Surveillance, yes. By forcing you to maintain control of a physical token they can more easily associate you with the account.

Sony so mad at Cox for not cutting off someone’s Internet for downloading they’ll take it to the SCOTUS, but they won’t even use the frankly abusive laws they already have access to to just sue the end user? What is even going on?

Artisanal idiocy.

You’re probably right. He was the lib-left’s Best Boy a few years back, was gonna solve climate change and do cool science shit and whatever, but then I forget what exactly happened but he kinda swung the other direction.

Motivation probably doesn’t matter too much. It just highlights the systemic problem of allowing one person to have that much money-power.

Conservapedia is worse, remarkably.

Being backed by real things isn’t always great for a currency. A lot of the value in the economy is from the transformative effects of labor, not just rare metals.

207 billion is insane, but if this money was being moved around by the mass of people or their legitimate representatives rather than shareholders and VC investors gambling on the next big thing, that would stand a chance of laying to rest this kind of reckless waste.

Bitcoin particularly is a pyramid scheme, but peer-to-peer payments via block chains are useful anyway.

I got theories on what would make a better token than BTC, but key to any utility would be little or no deflationary pressure.

I’m guessing by fiat you mean government issued currency that is not backed by precious metals but by faith and credit of the issuing government.

They call it fiat because a government just declares how much of it there is.

Blockchain tokens are also fiat in this sense, it’s just that the protocol makes the declaration instead of a government.

The other notable difference is that I can buy things with USD or other government currencies. I can’t with blockchain tokens. I mean technically I can but they have to be converted first and the popular ones are mostly depictionary so you’re deeply disincentivized from using them as currency.

The value of USD comes from people taking it in exchange for goods and services, and the US government taking it as payment for taxes. The value of a Bitcoin comes from people giving you USD for it under the assumption that they can sell it for more USD later. Like a stock, but without the incidental fractional ownership of a corporation with actual capital.

It’s a cool concept though, and peer-to-peer digital payment is a good thing, but it cannot function as a store of value without a connection to the material world.

It’s not the logs or the data which they would be monitoring with an encrypted no-logs VPN. What they would be monitoring, presumably, would be the fact that you are using a VPN at all. That’s also what they would be trying to block. They might try to block it by interfering with access to certain ports or blocking certain IP addresses, but there would be limits. Even China can’t stop all VPN traffic to get around its firewalls.

Every time someone says “I can’t stand the gaslighting and abuse anymore. This time I’m leaving him.” it’s an opportunity for them to really follow through.

Sometimes we are held back more by the stories we tell ourselves than our actual capacities. And the solution is to stop telling ourselves what we can’t do, but telling ourselves that we can and even will change our situations.

Eat of this toenail, for it is my flesh. Do this in remembrance of me.

When do you reckon they could last do that?

Rich asshole says he’ll invent something good but very expensive and so only available to the elite. People ITT: “Good things are bad!”

Yeah so, good for Altman, best idea he’s had probably. Spend the money before the bubble pops my dude.

Oh come on.

This guy couldn’t even get a train to run on time.

My grandpappy started this here AI company with a handful of GPUs he whittled himself, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let big gobmint regulations cost us the family business!

I suspect they’re going after .is because they are more resistant to taking things down. But that’s speculation on my part. And even if I’m right, what is it that they actually are trying to remove?

I definitely saw lots of ads on AliExpress for gels that would regrow your teeth before their algorithm realized I wasn’t there for that.

No for real, why? Why are they persuing this?

It is a bit frustrating how these different technologies are bunched under the same inaccurate moniker.

2 points: First, considering that the majority of Israelis support what’s happening in Gaza, I’d seek affirmative evidence that they are in the minority opposition. More importantly, unfortunately, is the fact that to the degree that they are successful and make money, their taxes and economic contributions will benefit a government and system that is actively engaging in a genocide of Palestinians, and in the best of time merely oppresses them.

It sucks to have to catch people for are individually decent in a larger boycott, if that is even the case here, but I don’t really see how to disentangle them from the larger Israeli system which, if it continues unchecked, will kill or push out every Palestinian in the West Bank and Gaza.