There is going to be so much wailing and gnashing of teeth when the settlement is made public. So many people are just completely out of touch.

Free advice: When that happens, have a little think about what news sources caused you to wallow in disinformation. Consider that that makes you completely incapable of advocating for your own interests or even understanding where those interests lie.

The complaint is hilarious. So on brand.

I guess they’ll win. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens then.

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

The DSA requires people offering apps (“traders”) to provide certain information. For example: address, email, and phone number must be made public. When Apple introduced that, this also caused some outrage and calls for EU regulation. Despite the fact that this was exactly the regulation called for. Hence, why I mentioned that trusted trader scheme.

Google may be legally required to do this. I’m not sure how the DSA is to be interpreted on this. It’s certainly not a stretch (see Article 31). It’s out of touch to believe the EU will push against this.

The Cyber Resilience Act may also have something to do with this.

You mean when they forced Apple to implement the “trusted trader” scheme.

Maybe a little, but it’s like spitting in the ocean. The SEO people are now targeting genAI; calling it GEO. They might be able to help you. Take other suggestions with a grain of salt. People who hate technology are generally not very good with it.

For Bitcoin, you mean. That will be in 2040 or so. Plenty of time to patch it.

Lotsa questions. I’ll give brief answers that will be a little incomplete.

Why is mining a nessecary part? Is it only to keep the quantity of units in circulation in check? And why is that nessecary?

Transactions need to be recorded so that it is known who controls how many crypto coins. This service needs to be paid. That is done by creating new coins or alternatively by subtracting a fee from transactions. Creating new coins has the advantage that it spreads coins to people with a stake in the success of the cryptocurrency. If there was only a fee, then you would have to find some other way to get coins to the people wanting to use them.

Crypto is for transferring money outside the banking system and thus beyond the reach of the law. People buy and sell crypto coins for that purpose.

The value of coins depends on how much money people want to transfer and how many coins are on the market. If people want to transfer $10M and there are 10M coins available, then the price of a coin is $1. If there are only 5M coins, then the price is $2. People wanting to transfer money do not need to consider the price. If you want to transfer $20, you buy that amount of coins. It does not matter how many coins that is.

When miners sell new coins, that causes a little bit of inflation. That way, real money is transferred from the users to the miners. If someone holds a large amount of coins, they can extract a lot of money without having to do anything. So people will not be very keen on promoting that currency because that person can skim off the gains. That means it’s simply preferable to slowly introduce new coins to a wide audience.

People who “invest” in crypto cause a bit of deflation. They spread real money to the users but there is no actual value created.

Removing coins from circulation increases the price in a purely mechanical way. If the price rises further, they are able to make a profit by selling the coins and skimming off money from the users. That does create an incentive to promote that crypto coin. That’s why we are seeing so much crypto spam.

It’s not necessary for adoption to increase to see a profit. If other people can be convinced to buy and hold coins, then the price increases mechanically. This makes it possible to skim off more money from actual users than was spread to them by buying the coins. Obviously, that’s economically nonsense. It’s another fatal design flaw.

instead of proof of busywork? Why does it need to be so wasteful of electricity?

The record of transactions, the ledger, is public and unprotected. You could have different, competing versions of that record. The version that is adopted by the majority is adopted as the correct one. This creates a problem. It would be possible to spam the system with lots of copies of a fraudulent record. Proof of work mitigates that risk. Originally, it was an idea to combat email spam by increasing the cost of sending each mail.

A more efficient alternative would be to only allow a limited number of known entities to keep the ledger. If they attempt manipulation, they can be prosecuted for fraud. That’s basically the banking system.

But the whole point of crypto is not to do that. If governments could prosecute the people involved, then they could also be made to crack down on ransomware, drug dealing, tax evasion, and so on.

A more crypto-compatible scheme is proof of stake. Miners have to put up a certain amount of cryptocurrency as a stake. If other miners find that one is not following the rules, then they can be fined. Also, because they own a substantial amount of currency, they can be assumed not to act in ways that harms the network. That would lower the price of their crypto.

Why is it so slow? Will it ever be as fast and cheap as an osko payment?

The overhead necessary to avoid law enforcement means that it will always be slower and more expensive than mainstream systems.

Bitcoin, in particular, is just not suited for such wide adoption. It’s actually amazing how well it does actually work, considering its humble origins. Because of the amount of money that rests on its reputation and its decentralized nature, it is extremely difficult to get people to agree on updates.

Is there an equivalent fixed amount of USD that is in circulation?

No. Money is created every time someone takes out a loan and destroyed when it gets paid back. Physical currency (called central bank money) is manufactured as needed.

It’s really clever. I also think it was unintentional. They did not want to create a money laundering tool but a currency in its own right. That failed.

Also, this scheme only works with money involved. The miners run the system, and they get paid by creating new coins. If they cannot sell the coins to cover their costs, then there is no blockchain.

If blockchain could be used for DRM, we’d see more of it.

Besides money laundering, you mean? Not as such.

Merkle Trees were thought up in the 70ies or so. A blockchain is a Merkle Tree without branches. They are used in a number of application; for example git which predates bitcoin.

The actual innovation behind bitcoin is mining. A payment system needs someone who runs it. Bitcoin introduced a way for these people to get paid by creating new currency for themselves. That way, there is no single entity in charge. There is no contractual relation that would require government enforcement.

If a Merkle Tree is the only thing a blockchain is to you, then it has legit uses. But that was already widely used before a simplified version became called blockchain.

If you’re thinking about a bitcoin-type blockchain, then evading government oversight is its sole use. The technical overhead and the economic inefficiencies exist only to obscure identities and legal responsibilities.

So there’s this discounter chain. Their toilet paper store brand is called Happy End. Goddam it. Just writing it ticks me off. I don’t understand why anyone would do that. I go out of my way to buy TP elsewhere. Am I really the only one? I can’t be the only one. It’s such a terrible pun. Why are they not rebranding? FFS

conscripted German teenager

Watch Die Brücke from 1959 some time. There’s a remake but it’s not worth it. The author of the story was one of those teenagers and wrote it to express his sense of betrayal. Adults had thrown them into battle and then condemned them for fighting. It’s a really good movie. You really get to know those kids as cringy teenagers.

A more modern German movie is Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad (1993). It’s in color and has a bit of budget, though it’s far from Saving Private Ryan. If you are interested in these things, watch it together with Stalingrad: Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever? (1959).

The differences between those 2 Stalingrad movies say a lot about how German society changed. The older movie wanted to be historically accurate and had input from some of the commanders. If you pay attention, you can tell who was still around to tell their side of the story. You can’t tell who was a convicted war criminal, though. Still, at the time, the movie was controversial for its (rather tame) anti-war message and not for its whitewashing.

In 1993, the conscripted teenagers were just retiring, after the german re-unification. That generation has been termed Flakhelfer generation (Flak-helper since they were made to operate anti-aircraft guns). Hans-Dietrich Genscher had been one of them. He was the (West-)German foreign minister during the reunification and had just retired in 1993. As a 17-year-old, he and, like many others his age, served in the Wehrmacht, in Wenck’s 12th army. If Western forces had marched on Berlin, they would have fought their way past those kids, or more likely over their dead bodies. As that didn’t happen, Nazi elites would have sacrificed them against the Soviets in the Battle of Berlin, as portrayed in Downfall. Wenck instead chose to secure a corridor from the Berlin region toward the West. Sabaton commemorates this in Hearts of Iron. Sabaton does not mention the Battle of Halbe, though. Genscher recalled seeing battle weary Generals marching past, wielding submachine guns.

You’re right, every new technology displaces some jobs, but AI is on a vastly larger scale (as was industrial production technology).

Famously, ye olde Boomer could just walk into a factory and get a job. None of these jobs exist anymore, mostly because of automation. Of course, none of those people wrote for a living, or had access to an audience of millions. I doubt that AI will displace jobs on a vastly larger scale but it is certainly communicated on a vastly larger scale.

If you think about all these jobs that might be displaced by AI, how many of them existed in the 1950ies? Many jobs, like web designer, are new. Either these new jobs reflect the displacement of old jobs, or you need a lot more people to do more jobs. Granted, global population has grown a lot, but that’s not where these new jobs came from, right?

As to your last question, it’s because the people controlling the narrative don’t want to pay for unemployment benefits, industrial retraining, or anything else that doesn’t immediately make them more money.

Yes, the narrative is all about more money for (intellectual) property owners. That doesn’t make a lot of sense if people are worried about losing their jobs.

Radio destroyed a lot of jobs for musicians. Before radio, there was only live music. With radio, a single professional orchestra or big band could supply the music for everyone with a receiver. Recordings came later and destroyed more jobs. Before “talkies”, cinemas had live music. Musicians did protest against such new technologies.

People don’t just hate AI because it’s new, they hate it because it will condemn millions of people to poverty while making a handful of rich people even more rich.

Then why aren’t people talking about unemployment benefits, industrial retraining, and such things?

Hah! That was my first thought, too, when I saw the headline.

Thanks, but I understand that. Where does that come up? There’s RSS feeds. Anything else?

What do you guys need this for? And why?

And much of that driven by lobbyism by the same media empires who are trying to get rid of ad blockers.