment company might be fucked, but customers funds should be totally separate from that.
I think that “should” is working really hard there.
We only have to look at the other crypto firms that have gone bust to know this space is rife with problems in that area - lies about FDIC protection, cryptocurrency and tokens considered part of company assets and subject to creditor claims, rather than customer deposits etc.
Ftx is quite profitable: Good fee income with little marketing expense. So it has a large intangible value.
I assume most traders on ftx only put enough capital on the exchange to keep their positions open in the short term.
So the intangible value of ftx may well exceed the value of clients assets by a significant margin. Then ftx may well be able to issue new shares should it experience a liquidity crunch.
Are you sure? I come bearing no data at all, but it seems everything I listen to or watch is sponsored by FTX. Didn't they also go huge during Superbowl? I would think FTX is one of the largest marketing spenders in crypto purely based on optics (which, again, may be completely off).
I don't see a problem. Of course banks want KYC, but that doesn't stop you from selling the crypto on e.g. Coinbase (also KYC'ed) and sending to your bank.
If you deposit a quarter million dollars into your bank account out of the blue the bank are absolutely going to ask you where it came from, and "don't worry yourself with that", or even "I sold some crypto" are unlikely to be sufficient answer to avoid your account being frozen and a note sent to the relevant authorities.
>or even "I sold some crypto" are unlikely to be sufficient answer to avoid your account being frozen
For 99% of banks, you'd be totally wrong about that.
> a note sent to the relevant authorities.
This, of course, means literally nothing. Banks will "send a note" for just about any reason. This results in said authorities drowning under a mountain of millions of pointless suspicious activity reports.
> If you deposit a quarter million dollars into your bank account out of the blue the bank are absolutely going to ask you where it came from,
I've deposited a larger lump sum into a US bank account and was never asked where it came from. I was then able to use that money the same day to pay off a loan.
What they actually tend to do is have someone in management call to congratulate you and invite you to discuss banking products. I know this from personal experience.
In the worst case your funds would be frozen for a couple months then you’d get a letter saying we are closing your account for compliance reasons and attached would be a cashiers check for the balance of your account. Then they’d file a SAR that would get put in a queue behind the millions of others because the government only reads a small fraction of them.
The IRS is responsible for checking if you are paying the correct amount of taxes, and a component of that is knowing what income you have and where it comes from - since tax depends on the source of income typically (you have to pay different amounts of tax on money you got by selling shares versus money you stole from a shop).
They'll obviously look into how your business has developed over the past years, compare expenses and income, also to other businesses from the same field, and see if something seems odd.
So, starting to book lots of income without scaling expenses etc. will likely raise suspicion and lead to further investigation which can then be passed to law enforcement.
