mt360 (u/mt360) - Readit News

mt360 commented on Facial recognition error message on vending machine sparks concern at university kitchener.ctvnews.ca/faci... · Posted by u/whycome

Freak_NL · 2 years ago

And this requires absolutely zero screens, cameras, or demographic data collection of any kind. Just track the inventory. This isn't new; I would be extremely surprised if Japanese vending machines didn't do just that for decades already.

But those cameras aren't there because of the vending machine. That is just a convenient platform. This is about ads, and tracking, and data brokering. We had digital ad screens placed on the platforms at train stations in the Netherlands with a camera hole a few years ago, and the advertising company swore that those cameras would not be activated, for now, until the legal side was resolved, or until they could get away with it without anyone noticing.

It feels icky.

mt360 · 2 years ago

Unfortunately they're popping up in Japan too, I just walked past this one https://ibb.co/27nh6gZ

mt360 commented on SEC Accuses Binance of Mishandling Funds and Lying to Regulators nytimes.com/2023/06/05/bu... · Posted by u/pyrophane

crote · 2 years ago

I wouldn't exactly call it "working" when the largest trading platforms turn out to be fraudulent, the value is highly volatile, the whole "immutability" thing is thrown out as soon as people are inconvenienced by it, and transaction volume always remains negligible. The only people for who Bitcoin is working is those using it for ransomware extortion.

mt360 · 2 years ago

People looking to buy Bitcoin unfortunately often end up at Binance.

They have long offered low trading fees, while heavily inflating on-chain withdrawal fees and duping users into accepting "wrapped bitcoin" instead (that is, a layer of misdirection and nonetheless custodial bitcoin, held by Binance or some other third party).

If what the SEC allege is proven, that they moved customer coins to a separate legal entity, I don't think it's a leap to assume the coins users think they're buying perhaps don't even exist - that the exchange have been selling paper coins banking on that users won't withdraw en masse.

This is what FTX were doing too - selling paper bitcoin; bitcoin that was not backed 1-to-1 (or anywhere close, they actually held a relatively small number), instead funneling customer money into the hundreds of other coins FTX had invested in.

This could reveal the apparent mass susceptibility for VC backed "cryptos" - that the masses are not so dumb after all, or at least not in the way you thought, that instead they've been fleeced.

Bitcoin may still suffer reputational damage in the short term, but surely the elimination of such schemes is, to use an overused phrase that seems very apt now, good for bitcoin?

mt360 commented on Switzerland bans deferred bonuses for Credit Suisse staff ft.com/content/cb213446-3... · Posted by u/belter

mt360 · 2 years ago

Just thought I'd leave this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/11wixa0/excredit_s...

mt360 commented on Google Bard waitlist bard.google.com/... · Posted by u/tfsh

mt360 · 2 years ago

What is the justification for barring citizens of countries like Portugal from this, seems very unfair. Have they said anything about this?

mt360 commented on Bitwarden PINs can be brute-forced ambiso.github.io/bitwarde... · Posted by u/aborsy

waboremo · 2 years ago

Using the PIN is outdated anyways when it comes to convenience, all reasonable user OS now support biometrics and those offer better risk mitigation in comparison.

It is something they should remove entirely in an upcoming version after giving users enough warning.

mt360 · 2 years ago

I wouldn't put too much faith in biometrics either, a real shame considering their convenience.

https://blog.kraken.com/post/11905/your-fingerprint-can-be-h...

Personally I advocate using BitWarden for commonly used logins that, if they were compromised, would not be catastrophic; perhaps in some cases because 2FA provides another, tautologically, factor, and KeePass secured with a FIDO2 device in challenge response mode, a passphrase, and possibly setting a higher key stretching work factor to further blunt any brute force attempt, in which more important data is held.

mt360 commented on OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit vice.com/en/article/5d3na... · Posted by u/isaacfrond

Loughla · 3 years ago

Oh wow. I forgot that was even a thing. Is that project dead? I assume it is, but would love to be surprised that it still exists, just for the novelty of the entire thing.

mt360 · 3 years ago

They've been present with their strange shiny orb at my local shopping mall in Portugal for the last year or two, and are often at a busy train station nearby too.

mt360 commented on What Happened at Alameda Research milkyeggs.com/?p=175... · Posted by u/amadeuspagel

DebtDeflation · 3 years ago

> Most news accounts seem to portray the scale of the bankruptcy as relatively small.

This is a key point.

They lost $16B in customer deposits.

LTCM lost $4.6B in investor funds.

Enron lost $11B in shareholder capital.

Interestingly, while Madoff is widely quoted as having lost $65B, that was almost all fabricated paper wealth, actual losses were around $18B and $14.4B of that was recovered and returned.

All of these situations are obviously somewhat different, but if what we're starting to hear is correct, FTX may be one of, if not the, biggest financial frauds/scandals in history. The media doesn't seem to be treating it as such.

mt360 · 3 years ago

They may have lost $16B but, as they were converting customer deposits into coins the customer did not buy, such as FTT but also many others, then it seems bad math to value the customer deposits at $16B - prior to essentially shorting against their customers, perhaps those deposits were worth 5x more. And it doesn't seem unreasonable to believe more deposits would have been made, if the price of the assets their customers hoped to buy (Bitcoin is far and away the market leader) were not being shorted in this manner. I'm not a mathematician but their activities may have amounted to many tens of billions of sell pressure against Bitcoin. Elon Musk purchased $1.5B and the price of this finite asset rallied tremendously, what might these tens of billions have resulted in?

mt360 commented on The Ethereum merge is done coindesk.com/tech/2022/09... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

FabHK · 3 years ago

Thanks for this summary of the basics of mining (that most people here are familiar with). None of it presents a challenge to my two arguments:

1. BTC holders pay a fee of around 1.7% p.a. of their holdings (until the next halving) to miners (through an increase in money supply),

2. which amounts to around $60 per transaction currently. (Higher if BTCUSD rises or the number of transactions falls; lower if BTCUSD falls or the number of transaction increases, which it cannot much because BTC operates not too far from the limit.)

> please DYOR next time before speaking on a subject as though you have some knowledge of it,

Ah, the old "you just don't understand crypto" chestnut...

mt360 · 3 years ago

The time taken to refute bs is much greater than the time it takes to generate bs. Your argument is at best mistaken and at worst intentionally misleading. My summary of mining is better than most you will find online and, only lacking in mention that the previous blocks hash is also included in each new proposed block to ensure each builds upon the chain tip. Even if I hadn't studied the source code and game theory myself, I think I trust the technical analysis of the Steve Wozniak's of the world over yours. A simple way to see through this argument that transactions cost $60 would be to say, that being the case, why can I currently pay $1-2 for a transaction. And if no transactions occur, why would miners still be able to continue creating blocks? I think it's very likely you simply dislike Bitcoin and want to mislead people about it, for personal reasons.

mt360 commented on The Ethereum merge is done coindesk.com/tech/2022/09... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

FabHK · 3 years ago

It is intellectually dishonest to use marginal cost here and not average cost.

A transactions costs $60, in the sense that all transactions together over some period, say N, cost $60*N over that period.

That is invisible to the user insofar as it is financed through an increase in money supply [1] which accrues to the miners at the expense of all other BTC holders.

[1] Increase in money supply is sometimes, particularly by Austrian economists and crypto acolytes, identified with inflation. The irony...

mt360 · 3 years ago

It would be intellectually dishonest, if the foundations of your reasoning were sound.

The increase in the money supply, aka block subsidy, is a value transfer from BTC holders to miners compensating them for enforcing the consensus rules of the ledger. Very similar to if you were paying fees to a mega secure vault company, though no vault company can provide decentralised value storage; value storage without any single point of failure. Considering the unprecedented level of security on offer, the value for money is astonishing.

The miners job is to construct a block. They're paid via a special transaction called a coinbase (a large American exchange named their company after this special transaction), which they can make payable to whomever they wish. They take incoming transactions and may include a certain number of those; the limit is 4 million weight units, as opposed to a certain number of kB as is commonly believed. Each transaction they include will usually include in addition to fixed recipients, a special "spend to anyone" transaction output, this is to encourage a miner to include your transaction preferentially as they can make this portion payable to themselves. They may attempt to include multiple transactions spending the same funds to different recipients, or to insert a coinbase transaction wherein they have made payable to themselves any number of bitcoin, or include more than 4 million weight units worth of transactions, or make some other attempt to break the rules of consensus that any block they published will be tested against by thousands of other computers who will then choose to store locally the new block as the new strongest valid chain tip, or disregard. Before publishing the transaction though, the miner must also solve the double spending problem, by providing proof of work. They do this by going back to that block they're constructing, and firstly putting a random number in the nonce field of the header. Then, they pass the blocks bits into a sha256 hash function, take the resulting hash and hash it again with the sha256 function. The result must meet the current block height difficulty, for example to just happen to start with 18 leading zeroes. If it doesn't, the nonce is incremented in the header and the block is hashed again. Without an appropriately difficult proof, first of all you wouldn't know which valid block had come first, and so would have double spend problems where after receiving payment, the block containing your payment was dropped and replaced with another, or outside of bitcoin, anyone can for example send you a transaction receipt via e-mail stating you have been paid, on its own it's worthless though, you will have to rely on PayPal or a bank to ultimately tell you if you have received a payment, and PayPal or bank payments are reversible in a way Bitcoin transactions are not so even then, you don't have the same degree of certainty (furthermore your funds are not in your custody, instead you have lent your money to the bank; they owe you it). I hope this clears up the difference between these different fees and what they are in payment for, please DYOR next time before speaking on a subject as though you have some knowledge of it, much of the confusion around Bitcoin results from people who have not studied it wanting to sound knowledgeable.