Losing my google account has to be a worst nightmare scenario. I've started disentangling slowly, starting with mail, but Google Photos is just so convenient.
I ordered a Chromecast on the Google store a couple years back and the item never came. Google wouldn’t refund or reship and I was so close to doing a chargeback, but 20 wasn’t worth the trouble. I’m so glad I didn’t. Now I know to buy Google products from elsewhere and slowly migrate away from Gmail.
This feels like a huge gap in consumer protections. Retaliatory account bans seem like they should not be legal when a retailer fails to deliver. Of course this is all exacerbated by how large the entities in question are and how the same account may govern access to multiple services.
I feel like this is treating the symptoms rather than the cause. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to have such a tight grip on a consumer’s digital life such that an account ban is crippling.
Everyone thinks their system is reasonable, that's the whole problem. Banks obviously don't think chargeback fraud is fraud when they perform fraudulent chargebacks. They think they're reasonably legit, which is why they perform them. Retailers also think their fraud prevention systems are reasonable. Reasonable means different things to different people and it certainly doesn't mean infallible.
Nobody in any of these situations thinks they are being unreasonable.
Steam froze my account to punish a PayPal dispute, the amount they would not refund was ~£2. Their refusal was contrary to UK law.
Small story about Steam. They sold me a broken game, in UK one can return broken things according to the Consumer Rights Act, specifically including digital goods. Steam said, at length, they would not refund me: the game would crash (losing some settings) after ~30 minutes, I spent more than 2h of playtime trying to fix it [it's a 50h+ game, I'd have accepted an 8p reduction in my refund!].
I complained to PayPal. PayPal decided in my favour -- ie in keeping with UK law. Steam didn't dispute PayPal's findings but instead froze my Steam account (and I assume paid PayPal the money back). PayPal made me whole, financially.
My Steam account was blocked for a month or so. Ongoing they "punish" me by making it hard for me to give them money -- which is good for me, but my kids are not keen!
WhyTF would I complain over a few £. It's the principle, clearly.
It was very interesting to me to see how a big company can ignore the law in this way. But also spend what must amount to quite a bit of customer service time just to avoid a minimal refund.
All I wanted was a refund for a game Steam sold, that was broken and wouldn't be fixed. I did cursory searching for bugs before buying, but hadn't found this particular one before my purchase.
You know what I did with the refund money, bought the next game in the same series, because it was only the bug that I didn't like, and I paid more money for it than the game they wouldn't refund ... mad, eh!
Also, what this does is really separates the wheat from the chaff. If the company can't tell me the salary or the job, it's not a good fit anyways.
Interestingly, what this means is that Google is not a good fit at all. They wanted me to talk to a sourcer, who would connect me to a recruiter. That's too much corporate foreplay for me, especially without even knowing what team I'd be joining.
I never really understood what incentive a government had to recognize bitcoin as legal tender. There are no real benefits over something like UPI in terms of user UX. It takes things out of the government's hands, as it's harder to print money.
El Salvador is a USD-based economy and does not have their own currency. This means they're at the whims of the US Federal Reserve, which they have representation with. And any USD reserves that are abroad can be seized by the US, as Afghanistan ($7B seized) and Russia ($300B seized) learned recently.
Bukele is promoting BTC as a way to attract talent and capital, and also to modernize El Salvador's economy. Similar to how Africa skipped landlines and jumped right to mobile phones. It remains to be seen how effective that part is. But, either way, it gives El Salvador some more independence from the US and sovereignty in a world where alliances are shifting fast.
> And any USD reserves that are abroad can be seized by the US
That doesn't have anything to do with USD. Any reserves (or really any asset) that is outside the country's jurisdiction can be seized by a foreign one. El Salvador could as easily lose all their Bitcoin reserves if they held them in a Coinbase wallet, for example.
It absolutely does have to do with USD. Other than actual physical dollar bills, which do not scale and are not practical to use for long-distance international transactions, the only form that real redeemable USD can exist in is deposits with the Fed which can be seized by the US. This is a fundamental property of using the US dollar as your country's currency.
Comment you're responding to is saying this is not unique to U.S. dollars. All currencies are controlled by their issuing sovereigns.
Separately, the idea that Bitcoin is unsanctionable is laughable. It may require enabling legislation. But marking wallets as sanctioned, and threatening any wallets that transact with it to be either similarly sanctioned or subject to heightened scrutiny, would diminish the value of those coins relative to coins which can be freely traded with anyone. Given the public nature of the blockchain, enforcement would likely be easier than e.g. enforcing an Iranian oil embargo.
> But marking wallets as sanctioned, and threatening any wallets that transact with it to be either similarly sanctioned or subject to heightened scrutiny, would diminish the value of those coins relative to coins which can be freely traded with anyone
Doesn't this already happen? Basically any bitcoin that comes out of a tumbler or any wallet address that has transacted with tumbled coins is banned on KYC exchanges: https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/fungibility-graveyard/
It’s why it’s so important to taint and mix the history of all coins. Given enough time, eventually all UTXOs are tainted, thus nothing is tainted. Most of the supply of BTC can be linked to SR taint from early 2010s. Doesn’t matter now.
Litecoin just introduced a sidechain called (mimblewimble extension blocks) MWEB, it permits “cut-through” transactions where UTXOs can mix. It looks like a single UTXO on the main chain. Very Fungible!
“What it instead of normalizing privacy, you just don’t have privacy.”
The problem is one of pragmatism. All money is dirty. All great fortunes are founded on exploitation.
Every dollar in your pocket has been used for crime many times.
The system works because we choose to ignore this. If we could programmatically enforce rules, the system would be fail in a day.
So it’s not about money laundering, it’s about achieving some kind of pragmatic equivalence, while permitting the system to continue to function.
I guess the problem for me is that the immediate action being normalized is just too ethically suspect. The closest analog outside of the cryptocurrency space is a crime that is generally only committed to get away with another crime. That feels categorically different from, say, normalizing using HTTPS or encrypted messenger apps.
It’s the dilemma of cryptography, in that you cannot have a secure system that doesn’t also allow bad guys to use it too. The only victim of weakening a system to fight bad guys are the good guys, as the bad guys will just use the original secure version of the protocol, etc.
My point is that eventually the major cryptocurrencies will have some fungibility enhancement mechanisms to deal with the practical limitations of taint and chain analysis. Tornado cash, Coinjoin, MW, etc. Its not about normalization of crime. It’s the default ignorant status quo.
> It’s the dilemma of cryptography, in that you cannot have a secure system that doesn’t also allow bad guys to use it too.
I hear similar things from the NRA about how we'd all be safer if everyone carried a concealed firearm. I just don't want the world to be a place where we all have to be armed and launder our money after every transaction.
There is always a balance that needs to be struck between privacy and accountability. Bob Woodward violated the privacy of the Nixon white house, but we generally believe the public interest there outweighs the privacy concerns at stake. I am always particularly skeptical of financial privacy maneuvers, since they are of considerably greater interest to the already rich and powerful.
I am not super pro guns, but I am super pro encryption. There are parallels. We are all safer if we encrypt our traffic and data at rest. Safer when we use end-to-end messaging schemes.
I don’t know if I agree about accountability balance — accountable to whom?? It is better if everyone is equally blind. Technology that takes power from the powerful is our weapon. You don’t need accountability if there is nobody to be accountable to.
"Accountability" here is the public's right to know some facts, like if corporation X dumped toxic waste on public land or if individual Y funded a spoiler candidate in a major political race.
Creating a new form of privacy means creating a new arena in which to conceal malfeasance, and some will inevitably take advantage of that. Privacy can become a means of entrenching power as easily as it can become a means of distributing power. Wealthy people and organizations in the US sue journalists for invasion of privacy to prevent embarrassing information from being published. In the US, some parties have been lobbying and suing for decades to be able to spend unlimited sums with no public disclosure on political and influence campaigns.
Sounds like a variant of the prisoner's dilemma: the best outcome is if no civilians are carrying guns, but needing and gun and not having one is a worse outcome than needing and having one?
This is because the Taliban is a terrorist organization that captured the capitol, not a government. You don't give $7bn to al qaeda, ISIS or lashkar-e-taiba either.
You can thank Trump and Pompeo and their plan to withdraw 100% of US forces by a fixed deadline for that (removing all support for the afghan government's armed forces), and Biden for going along with the foolish plan.
I really don't want to defend the Taliban, but the core of any government is the group that maintains a monopoly on violence in a realm.
The pre-Taliban government of Afghanistan as well as the US puppet state in 2021 failed in this core responsibility, and consequently lost the right to govern. Whether or not the Taliban will produce a stable or good government is a different question. I personally weep for those forced to live under it's rule.
It would make about as much sense to say the United States in 1783 was not a government, but a terrorist organization that attacked the rightful British government of the American colonies. The British lost the right to govern when they failed to maintain their monopoly on violence in the American colonies, and a new governmental organization formed from the ashes of the war that proved it.
The Taliban is not a terrorist organization. The Taliban was the government of the country of Afghanistan before we invaded it, and it is the government of the country of Afghanistan after we've left. "Terrorism" isn't a euphemism for killing US soldiers. If they're invading your country, the proper word is "patriotism."
The Taliban is both. I agree that killing invading foreign soldiers on your own soil isn't terrorism, but that's not where the Taliban stops. Plenty of attacks on their own populace over the last two decades.
Russia also defaulted because it can't pay (in any currency) parties that are barred by sanctions from transacting with the Russian government. It wouldn't matter if Russia were able to ship paper USD to their creditors; the creditors cannot accept that payment.
I would also blame Trump's relentless political attacks about Obama returning Iran's assets. And Biden's political cowardice after the Afghan collapse. All of it is reducing trust in US's supposed rules-based institutions. US is speedrunning through the fall of an empire
Calm down with the theatrics. Money continues to flow into the US during this current crisis because the US is still seen as the most stable place in the world. Rich people around the world wouldn't be rushing to park their money here if they thought the US was going to collapse.
It's a patently stupid strategy over the long run though. Abandonment of ones own currency is suicide regardless of whether it's USD or Bitcoin. And clearly, Bitcoin did not help El Salvador improve it's financing situation: the Bitcoin bond they tried to push was a complete flop. Argentina has a way better model: they control their money, they've defaulted repeatedly, the currency has magically remained stable, and everyone comes back after each default.
Another massive issue is that as a currency with an inelastic supply Bitcoin price volatility is guaranteed to remain unstable. This is not a desirable feature for any currency.
I'm not sure why you view Argentina as a "better model". They're in the middle of (another) currency crisis right now which is causing their economy to collapse and social unrest:
The annual inflation rate in Argentina is ~76%. It's basically impossible to do business in Pesos when it's devaluing so quickly. Every contract programmer in Argentina is doing business in Bitcoin or stablecoins because they would lose ~40-60% if they were paid in USD from abroad. People are stashing savings dollars (and Bitcoin) to keep it out of government hands and protect it from becoming worthless.
If historically your government has breached the trust of its people from careless money printing local
currency, using a major world currency as your money is something to keep you honest.
Bitcoin is like this for all governments and currencies. It is honest true hard money that cannot be devalued by the money printers. It’s the hard money of last resort and you bet this will be more and more important as we lose trust for each other’s currency.
The wrong (but popular) answer is to say that this is a move to break El Salvador's reliance on the USD--the USD still remains legal tender in El Salvador, and from what I can tell, there is absolutely no movement whatsoever towards things like pricing in Bitcoin in lieu of USD or other steps that would insulate El Salvador from US monetary policy.
The charitable answer I would give is that Bukele hoped to attract cryptocurrency investors with the move, perhaps to supplement existing institutional investors who haven't been happy with some of Bukele's policies.
The uncharitable answer I would give is that Bukele is trying to innovate and translate core cryptocurrency strategies of extracting money from people's pockets into extracting money from El Salvador's citizens' pockets.
> never really understood what incentive a government had to recognize bitcoin as legal tender
El Salvador is very corrupt, in the neighborhood of Sierra Leone and Algeria [1]. It is unclear to what degree the state has a monopoly on violence [2]. Bitcoin is a precedented dark money channel.
History has repeatedly shown that being able to print money is a critical tool during financial crises. No one likes their money being debased, but they like economic depressions even less.
There is a reason that nations have abandoned the gold standard.
Gold's physical characteristics tended towards centralization. Centralizing gave the institutions controlling the gold strong incentives to allow debasement of gold-backed money, as it gave those institutions handsome profits and strong political control.
History has repeated shown us that printing money in a crisis just makes it worse, eventually. Taking that away is hard, but honesty is the best policy, even if it hurts at first.
The reason we ditched the gold standard was for deviance. It’s very hard to fight wars if you can’t print the money. Ww1 ww2 Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq … try that on gold.
Bitcoin = End of all war.
I mean most wars happened before I the World Wars. Like the overwhelming majority of wars happened on a gold standard. Bitcoin would probably make us too poor for war though.
As people have pointed out this means that the US or wherever can print money and controls your monetary policy, but that's actually the least of the problems. Euros and US Dollars in large quantities, and digitally transferrable versions of them, can essentially only exist as numbers in databases controlled by the US and EU government respectively. So by adopting them as your country's currency, you're effectively giving them control over your money. They get to decide whether it continues to exist, whether you get to access it, whether it gets transferred to some well-connected megacorporations in those countries that bribed your former leader into a dodgy deal... In short, it gives a whole bunch of control to powerful entities who have tended to use their powers in ways that have not been good for developing countries at all.
Ethereum is not Bitcoin. Ethereum just showed the world Botcoin's unique value compared to Ethereum and the thousands of crypto projects so often conflated with Bitcoin.
The 2017 Bitcoin scaling wars proved that one can't simply change Bitcoin's consensus rules by majority control of the miners. I think at one point 80% of the miners were in favor of large blocks, yet they didn't have buy-in from the rest of the network participants (developers, regular users, merchants, exchanges).
I just don't see the relevance considering the absolutely insane amount of things that have happened that would cause nobody to act in this fashion again, namely...uh...many public people are using the project publicly.
The fork stuck because it was still an alpha, as far as society was concerned.
It's currently in a grey area between a social movement and a FOSS project, and it simply started as a FOSS project.
I think it's important to characterize what occurred with this context. Devs won't get another chance at that without the project (and movement!) ending — and everyone knows it.
You are always tied to the monetary and fiscal policy of the majority of a currency’s participants.
Can you make your own currency? Of course. How will you back it? Who will trust it? Who governs those policies? These are people problems people want to solve without people (crypto folks), with expected results (speed running financial regulation). They came at the king (reserve currencies) and missed by a mile.
Correct, but historically the price had been stable and predictable.
Imo you're just trading "beholden to the usgovt" with "beholden to miners, whales and wall street" plus wild price swings. Former or latter may be preferable for certain reasons, but for fiscal stability or day-to-day use the choice seems obvious to me.
Sure, but the ECB or Federal Reserve can print money, and you don't control them. If your goal is a mathematically guaranteed money supply (this would not be my goal, fwiw), BTC is superior.
I am not sure what libertarian really means but the idea that the rich of the past deserve to control the present and future strikes me as secretly authoritarian.
Except in bitcoin, having a large share from the past doesn't directly confer control in the present, since it's not a proof of stake system.
If it's actually used as a currency, a person with a large stockpile will gradually lose their relative share over time as they consume, since you don't generate interest on it.
It's also confusing to me that people can hold the cognitive dissonance of defending a post gold standard, infinitely inflatable currency with a negative view income inequality, which only started increasing drastically after we abandoned the gold standard.
An inflationary currency benefits the wealthy asset owners more than the working class almost by design. Asset owners get to borrow against their assets and pay it back in a depreciating currency, while at the same time getting to use a psychological magic trick to make poorly educated employees think they're getting a pay raise, when in real terms they're getting a pay cut.
If I was a greedy rich person who wanted to make sure I could never lose my wealth, I would build a financial system on a currency that inflates away by design.
A small amount of inflation (1-2% per year) is required or else you'd get deflation. Deflation is an almost guarenteed death spiral for an economy as everything grindes to a halt because not spending makes you richer.
What does that even mean? Is there any fiat currency system you can point to where elite insiders don't get special access to the money printer before us plebs do?
In addition, bitcoin limits government power. Most autocracies fund their operations with inflation. Even in liberal democracies, deficit spending funded with inflation is not really what people have voted for. People are fine with taxes to the extent they have voted for them, but that should be enough. Inflation is a way to covertly siphon wealth from citizens on top of tax revenues.
> autocracies fund their operations with inflation
There is limited evidence for connecting countries' foreign debt levels to their degree of democratization [1].
More pointedly, there is ample evidence--millenia of it!--for empires on commodity money waging war and whatnot and having a fine time of it.
> deficit spending funded with inflation is not really what people have voted for
Deficit spending / bond issuance is voted on at multiple levels of government practically every cycle. People have voted for this. Because the alternative is austerity, and fanatical governments that pursue that for its own sake tend to get replaced.
Well, you are right in that people usually do vote for more government spending. The problem exists in all kinds of governments.
Anyway, my point was that bitcoin can limit government spending and protect individuals against inflation due to government spending. It doesn't mean that a rich nation couldn't wage war.
It would be deeply unpopular as it could only be funded by austerity at home, and it would be very short.
I believe Bitcoin standard world is post war. It is uneconomical, and that hits the people very hard very quickly. No home propaganda could convince the people it was just…
I have a public notes repo [0] in which I only write for myself, with no real expectation that anyone will ever read it. I have however gotten feedback in the form of cold emails that people have found the notes useful or interesting. Writing in public without hooks can also be valuable.
I feel like Hugo / Jekyll (or equivalent) + GitHub Pages (or equivalent) is much much easier to set up. Is the resiliency really needed for your personal blog? Github Pages (which I use for my blog [0]) is pretty good at uptime afaik.
I also feel like Jekyll plus GitHub Pages is the easiest solution. I feel it is more minimal than the posted product. Jekyll plus GitHub is free, and aside from an initial setup and small learning curve, it is basically automatic. I am getting ready to publish my blog, and it's been nice to be able to customize things (like adding in MathJax support).
Umm what? Do you not see the inherent breakage of trust if your wife is having sex with someone else in a monogamous relationship and then trying to pass off someone else' kid as yours?
Purely mechanically, mild effort simply does not burn that many calories over baseline metabolism. To make a real dent you need extreme prolonged effort, or increased muscle mass (which increases base metabolism).
Caloric restriction is a much easier path to caloric deficit if the goal is weight loss.
Obviously if you resume caloric profit afterwards you’ll bounce back, but the same will happen if you din’t maintain your exercise-drive metabolism: the human body is quick to tear down deviations which are costly and not actively maintained.
> Purely mechanically, mild effort simply does not burn that many calories over baseline metabolism
I think that the point is not just "burning calories"; exercise has many effects on your body that go beyond just consuming energy. For example it affects the level of hormones, which in turn affects (among other things) your mood and stress level. I am one of those persons that end up eating just because I am nervous or depressed, and regular exercise makes me do that much less.
> I think that the point is not just "burning calories"
That's a weird take given entire thread is about weight loss, and the gp was specifically noting that exercise won’t help with that. thomasfedb’s statement is rather explicit on that subject.
Sorry, that phrase was meant to be "I think that the point of exercise is not just "burning calories"".
To lose weight you need (roughly speaking, I know it is not only about that) two things: reduce the amount of energy that you intake, and increase the amount of energy that you consume.
The traditional wisdom is you have to exercise because while doing that you consume more energy, but it is not only that. When you regularly exercise you also tend to eat less (- intake), process the food differently (- intake), speed up your metabolism out of the physical activity (+ consume)
Meta analyses of randomized controlled trials show diet and exercise both are related to weight loss but diet has a much bigger impact.
You have to take this with a grain of salt though. My experience clinically (working in obesity clinics) is some people need exercise much more than dietary changes at least at first. But the average person wanting to lose weight will see bigger gains from dietary changes.
The type of dietary change that works best seems to depend on the person.
The thing that I've found helpful with going to sleep on time and not spending too much time in the night on the phone is to just keep the phone in a different room. That way, you either read a book or go to sleep, both of which are better than social media (including HN IMO)
I also keep my phone in another room. Helps me with waking up because I need to get up to turn the alarm off. For going to bed on time, with which I still struggle, I tried to set reminders on the phone.
- 10 PM - Stop chores.
- 11 PM, settle down. Means no "active" things anymore, like gaming, HN. I lie down. Reading a book would be best then, watching TV is a bit worse but still more passive. Audiobooks or podcasts get me sleeping then right away.
- 11 PM: Go to bed. Getting up from the couch, brush teeth, go to bed. I think a routine like this is very helpful.
