Multiple states are currently making teaching about racism illegal based on whether or not parents subjectively feel "uncomfortable", and half of the country is trying to perform a fascist coup but you want to boil it down to "outrage and attention"?
This is the most hilariously sheltered and out of touch comment I have ever read in half a decade of reading HN
While this is definitely an anti-CRT bill, it does not make "teaching about racism illegal" in any sense.
> half of the country is trying to perform a fascist coup
> Fascism
> often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
Oddly enough, "half of the country" would be approximately a majority. If they are "performing" something, it would basically just be Democracy, though I suspect you're equivocating between a small group of insurrectionists and 175,000,000 people.
> This is the most hilariously sheltered and out of touch comment I have ever read in half a decade of reading HN
Well, you were at least self prescient if mistimed.
"Military" is by no means the only form a coup can take, and indeed it's just one of the examples in that definition.
This might be the benefit of international distance but it seems to me it is really _unambiguous_ -- based on known facts and no matter which side you come from -- that at the end of 2020 Trump and his DC faction attempted a legislative self-coup:
It's at least very arguable that there are ongoing, truly widespread, state-level efforts among his supporters to secure politicised control over the administration of future elections.
You do not need to be left-wing, or anti-conservative, to acknowledge the above. You merely have to make an honest appraisal of what we know (not least based on what various Trump-affiliated political actors have openly said).
I will leave it to others to decide whether Trump met the definition of a fascist, but one tech-related episode that strikes me as instructive on the subject is his attempt to force the sale of TikTok to a company of his choosing if they paid what amounted to a kickback levy to the Treasury.
A coup is via a military or other governmental power structure. When it is citizens, it is an insurrection.
You and I both agree Trump did not have his cabinet members attempt to dissolve Congress or such.
You might have the belief that Trump coaxed citizens into raiding a Congressional building. That would be "formenting insurrection".
> It's at least very arguable that there are ongoing, truly widespread, state-level efforts among his supporters to secure politicised control over the administration of future elections.
No, it's not. At most he has some loud and frothy followers demanding "recounts", which they got and were still disappointed with.
If you actually dislike Trump, do not repeat the mistakes of 2016. Don't paint him up as some master Hitler who is one step away from being dictator for life. Don't bring him up in every topic and let him live rent free. The media did that and he got a better PR campaign then he could have ever bought.
He's just not that smart, nor are most of his followers actually that dedicated. Even "insurrection", while accurate, gives the Jan 6th stunt too much credit.
> A coup is via a military or other governmental power structure. When it is citizens, it is an insurrection.
Yes, but you're misunderstanding/misrepresenting what is going on if you think the Capitol insurrection is the entirely of the story. The insurrection was _clearly_ provoked as a single component of a self-coup. There's abundant evidence of this; it's really not in doubt.
> You and I both agree Trump did not have his cabinet members attempt to dissolve Congress or such.
The "or such" is attempting more work here than it can pull off. For example, he and people close to him (like Giuliani) attempted to illegally establish a corrupt slate of electors to throw the election. And he attempted to literally intimidate his Vice President into not certifying at all.
Yes, he was dissuaded from some actions. but he was so much closer to pulling it off than you seem to suggest.
> No, it's not. At most he has some loud and frothy followers demanding "recounts", which they got and were still disappointed with.
Again, you are suggesting that the activity of citizens is the end of it. It is clearly not. It is a multi-state state-level legislative agenda, heavily co-ordinated.
> He's just not that smart, nor are most of his followers actually that dedicated. Even "insurrection", while accurate, gives the Jan 6th stunt too much credit.
You don't seriously think people should believe he did it all on his own and just discount it? It didn't succeed, yes, and he didn't surround himself with the best people, but it was a co-ordinated campaign by many people around him (see the Willard group for example).
In many ways it is still ongoing. If you are content to imagine that Trump and Trumpism are no longer a threat, you are mistaken. Trump may not get to run in person in 2024 (he's clearly dangling this in part so he can claim that his many legal troubles are political persecution), but Trumpism will not be reversed, and minority rule is not off the table.
From a distance, the USA looks increasingly like it is heading towards a very big political reversal from democracy. The GOP certainly won't ever close the lid on everything coming out of Pandora's Box and go back to being a normal political party, and there's no evidence they want to. (They are paying millions of dollars of Trump's legal fees, right now).
So the key reason for btc adoption in El Salvador is cheaper remittance payments, I find it odd that an article that sets out to criticize btc in El Salvador doesn't even mention the original intended use case.
This may work for smaller payments <$10, like when I had to split a restaurant bill with a foreign friend and paid him using the lightning network. (I wasn't carrying cash, and she no longer had a bank account in El Salvador, and other options would have been more expensive).
What I've seen is that Salvadorans in the U.S., that have bought or sent bitcoin using their U.S. credit/cards with the Chivo Wallet App based in El Salvador, is that have been hit by 1%-3% foreign transaction fees or cash advance fees from their U.S. banks.
So for some larger amounts it may end up being more expensive than a normal remittance.
I'm sad to hear that, I have been optimistic about this helping people actually. Good news is that there are other options besides Chivo, so hopefully conditions improve as the market develops.
Bitcoin doesn't solve the remittance problem any more than any government subsidized app solves it. People still end up using dollars for buy things with. This means for imported goods, dollars still leaves your country. However, only Bitcoins are coming into your country, so government ends up being a bigger and bigger bagholder.
author here. It got dropped for space reasons (it's overlength already), but Chivo didn't get US money transmitter licenses in order as yet, so sending remittances over Chivo is attracting conversion fees from people's banks, even as Chivo doesn't charge them.
I mostly think of Chivo as a real wasted opportunity as a payments system. A government-backed electronic dollar system that worked well, and which subsidised remittances from the US, could have been excellent for El Salvador. Instead they came up with semifunctional rubbish with a massive fraud scandal.
I believe the previous Chivo developers have been fired and a new team is being hired (based on LinkedIn job ads). Trying to find out more about this.
Yeah, isn't it a legal requirement subject to penalties, as you say? Then surely it's fair to measure success of the program on those terms as well -- i.e., is it being used as a currency for daily life? The answer is seemingly not (for technical, social, and speculation reasons), meaning it's fair to comment that this part of the project seems to be a failure. OP can't carve off criticisms they don't like or _personally_ care about.
Cost! And speed! I did a transfer wise last week and it cost me $15 in fees. What is this, ethereum?(a joke cos ethereum is too expensive to be useful for the retail user). I could have sent BTC and it would have been quicker and cheaper.
BTC fees does not include the conversion from currency1 -> btc acc 1-> btc acc 2-> currency 2. Where conversion from 1 currency to another would be more expensive than the BTC fees itselve.
From which currency to which currency did you transfer?
This isn’t true at all. Right now, the actual network costs would be $0.07*2 on chain, and 0.15% for the actual sale at the receiving end on an exchange, and the “true” BTC/foreign currency rate. This beats the bad rates being offered on the forex leg of the wise transfer.
I would rather remit funds by BTC any day, but not everyone at the other end has the competency to handle this yet. One day.
Also, it took days to clear. Most of that time was waiting on the local side for cash to clear. BTC settles every 10 minutes, with a 60 min window for 6 confirmations for security. The markets are 24/7. For countries where withdrawals from exchanges hit the bank account quickly, it can be in the order of days faster…
Wow. That site is very wrong. Their historical data is wrong too. It’s all the same value!! It’s about 100x off reality.
It’s been known since 2020 that it is fiction. Bitcoinfees.net appears to be correct (1-2 sats/vB). https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/ Also shows vast majority in last 24 hours paid <10sats/vB.
I notice that earn is also reporting way way too high numbers. The fact is you can send 1sat/vbyte right now and it will confirm. 7 cents. Anyone actually using BTC will agree with me here.
Look at the mempool. If it’s empty, BTC is super cheap. It is empty right now and frequently is on weekends.
I think in thia case remittance is more of a way to create organic currency supply for btc. If you have btc from your son and the store owner you buy your fruits from has some btc from his son, why not to use btc for trade?
Currency has a gigantic network effect and this is seeding the network.
People should read "The Internet of Money" by Andreas Antonopolous, in it he describes how much of the criticisms levied against crypto are similar to criticism levied against the internet in the early days. Many of the internets early adopters were actual criminals, and its detractors talked about how it "couldn't scale", was bad for the environment, etc. What sort erroneous conclusion might you have drawn during the tech bubble at the turn of the century? Similar criticism were pushed on the automobile, the airplane, and even electricity.
It might not seem like now, but we are still in the early days of crpytocurrency, being this overly hung up on the current state of things is missing the forest for the trees.
> Many of the internets early adopters were actual criminals
the early adopters were college students and professors since that's where it was available. as far as "criminals" it would have only been those pesky "hackers" who were mostly acting from curiosity. there wasnt any big opportunity for financial fraud on the "internet" because there was no commerce on the internet. the commercialization had to happen first and that required massive buy-in long before criminals could have any fertile ground to operate upon.
> and its detractors talked about how it "couldn't scale",
ive never seen such a thing, in the early 90s most of us didnt even have terms like that queued up
I was an early adopter and I don’t recall anyone saying the internet was bad for the environment, or that it couldn’t scale. Quite the opposite actually! And there was very little fraud or criminality - most new applications and ideas were genuinely innovative and immediately and obviously beneficial. Yea the financial hype took over in the late nineties but the fundamentals were always sound and the potential was obvious. And over time that potential grew, it didn’t shrink like it has for cryptocurrency.
Actually, yes. It's had almost 13 years to prove itself as a store of value, medium of exchange, and/or unit of account. It has failed to do that in any functioning economy because despite all the hype, it's remained worse than what we already have.
The fact that after all this time proponents are celebrating it being made legal tender in a tiny dysfunctional country is a very good sign of how the horizons have narrowed. After 13 years of the web no arguments about "potential" were even needed - the evidence was embedded in all our lives.
Monero is referred to as a zkp coin in this article; but afaik it is cryptonote based, using a combination of mixing and stealth-addresses and doesn't actually use zero-knowledge proofs. Did that change at some point or was this said in error?
I think this is still a fantastic article as an introduction to the concept, I hope it is not removed.
Sorry but this reeks of nonsense to me. Even if true, surely the compute power could be used for protein folding or something actually useful instead of hashing bits only to throw the results away the majority of the time. Crypto needs to die.
Not all cryptocurrencies require a ton of electricity. Some, such as those based on Proof of Stake are extremely efficient and use very little electricity so it's not fair to disparage them all on that basis.
completely false, privacy coins command billions of dollars in market cap, Monero alone is currently worth 2.2 billion and will likely continue to grow.
I would look into paleo diets like the autoimmune protocol(AIP), the idea behind them is that removing certain foods is a lot more important than adding them for that sort of condition.
Currently use a paleo/ketogenic diet to manage IBS, and fortunately blueberries (and other low sugar fruits) can fit into this sort of approach.
This is the most hilariously sheltered and out of touch comment I have ever read in half a decade of reading HN