Original authors have been working on it for 23 years since they first found the material in 1999. They are part of private institution and have no incentive to rush the disclosure so that other labs can catch on their life's work. Authors already have stated they will publish more information next year. It's pretty arrogant to draw premature conclusions on quick analysis and demand the authors to disclose more information right now, when they are clearly not obligated to anything.
I’ve seen inside of privately funded research that doesn’t have publication requirements and sometimes it is driven by a combination of belief, passion and incompetence which leads to an avoidance of accepting failure. Not saying this is the case with this but please do not elevate private research above public research. There is actually less controls over the quality of private research.
I did not say I consider private research in some sort of higher level than public research. I only said they have no incentive to do full disclosure right now. Without knowing exactly what they know, it is insulting to authors to describe, or even hint, them as avoiding to accept failture. It is simply unwarranted ad-hominem and not contributing anything to academic discussion at this point.
When the authors/executives of a private research company are making fraudulent affiliation claims to established corporations and research universities it's actually very warranted to be dismissive of their claims in the absence of supportive evidence. Especially when there is growing evidence suggestive of failure.
This is not the behavior of ethical scientists and suggests malice.
Faking affiliation and refusing to provide supportive evidence both smell like a fundraising scam (i.e. running out of money and need to raise more to continue research seems like the simplest explanation for this behavior).
Without getting into a philosophical discussion of whether ad hominem is ever appropriate.
This is, in fact, the opposite of ad hominem.
Ad hominem would suggest we are attacking the claim based solely on the author's credibility. In fact, multiple independent replication experiments failed and theoretical models suggest it doesn't work.
So instead of attacking the authors the question is should we be trusting them at their word, and the answer which is reasonably based on credibility seems to be no.
The science behind the claims is being scientifically discussed and the preponderance of available evidence provide no experimental or theoretical support.
We're separately discussing the author's credibility as the claims cannot be verified by anyone but the authors. One example of a time we do this is the "disclosures" section of any academic publication.
Are you arguing someone with a conflict of interest and history of making fraudulent arguments should not be placed under heightened scrutiny?
Combining both available evidence and author credibility is completely valid and leads one to the conclusion that this is incorrect until proven otherwise. It's not like we're solely dismissing the claim because the authors have poor credibility.
Preponderance of available evidence is irrelevant to assessing scientific claims of fact.
The original claims only need to be rigorously verified once. As it currently stands the original claims are claimed to have been partially replicated. What's needed now is the rigor.
> Preponderance of available evidence is irrelevant to assessing scientific claims of fact.
The issue is that trying to prove a negative is very hard in this case.
It is similar to me saying that there is a type of cat that floats, although most don't. It is very hard to prove me wrong because even if you find 1M cats that do not float, it doesn't mean that there is a type of cat you missed to find.
All we can say is that we tried to find cats in a thorough way and none of them float.
When that happens, it is often standard to turn the argument over to the one that is claiming that cats float -- prove that you have a cat that floats, rather than relying on me to prove that no cats float.
This is why people are saying we need to do an analysis of the SC sample from LK. If it is super hard to produce, but we can confirm that they made one, then it is true. Otherwise, it is probably best to assume that the claim isn't true.
No one in this thread is saying the Korean researchers have a superconductor in their possession has been proven false.
We have an unverified claim of a significant discovery released in a pre-print that was taken on good-faith and replication experiments were attempted.
This has resulted in what can be described as a very thorough and publicized review process by multiple researchers qualified to serve as reviewers. As this was all done in good faith it is effectively analogous to the scientific standard of blinded peer review as no one was considering the author's credibility.
The conclusion of multiple reviews has been the equivalent of "recommend rejection, invitation to resubmit with major revisions". Major revisions being verification of superconductivity in the sample they possess and further details regarding synthesis and yield as what has been described is clearly not working as claimed.
The relevance of author credibility is for a confidence estimation that a superconductor has been discovered at this time. Obviously, if this was Argonne or [peer] one would be more confident than in a private research corporation with a history of claiming false affiliations to notable research institutions. This is not an ad hominem attack, it's a credibility assessment.
The current state is we have a flawed and effectively rejected manuscript making a significant claim. Looking at the authors credibility is an attempt to remain optimistic but this also points to low confidence.
> It's pretty arrogant to draw premature conclusions on quick analysis and demand the authors to disclose more information right now, when they are clearly not obligated to anything.
“Put up or shut up” is a very valid stance in the face of extraordinary claims backed by dodgy evidence. They are not obligated to anything, but then we don’t have to take them seriously. The mere fact that they’ve sat on it for 20 years and don’t have anything solid after seriously working on it for 4 years is strange.
So far, the community has responded as it should, with a proper mixture of excitement and skepticism, which results in renewed interest in lead apatites (which is fine, apatites are great). But when questions keep piling up, “we have the proof but we’re not going to share” is bound to cause some frustration.
Nobody mentioned any of this. There are several tools commonly used for communications within the scientific community, including peer-reviewed articles, letters, preprints, and conferences. It’s hardly controversial.
Well, it's important to keep this all in context: They did not want to release the paper, even as a preprint, at this point. The infighting in the group necessitated it when someone went off script and threw up the original shoddy paper, forcing them to release their marginally better one.
They had sent out some samples prior to this whole debacle, including to KENTECH (a Korean university focusing on energy technology), but are waiting to send out more samples specifically because they want to get a peer-reviewed article out there before they start sending them out to a broader audience.
I'm not saying LK-99 is a RTAPS, and current evidence seems to indicate it is almost certainly not one, but the broader LK-99 team seems to have been attempting to follow the normal process the whole time.
From my understanding they haven't been actively researching during that time.
It should also be noted that the team most likely did not intend to disclose any information already.
"Currently, two papers concerning LK-99 are available on the preprint service arXiv, which does not conduct peer review, and a related past study was published in the Journal of the Korean Crystal Growth and Crystal Technology in April 2023. Kim has only co-authored one of the arXiv papers, while the other is authored by his colleagues at QERC, some of whom also applied for a patent on LK-99 in August 2022. Both papers present similar measurements, however Kim says that the second paper contains “many defects” and was uploaded to arXiv without his permission. In that paper, the work is described as opening a “new era for humankind”." - From the New Scientist
The "second paper" referenced here is actually the first that was published, in which Young-Wan Kwon is the third author. If Hyun-Tak Kim states that this paper was not published with his permisison it seems like Young-Wan Kwon prematurely published it on arxiv to be the third author. The other paper was submitted by Hyun-Tak Kim just two hours later, listing himself as the third author.
Furthermore, Young-Wan Kwon isn't related to the Q-Centre anymore as he resigned from the function of CTO.
Algo trading != HFT. HFT is a type of algorithmic trading strategies, categorized by trading interval. In the same categorization there are mid-freq strategies as well. The term "high frequency" is rather subjective, it depends on what alpha you're targeting after.
The big deal is that it's highly likely that Tether is backed up by way less than 83 billion in actual dollars. Let's say, for argument's sake, that they were 50% backed a week ago and had $40B in actual dollars.
If $10B was pulled out, that was into actual US dollars or equivalent, meaning they now have $70B backed up by $30B. If another $10B drains in the next week, it'll be $60B vs $20B. This incentivizes other holders of Tether to also pull out so they're not left holding the bag (= Tether's stash of dodgy loans etc), basically kicking off a slow-motion version of the same death spiral that we saw for UST/LUNA, until Tether runs out of assets and the whole crypto economy goes poof.
Crypto is priced on the exchanges in terms of USDT, USDC, etc.
If USDT dies then BTC goes to like $500 on Binance. The cascade effects will cause runs on other exchanges, and then you're betting that they have enough reserves to cover a run. I'd want to be far away from the scene when that happens.
The fiat banking system is backstopped against this behavior by the FDIC, which guarantees your funds are safe even if the bank holding the funds goes under. This prevents customers from mass withdrawals in times of crisis. Crypto doesn't have anything like that, therefore it's going to look like the bad ol' days of 19th Century financial panics when a run occurs.
Yep. A good old 19th century bank run, happening at the speed of light around the world simultaneously. It truly will be breathtaking how fast the entire crypto ecosystem will implode. I fully expect that when the dust settles multiple banks will be bankrupt and have to be bailed out too.
> If USDT dies then BTC goes to like $500 on Binance.
Do you just mean that confidence will be so low that people will try to shun cryptocurrencies and dump their positions, or are you talking about another mechanism?
When people say that BTC is worth $30,000 on Binance right now, what they are really saying is that BTC is worth 30,000 Tether dollars (USDT) on Binance, because there's no mechanism on Binance to exchange BTC for US Dollars in a direct swap. You have to buy USDT and then use that USDT to buy BTC.* Basically USD -> USDT -> BTC. Today the ratio is 1 -> 0.998 -> 30,000, so in theory BTC priced at 30,000 USDT is currently worth 29,940 USD.
If the USD -> USDT relationship breaks and "USDT dies", then what happens is the prices goes 1 USD = 0.05 USDT, which means that 30,000 USDT worth of BTC on Binance [1] is now worth just $1,500 USD.
* You can buy directly with a credit card, but that's likely settled off-chain with a banking relationship. If you want to use a direct bank transfer, you have to buy a stablecoin first on Binance.
But to your original comment, shouldn't BTC go to 500 USDT but stay at a constant USD price (assuming no contagion to the rest of the crypto market which I mentioned above)?
Basically if you buy BTC using USD going through a random currency RC (USD -> RC -> BTC), the exchange rates BTC:RC and USD:RC shouldn't matter as long as they're constant. If they become volatile, I'd expect exchanges to stop trading these pairs, making these rates undefined. But if Tether ends up being stable at say $0.1, I don't see why the BTC:USD rate (going through Tether) would change.
There are also other stablecoins, I'm assuming that USDT is not the only one in use, so why would it impact the BTC:USD rate (again, forgetting about the contagion)? E.g. on https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/markets/ there are several pairs defined, some directly with USD, some with DAI.
Edit: maybe you mean that as long as they pretend the peg still holds, people would just buy BTC with USDT, making the run worse?
No, literally. The price of lots of coins is specified in USDT on lots of exchanges so if USDT crashes then the price of coins relative to USD also crashes.
Now, would there be lots of manual intervention by exchanges to fix this as fast as possible, absolutely but that's the parents point.
I'm a complete layperson when it comes to crypto, but from what I have heard a good bit of the recent bitcoin volume has been done via tether. if tether crashes, I don't know how this doesn't cause a crash when volume dries up?
Just yesterday the Financial Times ran this story: "Binance promoted terraUSD as a 'safe' investment just weeks before the stablecoin and its counterpart luna collapsed in a $40bn wipeout that shook the crypto industry"[0]
I think Tether can get away with less than 100% collateralization. At the current market cap of 82bn, even if they are only 20% collateralized, it takes 16.4bn one way movement to deplete their reserve. Is that likely event? Guess it depends, but I think market makers would be more willing to backstop them than UST shitshow. UST has "death spiral" structure that makes MMs less willing to backstop them once it goes on a path, which is exactly what hedge funds attacked against these past few days.
All that Tether really need is for enough people to believe that they probably have enough collateral to handle any potential bank run. Those people will buy up discounted tether and prevent the bank run from even happening.
Though, the mess with TerraUSD has clearly knocked a bunch of people's confidence in Tether. I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see it crash.
Isn't that what the banks said before their first bank run and then the government had to step in to back peoples deposits to ease their worries. The government isn't backing these deposits.
A lot of people have looked for conspiracy or motivation around the Terra Luna crash, but the real answer is if you can legally make money by making something crash, then someone will make it crash.
From my experience, this is true, but reward is not why such behavior becomes culture. Culture is ingrained by leaders who act and lead according to value organization adheres to. The key here is to have leaders at every level who embodies such value. Having such values baked into performance evaluation is how "reward" plays a role in engendering and sustaining such culture. It is about whom does the organization promotes and chooses to be a leader. It's not about simple salary increase or cash rewards, as such things don't last more than a few months.
I sense negative images on the term "growth". Yes, "growth" often employs methods that are borderline scam. It's exactly what they are hired to do: enlarge and fix funnel at all stages. There's nothing inherently wrong with what "growth" team does. Think of them as aggressive salespeople - as long as product team delivers, you will see fundamental business growth. If you product team can't keep up, well, that's not sustainable.
A society where quickest decisions are made would be either 1) dictatorship or 2) non-human, i.e. AI based. Would that be a good society to live in, I can't tell for sure. I can say for sure that democracy is designed to be slow and inefficient with regards to decision making. We humans need time to understand, think and argue. We have slow decision making system so that we may reduce chance of error. I think "fast and efficient" are wrong benchmarks.
There's another option - direct democracy, assuming everyone has a neural implant and constant network connection. Then any important decision could be voted in a matter of minutes or hours.
I don't agree with this argument. Open source contribution is a fine art. Half-baked pull request is a nightmare for already-strained code reviewers. It does not help open source community as a whole.
It's not politically correct nor polite to say this, but Japan's problem is their education and cultural system ingrains subservience to the point that Japanese people are subservient even to injustice. It's not just inefficiency Japanese people put up with, they don't do anything about corrupt and ridiculous politicians having their way through generations. They call it a tradition, but they are just afraid of speaking out because of peer pressure. It's like a mafia system. I know that I sound very broad and generalizing, but those who have lived in Japan for long enough would probably agree with this.
It's the elephant in the room, it's absolutely true.
It's like a hidden autocracy, people in the west probably think it's a democracy here. I mean, people can vote, but there's really only a single party with the same old ideas.
I once read that the reason Buddhism became popular in Japan so quickly is because it gave people a break from the rigid hierarchy everyone was used too. I often wonder why it's less popular now and whether that's an accident.
Here in Europe we have multiple parties, all of them full of liars who eventually implement the same old ideas anyway when in power. Our politicians and multi-party systems are there just to give an illusion of choice.
As far as I can see we're not so different from Japan, other than the fact we have more crime and our cities are dirtier because individualistic Westerners are too lazy to use rubbish bins.
One of the main reason there is one party in power is because of the American occupation. While the American wanted to get rid of the the most "rightist" factions of the elite for obvious reasons, they quickly change to fight communism (see the book "embracing defeat"). I don't think it is an especially inherent Japanese thing.
People can be very individualistic in Japan as well, it just expresses itself in a different way than more Western cultures. It is very broad generalization, but in the west we like to show ourselves as more individual than we really are, while it tends to be the opposite in Japan. Open conflict avoidance is certainly more common in e.g. corporations in Japan, at least in my experience. But that's a very narrow definition of collectivism.
