"This will be of increasing interest as governments become ever more intrusive. Facilitating this type of transaction will be a way for entrepreneurs to make money along the way, provided of course they don't contravene the law as happened with Silk Road and Pirate Bay." That's easy for an intrusive government to overcome - simply outlaw all transactions which are not transparent to government. Another thing - the Internet was designed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, so there is surveillance and collection capability built in - see this panel discussion - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keUqOHoNSso. And there is the problem of backdoors in software and in Intel brand hardware - and in "firmware updates". Over and above that, there's Traffic Analysis - sending lots of short messages without padding is a bad idea. Finally, there's network analysis -which is greatly facilitated by social media including most notoriously Facebook... One-time pads using characters randomly generated are probably the best way to do things - but you've got to airgap pad generation, then keep the pad off the net - hand it off physically to your receiver. And so forth. Open source software that you understand and compile using an open source compiler is the only way to go - "security by obscurity" is a delusion... And so forth. Just count on all traffic being sent across the net being collected and stored - including metadata.
Recalling One Time Pads and hand coding messages in my younger days. Way tedious. Brought to mind the OTP paper tapes for teletype machines. Just miss one alignment count and see the gibberish! And no way to stop easily to reset and realign. Today key exchange makes life so much easier for operators aside from the need to secure and move the keys.
If you've got one entire Bitcoin, I'd sell it now because it's close to a historic high - and hold onto the proceeds -eventually putting them into precious metals - gold, silver, weird ones used in chip doping and so forth - https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/This-Year-Could-See-a-Significant-Rebound-in-Rare-Earths-Metals-Prices.html. Of course, I've always thought that crypto was a major scam - it's easy to get in, but tough to get out - crazy commission rates, fees, slowness by exchanges in actually coming up with the cash, front-running and other such games...
That reason for selling Bitcoin I had already factored in. The unknown is how long the cryptographic foundation will stay in place. Given the number of whales who have jumped in over the past year, my guess is that it has a ways to run.
There are downsides to every imaginable asset. Bitcoin is useful because it crosses borders more easily than the others. With metals, each format has its drawbacks: ETFs, foreign vaults, under the floorboards, mining companies. My conclusion is to hold a bit of each and keep my eyes open.
See https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/threats/crypto-exchange-hacks and https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/15/1050259/a-620-million-hack-just-another-day-in-crypto/ Over and above that, bitcoin has only speculative value, which means that it's basically a momentum play, you get in - hopefully low - and sell when it hits a target price, then stay out until it goes low again - and the BTC chart shows this kind of activity. It's not a long term hold like a stock. And then when all Bitcoin have been found, the game of musical chairs is over, and the value reverts to zero. A Bitcoin is a numerical solution to a problem involving prime numbers, there may be an infinite number of solutions to that problem, but there's a bound imposed by computability. As time goes on, finding solutions gets progressively harder, and at some point, solution within a reasonable time - say less than ten years per Bitcoin - becomes impossible - or the electrical energy to achieve a solution simply becomes out of reach - some bitcoin "miners" (processes to find a solution) use up enough electricity to reach the bounds of the supply of electric power available. At this point, the last findable Bitcoin has been found and the game ends, because numbers have no intrinsic value.
IBM would probably be a prime contractor to the CIA back in the day. They were selling hardware, not services.
Stream, the book IBM and the Holocaust got a lot of stuff wrong. I worked with those machines. Black, the author, quite obviously did not. See my review.
I've seen two Auschwitz number tattoos - each had five digits, one on my 1990s landlady's forearm, one on the forearm of my grandmother's tailor. Both of them fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, both escaped, got ratted out by the Polish Home Army, sent to Auschwitz, survived that, ended up going to Israel in 1946, joining the Stern Gang - she was in on the bombing of the King David Hotel and further fighting - then both of them came to the US in 1950, they didn't like Israeli-style socialism, so they came here to make money. She found out that I could speak and understand German when I first met her, so every time I paid rent, I'd go to her apartment and get served milk and cookies and she'd tell me about her life in both wars. The tailor showed up once or twice, too. She spoke fluent Polish, Yiddish, German, Russian, and Hebrew, but very halting English. The Holocaust Museum people interviewed her in English only - and she used a lot of German words when she couldn't think of the English word - so they missed a *lot* of details, including how she got the guns for her Resistance group...
My bet is that the majority of Jews died before they could get to the camps - and the fact that there are so many survivors strongly suggests that these were primarily slave labor camps. The Holodomor ended up with the same death toll as the Holocaust, only in a much shorter time. After that, it's no surprise why many Ukrainians would become Nazis. The Russian and Chinese Communists both killed ten times more people than Hitler did - but for some reason it's acceptable to have Marxist-Leninists and Maoists doing their indoctrination routine in Western schools - whereas Nazis are entirely run out. People who do Communist indoctrination should be shown the same respect and admiration we show to Nazis...
"This will be of increasing interest as governments become ever more intrusive. Facilitating this type of transaction will be a way for entrepreneurs to make money along the way, provided of course they don't contravene the law as happened with Silk Road and Pirate Bay." That's easy for an intrusive government to overcome - simply outlaw all transactions which are not transparent to government. Another thing - the Internet was designed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, so there is surveillance and collection capability built in - see this panel discussion - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keUqOHoNSso. And there is the problem of backdoors in software and in Intel brand hardware - and in "firmware updates". Over and above that, there's Traffic Analysis - sending lots of short messages without padding is a bad idea. Finally, there's network analysis -which is greatly facilitated by social media including most notoriously Facebook... One-time pads using characters randomly generated are probably the best way to do things - but you've got to airgap pad generation, then keep the pad off the net - hand it off physically to your receiver. And so forth. Open source software that you understand and compile using an open source compiler is the only way to go - "security by obscurity" is a delusion... And so forth. Just count on all traffic being sent across the net being collected and stored - including metadata.
You are my audience! That's the problem that needs to be solved.
Recalling One Time Pads and hand coding messages in my younger days. Way tedious. Brought to mind the OTP paper tapes for teletype machines. Just miss one alignment count and see the gibberish! And no way to stop easily to reset and realign. Today key exchange makes life so much easier for operators aside from the need to secure and move the keys.
Unfortunately the RSA keys can be cracked - see https://algorithmsoup.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/breaking-an-unbreakable-code-part-1-the-hack/ - so OTP is the way to go for actual secure commo...
Tell me when to sell my Bitcoin!
If you've got one entire Bitcoin, I'd sell it now because it's close to a historic high - and hold onto the proceeds -eventually putting them into precious metals - gold, silver, weird ones used in chip doping and so forth - https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/This-Year-Could-See-a-Significant-Rebound-in-Rare-Earths-Metals-Prices.html. Of course, I've always thought that crypto was a major scam - it's easy to get in, but tough to get out - crazy commission rates, fees, slowness by exchanges in actually coming up with the cash, front-running and other such games...
That reason for selling Bitcoin I had already factored in. The unknown is how long the cryptographic foundation will stay in place. Given the number of whales who have jumped in over the past year, my guess is that it has a ways to run.
There are downsides to every imaginable asset. Bitcoin is useful because it crosses borders more easily than the others. With metals, each format has its drawbacks: ETFs, foreign vaults, under the floorboards, mining companies. My conclusion is to hold a bit of each and keep my eyes open.
See https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/threats/crypto-exchange-hacks and https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/15/1050259/a-620-million-hack-just-another-day-in-crypto/ Over and above that, bitcoin has only speculative value, which means that it's basically a momentum play, you get in - hopefully low - and sell when it hits a target price, then stay out until it goes low again - and the BTC chart shows this kind of activity. It's not a long term hold like a stock. And then when all Bitcoin have been found, the game of musical chairs is over, and the value reverts to zero. A Bitcoin is a numerical solution to a problem involving prime numbers, there may be an infinite number of solutions to that problem, but there's a bound imposed by computability. As time goes on, finding solutions gets progressively harder, and at some point, solution within a reasonable time - say less than ten years per Bitcoin - becomes impossible - or the electrical energy to achieve a solution simply becomes out of reach - some bitcoin "miners" (processes to find a solution) use up enough electricity to reach the bounds of the supply of electric power available. At this point, the last findable Bitcoin has been found and the game ends, because numbers have no intrinsic value.
Good stuff! I'll bet IBM was a CIA subcontractor in the day.
It was a subcontractor to the Nazi government in Germany as well - https://www.c-span.org/video/?162717-1/ibm-holocaust
IBM would probably be a prime contractor to the CIA back in the day. They were selling hardware, not services.
Stream, the book IBM and the Holocaust got a lot of stuff wrong. I worked with those machines. Black, the author, quite obviously did not. See my review.
https://grahamseibert.com/Reviews/Business/IBM%20and%20the%20Holocaust.pdf
I've seen two Auschwitz number tattoos - each had five digits, one on my 1990s landlady's forearm, one on the forearm of my grandmother's tailor. Both of them fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, both escaped, got ratted out by the Polish Home Army, sent to Auschwitz, survived that, ended up going to Israel in 1946, joining the Stern Gang - she was in on the bombing of the King David Hotel and further fighting - then both of them came to the US in 1950, they didn't like Israeli-style socialism, so they came here to make money. She found out that I could speak and understand German when I first met her, so every time I paid rent, I'd go to her apartment and get served milk and cookies and she'd tell me about her life in both wars. The tailor showed up once or twice, too. She spoke fluent Polish, Yiddish, German, Russian, and Hebrew, but very halting English. The Holocaust Museum people interviewed her in English only - and she used a lot of German words when she couldn't think of the English word - so they missed a *lot* of details, including how she got the guns for her Resistance group...
My bet is that the majority of Jews died before they could get to the camps - and the fact that there are so many survivors strongly suggests that these were primarily slave labor camps. The Holodomor ended up with the same death toll as the Holocaust, only in a much shorter time. After that, it's no surprise why many Ukrainians would become Nazis. The Russian and Chinese Communists both killed ten times more people than Hitler did - but for some reason it's acceptable to have Marxist-Leninists and Maoists doing their indoctrination routine in Western schools - whereas Nazis are entirely run out. People who do Communist indoctrination should be shown the same respect and admiration we show to Nazis...
Thanks. Real history. Not the kind Tim Walz apparently taught.