381–390 of 496 posts
submitted the same comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30473047 link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/25/western-powers... Comes as a shock, it seems that Ukraine has been sold out. Key passage: "As Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, the head of the European Centre for International Political Economy, said, Europe has allowed itself to become more integrated with Russia, while Russia has separated itself f…
submitted the same comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30473047 link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/25/western-powers... Comes as a shock, it seems that Ukraine has been sold out. Key passage: "As Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, the head of the European Centre for International Political Economy, said, Europe has allowed itself to become more integrated with Russia, while Russia has separated itself f…
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Sure, trust is a shortcut we use to not do hard work, and free our time to do more useful things that constantly check on each other. That's fine. But it is critically important that we can periodically check in and verify that our trust is still well placed, and not have systems that can allow someone to massively profit from violating people's trust. The stronger those foundations and verifications of trust are, th…
No, it's absolutely absurd that you expect every scientist to independently (and recursively) verify every result their work is based on.
I never suggested that every scientist independently and recursively verify every piece of previous work. Work and verification of work builds on each other. And every once in a while, we have a major milestone that verifies that much of the work that went into accomplishing the milestone (such as the moon landing) is generally correct.
That's how we teach science to people. It's not just "here's the math and the science we know and it's totally right, just trust us bro". We say "here's the math and science we think is right, now let's do experiments along the way to periodically verify that the things we're teaching you actually generate real predictions that match reality".
Science is all about being suspicious and verifying. Many (if not all) of the greatest scientific discoveries came from people questioning the established "truth".
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>I can 100% confirm that all money in the world is just literally numbers, and it is balanced by the different federal reserve systems around the world to ensure no one can "create" money without notifying everyone. How does the system guarantee that nobody's creating money without notifying everyone? Furthermore, does the system guarantee that the central banks of each country are correctly adjusting their books in…
> How does the system guarantee that nobody's creating money without notifying everyone? Simple answer is balanced books. Longer answer is public reporting and reconciliation. If a bank shows its Federal Reserve balance at X on its asset side and the Federal Reserve shows its bank balance at 0.9X on its liability side, that will raise issue on reconciliation. The system lazily evaluates, however, which makes it nimbl…
Seriously I have wondered about this for decades. I don't know why this would be obvious to anyone.
I often wonder how money is stored. It can't be just a number on a computer in a bank, right? Otherwise some Russian bank could just increase that number to whatever they like. And say "Look, we own 100 Trillion USD. Now let's go shopping.". So I guess USD needs to be recognized by the US somehow? Could the US simply "void" all USD that are owned by Russia?
> I often wonder how money is stored. The Bank of England published a summary of how modern banks work. See https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m... > It can't be just a number on a computer in a bank, right? It can and it is, see the BOE paper. > So I guess USD needs to be recognized by the US somehow? This is a complicated question that will start a flamewar, but basically, any bank in the wo…
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No, it's absolutely absurd that you expect every scientist to independently (and recursively) verify every result their work is based on.
Why are you putting words in my mouth? I never suggested that every scientist independently and recursively verify every piece of previous work. Work and verification of work builds on each other. And every once in a while, we have a major milestone that verifies that much of the work that went into accomplishing the milestone (such as the moon landing) is generally correct. That's how we teach science to people. It'…
Right- that's called trust. I can't independently launch my own lunar program, so I trust those that did... did.
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>But most scientists trust the peer review process We really don't. There's so much stupid stuff that gets published on the daily. And then, you publish a paper refuting a lot of the nonsense, and people start citing your paper as evidence of the opposite of what you wrote, just because you had a keyword in your abstract and they didn't read it, just needed a citation. It's mind boggling that we aren't going backward…
Agreed. When I was doing science, we had a weekly lab meeting where one of our lab members would pick a piece of published literature in our field and break down how bullshit it was. It's hard to do good science.
Did you (or your lab members) publish contradictory results, or should I just trust this assessment?
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> If they're building a replacement, doesn't that also mean we should use "cut off SWIFT" now, rather than later when it'll be ineffective? The replacement is already functional. In fact, Russia is not the only one having built a replacement to protect against the risk that SWIFT would be sanctioned: Europe has done it too with Instex: https://instex-europe.com/about-us/ SWIFT is a private company; those sanctions ma…
India has UPI and Rupay which is getting adopted by other SEA countries. Nepal is as another addition.
SWIFT is mostly about international settlement.
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So it's all trust based? We have to trust that all the governments of the world, who pinky promised to follow the rules, aren't secretly cheating internally and reporting false numbers to everyone else?
Yep! This is the fundamental "disruption" blockchain tech introduced. It doesn't require trust.
This is also why cryptocurrencies can never be made efficient, and will be a blight for as long as they exist. They are the logical extreme of the inefficiencies imposed by a low-trust society[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_socie...
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Yes. Money means nothing without trust. I do not think we can have civilisation without trust
"The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust." -- Satoshi Nakamoto