lkn

I doubt white tourists are subjected to any harassment, but two weeks ago someone I know was told she had to pay 10,000 baht as “entry fee”, she managed to get it down to 2,000 baht. They would not allow her to enter Thailand, if she did not pay. This was in Suvarnabhumi, and she did not already have a visa.

What did you do with the savings from the reduced rate during COVID? We’ve btw had a couple of employees who didn’t want to pay social security fund contribution.

I don’t think he wants to understand. He made money on crypto by being early, and now he thinks that everyone can make money from a zero-sum game, even though all the coins he has recommended are down and some of the staking services recommended in these threads turned out to be unsustainable, with many people losing all what they had staked. It’s baffling to me that a community which has DYOR as a mantra and think skeptics are just to old to understand crypto, does not grasp even basic principles like how you can’t create money without underlying economic activity — they literally think they have invented the perpetual motion machine, and skeptics are just bitter for having missed the boat, not realizing that even this statement (which has often been said on this forum) indicates that there are no gains to be had for those late to the (pyramid) scheme. And yet, they still don’t see it… As for what lead up to the $69,000 per bitcoin, Amy Castor has a good writeup titled How 2020 set the stage for the 2021 bitcoin bubble.

Depends on who you ask. The security of bitcoin is proportional to number of miners. I personally think it is a completely flawed model, which I have elaborated on in the past, i.e. if you receive $100M worth of BTC you want to make sure that it cost more than that to “take over” the network (e.g. bribe miners and/or startup enough servers to have majority), as those who sent you $100M might otherwise spend less to allow a double-spend. Though nobody cares about BTC for actually transferring value, all that matters is buying and selling the tokens on centralized exchanges and hope that there are enough new buyers to make the price go up ????

You can get a debit card associated with your Wise account, that way, you can just use that card for expenses when traveling, and enjoy the better exchange rate (without needing a local bank account). Also, as it is a multi-currency account, you can accept USD, EUR, JPY, etc. on your Wise account and keep them in that currency. Of course this is mainly if you know that you will need to spend the money later — e.g. I have expenses in USD and I also receive some income in USD, but I no longer have a US bank account, so I could in theory just use Wise for that. Though these days I use Revolut for this stuff, since it is a real bank and has some other advantages, plus slightly better exchange rate on pretty much all but THB.

There is no fee transferring money into your Wise account. There is however a fee when you transfer it out of your account, but this somewhat matches the fee for doing a cross-border transfer. As for using the debit card: Yes, there is a percentage added to the rate (for foreign currency), for me this has averaged out to be 0.44% compared to the ECB rate for the same day, which is much less than most of banks, and no-one will give you the ECB rate, as that is the mid-rate.

You mean 2019? ???? BTC is now at 18,160 USD, so if you bought in December of 2020 then you would be in the red. My portfolio definitely down YTD, but I invest in productive assets, so I mainly care about how profitable the companies I invest in are (expected to be) relative to their price, and YTD I have received around $60,000 in dividends, because even though some of the companies are down 20% YTD, they are still profitable and paying dividends to the stockholders. That is the big difference between crypto (non-productive assets) and stocks (productive assets). And yes, commodities are also non-productive assets and many are up YTD, but those assets have end users, e.g. you don’t but oil, wheat, or soy beans to just hold it for all of eternity.

He just says there are some good technologies used, those are Merkle trees, cryptographic hash functions, public/private key infrastructure, the hashcash idea to guard against DoS attacks, etc., all this stuff predates the bitcoin white paper, and note how Bill himself says “talked about as blockchain”. Also, from an economic/game theory perspective the bitcoin idea is very interesting, but also flawed because of some unfortunate couplings, like how it must be more expensive to attack the network than the potential reward you get from attacking it, which is what leads to this huge cost of performing the transactions. For the smart blockchains (like Ethereum) you also have some unfortunate couplings, like how miners can front-run people. In bitcoin this doesn’t matter, but when you start to build decentralized exchanges on the blockchain, you start to see that miners (or bots) will scan pending transactions for potential arbitrage possibilities and simply “steal” this opportunity by (for miners) front-running the user, and for bots, post a transaction and offer the miner a higher fee. So nice try appealing to authority, but Bill does not say what you think he said. Also, still waiting for you to reply to my question about whether a “private blockchain” needs a consensus algorithm.

IOW you can’t give an actual example of how blockchain solves problems, but you think I need to do more research? Let me ask you something simple: Does a private blockchain require a consensus algorithm?

What does that mean? You really don’t see this as vague hand-wavy salesmanstalk? If I am going to sell you a product and I just tell you it will improve productivity, transparency, and efficiency, you will be satisfied? Or will you ask how does your product do that? Honestly @dj230 I am disappointed that you think the above is a meaningful response to my question. Try google some of the things mentioned, e.g. the only thing blockchain about TradeLens is that is uses IBM’s Blockchain stuff, which I already said is in name only, and CoinDesk agrees: “IBM develops private and permissioned blockchains, which stand in contrast to public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. IBM notably utilizes Hyperledger Fabric, an open-source blockchain protocol developed by the Linux Foundation-hosted Hyperledger consortium” — a private and permissioned blockchain is nonsensical, it is just a database, as there is no consensus algorithm and no network that untrusted nodes can join, and presumably no random person can download the full database/blockchain. It really is all just marketing speak to make people with little understanding of these things think that this is new and innovative.

I say they have no use for it, because a company operating legally has no benefit from running a censor resistant network, so what other advantage is there in it for them? Give me that actual example of what blockchain can be used for that I have repeatedly asked for, don’t tell me about somebody who said they were looking at it, that means zero, especially since it is not exactly new technology, and I mean, even I myself have been looking at blockchain! Where is that example? Put up or shut up!

The way I often explain it is like this: Imagine you have a town with 10 people who have $120 each. They only trade among themselves, and they have agreed that one hour of labour is $10. So each person can buy 12 hours of labour, and then they have to work themselves to get money back. This could be cutting hair, baking bread, etc., i.e. small town stuff, no import/export with neighbouring towns. Perfect balance, but Imagine these 10 people get five kids in total, and 20 years have passed, so you now have 15 people working in this small town economy, but you still only have $1,200 in total, so each person now only holds $80. See the problem? If one hour of work is still $10, the 10 original people have become poorer.

You are somewhat right that a distributed system can handle a higher volume, but there is overhead, i.e. ten machines that each do 10,000 tasks/second will never be faster than a single machine that can do 100,000 tasks/second, because you don’t have the communication overhead with the single machine, so in general, it will be faster (and never slower). The only reason you move to a distributed system if you cannot get a single machine/connection fast enough to handle the required load, but you do pay an overhead for this. However, with a blockchain you are not taking advantage of parallel processing, all the machines solve the same problem and has to constantly agree on the same single truth. As said earlier, the bitcoin blockchain processes around 3 transactions per second, obviously this could be trivially done by a single machine. And you cannot use something like sharding because then you get the double-spend problem. Already it is recommended to wait around one hour to be reasonable sure that your BTC transaction is immutable, i.e. that the entire network of machines has now agreed on the state of the blockchain that includes your transaction.

Wrong, he said that he personally had invested in cryptocurrencies. Here’s what was actually said: “Just one example, our Cloud team is looking at how they can support our customers' needs in building, transacting, storing value and deploying new products on blockchain-based platforms. So we'll definitely be watching the space closely and supporting it where we can”. IOW Google is looking at how they can make money from selling their services to people who think products with blockchain in the name are the new hotness. MIT is in the business of selling classes, right? So they wouldn’t care how useful the content is, they care about how many would attend the class. No, I keep saying: Give me an actual example of where blockchain solves a problem, and you keep replying with, but this guy talks a lot about blockchain, or that company says they are looking at it, so clearly, it must be useful… Do you understand what a blockchain is? If you did, I think you would actually be able to understand that it has absolutely on competitive advantages over a regular database. You gave me the marketing departments spin on the hosted hyperledger software that IBM hosts for clients. Blockchain is extremely simple, if it was actually solving a problem for someone, it should be trivial to explain, yet it is always this vague BS, and the “technology” is a decade old, yet you quote yourself that it’s Q4 2021 that Google is saying that they are looking at it! It was btw said on an earnings call, you will often hear that on earning calls the CEO is always looking at whatever is the latest buzzword, I’ve heard dozen of companies say they are looking at blockchain and crypto currencies, including many banks, yet nothing has come of it, because it is absolutely useless technology for a business that operates within the law. But it is probably great for their various marketing departments! ????

I am not aware of any blockchain products from Apple or Google. Facebook did try with their Libra thing, but this was not about blockchain, this was about issuing their own currency, which is why regulators shut it down! That they have a class about blockchain does not mean they think it is a disruptive technology. Musk, Zuckerberg, and Thiel are definitely not people which I would look to for moral guidance. Wozniak is a little weird, and you know he actually got scammed out of hit bitcoins, right? I am not too familiar with Levchin. But anyway, what have these people said about the usefulness of blockchain? To me, those who have spoken about crypto has just been trying to hype it up, but never given us any idea about why it is good. Actually, SBF described how yield farming worked, and seemed to unknowingly describe a ponzi scheme. Though I am confused, above you said that everyone you know in Silicon Valley are looking into blockchain, now you admit that these people are fully aware that it’s a con and ponzi schemes? Do you know that these people (like SBF) subscribe to the Effective altruism philosophy? This basically means that SBF is happy to e.g. allow Luna/UST to be traded on his exchange (FTX) even though he said before, that it was destined to collapse, because it makes SBF richer, and then, at some unknown time in the future, he will use his accumulated wealth for charity, so it doesn’t matter where the money is from, as long as he does more good with them, than the harm caused by earning them.

I understand the difference, I could implement it from scratch if you wanted me to. That is how I know that there is nothing innovative or useful about “blockchain technology”, which is what you said, and where I begged to differ, and then you started to talk about removing intermediary in transactions, supply chains, etc. Please give a single example of a problem being solved by blockchain, which previously was either unsolved, or solved in a less efficient way! Don’t give me hand-wavy stuff or say “it’s still early” but people are working on it, or soon we’ll get something, or some big tech company is looking into blockchain, MIT is teaching a class, etc. An actual use-case that works right now, and which works better than existing solutions!

Maybe you only know the grifters? ???? From CNBC: In speaking off-air to tech executives during his trip to San Francisco last week, Cramer said he got the sense that Silicon Valley thinks crypto is a con and its promoters have taken an awful lot of money from unsuspecting investors. I don’t normally put much weight on Cramer’s word, but my own background is in computer science, so I do follow forums/news about the field and have lots of friends in the field, and honestly, crypto/blockchain has a pretty bad reputation, being a (bad) solution in search of a problem or outright snake oil / ponzi scheme enabler, wasting tremendous amounts of energy in the process, and causing a lot of people to lose money.

Are we talking about a trustless blockchain with a proof-of-work consensus algorithm (i.e. what the Bitcoin whitepaper introduced)? Do you understand that the security of such a setup comes from the scale of the network? I.e. the more nodes that contribute to running the blockchain (software), the more secure it will become (because it becomes uneconomic for an attacker to add enough new nodes under their control, to gain a majority). Do you then understand that running a database that require thousands of computers (if not more) to constantly work on running hard computations (proof of work) inferior to just running a database on a single machine under the control of whoever need this supply chain database, and this computer can even run idle most of the time. E.g. the bitcoin network only does about 3 transactions per second, this is something my old Commodore 64 could easily do, yet the bitcoin network require something like 500-1,000 kWh per transaction.

Isn’t that just PromptPay? Blockchain is not needed for this. What VISA/MasterCard offers is credit (to some consumers), risk management (to some merchants), currency exchange (for tourists), purchase insurance, etc. This is just a product that some have chosen to use, there are many other alternative payment methods, as mentioned Thailand has PromptPay which is gaining popularity, which takes money directly from my bank account and deposits into merchant’s bank account via QR code, in China they like WeChat Pay, in India there is UPI, in the U.S. they used to use PayPal but now there is Venmo, and also some new system introduced by the banks, etc. And actually, blockchain is not what you want for any of this, because the two things that is important in payments are the two “features” of blockchain, namely pseudonymous and irreversible. But in the real world we a) want a recourse incase a merchant does not deliver, and b) want to know the identity (KYC) of whom money is sent to/from (this is both a regulatory issue, but also incase of fraud). I have looked into more of these stories than I can count, and there is never any real meat to it. I already looked at IBM’s blockchain stuff, and their department has long since been effectively shut down and what they are selling is a hosted instance of the open source Hyperledger software, so it is just centralized software running at IBM’s servers, nothing trustless, no consensus algorithm, no nodes run by random people on the internet.

The tedious stuff is AML procedures, which is not a technology problem. There is also a problem with cross-country transfers if the sending bank has no relationship with the receiving bank, as then an intermediary has to be used. For Europe, the ECB will act as intermediary for the SEPA area, which is why we have instant cross-border transfers in Europe (free of charge with many banks). You can argue that having it all on a blockchain would make international payments easier, as then you would never need an intermediary. But effectively you are just introducing a new closed system (the blockchain) and have the on/off ramp issue. So this is no different than Western Union, PayPal, Wise, etc. which already solved this problem, and did the on/off ramp integration with majority of banks, WU even offering cash on/off ramps. So again, blockchain offers nothing new, and is less efficient than the previously mentioned providers. Sorry, but I call BS. A distributed database (like the blockchain) will always be less efficient than a centralized one. So it is never more efficient. What might be argued is that it is trustless, but this is just stupid with respect to supply chain, because tampering with data records is not the issue. This video goes over the oracle problem with using blockchain in supply chains. If anyone is selling “blockchain technology” most likely they are just using blockchain as a buzzword, and effectively it’s just a regular old database. Notice how many will call it either a permissioned or private blockchain, which makes little sense, because the idea with blockchain is that it is a public ledger that anyone can (try) to add blocks to.

Beg to differ, I am not aware of any problems that blockchain solves for a (legal) business that hasn’t already been solved cheaper and faster by existing technology. It is only for black market stuff / legal arbitrage where it “solves” a problem, but this actually only works if you have one of these tokens you can exchange for money. The reason is that for us to rely on settling transactions on the blockchain, we need enough nodes/miners so that we are fairly sure that no bad actor can control majority of the network, but the only way to get people to participate in running such giant network is by rewarding them with something that they can convert to money, to pay for electricity and equipment.

Bitcoin’s performance for the last 12 months vs. S&P 500, neither a hedge against inflation or the stock market:

The 1,000 kWh is the upper limit (with the current bitcoin price) of what a miner can spend, before they start losing money mining bitcoins. If price doubles (to $60k per BTC), it would mean they can waste 2,000 kWh per transaction, and still be profitable. The actual energy required depends on how many other miners you are competing with, and in an efficient market, excess profit should be eliminated, so by that theory, energy consumption should move toward the 1,000 kWh per transaction — but this ignores capital expenditure on setting up the mining rig, and also that energy prices vary around the world. The 500 kWh per transaction is what I estimate is currently being used by the two North American mining companies. Definitely, you are effectively giving your coins to a third party that you have to trust, both to be solvent, but also to not do front-running, wash-trading, etc. And there are countless examples of exchanges being insolvent, like QuadrigaCX, which went bankrupt with liabilities of over 200 million CAD, Mt.Gox which was just a total mess (stolen coins kept secret and then owner seemingly trying to recover the loss via wash trading), Bitfinex which was also hacked but then comingled/borrowed funds from Tether, AfriCrypt where the founders claimed to have been hacked, but seems to just have run with the money, etc. That is why many in crypto say “not your keys, not your money”, basically meaning that if you have your coins on an exchange, you effectively do not have these coins. Looking at Coinbase’s financial report though, it seems something like 12% of all mined bitcoins are actually kept with this exchange (quoting from memory, so I might be a little off). This just goes to show that nobody cares about decentralized or trustless finance, it’s only about “number goes up”.

Let me just remind people that Michael Saylor’s company paid a $11 million fine to S.E.C. to settle fraud charges back in 2000 and that his 4 billion dollar debt financed bitcoin investments is in the negative. So yeah, definitely go listen to this guy! ????

If you mean sold on a central exchange: That does not use any significant energy, because here we only update the central exchange’s database and not the blockchain. But if you withdraw from the exchange, transfer to the exchange, or transfer directly to me, then that is a transaction that must be added to the blockchain, and thus will probably use around 500 kWh.