jcranmer

694 ms·

3091.
by jcranmer 4y ago
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 th
3092.
by jcranmer 4y ago
Speaking as a compiler developer: compilers for standard languages make no attempts to guarantee constant-time properties, nor to provide any primitives that can be used implement constant-time guarantees. Indeed, the developers are likely
3093.
by jcranmer 4y ago
The asset classes they have previously admitted to investing in are similar asset classes to those that money market funds have invested in, and historically, that has not proven sufficient to always maintain a 1:1 backing. And also, I beli
3094.
by jcranmer 4y ago
I said USDC has said that is using fractional reserves. I did not say that it is insolvent. (That said, I do believe that USDC and USDT are likely to be insolvent, primarily on the basis that assets equaling 100% of liabilities to three sig
3095.
by jcranmer 4y ago
> It is (or should be) backed 1:1 by dollars, and the institution holding USDs should be profiting only for the service provided, not by re-investing the money. Should be, perhaps. But it does not appear to be. Tether's statements i
3096.
by jcranmer 4y ago
Yes, the qualifier of "surviving" is very important. Trying to look quickly for a hard number, it seems that the usual estimate (perhaps one study being widely reported rather than hard estimates) is about 5-10% of works surviving
3097.
by jcranmer 4y ago
The idea that the digital world is launching us into another "Dark Age" is probably overselling the issue. Let's look at how much actually survives from the pre-Dark Ages. The complete corpus of Classical Latin and Greek lite
3098.
by jcranmer 4y ago
The general tenor of a lot of agricultural objections to these kinds of scenarios tends to be along the lines of "everyone else must fully eliminate all of their emission scenarios before we are forced to reduce a single thing." Y
3099.
by jcranmer 4y ago
> Something as simple and trivial as loading a 64-bit immediate into a register is a 10-byte instruction in x86... It will only take a 10 byte instruction if you can't zero- or sign-extend from a 32-bit immediate. Of course, if you
3100.
by jcranmer 4y ago
That would be a dumb way to build a decoder. Which is why that's not how it works on x86 processors. What an x86 processor does is fetch an entire cacheline of instructions at once. Working out which byte corresponds to instructions is
3101.
by jcranmer 4y ago
The general rule of thumb is that consent to be called overrides the Do-Not-Call stuff. Although, that said, you also have to be able to later withdraw that consent, I believe (I know this is true as far as anti-spam laws go, but I'm
3102.
by jcranmer 4y ago
> I don’t understand why Bitcoin mining is incompatible with emissions reduction. It sounds like an additional source of demand may make economical plants that otherwise could not be built. Some years ago, there was a book published wher
3103.
by jcranmer 4y ago
Surely someone has made a graph analyzing the trend line of projected PoS switch date compared to the current date, à la https://xkcd.com/2014/ ... where might I find such a graph?
3104.
by jcranmer 4y ago
Those numbers don't look right. A plant running at 90% uptime is ~8000 h/yr, and a typical large power plant produces 100s of MW. So you should be looking at a yearly output in ~1000s GWh/yr range.
3105.
by jcranmer 4y ago
You shouldn't be so surprised. The energy consumption issues of cryptocurrency are very well-known, and the claims that "you didn't take into account all the human office staff" were attempts to deflect discussion from t
3106.
by jcranmer 4y ago
> USDC is USD backed, so one would conclude you actually do "hold" USD through the USDC security. I mean, I can see the thought pattern behind this, but it's wrong. No court will uphold this interpretation. You don't
3107.
by jcranmer 4y ago
The textbook example of fractional reserves: You are a bank. Sally gives you $100, so now you have $100 in cash as assets. Bob comes up to and asks for $80. You agree to give him $80, on the condition that he gives you $90 next week. Now yo
3108.
by jcranmer 4y ago
> USDC is supposedly USD backed, so a reasonable person would presume someone who advertises FDIC insurance of cash would assume the USDC underlying USD is backed by FDIC. That is not how FDIC insurance works. If you don't hold USD,
3109.
by jcranmer 4y ago
> I have no idea what happens to the customer accounts at the bank in case of a Voyager bankruptcy. E.g. if they can be used to cover voyagers debt or have to be handed over to the customers. Most likely, the customers are unsecured cred
3110.
by jcranmer 4y ago
What this means for anyone who is a customer is that Voyager is having an uproarious laughing session in their private conference rooms at how gullible their customers are. The FDIC insurance means that Voyager is guaranteed at minimum $2
3111.
by jcranmer 4y ago
If loans were a component of Voyager's reserves, then by definition, Voyager was employing fractional reserve banking. It's even more amusing that you think this crisis being caused by failed loan payments doesn't mean that f
3112.
by jcranmer 4y ago
Their audit has been forthcoming for over 5 years at this point. I wouldn't hold my breath. (Also note that attestation ≠ audit.)
3113.
by jcranmer 4y ago
The have had to unwind a double-digit percentage of their portfolio, in a down market, in a very short amount of time. The total net effect of doing so has been to collect something like 0.00001% net profit. That is simply not credible.
3114.
by jcranmer 4y ago
Those messages come from the "health supplement" industry, which is basically a segment of the health industry that the FDA is prohibited by law from regulating. And it entirely feeds on consumer cynicism towards the health indust
3115.
by jcranmer 4y ago
S&P 500 average profit margin is typically around 10%. So, yes, 5% is low profit margins.
3116.
by jcranmer 4y ago
Instead, they'd say that Congress didn't clearly intend for the FCC to be able to regulate phone calls.
3117.
by jcranmer 4y ago
TIL about set shiftround... that would definitely help with > commands...
3118.
by jcranmer 4y ago
This is based on the IEEE 754 totalOrder predicate. If you look at how this function works on binary floats, it turns out that it sorts numbers as 0xffff, 0xfffe, 0xfffd, ..., 0x8001, 0x8000, 0x0000, 0x0001, 0x0002, ..., 0x7ffd, 0x7ffe, 0x7
3119.
by jcranmer 4y ago
> decisions of vast “‘economic and political significance." How is "economic and political significance" defined? From what I understand of the decision, it's defined as "6 of 9 people on SCOTUS don't like t
3120.
by jcranmer 4y ago
Here is the tl;dr of why it was rejected, from a brief skimming: The spot bitcoin price used to compute the ETF is based on unregulated exchanges in a sector that is concentrated, and rife with fraud and market manipulation (which the entit

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