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Something to think about before we all decide we want to be a "cashless society", especially when the U.S. also currently fears EMP attacks from North Korea, Ru
by mtgx 9y ago
Something to think about before we all decide we want to be a "cashless society", especially when the U.S. also currently fears EMP attacks from North Korea, Russia, etc
- omarchowdhury 9y agoWould love to hear Bitcoin proponents solution to this.
- lightedman 9y agoYou won't, because they have no understanding of how anything truly works. Cash in hand is unhackable, almost entirely untraceable, and works when there is no power. 20:1 the Bitcoin people would propose some sort of buffered/delayed transaction solution. Of course that wouldn't work as there's no way of telling when you'd have restored power or connectivity. Puerto Rico is looking to have nothing for several weeks if not longer, much like the Ice Storm of 1994 in Western Tennessee.
- holydude 9y agoSee my other comment reg. cash. Cash is not the solution it is just a band aid.
- lightedman 9y agoCash is the solution. Your other comment is literally demonstrating what merchants have done for millennia before we had computers - write down the transactions in a ledger so you can keep track of daily business. Now, if the lady behind the counter had a problem counting cash - that's on her.
- holydude 9y agoWell yeah it is for inventory purposes.
- lojack 9y agoCash in hand isn’t unhackable at all. Counterfeiting is still a real thing.
- lightedman 9y agoCertain types of currency are absolutely unforgeable or easily detected if they are forged. Gold, for example. It's how we discovered specific gravity.
- chrissnell 9y agoNonsense. The average person, me included, could not detect impure gold if given a piece of it.
- dnautics 9y agoIt's not that hard. Take a Black Rock, and a few samples ok known purity, 75,80,95,100%. Then scratch the gold sample across a set of lines, of these purities, and see which is the closest.
- 21 9y agoYou failed. A lot of counterfeit gold has insertion of other metals in the center (tungsten for example which has a similar density) https://static6.businessinsider.com/image/505a1d2eeab8ea8610000007-480-640/fake-gold-bar.jpg https://static6.businessinsider.com/image/505a1d2eeab8ea8610...
- lightedman 9y agoTungsten is noticeably lighter, by about 7%. Hand-in-hand comparison with another similar-sized bar of pure gold would give it away instantly.
- 21 9y agoNote that I specifically talked about density, not weight. Wikipedia: Because the density is so similar to that of gold (tungsten is only 0.36% less dense), tungsten can also be used in counterfeiting of gold bars, such as by plating a tungsten bar with gold
- Finnucane 9y agoNot sure why you're getting downvoted; Bitcoin was clearly designed by someone with no understanding of how money actually works.
- digi_owl 9y agoIndeed. Bitcoin is a crossover point between cypherpunks and goldbugs.
- rothbardrand 9y agoBitcoin is pretty much the essence of the entire point of the cypherpunks. That an privacy, but bitcoin is nothing but a censorship resistant ledger.
- offtopicques 9y agothat bitcoin works would suggest your understanding does not survive contact with reality
- Finnucane 9y agoDoes it work as money? It hasn't yet.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rothbardrand 9y agoYes, it has, though I'm sure you have some tortured narrow definition of "money" and an inaccurate assumption of some failing of bitcoin to claim that it hasn't. But that doesn't matter. All you're saying here is that it's going to be a few more years and a much higher bitcoin price until you convert over. That's your loss.
- omarchowdhury 9y ago
- sametmax 9y agoPeople didn't create bitcoin to replace cash. Years ago, the community tried to create an alternative to all existing money systems. That's all. No false promises. No silver bullet. Just a social experiment. The way you put it sounds like the early bitcoin believers were pretentious know-it-all getting over their head. What we tried to do was just something new related to money. And we did. We took risk. We were mocked. We invested time, energy and resources in a system we knew was experimental, unreliable and untested. And it did a dent. I would add, despite very negative people like you.
- lightedman 9y ago"I would add, despite very negative people like you." Have fun when you run into the same lesson left unlearned from the 70s - distributed permission-less databases like blockchains cannot scale without becoming centralized. The more people that wish to participate, the growth rate starts jumping from exponential to exponential * log with the bandwidth and storage requirements to ensure every other node on the network is properly updated. "People didn't create bitcoin to replace cash. Years ago, the community tried to create an alternative to all existing money systems. That's all." Cash is a money system. You contradict yourself.
- sametmax 9y ago> Have fun when you run into the same lesson left unlearned from the 70s - distributed permission-less databases like blockchains cannot scale without becoming centralized. The more people that wish to participate, the growth rate starts jumping from exponential to exponential * log with the bandwidth and storage requirements to ensure every other node on the network is properly updated. You mean it may fail ? Yes, we are aware. Since the beginning. That's what "experiment" comes from. > Cash is a money system. You contradict yourself. Being an alternative is not being a replacement. Just like the bike is an alternative to a car, and not a replacement for it. You seem to have a terrible grudge against bitcoin. I'm sorry about it, but it's irrelevant here. You may like it or not, but don't give the early community objectives we didn't have. We never sold a magical solution. We were not some 14 years old kid in a hoodie screaming "kill the banks". We hoped. A lot. We dreamed. We did noticed and disliked a lot of flaws in our current systems and institutions and explored other ways. But as intelligent people, we know very well the limit of the project and how much it can hurt. So keep your negativity to yourself. It's uncalled for, and definitely unwanted.
- phil21 9y agoBitcoin is the digital equivalent to paper cash money. It's pretty hard for me to teleport a $100 bill to someone a continent away, so Bitcoin works as analogous to cash as so far been invented. I agree that Bitcoin does in no way replace paper cash, simply complements it by extending many of it's features to the digital space. It also can be improved on drastically.
- tphyahoo 9y agoWhenever you have a question about bitcoin ask the same question about gold, most of the time it is the same answer. Can you use paper cash in a monetary system that runs on gold? Yes, see the 17th to 19th century. Banks issue counterfeit resistant pieces of paper that represent pieces of gold in the banks safe. Sometimes you get counterfeiting or fraud, but it works well enough. When the power gets turned back on you go back to using real bitcoin payments (which are more convenient than gold).
- rothbardrand 9y agoRegarding TEOTWAWKI Bitcoin is just as vulnerable as the existing financial system. In fact, lower level disasters can take out the existing system before they take out bitcoin. Why aren't you asking "I would love to hear keynesians answer to this!" Power outages are power outages and will harm every electric system, including gasoline, electric cars, food production, etc. The entire society relies on electricity. As for physical bitcoin, which can be transacted offline. Just hand it over like a dollar bill: https://opendime.com https://opendime.com Still mostly useful for larger amounts, though, due to the relative high cost of hardware, but it's new.
- walterbell 9y agoWake up call for "modern" retailers with touch screen cash registers that don't accept cash. They would either go out of business or have to invent a new ERP system on the fly.
- holydude 9y agoIf there would be an emp blast anywhere in the world you would have far bigger problems. Btw a cash counter in my local mcdonalds was out of order meaning the lady had to write down every payment on a piece of paper. Because apparently it is not enough to just hand over the banknotes. You need to know that you sold cafe latte for 3euros and a mcmuffin for 1.5.
- receipt 9y agoIt’s called a receipt, and they better be handing them out.
- mcculley 9y agoI’m sure their process needs a receipt. I usually don’t need documentation of such transactions. I often wish they had a way to decline the receipt so the paper isn’t wasted on something going straight into a waste bin.
- holydude 9y agoIn some shops in my area you can ask for a digital invoice via sms / email
- mcculley 9y agoLikewise in my area. But I don’t want a receipt at all for a bottle of water. I certainly don’t want to give the cashier my contact information. I want to spare them printing it out at all. Often they can’t because of their process. I’ve asked several cashiers about this.
- 9y ago
- kiba 9y agoNaw. We became so dependent on our electrical infrastructure that non-working ATM is just one more additional woe. If you want EMP resiliency, you may want to invest at least a few billion into it. Of course, steering the governmental budget to spend money on stuff that only raise electrical bill and will only prove its worth in an emergency and catastrophic situation is a hard pill to swallow, especially when there are competing priorities.
- Animats 9y agoIf we want EMP resiliency, we need to stop export controls on it. (US Munitions List [1], page 24.) It's not hard, or even expensive. All portable devices without cables could easily be EMP protected. Cars and trucks, especially, should be EMP-tested. Long wires are more of a problem. Lightning and surge protection devices should include EMP protection; some do, just because the devices are fast enough.[2] Fiber optic cables are totally immune to EMP. We're not going to get it from China. Anti-static Mylar bags are touted on Alibaba as "EMP protection". They're not. [1] https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/regulations_laws/documents/official_itar/ITAR_Part_121.pdf https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/regulations_laws/documents/offi... [2] http://www.futurescience.com/emp/EMP-myths.html http://www.futurescience.com/emp/EMP-myths.html
- mikeash 9y agoI think this should be a lesson in better disaster preparation and response, not a lesson in handling payments.
- joering2 9y agoCash or not when it hits hard and you go to a local ground-master to buy food and water, he won't accept any fancy green paper printed with american president on it. It will be just paper in his eyes like a toilet roll. You can trade with your watch or other valuables but better yet make sure you have some silver coins. Just get few of these bags and you should be fine: http://www.monex.com/prods/silver_90.html http://www.monex.com/prods/silver_90.html
- TomMarius 9y agoWhy would he even care about silver? Bullets, weapons, water, actual toilet paper, food... That's what'd be valuable. Also cigarettes and alcohol even though it may seem illogical.
- firethief 9y agoDepends on what kind of apocalypse you're prepping for; fat lot of good all that stuff will do you without silver when the werewolves come.
- mcculley 9y agoI’ve never understood this fear over EMP attacks. Is there a viable EMP attack? Wouldn’t a blast strong enough to damage lots of infrastructure also damage the contents of human skulls?
- NotSammyHagar 9y agono, a high altitude emp burst of a nuke over a big city like nyc would be devestating to electronics but kill no one other than people dieing from the loss of power.
- mcculley 9y agoDo you have any citation for that? I would like to learn more about how that works.
- mikeash 9y agoWikipedia has a pretty good article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_puls... Note that this is not just theoretical. The American Starfish Prime nuclear test did significant damage to electrical systems in Hawaii, and the Soviets destroyed a power plant in Almaty with one of theirs.
- dredmorbius 9y agoIn any energy-transfer weapon, from a club to a bullet to a grenade to a nuke, the critical elements are: 1. How much energy is released? 2. Over what time period? 3. In what forms? 4. At what distance from the target / victim? A bullet which misses you by a millimeter might as well be 1,000 km away. It requires direct contact with tisue to transact damage. Where it hits you also matters, and in many cases, a light interaction with an extremity (hand, foot) may do little damage, whilst a trunk or head shot will be critical or instantly lethal. Much of that comes from the transmission of fluid shock through the body. (Watching super-slow-motion video of bullets impacting various targets on YouTube is ... interesting and informative.) A nuclear bomb delivers energy to the target in four major forms: 1. Prompt ionizing radiation. This is a pulse which lasts for a tiny fraction of a second, and is rapidly absorbed even by the atmosphere. It can be lethal or disabling at relatively close range. 2. Thermal pulse. Depending on the size of the weapon, this will ignite directly exposed flammable materials at ranges from a few hundreds of meters to a hundred km or so. This can be mitigated with white or reflective paint, or intervening structures. 3. Blast wave. This is the physical shockwave of the weapon (as well as any material picked up by it) which causes much of the direct damage. 4. Radioactive fallout. This is long-term radiation delivered generally downwind of the blast site. Exposure follows the seven-ten rule. For each increase by a factor of seven in time, the radiation falls by a factor of ten. A 1,000 rad dose 1 hour after the blast is 100 rads 7 hours after, 10 rads 2 days (49 hours) later, and 1 rad after two weeks. The detonations of nuclear weapons are fast, on the order of a microsecond (on one-millionth of a second). In large part it's the ability to deliver all its energy virtually instantly which gives a bomb its power. An alternative understanding comes from the idea of "generations" of nuclear interactions and their timescale -- a typical nuclear blast occurs over about 50 generations, after which the core has generally spontaneously disassembled past the point of sustainable reactions. (There's a pretty good Quora article on that point here: https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-a-nuclear-explosion-take https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-a-nuclear-explosion-take) Chemical explosives are far slower -- I believe closer to milisecond (thousandth-of-a-second) range. Or: a nuclear explosion is as much faster than a chemical explosion as a chemical explosion is to change taking a full second. A table of chemical reaction velocities peaks at 10,000 m/s, or 1 km/s, or 1m / 0.001s, suggesting a typical deonation period of 0.001ms - 1ms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_explosive_detonation_velocities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_explosive_detonation_... Meteor and meteorite impacts are often described in terms of megatons or Hiroshima-bomb equivalents. The Chelyabinsk meteorite is estimated to have released the energy of 20 - 30 Hiroshima-sized bombs, approximately 400 - 500 kilotons of TNT. However: 1. It did so primarily at an elevation of ~30 km, 2. over a period of 5 - 10 seconds, 3. in the form of light, heat, and sonic blast Much the same as you experience the same total change in kinetic energy whether you decelerate from 100 kph in 10 seconds or 0.01s, the difference is in the total shock and stress, as well as the energy delivered. TL;DR: a modest-sized nuclear blast high in the atmosphere or above it could have relatively modest ground impacts whilst delivering a strong EMP effect.