Readit NewsThe only way I can get to the "crypto is inevitable" take relies on the scams and fraud as the fundamental drivers. These things don't have any utility otherwise and no reason to exist outside of those.
Scams and fraud are such potent drivers that perhaps it was inevitable, but one could imagine a more competent regulatory regime that nipped this stuff in the bud.
nb: avoiding financial regulations and money laundering are forms of fraud
The idea of a cheap, universal, anonymous digital currency itself is old (e.g. eCash and Neuromancer in the '80s, Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon in the '90s).
It was inevitable that someone would try implementing it once the internet was widespread - especially as long as most banks are rent-seeking actors exploiting those relying on currency exchanges, as long as many national currencies are directly tied to failing political and economic systems, and as long as the un-banking and financially persecution of undesirables was a threat.
Doing it so extremely decentralized and with a the whole proof-of-work shtick tacked on top was not inevitable and arguably not a good way to do it, nor the cancer that has grown on top of it all...
The air is colder in winter than the water, and the ground only provides a limited amount of heat before you can't extract any more. So water beats both.
As I understand the only countries where one could barely pull that off would be Korea or Japan, and the local makers are mostly giving up as they lose too much on cost.
Bosch/Siemens are far larger than those, but they outsourced a lot. But even here, significant parts of the higher-end stuff is still made outside China.
The explanation I found online at the time was that a GPS receiver needs to download data about the exact orbits of all GPS satellites from time to time. Satellites slowly lose altitude and change their orbits. Up-to-date information is constantly broadcasted by every satellite, but it takes about 15 minutes for a device on the ground to download this dataset.
Most GPS devices do this automatically whenever they get the chance. But if your GPS is somehow unable to stay online for 15 consecutive minutes (bad firmware, faulty memory, tunnels, underground parking lots, etc), it will be relying on increasingly outdated info and drift far off its actual location.
The issue is that now the government knows what you are doing online, and that should never be allowed to happen.
I grew up when the Internet was truly free, before Facebook even existed. People shared source code, videos, MP3s, games, regardless of "copyright" or "intellectual property." To some extent, it is still possible to do all of this, but these freedoms are being eroded every day by making the Internet less anonymous. The endgame is obviously to force people to pay for things whose "marginal cost" is zero in the language of economists. "Protecting the children" is just a convenient excuse.
There's zero technical necessity for this. You could do zero knowledge proofs with crypto key pairs issued together with the eID.
The Swiss proposal for eID includes stuff like that. If a service needs proof of age, you use an app on your phone to generate the response, which is anonymized towards the requester and doesn't need to contact a government server at all.
A completely optimized high capacity cargo rail line can move 500 rail cars per hour. That's 1000 FEUs if we double stack containers. A lithium battery system in a FEU has around 2 MWh of storage. So that rail line has 2 GW transmission capacity if we saturate it with batteries - the same as a single high voltage transmission line. Being unable to build one of those in parallel to the rail line would be extremely sad.
Note that 500 rail cars per hour is actually an impressive feat of logistics. A normal rail yard at a port would be very happy with a sustained rate of 200 rail cars per hour, and will frequently drop below that.
Now it means whoever has access to uncensored/non-watermarking models can pass off their faked images as real and claim, "Look! There's no watermark, of course, it's not fake!"
Whereas, if none of the image models did watermarking, then people (should) inherently know nothing can be trusted by default.
Add an anonymizing scheme (blind signatures or group signatures), done.