21 ms·

Internet disrupted in Kazakhstan amid energy price protests

267 points by r721 5y ago

nikanj 5y ago
Not that long ago Kazakhstan was considered very attractive for BTC miners. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-09/bitcoin-btc-miners-who-flocked-to-kazakhstan-now-see-zero-potential https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-09/bitcoin-b... One of the surprising features of the crypto boom is the discovery of places where the price of energy is directly subsidized, or otherwise broken (e.g. you can just bribe the head of the city power plant, instead of paying your power bill).
- baybal2 5y ago
  The Xive, the biggest mining business there actually don't mine itself. They lease self-contained mines in ISO containers, and a membership in the pool. Anybody with access to near free electricity gets it hauled, or even flown to him, then they only have to wire-in few kiloamps of power, and internet.
- SilasX 5y ago
  Wait, really? It wasn’t possible to efficiently turn spare energy into money at scale before crypto?
  - dustintrex 5y ago
    Not very easily: the capital expenditure required to build, say, an aluminum smelter (which is how Iceland converts excess geothermal into cash) is orders of magnitude more than some crypto rigs.
    - nikanj 5y ago
      And once you've built it, you have to have the aluminum ore shipped to you, and get the processed aluminum shipped to the world market. A BTC mine fits into a few shipping containers, needs no in-out logistics, and can easily be transported around as needed
      - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Containers or a warehouse of miners also has far less effect on anything local. You don't have to worry nearly as much about local oligarchs or regulators getting uppity and trying to shut you down.
        beckman466 5y ago
        > Containers or a warehouse of miners also has far less effect on anything local. uhm what? the presence of miners mean energy prices rise as well as more environmental destruction to produce energy, especially if it's a place without green(er) energy production.
        hippich 5y ago
        prices rise until mine is moved to different place with cheap (for now) energy.
        bellyfullofbac 5y ago
        Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away? Obviously it's all stupidly chaotic, there might be a huge waterfall somewhere, and if we ignore the natural beauty aspects, before some cryptobros show up with money (however tangible) to build a hydropower plant and some wires to their container site, that waterfall's energy is not being utilized...
        beckman466 5y ago
        > Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away? yep, that's my argument above. and i personally wouldn't say hashes "are mostly thrown away", i would argue they're all thrown away, especially when considering this 'tech' will become defunct in a few years. “In what may be the best expression yet of capitalist realism, a new tool for free market speculation has become for many a populist symbol of resistance to the ravages of finance capitalism.” https://mronline.org/2021/12/28/cryptocurrencies-a-view-from-the-left/ https://mronline.org/2021/12/28/cryptocurrencies-a-view-from...
    - SilasX 5y ago
      What about storage of energy in batteries for resale to the grid? That’s very low (or negative) return by comparison? (Also probably not possible everywhere.) Also, if the claim is correct (about crypto making energy price arbitrage much easier), then a motivated reasoner could argue that it has had the positive effect of eliminating inefficiencies by forcing energy to obey the “law of one price”. Which, to clarify, doesn’t necessarily make it positive-sum overall, but still needs to be weighed against its energy usage cost to accurately gauge the full effect.
      - acdha 5y ago
        There’s an interesting short term versus long term discussion: if a place has cheap electricity (hydro, geothermal, solar, etc.) for a while it becomes appealing for people to reconfigure around it — electrification for homes & vehicles, building heavy industry or cloud data centers, etc. If someone can deliver shipping containers full of cryptocurrency mining hardware, they can very quickly soak up that extra capacity, maybe even drive prices up a bit, and it has no benefit to the surrounding community other than perhaps a maintenance job.
        SilasX 5y ago
        To make my point more concrete in terms of your example, the benefit would be something like: Let's say Iceland has some natural advantage in fishing, because of the great fish around there. But, because our world violates the law of one price, it's instead of profitable to smelt aluminum there instead of fishing[2], and the world is deprived of the utility gain from the fish captured and shipped[1]. But then, once the world obeys "one energy price", the smelting doesn't make sense and they go back to fishing (while the imported crypto miners sop up the extra energy). [1] hopefully with sustainable management [2] They still fish there, today and in the hypothetical, but probably much less than the optimum.
        acdha 5y ago
        Those seem fairly separate industries — I don't know how many power-plant operators would switch to fishing. The process I was thinking of would be more like this: 1. A major hydro / geothermal / solar / etc. project goes online providing n GW/day 2. Usage within the region where that power can viably be transmitted is 0.2n so there isn't pressure to elevate prices. Because the power supply is based on the local geography, there isn't a way to bring production closer to the consumers in distant areas (e.g. a solar farm is going to be more productive in Arizon even if you want to power a factory in Portland). 3. Ordinarily, someone who owns, say, an aluminum smelter might consider building a new one in that region to take advantage of the guaranteed green power rather than facing escalating prices based on competition and emissions controls take effect. However, if someone ships a bunch of cryptocurrency miners in to soak up any available power there won't be slack capacity and that's guaranteed to happen because they can ship containers of mining hardware in days whereas building an industrial facility takes years.
    - Symmetry 5y ago
      The aluminium smelter also requires collocated skilled labor which is another factor.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      Just FYI most of the energy in Iceland goes into smelting. It's not excess the capacity has been expanded and continues to be expanded to power smelting. https://nea.is/hydro-power/power-intensive-industries/nr/70 https://nea.is/hydro-power/power-intensive-industries/nr/70 It's also quite borderline as to whether or not it breaks even these days. Supply chain woes increasing prices have helped last year for example but before that they were losing money. https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/09/14/icelandic-smelters-helped-by-high-aluminium-prices https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/09/14/icelandic-smelters-helpe...
  - pjc50 5y ago
    The electricity in this case is not "spare", just at non-global prices. Electricity generation has always been managed by turning down the generation to match the demand. Your point below about battery storage: battery storage has only just become economically viable at the best of times, and that relies on getting paid to provide "fast frequency response" - stabilisation as a service.
- beckman466 5y ago
  > One of the surprising features of the crypto boom is the discovery of places where the price of energy is directly subsidized, or otherwise broken are you really arguing that letting the market work on energy instead of having somewhat democratic state run utilities works well? i think the evidence speaks for itself. what do you see? https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/10/texa-a10.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/10/texa-a10.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/01/texa-j01.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/01/texa-j01.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/08/texa-m08.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/08/texa-m08.html
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- h4kor 5y ago
  Just stumbled over this site being down because of the shutdown https://blockchair.com/ https://blockchair.com/
- _jal 5y ago
  > discovery of places where the price of energy is directly subsidized, or otherwise broken So, an anti-state financial mechanism subsidized by governments and fraud. There is nothing new under the sun.
  - tsol 5y ago
    What are the prior examples of this happening?
- trembolram 5y ago
  They are now disconnected from the global Internet. What happens to all BTC transactions made in Kazakhstan? Will the local network accept them? What will happen to them when the Internet connection to the global world is back?
  - VMG 5y ago
    They can use a satellite connection. There are ready-made setups for this: https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/
  - xxpor 5y ago
    As a someone ignorant occational user: It'd operate similar to a git repo no? Transactions within KZ would be accepted by the local chain, which would then be merged when reconnected. If there's a conflict you have to decide which chain is the correct one, which in this case would be the global version.
    - 8organicbits 5y ago
      When the network is segmented multiple chains could form. Likely KZ would have a very low hash rate, so that segment would take very long to form blocks (or never complete any). Once the networks rejoin, the global chain almost certainly "wins" and the local chain is ignored. Transactions written to a KZ block will show some confirmations, but won't remain in the eventual dominant chain.
      - nybble41 5y ago
        The global chain will "win" but transactions made in the local chain can be retried in the global chain after the networks rejoin so long as there are no conflicts. Absent deliberate or accidental double-spending, the biggest source of conflicts would be the mining rewards from the local chain since these rewards never existed in the global chain and cannot be carried over. There is a 100-block waiting period before mining rewards can be spent specifically to avoid this issue for shorter-term forks, but it could still be a problem in the event of sustained network fragmentation. On the bright side, it's not necessary to have full Internet connectivity to keep the local chain in sync with the global chain. A single local node with access to the global blockchain (via a VPN or dedicated satellite receiver[0] or multiple upstream Internet connections near the border) can ensure that the local chain is constantly synchronized with the global one, and even forward local transactions for inclusion in the global blockchain. [0] https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/
senectus1 5y ago
hmmm we have ppl in Kaz. Suddenly Starlink sounds like a useful tool in the back pocket.
- hippich 5y ago
  at least in Belarus one can _receive_ from the sat but can not _transmit_ to the sat. precisely for that reason. i would not be surprised that in the rest of former USSR countries there are similar laws. nonetheless, looks like protesters there are successful despite cut internet.
  - OldManAndTheCpp 5y ago
    Not being able to send means they can't use Starlink in Belarus, right? There's no ability to send e.g. HTTP GET, so you can't actually use the internet. Right?
    - senectus1 5y ago
      how would they govern the sending to sats? via starlink themselves?
      - raxxorrax 5y ago
        Starlink offers full duplex lines compared to classical satellite connections that require a secondary line for sending data.
    - hippich 5y ago
      correct. last time i checked, sat internet is possible, but outbound connections are happening via local ISP. This worked quite well in the past to download large files. Nowadays with fast local internet such sat/local setup doesn't make much sense anymore.
- wrinkl3 5y ago
  I've been thinking about Starlink too. Rural Kazakhstan should actually be pretty good for reception with all that barren steppe.
londons_explore 5y ago
Name a country which hasn't done this when >30% of the population are on the streets with pitchforks. I think even western countries would do the same, they've just not had protests big enough in recent history.
- helge9210 5y ago
  Ukraine, for example. The main question here is not "would a state shutdown internet if needed?", but "should a government have a direct control over internet infrastructure?"
  - baybal2 5y ago
    Kazakhstan has no private Internet providers sans local ISPs. All long range fibre, and cross-border connections are owned by SOEs, and president's damat personally.
  - iso1210 5y ago
    A state has direct control over everything it its borders. Ultimately you can send in the army to the IXPs and you pull the plug, be that North Korea or the USA
- emteycz 5y ago
  I don't think western countries even have the necessary mechanisms.
  - Victerius 5y ago
    There have never been widespread energy shortages in Western countries. The closest we came was the oil shocks of the 70s, and it cost Jimmy Carter a second term.
    - adventured 5y ago
      Jimmy Carter had zero shot at beating Reagan, with or without the oil shocks. Carter and Ford were both extraordinarily weak candidates. Ford was a Bob Dole tier candidate (ie incapable of winning the Presidency in an election), with the Republicans still mired in the consequences of Nixon, and Carter still struggled to beat him in 1976. Reagan's carry of California was a near certainty, and it guaranteed the end of Carter with or without the energy problems. Carter was a weak southern Democrat that couldn't pull Texas and couldn't pull New York - there was nowhere for him to win from, there was no angle of victory.
baybal2 5y ago
It's a complete shutdown, likely somebody pulled the plug on the sole cable which connects the country to the Internet.
- SilasX 5y ago
  Wait, so the South Park scene was actually accurate for some countries’ internet? https://youtube.com/watch?v=zAJbOygaJ0o https://youtube.com/watch?v=zAJbOygaJ0o
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Most countries do have something similar in place where they can turn off the outside connections if needed. I don't think it has happened yet in any western country, but those safe-guards are in place at the edges of the national network.
  - iso1210 5y ago
    I remember trying to get internet in Kabul when we expanded an office there about a decade ago, there was one fibre over the khyber pass to Pakistan, and I seem to remember the connections north and south to Uzbekistan/Iran relied on a ropey copper ring circuit with c. 100mbit of connectivity - for the entire traffic. That episode was released in 2008, a lot of countries in Africa then had just one subsea circuit, if that, before WACS, before EASSy. If I remember right, even bandwidth out of Austrailia cost a fortune.
f311a 5y ago
The government had initially tried to calm protesters by conceding a reduction in the price of liquefied natural gas (LNG), setting it at 50 tenge (€0.1) per litre, compared with 120 at the start of the year — a significant increase in a country where the minimum wage is 42,500 tenge (€98.7) a month. The price of the gas has doubled (the link does not mention it).
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  >the minimum wage is 42,500 tenge (€98.7) a month. Surprising. Ukraine, where I'm from, has a minimum wage of €200 despite being resource-poor and simply poor-poor, if you go by relatively objective measures like GDP per capita with PPP. But oil-rich Kazakhstan seems to really keep their hoi polloi on a lean diet.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    It's all a matter of costs and standard of living. Oil (and generally resource rich countries) have a tough line to thread between spreading the riches among the population without making the said population dependent on that sharing ( e.g. Venezuela) and hoarding at the top. Most fail miserably, and honestly the only one i can think of doing a great job is Norway, and it was mostly by accident.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      The reason why Norway is an exception is largely because its liberal democratic political system was already well-developed by the time it became a heavy oil producer. https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=758 https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=758
    - BurningFrog 5y ago
      Norway already had a rich modern economy before they struck oil.
    - qnsi 5y ago
      what about US?
jabej 5y ago
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Westerners should protest about energy prices? If anything, Westerners ought to be paying far higher energy prices in the form of carbon taxes.
  - redanddead 5y ago
    How so? And by Westerners do you mean NA + EU or NA? What about Australia?
  - tlear 5y ago
    I am sure this will work great and not lead to historic route at the next election. Notice how fast Biden got on trying to contain the gas prices? You have to understand that massive slices of society whole lives depend on gas prices being in certain range. They are not going to go eat cake.. they WILL do something about it.
  - adventured 5y ago
    By a dramatic margin the most polluting nations in all respects are non-Western nations. Your tax premise is backwards accordingly. Insert retort: yeah but that's just because the West outsources its pollution. No, in fact 'developing' countries like China are self-contained pollution monsters. In order to fulfill their own gigantic consumer demand, China has to be the world's most polluting nation with how they've structured their grid and industry. Exports to eg the US are a small share of China's emissions problem and getting ever smaller as a share of the problem. China is about to become the world's largest economy and gets 60% of its energy from coal, while they aggressively build a lot more coal power plants and their emissions continue to skyrocket (despite already outputting more emissions than the US + EU combined). While US and EU emissions continue to contract (their consumer demand growth + economic growth is largely net stagnant anyway), China will again double its emissions output, guaranteeing the planet will be partially destroyed (if the climate predictions are at all accurate).
r721 5y ago
Recent updates: >President Tokayev says that he is the chairman of security council from now, instead of Nazarbayev https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478713537065369601 https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478713537065369601 >The building of the Almaty Police Department has been seized by protesters, according to several Orda.kz sources. Weapons also captured >Big proliferation event in Kazakhstan, hundreds of small arms will flow on the streets https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478723503918653440 https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478723503918653440 (UPD: unclear whether this is confirmed, according to some sources assault on police department is ongoing https://t.me/sputnikKZ/13893 https://t.me/sputnikKZ/13893 (in Russian)) UPD >Almaty airport(IATA: ALA, ICAO: UAAA) has been reportedly seized by protesters. Evacuation of employees ongoing >The press service of Almaty International Airport(IATA: ALA, ICAO: UAAA) confirms the lost of control. "There are now about 45 invaders at the airport" https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478747716356345861 https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478747716356345861 (source in Russian: https://t.me/orda_kz/13180 https://t.me/orda_kz/13180)
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  >President Tokayev says that he is the chairman of security council from now, instead of Nazarbayev This is a huge deal. Conventional wisdom was that Nazarbayev, an unchallenged strongman for almost 30 years, only gave up the day-to-day duties of running the country to a younger sycophant but retained the ability to make "higher-order" decisions via his chairmanship of the security council - one of the models which Putin might follow as well, since he cannot ever simply retire. This either means Nazarbayev doesn't want to be associated with the fall of Tokayev and will attempt to feign conflict with him to retain power in case shit goes south, or perhaps Tokayev just used the situation to perform a "forced retirement" coup against Nazarbayev.
  - r721 5y ago
    It's also unclear (judging from my twitter feed and a few liveblogs I follow) where Nazarbayev is currently located (and what he thinks about this mess).
  - hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
baybal2 5y ago
FYI: most of gas Russia sells to Europe is actually not Russian, but coming from Central Asian vassal regimes at less than a penny per cube, and then resold at incredible markups to Europe. I am talking exactly about Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. This is why Russia is not really fearing for oil price. Their gas is incredibly profitable, and stable, unlike Siberian oil where freezing, rusting USSR era oil rigs require a lot of upkeep. Without Kazakhstan, no "Russian" gas for Europe. -------- P.S. I got blocked again, so posting news here through edit T7-VIP1 is a personal aircraft of Nazarbayev family. https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/t7-vip1 https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/t7-vip1 The news are there that he fled the country to Switzerland, got a boot from there, and was forced to flee to Uzbekistan.
- kgeist 5y ago
  >most of gas Russia sells to Europe is actually not Russian, but coming from Central Asian vassal regimes at less than a penny per cube, and then resold at incredible markups to Europe >Without Kazakhstan, no "Russian" gas for Europe. Do you have some links to back it up?
  - sushibowl 5y ago
    It doesn't add up for me. Central Asian sources are less than 1.5% of GazProm total production, and Gas production of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan is dwarfed by Russian fields. Further, output from Russian fields in Siberia is on the decline and new fields are being developed in the Yamal Peninsula to replace these, so no Soviet era oil rigs at all. https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Russian-gas-amid-market-tightness.pdf https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/0...
    - baybal2 5y ago
      It does not add up to me, and any Russian who knows where Russian government gets its money. In 2009, I heard accounts of up to half of gas coming to Europe being Central Asian
londons_explore 5y ago
I think it is very interesting how these countries fall off the internet... Specifically, if I was a country leader who wanted to turn off the internet, I would get my minister to call up all big ISP's and tell them to disconnect everyone. The ISP bosses tell their tech people to do it. And what do those tech people do? Well, if I were in their shoes, I would head to the billing system and mark all customers as 'bill overdue, not eligible for service' or some similar status. That gives me the ability to allow certain customers to still use the service (eg. the president and his mates). Yet that isn't what we see... The actual BGP routes go down... That suggests to me that the story might be more like "army storms ISP headquarters, ripping out cables till their phone internet stops working".
- capableweb 5y ago
  No, what actually happens in practice is that the backbone connections to the outside gets disconnected (by the government) without the involvement of ISPs. Certain users who still want to access the internet has access to it via other means, sometimes even satellite connections.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    This reminds me of how Gorbachev kept informed about the coup that was happening around him via the BBC World Service on shortwave. I wonder if there's a market for re-instating such services in areas that are prone to internet outages?
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      The BBC still does longwave radio, receivable in most of the world, partly for strategic political reasons that you describe.
      - BoxOfRain 5y ago
        I'll miss that when they shut it down, I'm too young to have actual nostalgia for longwave as a primary way of listening to the radio but but I enjoy having Test Match Special on crackly old longwave as background noise when I'm working. I always liked how you can hear the lightning from miles away if it's stormy. I've also got a friend who still sometimes uses the Shipping Forecast on longwave when he's on smaller boats in the North Sea! My understanding is that the longwave service is very expensive to run (on the order of hundreds of kW) and the only thing keeping it alive is the fact its carrier wave is used to switch over old electricity meters to night rates. AFAIK the energy companies subsidise it rather than the BBC and when everyone's on a smart meter it'll probably go off air. Having said that, I suspect the Venn diagram of 'people who'd be miffed about 198 kHz going quiet' and 'people who regularly write to their MPs' is basically a circle so maybe it'll last years after its execution date like the Irish longwave service has.
pyuser583 5y ago
Strongly recommend reading Kelptopeia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World Covers the current situation in Khazakhstan. One of the most chilling chapters deals with what can happen to protestors in Khazakhstan. Even more chilling, how the ruling elite manipulate the international press. If you don’t hate Tony Blair already, this will help you cross that line in a big way. https://www.amazon.com/Kleptopia-Dirty-Money-Conquering-World/dp/0062883658 https://www.amazon.com/Kleptopia-Dirty-Money-Conquering-Worl...
- sofixa 5y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation. I've just bought the book, but before diving in, out of curiosity, what's the link with Tony Blair?
  - pyuser583 5y ago
    He was a highly paid advisor for the oligarch ruling Khazakhstan. Specifically, the Khazakh leader was giving a speech in the Uk at the same time he was suppressing protests with torture and rape. Blair wrote up talking points for him to help with damage control.
- HatchedLake721 5y ago
  I assume the Tony Blair hate is based on the Iraq War? I don’t get it. Prime Minister in the UK cannot go to war without parliament’s approval. Parliament approved invasion with 412 to 149 votes. Is Tony Blair the scapegoat? Can someone explain?
  - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
    "On 6 July 2016, Sir John Chilcot announced the report's publication, more than seven years after the inquiry was announced.[3] Usually referred to as the Chilcot report by the news media,[4] the document stated that at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein did not pose an urgent threat to British interests, that intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction was presented with unwarranted certainty, that peaceful alternatives to war had not been exhausted, that the United Kingdom and the United States had undermined the authority of the United Nations Security Council, that the process of identifying the legal basis was "far from satisfactory", and that a war was unnecessary.[5][6][7] The report was made available under an Open Government Licence." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Inquiry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Inquiry
jgrahamc 5y ago
Live data is available on Cloudflare Radar for Kazakhstan here: https://radar.cloudflare.com/kz?date_filter=last_24_hours https://radar.cloudflare.com/kz?date_filter=last_24_hours
- capableweb 5y ago
  Better view of the current situation (last 6 hours shown, instead of last 7 days): https://radar.cloudflare.com/kz?date_filter=last_6_hours https://radar.cloudflare.com/kz?date_filter=last_6_hours
  - mirages 5y ago
    debian.org jumped to the 14th most visited according to that page coming from the low 400th
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      Two possibilities: 1) People are looking for Linux resources as it might help them evade censorship or set up local networks 2) Residential traffic dropped but servers aren't affected and so Debian-based servers' update traffic now represents a much larger part of the country's total traffic
      - thrdbndndn 5y ago
        Most likely 2 since most people don't have internet RN. But I don't know who exactly still have; I assume most non-backbone civil servers got cut out too.
      - bmicraft 5y ago
        It may also be that debian.org is just whitelisted
thempes123 5y ago
- y04nn 5y ago
  That made me remember reading about it, there is a satellite broadcast of the blockchain, by Blockstream [1] started by Adam Back I think. Not sure if it really works or is used/usable. [1]: https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/
- gruez 5y ago
  >Turns our there isn't much use for it if you unplug the cable huh? Not really. Bitcoin transactions are typically around 500 bytes. Smuggling that out via alternative means doesn't seem too hard. As for the blockchain itself (for verifying transactions), there's this: https://www.blockstream.com/satellite/ https://www.blockstream.com/satellite/
  - thempes123 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fsflover 5y ago
  During a local revolution, crypto is as useless for transactions as regular money. However, it will not loose its value unlike the latter.
democracy 5y ago
30 years under the dictatorship... my heart is with the people and I hope for the best for the country!
- osipov 5y ago
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  Before that 70 years of communist dictatorship. Before that centuries of Russian Tsar dictatorship, and so on...
- q1w2 5y ago
  The most likely government to be installed will be an islamic state, so I would not be very hopeful. Also, Russia might intervene militarily and annex the norther half of the country - as they have recently made comments that the Soviets gave them too much land. It is far more likely this will end badly for the average Kazakh citizen.
  - yladiz 5y ago
    What do you mean by Islamic state? Something like in Iran, or something like in Turkey? I'm not sure what your sources are but if you mean something like in Iran it's extremely unlikely to happen in Kazakhstan. Russia taking some land is more likely but Russia would likely prefer better relations with Kazakhstan due to their gas and economic ties, and annexing that land isn't really that important compared to Ukraine.
    - q1w2 5y ago
      Something like the Taliban in Afghanistan.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    Kazakhstan is one of the most secular countries in Central Asia (20% self-reported as "irreligious" in a 2019 poll), so I find that rather unlikely.
baybal2 5y ago
T7-VIP1 is a personal aircraft of Nazarbayev family. https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/t7-vip1 https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/t7-vip1 The news are there that he fled the country to Switzerland, got a boot from there, and was forced to flee to Uzbekistan.
- hitpointdrew 5y ago
  Curious as to how you know that the T7-VIP1 is a personal aircraft of Nazarbayev family?
- baybal2 5y ago
  Alternative theories are going around now, but all say the previous pres fled some far away. From Russia, and China, to other Stand, to Switzerland, or UAE.
StringyBob 5y ago
Do wonder what Russia’s reaction will be. Not wanting to belittle the impact on people’s lives from geopolitical turmoil, but amongst other things Baikonur Cosmodrome is inside Kazakhstan - where a lot of the Russian space launches are from.
- q1w2 5y ago
  Numerous Russian politicians have recently said that the Soviets gave Kazakhstan too much land, and that the northern portion of the country which holds the 25% ethnic Russian population, should return to Russia. This seems like a possible opportunity for Putin to annex more territory.
  - StringyBob 5y ago
    I expect Putin’s forces will now move in to secure the country, and will never leave
    - q1w2 5y ago
      ...and thus it was... https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/troops-protesters-clash-almaty-main-square-kazakhstan-shots-heard-2022-01-06/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/troops-protesters...
BlueTemplar 5y ago
Sounds like a great opportunity to experiment with mesh networks ? (Especially these days, with millions of smartphones around, each one being able to work as a Wi-Fi router !)
- iso1210 5y ago
  Sounds like a great opportunity to ensure you've got water, fuel and food safely stockpiled (secretly)
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    This is hacker news, so cans of Pringles (not for eating), Soylent, (and yes, water, Soylent doesn't go well with Red Bull, sigh...). Fuel only for powering hardware, meatware can survive from hardware's waste heat. (/s)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
timka 5y ago
What nobody says is that effective January the 5th non-vaccinated people who haven't had COVID and have no valid PCR test are not permitted to visit molls, food supermarkets and non-food chain stores. The government also plans to block access to MFCs, banks, post offices etc. Source: https://t.me/delyagin/14915 https://t.me/delyagin/14915

267 points by r721 5y ago

Not that long ago Kazakhstan was considered very attractive for BTC miners. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-09/bitcoin-btc-miners-who-flocked-to-kazakhstan-now-see-zero-potential https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-09/bitcoin-b... One of the surprising features of the crypto boom is the discovery of places where the price of energy is directly subsidized, or otherwise broken (e.g. you can just bribe the head of the city power plant, instead of paying your power bill).

baybal2 5y ago
The Xive, the biggest mining business there actually don't mine itself. They lease self-contained mines in ISO containers, and a membership in the pool. Anybody with access to near free electricity gets it hauled, or even flown to him, then they only have to wire-in few kiloamps of power, and internet.
SilasX 5y ago
Wait, really? It wasn’t possible to efficiently turn spare energy into money at scale before crypto?
- dustintrex 5y ago
  Not very easily: the capital expenditure required to build, say, an aluminum smelter (which is how Iceland converts excess geothermal into cash) is orders of magnitude more than some crypto rigs.
  - nikanj 5y ago
    And once you've built it, you have to have the aluminum ore shipped to you, and get the processed aluminum shipped to the world market. A BTC mine fits into a few shipping containers, needs no in-out logistics, and can easily be transported around as needed
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      Containers or a warehouse of miners also has far less effect on anything local. You don't have to worry nearly as much about local oligarchs or regulators getting uppity and trying to shut you down.
      - beckman466 5y ago
        > Containers or a warehouse of miners also has far less effect on anything local. uhm what? the presence of miners mean energy prices rise as well as more environmental destruction to produce energy, especially if it's a place without green(er) energy production.
        hippich 5y ago
        prices rise until mine is moved to different place with cheap (for now) energy.
        bellyfullofbac 5y ago
        Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away? Obviously it's all stupidly chaotic, there might be a huge waterfall somewhere, and if we ignore the natural beauty aspects, before some cryptobros show up with money (however tangible) to build a hydropower plant and some wires to their container site, that waterfall's energy is not being utilized...
        beckman466 5y ago
        > Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away? yep, that's my argument above. and i personally wouldn't say hashes "are mostly thrown away", i would argue they're all thrown away, especially when considering this 'tech' will become defunct in a few years. “In what may be the best expression yet of capitalist realism, a new tool for free market speculation has become for many a populist symbol of resistance to the ravages of finance capitalism.” https://mronline.org/2021/12/28/cryptocurrencies-a-view-from-the-left/ https://mronline.org/2021/12/28/cryptocurrencies-a-view-from...
  - SilasX 5y ago
    What about storage of energy in batteries for resale to the grid? That’s very low (or negative) return by comparison? (Also probably not possible everywhere.) Also, if the claim is correct (about crypto making energy price arbitrage much easier), then a motivated reasoner could argue that it has had the positive effect of eliminating inefficiencies by forcing energy to obey the “law of one price”. Which, to clarify, doesn’t necessarily make it positive-sum overall, but still needs to be weighed against its energy usage cost to accurately gauge the full effect.
    - acdha 5y ago
      There’s an interesting short term versus long term discussion: if a place has cheap electricity (hydro, geothermal, solar, etc.) for a while it becomes appealing for people to reconfigure around it — electrification for homes & vehicles, building heavy industry or cloud data centers, etc. If someone can deliver shipping containers full of cryptocurrency mining hardware, they can very quickly soak up that extra capacity, maybe even drive prices up a bit, and it has no benefit to the surrounding community other than perhaps a maintenance job.
      - SilasX 5y ago
        To make my point more concrete in terms of your example, the benefit would be something like: Let's say Iceland has some natural advantage in fishing, because of the great fish around there. But, because our world violates the law of one price, it's instead of profitable to smelt aluminum there instead of fishing[2], and the world is deprived of the utility gain from the fish captured and shipped[1]. But then, once the world obeys "one energy price", the smelting doesn't make sense and they go back to fishing (while the imported crypto miners sop up the extra energy). [1] hopefully with sustainable management [2] They still fish there, today and in the hypothetical, but probably much less than the optimum.
        acdha 5y ago
        Those seem fairly separate industries — I don't know how many power-plant operators would switch to fishing. The process I was thinking of would be more like this: 1. A major hydro / geothermal / solar / etc. project goes online providing n GW/day 2. Usage within the region where that power can viably be transmitted is 0.2n so there isn't pressure to elevate prices. Because the power supply is based on the local geography, there isn't a way to bring production closer to the consumers in distant areas (e.g. a solar farm is going to be more productive in Arizon even if you want to power a factory in Portland). 3. Ordinarily, someone who owns, say, an aluminum smelter might consider building a new one in that region to take advantage of the guaranteed green power rather than facing escalating prices based on competition and emissions controls take effect. However, if someone ships a bunch of cryptocurrency miners in to soak up any available power there won't be slack capacity and that's guaranteed to happen because they can ship containers of mining hardware in days whereas building an industrial facility takes years.
  - Symmetry 5y ago
    The aluminium smelter also requires collocated skilled labor which is another factor.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Just FYI most of the energy in Iceland goes into smelting. It's not excess the capacity has been expanded and continues to be expanded to power smelting. https://nea.is/hydro-power/power-intensive-industries/nr/70 https://nea.is/hydro-power/power-intensive-industries/nr/70 It's also quite borderline as to whether or not it breaks even these days. Supply chain woes increasing prices have helped last year for example but before that they were losing money. https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/09/14/icelandic-smelters-helped-by-high-aluminium-prices https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/09/14/icelandic-smelters-helpe...
- pjc50 5y ago
  The electricity in this case is not "spare", just at non-global prices. Electricity generation has always been managed by turning down the generation to match the demand. Your point below about battery storage: battery storage has only just become economically viable at the best of times, and that relies on getting paid to provide "fast frequency response" - stabilisation as a service.
beckman466 5y ago
> One of the surprising features of the crypto boom is the discovery of places where the price of energy is directly subsidized, or otherwise broken are you really arguing that letting the market work on energy instead of having somewhat democratic state run utilities works well? i think the evidence speaks for itself. what do you see? https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/10/texa-a10.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/10/texa-a10.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/01/texa-j01.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/01/texa-j01.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/08/texa-m08.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/08/texa-m08.html
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
h4kor 5y ago
Just stumbled over this site being down because of the shutdown https://blockchair.com/ https://blockchair.com/
_jal 5y ago
> discovery of places where the price of energy is directly subsidized, or otherwise broken So, an anti-state financial mechanism subsidized by governments and fraud. There is nothing new under the sun.
- tsol 5y ago
  What are the prior examples of this happening?
trembolram 5y ago
They are now disconnected from the global Internet. What happens to all BTC transactions made in Kazakhstan? Will the local network accept them? What will happen to them when the Internet connection to the global world is back?
- VMG 5y ago
  They can use a satellite connection. There are ready-made setups for this: https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/
- xxpor 5y ago
  As a someone ignorant occational user: It'd operate similar to a git repo no? Transactions within KZ would be accepted by the local chain, which would then be merged when reconnected. If there's a conflict you have to decide which chain is the correct one, which in this case would be the global version.
  - 8organicbits 5y ago
    When the network is segmented multiple chains could form. Likely KZ would have a very low hash rate, so that segment would take very long to form blocks (or never complete any). Once the networks rejoin, the global chain almost certainly "wins" and the local chain is ignored. Transactions written to a KZ block will show some confirmations, but won't remain in the eventual dominant chain.
    - nybble41 5y ago
      The global chain will "win" but transactions made in the local chain can be retried in the global chain after the networks rejoin so long as there are no conflicts. Absent deliberate or accidental double-spending, the biggest source of conflicts would be the mining rewards from the local chain since these rewards never existed in the global chain and cannot be carried over. There is a 100-block waiting period before mining rewards can be spent specifically to avoid this issue for shorter-term forks, but it could still be a problem in the event of sustained network fragmentation. On the bright side, it's not necessary to have full Internet connectivity to keep the local chain in sync with the global chain. A single local node with access to the global blockchain (via a VPN or dedicated satellite receiver[0] or multiple upstream Internet connections near the border) can ensure that the local chain is constantly synchronized with the global one, and even forward local transactions for inclusion in the global blockchain. [0] https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/

senectus1 5y ago

hmmm we have ppl in Kaz. Suddenly Starlink sounds like a useful tool in the back pocket.

hippich 5y ago
at least in Belarus one can _receive_ from the sat but can not _transmit_ to the sat. precisely for that reason. i would not be surprised that in the rest of former USSR countries there are similar laws. nonetheless, looks like protesters there are successful despite cut internet.
- OldManAndTheCpp 5y ago
  Not being able to send means they can't use Starlink in Belarus, right? There's no ability to send e.g. HTTP GET, so you can't actually use the internet. Right?
  - senectus1 5y ago
    how would they govern the sending to sats? via starlink themselves?
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
      Starlink offers full duplex lines compared to classical satellite connections that require a secondary line for sending data.
  - hippich 5y ago
    correct. last time i checked, sat internet is possible, but outbound connections are happening via local ISP. This worked quite well in the past to download large files. Nowadays with fast local internet such sat/local setup doesn't make much sense anymore.
wrinkl3 5y ago
I've been thinking about Starlink too. Rural Kazakhstan should actually be pretty good for reception with all that barren steppe.

londons_explore 5y ago

Name a country which hasn't done this when >30% of the population are on the streets with pitchforks. I think even western countries would do the same, they've just not had protests big enough in recent history.

helge9210 5y ago
Ukraine, for example. The main question here is not "would a state shutdown internet if needed?", but "should a government have a direct control over internet infrastructure?"
- baybal2 5y ago
  Kazakhstan has no private Internet providers sans local ISPs. All long range fibre, and cross-border connections are owned by SOEs, and president's damat personally.
- iso1210 5y ago
  A state has direct control over everything it its borders. Ultimately you can send in the army to the IXPs and you pull the plug, be that North Korea or the USA
emteycz 5y ago
I don't think western countries even have the necessary mechanisms.
- Victerius 5y ago
  There have never been widespread energy shortages in Western countries. The closest we came was the oil shocks of the 70s, and it cost Jimmy Carter a second term.
  - adventured 5y ago
    Jimmy Carter had zero shot at beating Reagan, with or without the oil shocks. Carter and Ford were both extraordinarily weak candidates. Ford was a Bob Dole tier candidate (ie incapable of winning the Presidency in an election), with the Republicans still mired in the consequences of Nixon, and Carter still struggled to beat him in 1976. Reagan's carry of California was a near certainty, and it guaranteed the end of Carter with or without the energy problems. Carter was a weak southern Democrat that couldn't pull Texas and couldn't pull New York - there was nowhere for him to win from, there was no angle of victory.

baybal2 5y ago

It's a complete shutdown, likely somebody pulled the plug on the sole cable which connects the country to the Internet.

SilasX 5y ago
Wait, so the South Park scene was actually accurate for some countries’ internet? https://youtube.com/watch?v=zAJbOygaJ0o https://youtube.com/watch?v=zAJbOygaJ0o
- capableweb 5y ago
  Most countries do have something similar in place where they can turn off the outside connections if needed. I don't think it has happened yet in any western country, but those safe-guards are in place at the edges of the national network.
- iso1210 5y ago
  I remember trying to get internet in Kabul when we expanded an office there about a decade ago, there was one fibre over the khyber pass to Pakistan, and I seem to remember the connections north and south to Uzbekistan/Iran relied on a ropey copper ring circuit with c. 100mbit of connectivity - for the entire traffic. That episode was released in 2008, a lot of countries in Africa then had just one subsea circuit, if that, before WACS, before EASSy. If I remember right, even bandwidth out of Austrailia cost a fortune.

f311a 5y ago

The government had initially tried to calm protesters by conceding a reduction in the price of liquefied natural gas (LNG), setting it at 50 tenge (€0.1) per litre, compared with 120 at the start of the year — a significant increase in a country where the minimum wage is 42,500 tenge (€98.7) a month. The price of the gas has doubled (the link does not mention it).

kspacewalk2 5y ago
>the minimum wage is 42,500 tenge (€98.7) a month. Surprising. Ukraine, where I'm from, has a minimum wage of €200 despite being resource-poor and simply poor-poor, if you go by relatively objective measures like GDP per capita with PPP. But oil-rich Kazakhstan seems to really keep their hoi polloi on a lean diet.
- sofixa 5y ago
  It's all a matter of costs and standard of living. Oil (and generally resource rich countries) have a tough line to thread between spreading the riches among the population without making the said population dependent on that sharing ( e.g. Venezuela) and hoarding at the top. Most fail miserably, and honestly the only one i can think of doing a great job is Norway, and it was mostly by accident.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    The reason why Norway is an exception is largely because its liberal democratic political system was already well-developed by the time it became a heavy oil producer. https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=758 https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=758
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    Norway already had a rich modern economy before they struck oil.
  - qnsi 5y ago
    what about US?

jabej 5y ago

actually_a_dog 5y ago
Westerners should protest about energy prices? If anything, Westerners ought to be paying far higher energy prices in the form of carbon taxes.
- redanddead 5y ago
  How so? And by Westerners do you mean NA + EU or NA? What about Australia?
- tlear 5y ago
  I am sure this will work great and not lead to historic route at the next election. Notice how fast Biden got on trying to contain the gas prices? You have to understand that massive slices of society whole lives depend on gas prices being in certain range. They are not going to go eat cake.. they WILL do something about it.
- adventured 5y ago
  By a dramatic margin the most polluting nations in all respects are non-Western nations. Your tax premise is backwards accordingly. Insert retort: yeah but that's just because the West outsources its pollution. No, in fact 'developing' countries like China are self-contained pollution monsters. In order to fulfill their own gigantic consumer demand, China has to be the world's most polluting nation with how they've structured their grid and industry. Exports to eg the US are a small share of China's emissions problem and getting ever smaller as a share of the problem. China is about to become the world's largest economy and gets 60% of its energy from coal, while they aggressively build a lot more coal power plants and their emissions continue to skyrocket (despite already outputting more emissions than the US + EU combined). While US and EU emissions continue to contract (their consumer demand growth + economic growth is largely net stagnant anyway), China will again double its emissions output, guaranteeing the planet will be partially destroyed (if the climate predictions are at all accurate).

r721 5y ago

Recent updates: >President Tokayev says that he is the chairman of security council from now, instead of Nazarbayev https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478713537065369601 https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478713537065369601 >The building of the Almaty Police Department has been seized by protesters, according to several Orda.kz sources. Weapons also captured >Big proliferation event in Kazakhstan, hundreds of small arms will flow on the streets https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478723503918653440 https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478723503918653440 (UPD: unclear whether this is confirmed, according to some sources assault on police department is ongoing https://t.me/sputnikKZ/13893 https://t.me/sputnikKZ/13893 (in Russian)) UPD >Almaty airport(IATA: ALA, ICAO: UAAA) has been reportedly seized by protesters. Evacuation of employees ongoing >The press service of Almaty International Airport(IATA: ALA, ICAO: UAAA) confirms the lost of control. "There are now about 45 invaders at the airport" https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478747716356345861 https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478747716356345861 (source in Russian: https://t.me/orda_kz/13180 https://t.me/orda_kz/13180)

kspacewalk2 5y ago
>President Tokayev says that he is the chairman of security council from now, instead of Nazarbayev This is a huge deal. Conventional wisdom was that Nazarbayev, an unchallenged strongman for almost 30 years, only gave up the day-to-day duties of running the country to a younger sycophant but retained the ability to make "higher-order" decisions via his chairmanship of the security council - one of the models which Putin might follow as well, since he cannot ever simply retire. This either means Nazarbayev doesn't want to be associated with the fall of Tokayev and will attempt to feign conflict with him to retain power in case shit goes south, or perhaps Tokayev just used the situation to perform a "forced retirement" coup against Nazarbayev.
- r721 5y ago
  It's also unclear (judging from my twitter feed and a few liveblogs I follow) where Nazarbayev is currently located (and what he thinks about this mess).
- hnthrowaway0315 5y ago

baybal2 5y ago

FYI: most of gas Russia sells to Europe is actually not Russian, but coming from Central Asian vassal regimes at less than a penny per cube, and then resold at incredible markups to Europe. I am talking exactly about Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. This is why Russia is not really fearing for oil price. Their gas is incredibly profitable, and stable, unlike Siberian oil where freezing, rusting USSR era oil rigs require a lot of upkeep. Without Kazakhstan, no "Russian" gas for Europe. -------- P.S. I got blocked again, so posting news here through edit T7-VIP1 is a personal aircraft of Nazarbayev family. https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/t7-vip1 https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/t7-vip1 The news are there that he fled the country to Switzerland, got a boot from there, and was forced to flee to Uzbekistan.

kgeist 5y ago
>most of gas Russia sells to Europe is actually not Russian, but coming from Central Asian vassal regimes at less than a penny per cube, and then resold at incredible markups to Europe >Without Kazakhstan, no "Russian" gas for Europe. Do you have some links to back it up?
- sushibowl 5y ago
  It doesn't add up for me. Central Asian sources are less than 1.5% of GazProm total production, and Gas production of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan is dwarfed by Russian fields. Further, output from Russian fields in Siberia is on the decline and new fields are being developed in the Yamal Peninsula to replace these, so no Soviet era oil rigs at all. https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Russian-gas-amid-market-tightness.pdf https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/0...
  - baybal2 5y ago
    It does not add up to me, and any Russian who knows where Russian government gets its money. In 2009, I heard accounts of up to half of gas coming to Europe being Central Asian

londons_explore 5y ago

I think it is very interesting how these countries fall off the internet... Specifically, if I was a country leader who wanted to turn off the internet, I would get my minister to call up all big ISP's and tell them to disconnect everyone. The ISP bosses tell their tech people to do it. And what do those tech people do? Well, if I were in their shoes, I would head to the billing system and mark all customers as 'bill overdue, not eligible for service' or some similar status. That gives me the ability to allow certain customers to still use the service (eg. the president and his mates). Yet that isn't what we see... The actual BGP routes go down... That suggests to me that the story might be more like "army storms ISP headquarters, ripping out cables till their phone internet stops working".

capableweb 5y ago
No, what actually happens in practice is that the backbone connections to the outside gets disconnected (by the government) without the involvement of ISPs. Certain users who still want to access the internet has access to it via other means, sometimes even satellite connections.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  This reminds me of how Gorbachev kept informed about the coup that was happening around him via the BBC World Service on shortwave. I wonder if there's a market for re-instating such services in areas that are prone to internet outages?
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    The BBC still does longwave radio, receivable in most of the world, partly for strategic political reasons that you describe.
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      I'll miss that when they shut it down, I'm too young to have actual nostalgia for longwave as a primary way of listening to the radio but but I enjoy having Test Match Special on crackly old longwave as background noise when I'm working. I always liked how you can hear the lightning from miles away if it's stormy. I've also got a friend who still sometimes uses the Shipping Forecast on longwave when he's on smaller boats in the North Sea! My understanding is that the longwave service is very expensive to run (on the order of hundreds of kW) and the only thing keeping it alive is the fact its carrier wave is used to switch over old electricity meters to night rates. AFAIK the energy companies subsidise it rather than the BBC and when everyone's on a smart meter it'll probably go off air. Having said that, I suspect the Venn diagram of 'people who'd be miffed about 198 kHz going quiet' and 'people who regularly write to their MPs' is basically a circle so maybe it'll last years after its execution date like the Irish longwave service has.

pyuser583 5y ago

Strongly recommend reading Kelptopeia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World Covers the current situation in Khazakhstan. One of the most chilling chapters deals with what can happen to protestors in Khazakhstan. Even more chilling, how the ruling elite manipulate the international press. If you don’t hate Tony Blair already, this will help you cross that line in a big way. https://www.amazon.com/Kleptopia-Dirty-Money-Conquering-World/dp/0062883658 https://www.amazon.com/Kleptopia-Dirty-Money-Conquering-Worl...

sofixa 5y ago
Thanks for the recommendation. I've just bought the book, but before diving in, out of curiosity, what's the link with Tony Blair?
- pyuser583 5y ago
  He was a highly paid advisor for the oligarch ruling Khazakhstan. Specifically, the Khazakh leader was giving a speech in the Uk at the same time he was suppressing protests with torture and rape. Blair wrote up talking points for him to help with damage control.
HatchedLake721 5y ago
I assume the Tony Blair hate is based on the Iraq War? I don’t get it. Prime Minister in the UK cannot go to war without parliament’s approval. Parliament approved invasion with 412 to 149 votes. Is Tony Blair the scapegoat? Can someone explain?
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  "On 6 July 2016, Sir John Chilcot announced the report's publication, more than seven years after the inquiry was announced.[3] Usually referred to as the Chilcot report by the news media,[4] the document stated that at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein did not pose an urgent threat to British interests, that intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction was presented with unwarranted certainty, that peaceful alternatives to war had not been exhausted, that the United Kingdom and the United States had undermined the authority of the United Nations Security Council, that the process of identifying the legal basis was "far from satisfactory", and that a war was unnecessary.[5][6][7] The report was made available under an Open Government Licence." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Inquiry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Inquiry

jgrahamc 5y ago

Live data is available on Cloudflare Radar for Kazakhstan here: https://radar.cloudflare.com/kz?date_filter=last_24_hours https://radar.cloudflare.com/kz?date_filter=last_24_hours

capableweb 5y ago
Better view of the current situation (last 6 hours shown, instead of last 7 days): https://radar.cloudflare.com/kz?date_filter=last_6_hours https://radar.cloudflare.com/kz?date_filter=last_6_hours
- mirages 5y ago
  debian.org jumped to the 14th most visited according to that page coming from the low 400th
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Two possibilities: 1) People are looking for Linux resources as it might help them evade censorship or set up local networks 2) Residential traffic dropped but servers aren't affected and so Debian-based servers' update traffic now represents a much larger part of the country's total traffic
    - thrdbndndn 5y ago
      Most likely 2 since most people don't have internet RN. But I don't know who exactly still have; I assume most non-backbone civil servers got cut out too.
    - bmicraft 5y ago
      It may also be that debian.org is just whitelisted

thempes123 5y ago

y04nn 5y ago
That made me remember reading about it, there is a satellite broadcast of the blockchain, by Blockstream [1] started by Adam Back I think. Not sure if it really works or is used/usable. [1]: https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/
gruez 5y ago
>Turns our there isn't much use for it if you unplug the cable huh? Not really. Bitcoin transactions are typically around 500 bytes. Smuggling that out via alternative means doesn't seem too hard. As for the blockchain itself (for verifying transactions), there's this: https://www.blockstream.com/satellite/ https://www.blockstream.com/satellite/
- thempes123 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fsflover 5y ago
During a local revolution, crypto is as useless for transactions as regular money. However, it will not loose its value unlike the latter.

democracy 5y ago

30 years under the dictatorship... my heart is with the people and I hope for the best for the country!

osipov 5y ago
BurningFrog 5y ago
Before that 70 years of communist dictatorship. Before that centuries of Russian Tsar dictatorship, and so on...
q1w2 5y ago
The most likely government to be installed will be an islamic state, so I would not be very hopeful. Also, Russia might intervene militarily and annex the norther half of the country - as they have recently made comments that the Soviets gave them too much land. It is far more likely this will end badly for the average Kazakh citizen.
- yladiz 5y ago
  What do you mean by Islamic state? Something like in Iran, or something like in Turkey? I'm not sure what your sources are but if you mean something like in Iran it's extremely unlikely to happen in Kazakhstan. Russia taking some land is more likely but Russia would likely prefer better relations with Kazakhstan due to their gas and economic ties, and annexing that land isn't really that important compared to Ukraine.
  - q1w2 5y ago
    Something like the Taliban in Afghanistan.
- int_19h 5y ago
  Kazakhstan is one of the most secular countries in Central Asia (20% self-reported as "irreligious" in a 2019 poll), so I find that rather unlikely.

baybal2 5y ago

T7-VIP1 is a personal aircraft of Nazarbayev family. https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/t7-vip1 https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/t7-vip1 The news are there that he fled the country to Switzerland, got a boot from there, and was forced to flee to Uzbekistan.

hitpointdrew 5y ago
Curious as to how you know that the T7-VIP1 is a personal aircraft of Nazarbayev family?
baybal2 5y ago
Alternative theories are going around now, but all say the previous pres fled some far away. From Russia, and China, to other Stand, to Switzerland, or UAE.

StringyBob 5y ago

Do wonder what Russia’s reaction will be. Not wanting to belittle the impact on people’s lives from geopolitical turmoil, but amongst other things Baikonur Cosmodrome is inside Kazakhstan - where a lot of the Russian space launches are from.

q1w2 5y ago
Numerous Russian politicians have recently said that the Soviets gave Kazakhstan too much land, and that the northern portion of the country which holds the 25% ethnic Russian population, should return to Russia. This seems like a possible opportunity for Putin to annex more territory.
- StringyBob 5y ago
  I expect Putin’s forces will now move in to secure the country, and will never leave
  - q1w2 5y ago
    ...and thus it was... https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/troops-protesters-clash-almaty-main-square-kazakhstan-shots-heard-2022-01-06/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/troops-protesters...

BlueTemplar 5y ago

Sounds like a great opportunity to experiment with mesh networks ? (Especially these days, with millions of smartphones around, each one being able to work as a Wi-Fi router !)

iso1210 5y ago
Sounds like a great opportunity to ensure you've got water, fuel and food safely stockpiled (secretly)
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  This is hacker news, so cans of Pringles (not for eating), Soylent, (and yes, water, Soylent doesn't go well with Red Bull, sigh...). Fuel only for powering hardware, meatware can survive from hardware's waste heat. (/s)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

timka 5y ago

What nobody says is that effective January the 5th non-vaccinated people who haven't had COVID and have no valid PCR test are not permitted to visit molls, food supermarkets and non-food chain stores. The government also plans to block access to MFCs, banks, post offices etc. Source: https://t.me/delyagin/14915 https://t.me/delyagin/14915