Will rich nations back a deal to tax multinational citizens?
This is one area where America has a secret lead for both foreigners and ultra-rich citizens. Checkout GRATs and Opportunity Zones if you want to daydream about how to pay near-nothing in taxes as an American sitting on a massive windfall.
And then there’s all of the things you can do inside of an insurance policy.
As a European who doesn’t think Europe has an ongoing skin color / racism problem, you’re signaling that you’ve never really thought about the proceeds of slavery and colonialism to finance, well, almost everything we associate with modern Europe. Especially ignorant if you’re French, British, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, and probably a few other extreme oppressors left off that list.
America has a lot of problems, but we TALK about them. Europe is at least 20 years behind the curve. You guys would be happy with pedophile priests if we hadn’t exposed them.
That’s a pop star you ran out of town. The BBC or Der Spiegel weren’t falling all over themselves to be first to let everyone know that the Catholic Church had a giant problem. There’s a reason Spotlight was an important movie.
An Irish pop-star... Ireland has known about paedo-priests long before Hollywood. And the pop-star above performed that piece on SNL. It ended her in the US. I'm not American, by the way.
I didn't want to start a comment war of Europe against USA. I'm saying that from my outsider point of view, with an European education that taught me about slavery, colonialism, and a little of finance, USA has an obvious ingoing problem with skin colours and racism. I don't really think us European are behind the curve, we are just on another line. We are not perfect too, and we haven't been in the past. You mention slavery and colonialism I will add the too many genocides. We can take, and we do take lessons from USA, sometimes a bit late yes. USA could also take lessons from Europe, we have some experience about what not to do.
Ultimately Tether is backed by obligations from the participating exchanges to fund the tethers that were generated on their behalf. It is basically a scheme being run on behalf of the large crypto exchanges to enable wash trades (which are illegal in every market EXCEPT crypto because nobody figured out how to regulate crypto properly, as per Gensler’s recent comments).
If you want to kill Tether and Bitcoin, you don’t need to go after Tether directly or wait for some price drop. Subpoena all of the exchanges and ask for their commercial relationship with Tether to be documented, and for them to disclose all of their loan obligations, collateral and so on. But, your friendly politicians aren’t going to do that, because Coinbase and Binance and the others have locked up some very high powered lobbyists at this point. That’s where Madoff went wrong...
One of the craziest things is actually USDC — an attempt to replace Tether with a cleaned up, legitimate-looking version of the same nonsense.
> Coinbase and Binance and the others have locked up some very high powered lobbyists at this point. That’s where Madoff went wrong...
Madoff was extremely well connected, and numerous reports to the SEC were ignored as a result. His empire came down when he confessed to his sons, who immediately called the FBI.
FYI Madoff did have high-powered friends, and was never caught despite numerous tip offs. Madoff turned himself in when the GFC hit and his marks wanted their money.
A reason to be wary about USDC are that their haven't been audited, just attested https://www.circle.com/en/usdc , and not even recently at that.
Note that attestations are easy to fake: the article mentions the case of Tether
> Failing to complete an audit and settling on an attestation “for transparency”. The morning of the attestation, tether moved $380m from sister company bitfinex into a bank account to pass the verification
USDC isn't backed by actual USD in a bank account somewhere either. (Largely because you can't just stick that much money in a bank account, and it wouldn't actually be close to 100% safe even if you could.)
Coindesk has a breakdown [1]. Treasury bills make up 2.94% of their cash/cash equivalent balances, which in turn make up 75.85% of their balance sheet. It's mostly in commercial paper. As the Coindesk article points out, it's hard to say what the credit rating or liquidity of the commercial paper is.
Compare to the capital ratios of your average bank, though.
From what I can tell, unlike Tether USDC haven't publicly disclosed what proportion of their reserves are backed by treasury bills and what proportion are stuff like commercial paper - just that they're backed with a mixture of both. On the other hand, they do claim that everything backing their token has very good credit ratings and I don't think Tether do.
Bank customers money are backed (up to 250k for each account) by the US treasury though which is a pretty significant difference. The US can print itself out of any bank run, at least in the short term.
Someone is going to make a chart comparing crypto to the already-ridiculous crypto derivatives market, and you’ll realize your point is totally irrelevant.
Companies don’t transact in Bitcoin because nobody wants to hold it. Except for companies getting a valuation boost from retail investors.
No, my point isn't irrelevant, and you thinking it is means you almost certainly missed it. Most of the world's value is speculative in nature (derivatives, credit, real estate, you name it), so I couldn't care less about the crypto derivatives market, or the "normal" derivatives either. Neither are preventing me from using crypto as a store of value. At the end of the day, people speculating the value of crypto does nothing to detract from its core function as a decentralized ledger. I know this to be fact, because I have and continue to use it as money, and no amount of smug pseudo-intellectual retorts can change that. The briefest of cursory internet searches will disprove your idea that companies don't want to hold crypto - there's been massive buy in from very significant companies. Eg Sotheby's, a company that has existed since the 1700s. But they must be fools who don't know what they're doing, right?
You wrote: <<internet searches will disprove your idea that companies don't want to hold crypto - there's been massive buy in from very significant companies. Eg Sotheby's>>
I looked into this claim, and I disagree. Google search for <<sotheby's cryptocurrency>>. The first two results for me were:
They are allowing partial cryptocurrency payment for a single Banksy painting.
From the FAQ:
<<
Which part of the transaction is payable in cryptocurrency?
Sotheby's will accept cryptocurrency for the hammer price of the lot. The buyer’s premium and overhead premium, as well as any taxes, must be paid in USD.
>>
Sotheby's is simply facilitating the transaction as an auction house. They have zero exposure to cryptocurrency. I assume the cryptocurrency will be transferred to the seller after the auction is paid-in-full. The buyer must pay all non-hammer-price costs in USD to Sotheby's. (As I understand, these fees can be significant.)
Like some other posts mentioned, the seller could agree to receive seashells instead of cryptocurrency. All said, this seems like a very good publicity stunt by Sotheby's.
Okay, and what happens when I run a phony ad next to this one in the New York Times? What happens when I bribe the guy at the Times to accidentally use my hash rather than theirs?
They prove that the hash they publish in the NYTimes exists at that time.
There are probably some archives which can give you an authorized copy of the NYTimes from a specific date. You can use that to prove that the hash existed at the date the NYTimes was published. This is now the hash over a hash tree, which this companies stores. With this single hash they can also prove that every document in this hash tree existed at that time. They can not add a extra document later, because this would alter the hash they published in the NYTimes.
When you publish your phony ad in the NYTimes, you also prove that this phony ad existed at the date the NYTimes was published.
This company probably buys one edition of the NYTimes with their add and check if the NYTimes published the correct hash, if it is wrong they will run an other add the next day with the correct hash the next day. Now they only prove that the hash existed the next day.
The NYTimes hashes idea is brilliant, but if you were to try to scale that concept to thousands or millions of different global use cases, eventually it seems like you'd end up with a technology platform similar to a public distributed ledger, i.e. a blockchain.
I'm open to hearing about any other non-blockchain solutions to this problem, though. One seems to be IOTA and their "Tangle" graph, but I don't fully understand how that could facilitate a historical record of each transaction, as (unlike a blockchain) it is not an append-only ledger.
According to https://discordstatus.com/, there isn’t an outage. Are you suggesting that there’s currently an ongoing outage, and their status page is useless? (Wouldn’t be the first time, but it’s surprising that an otherwise excellent engineering team would make such a mistake.)
Self reporting can be problematic if a company is looking to be acquired. I prefer to use 3rd party monitoring tools. The paid ones like 1k-eyes are great, but there are some free ones like DownDetector [1] that sometimes help paint a picture albeit not perfect.
This sounds like an extremely naive and optimistic outlook. Large scale command and control situations are getting increasingly close to reality. Anyone who has followed US foreign policy and the like won’t be too surprised that this guy worked for the military (which is sad, really).
That's not the US military by the way - despite persistent rumors to the contrary, other countries do exist.
I also find the outlook a bit optimistic admittedly, but there are definitely plenty of better targets than cars for a sophisticated actor. Car software is very different from model to model, and there's a large variety of models on the road - even if you can cause all cars of model X in an area to accelerate to dangerous speeds (something far beyond the capability of current exploits), that will only affect a small proportion of all cars in the area. It will undoubtedly cause chaos, but nothing on the scale you can get by attacking some weaker systems.
Even a coordinated attack against traffic lights is easier to pull off and has no less potential damage.
But it only takes one car (or truck) to cause chaos on a freeway.
As to versions, you may be familiar with Cellebrite? Their stock in trade is having a huge database of exploits for every popular phone. And cars frequently have common software and computing components. It's just a matter of time before script kiddies can pop an unpatched car -- as soon as their is an external wifi / 3g connection. At the moment most only have Bluetooth to the stereo.
I'm curious as to what weaker systems they were thinking about. Obviously the OT at various plants, but that can be air gapped. Most traffic light systems have in built low level safeguards to prevent conflicting states, and the high level system is centrally managed and patched. Attacking requires a multi-stage attack, maintaining access requires continual maintenance, so it just doesn't have the impact an unpatchable vuln in embedded devices does.
> But it only takes one car (or truck) to cause chaos on a freeway.
And that's back to the original point, if you are looking for such small scale problems, make a spike strip and deploy it on the highway. Same scale of destruction as taking one car over, orders of magnitude less skill and money required.
Cars have standard components, but even for cars that don't take digital security seriously (Tesla has that reputation), no driving functions should be on the same network as the external 3G/4G. Yeah you have the infotainment or door opener there, but any ECU running an ASIL-qualified function should be on a separate network, and treat anything connected to the external world as untrusted. That was definitely one of the core architecture assumptions in all car software I've seen. The infotainment system is considered to be compromised and possibly sending malicious data. All the important communication happens on a different network, where internal signing and authentication mechanisms are also used.
And at that level, the internals are too different for the same exploit to work everywhere. What you need to send on the network to make the car brake, or what data format represents the gearbox position, those are different.
I think the major overlooked point is that the modern digital world provides a means for people to commit crimes they otherwise would not have done, simply because they can and because they feel there is low risk of getting caught.
A spike strip, you have to be in the area. A remote attack, you don't have to particularly care about any specific area enough to physically travel to it.. someone can cause chaos simply because they are bored.
And immediately after, they can go do something else.
Tech vulnerabilities aren't yet accessible enough to these types of people, but soon enough they will be and it is not like security is in a temporary poor state. A lot of these systems will remain unchanged for a long time because they are part of an already working business model
Police are quite practiced in finding armed robbers and other people who might use a spike strip (which is pretty tricky to deploy IRL if you want to hit a specific car). But organised crime car theft (with access to key cutting/duplication, remote unlock repeaters, engine immobilizer bypass codes, etc) is a significant problem. I don't see any reason why OCGs wouldn't be enthusiastic users of hacks, the same way that card skimmer gangs operate.
A centralised and timed attack against a tech stack that has significant dominance in the market in the future has one of the biggest potential ceilings out there. Cars are effectively kinetic weapons and if you could say, get 30% of vehicles to turn into on coming traffic on a Friday afternoon the outcome could be seriously ugly.
Funny enough, my story is not quite so bad but still sad. I got bored of the events that evening and went back to gaming. The event stage and the BYOC were at least 1/4 mile apart - I get back to my desk and all my friends are texting me that my name was called to play a "RAGE" 4player deathmatch to win a raffle ticket for the Raptor F-150.
https://www.anom.io/trojan_shield_seal.jpg