jpmattia

33 ms·

331.
by jpmattia 8y ago
> One of the primary arguments in favour of cryptocurrency is avoiding the fragility of fractional reserve banking. Only by people that don't understand fractional reserve lending. For example, the exchanges are loaning BTC for t
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by jpmattia 8y ago
One thing that has been confusing me about the recent news: $850M is more than "crook" levels of money: It is well into the realm of state-actor or kingpin levels. When that kind of money goes missing, I would expect whole armie
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Bitfinex Responds to New York Attorney General's Actions(bitfinex.com)
3 points by jpmattia 8y ago|0 comments
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by jpmattia 8y ago
> So...the CFTC isn't a State of New York agency, so what does this have to do with the reading into a New York AG action that Tether must have been solvent otherwise the AG wouldn't have sat on information since then? Becaus
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by jpmattia 8y ago
We're apparently talking about two different subpoenas. CFTC subpoenaed Tether back in 2017: See eg https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4hW_8L...
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by jpmattia 8y ago
To repeat the other reply: The primary suspicion about tether was lack of solvency, and the [edit: CFTC] subpoena went out in late 2017. It would not have taken more than some weeks to determine if the assets were not present. It's pre
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by jpmattia 8y ago
1. The primary suspicion about tether was lack of solvency, and the subpoena [edit: from CFTC] went out in late 2017. It would not have taken more than some weeks to determine if the assets were not present. Moreover, the NY AG would have
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by jpmattia 8y ago
> The attorney general said Bitfinex’s problems began in 2018, when it handed over $850 million to third-party payments processor Crypto Capital Corp. to handle customers-withdrawal requests. Over the months that followed, Panama-based
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by jpmattia 8y ago
Amen to that first paragraph. > both of the worst bullshitters I've ever met were in academia - and the business world has been a breath of fresh air in comparison. I've had the opposite experience. One example was a company
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by jpmattia 8y ago
> I have, and those are fun, but there's something really satisfying with playing with old hardware like that. I'm sorry to inform you that you probably have an unhealthy interest in wirewrapping and should probably seek help
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by jpmattia 8y ago
> Coming up with how it actually happens (particle-antiparticle pair) is another story, so it seems a bit unfair to Hawking to say that Feynman got it first. It is analogous to evolution of how stimulated and spontaneous emission were
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by jpmattia 8y ago
> So are my deposits FDIC insured, even if held in BTC form? Fiat is FDIC insured, crypto has different insurance. https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/166237...
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by jpmattia 8y ago
I think an important point was missed: Steve writes: > The first big idea is that unlike in the 20th century when there were two phases of funding startups–Seed capital and Venture capital–today there is a new, third phase. It’s called
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The Problem with Programming (2006, Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup)(technologyreview.com)
2 points by jpmattia 8y ago|0 comments
345.
by jpmattia 8y ago
> Loaning gold isn't performing FRB on gold. It is, in fact, exactly what fractional-reserve banking means: Loaning a fraction of your reserves. BTW: The exchanges are creating money by allowing margin: There is already a diffe
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by jpmattia 8y ago
> FRB is essentially a form of "double spending" This is nonsense. Loaning money that you own is not "double spending".
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by jpmattia 8y ago
> "Particularly, there is a sense in which bank account balances are a separate currency" You can define "credits" and "debits" in a currency to be a separate currency, but since that has been in the lexicon
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by jpmattia 8y ago
> No, you can't, you need to create a new "currency" to do so. You are confusing "fraction-reserve banking" with something else, probably "quantitative easing". There is no requirement to create curre
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by jpmattia 8y ago
> This is accentuated by the fact that bitcoin can't be used in fractional-reserve-banking. I don't know what you mean to say here, but you can absolutely use bitcoin for fractional-reserve banking, just as gold was used thro
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by jpmattia 8y ago
> So the extermination industry uses anticoagulants, or blood thinners, which don’t affect rats for hours and don’t kill them for several days. The rats die slowly from internal bleeding. Corrigan hates to inflict such a death, but he f
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by jpmattia 8y ago
> A dumb terminal isn't a development machine. That's like saying "Using my DEC VT100 terminal to develop in Go", let me just hook it up to an actual compute And to be clear: The iPad Pro does not even achieve the le
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by jpmattia 8y ago
It may seem quaint now, but it cost many of us a great deal of time back then and was a huge PITA. My favorite vulnerability is not often mentioned: The sendmail config file used to have a completely byzantine syntax. Consequently, there
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by jpmattia 8y ago
Background: Started using vtwm back in the early 90s, then on linux once it became viable. I now have a muscle memory associated with switching and manipulating virtual desktops to the point that I can't even tell you what keys I&#x2
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by jpmattia 8y ago
Repeat after me: A blockchain without decentralization is just a database.
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by jpmattia 8y ago
For those of us married to emacs: I would love to know if anyone has succeeded in using SSH on an iPadPro with a sensible mapping of the keyboard. Every SSH I tried had some intercept of control sequences, which was fatal as far as I was
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by jpmattia 8y ago
Isn't that also true for non-stingray connections? For an example of location from today's news: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/investigations/article21901...
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by jpmattia 8y ago
Anyone happen to know if the Voyager's energy is such to exceed escape velocity wrt sun?
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by jpmattia 8y ago
If it's any consolation: Those "uninterested complaining old men" were there even in the 70s, when I got started. Hell, it's probably the same bunch of guys. :) So don't let that deter you. Electromagnetism is ind
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by jpmattia 8y ago
> Yes, I am the same gumby at the MIT AI lab from late 70s to mid 80s. Apparently you have a pretty memorable username, because I don't think we ever interacted. I was a mere UROP. (I worked on a robot named TARDIS (tea and ravi
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by jpmattia 8y ago
> If you missed it, the tiny section on ITS has some gems: I was there a few years later in the early 80s, and I wouldn't romanticize ITS. There were reasons it didn't live on. However, one of the more hilarious inventions in

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