Viewing profile — semiel

> And if you cannot trust the police, it is already too late. No. Life went on in the USSR, despite the police being manifestly untrustworthy. Life goes on in the US and UK, despit…

Those aren't securities, though, because their value doesn't depend on the efforts of the seller, which is one of the prongs of the Howey test.

It's of course possible that Bitcoin had less than a 1/10000 chance of hitting $10,000, and we're just living in an extremely unlikely world. But given that it _did_ happen, it's p…

> It doesn't make sense to dump all your resources onto every new coin that pops up. No, but if the odds work out, then it definitely makes sense to dump a _small_ amount of money …

> Confirmation bias. How many things were discussed on rationalist websites that people were sure were going to be yuge, petered out, and were forgotten? You can't claim victory fo…

Yep, and we pretty much know what the solution will look like: zero-knowledge proofs, such as the ones used by ZCash.

Why does it matter if it's dangerous if used incorrectly, if the majority of users use it correctly, and the overall effect is that fatalities go down?

Surely they can not turn on autopilot, if that's the case? For me, I prefer life over a false sense of control.

It was a badly designed app written by a couple of over-eager developers who didn't have any security plan in place. If you blamed the language every time a website got hacked, the…

That's why you have backups. I agree that having full control over your identity has risks as well as benefits, though. I expect that we'll eventually see security providers arise …

Solidity is not an ideal language, but I also think that the ~ deep concern ~ everyone has about it is overblown. C is a pretty problematic language too, but plenty of reliable sof…

They are comparable, though, and that's exactly my point. They're not the _same_ by any stretch of the imagination, but it's just a weaker reading of history to refuse to consider …

Since these countries (in some form or other) still exist, it's tempting to start making moral comparisons and trying to figure out "which side you should be on". But that's not th…

Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

> Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It might sound…

On the other hand, it's much easier to protect your Bitcoin keys than your credit card number. Credit cards basically require you to share your password with anyone you want to buy…

> So what are the implications of an object that breaks that symmetry? Would it be possible to observe an object in different times in the same state, or the same time in different…

Really? I haven't heard about this. I'd love a link if you have one.

It took me way too long for this reason. I got it instantly once I realized I had made that limitation up. I feel like there is some sort of lesson, here.

I mostly disagree. You definitely need to know the basic abstractions and concepts, like blocks, transactions, and addresses. But they're not particularly harder than concepts like…

I've been working in the Ethereum space for a year and a half, so I know my perspective is warped, but I really don't think the learning curve is that bad any more. Solidity isn't …

The point is the security professionals exist in order to facilitate the needs of the users they serve, not the other way around. It's always easier to just say no, but a good secu…

AlphaGo isn't a fixed strength, though. It's substantially stronger now than it was in October. Obviously it's not a completely continuous function, but I think it's close enough t…

I think there's something analogous to the anthropic principle happening here. This match is happening now because Google realized we are in the moment when Go AIs are passing the …