Or maybe it's a good thing? In The Curse of Cash, economist Kenneth Rogoff (of austerity fame, or infamy) argues against cash, particularly large denomination bank notes and crypto, as accessories to crime, corruption, and tax evasion, and I'm with him there. But also, btw, because you can't impose negative interest rates on cash (but on deposits!) - not sure what to think about that.
That's part of why larger banknotes like the €500 euro were discontinued.
Oliver Bullough on Odd Lots podcast[0] talked about this issue recently (the large denominations). I guess he had a book "Everybody Loves Our Dollars" that went into this too.
I found the argument compelling but hopefully there's a balance to be struck at individual vs organizational scales.
Isn't that a very simple substitution cipher (any clear text letter is substituted by two letters of cipher text, with a fixed one-to-one correspondence)?
And aren't they all amenable to very simple cryptanalysis, at least if the encrypted text is long enough, by counting how often certain letters appear, and then trying to plug in reasonable guesses?
"The model used “TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG” as the encryption word, as described on pgs. 214-215 of J. Rives Childs's “The History and Principles of German Military Ciphers, 1914–1918”"
Even if it isn't a simple substitution cipher as you said, all the model did was try a decryption key that had already been found and was publicly accessible. This is basically a nothingburger.
I didn't understand it either, but now given the sibling posts I'll give it another shot:
Assume you have a number of hot dog vendors in a stadium, and over time randomly people get hungry and want a hot dog. One of the hot dog vendors needs to come to them, covering a certain distance, and "serve" them their hotdog. (After that, the vendor will idle around there.)
Assume there is a central controller with a radio that oversees the whole thing, noticing requests, then picks a hot dog vendor when a request comes in and sends them on the way. After the game, all the hot dog vendors together walked a certain distance: that's the cost (which of course you'd like to minimise).
Crucial question now is which hot dog vendor to pick for each request, and there are many algorithms (you could always pick the closest one, for example).
However, now comes the trick: Suppose the controller knows in advance all the requests - who will want to have a hotdog when and where. He still, anytime a request comes in, needs to pick a vendor to send them to the request. But now, knowing the entire future, the controller can make better choices, leading to a smaller total cost. (That's the offline version; getting to know the requests only "as they come in" is the online version.)
The question now is: Compare the actual cost an "online" algorithm incurs with the "super optimal" that would have been feasible with full foresight ("offline"). It was proven that, for k hotdog vendors, it is at least k times higher (that's the "competitive ratio") worst case (plus a constant). On average, the online algo can do much better, but worst case it would be at least k times worse.
Here, the authors of the paper prove the conjecture, namely that it is also at most k times higher. (So, even if an evil genius plans the sequence of requests against this algo, it can't make it more than k times worse.)
Thank you! The "online" and "offline" terms were what was confusing me when trying to understand the conjecture. As a career-long software and networking person, I had a preconception of the terms that was REALLY throwing me off. :D
Crypto scammers have long operated in Cambodia, Philippines, Myanmar after being kicked out of China, and were looking to go to Sri Lanka and Timor Leste next - but Timor Leste's politicians and population got together and fought back successfully, it seems:
I actually visited abandoned scam centers a couple weeks ago in Bavet, Cambodia. It’s really eery now.
All the units had air conditioning units, which I thought was sweet, considering many Cambodians don’t have that. But the prison bars on the windows and barbed wire surrounding the complex was a bit uncomfortable to see.
I live in Vietnam. Bavet is a popular border for visa runs for expats. Normally, you don’t actually leave the Cambodia border building or you just take a bus all the way to Phnom Penh to wait for a visa was approved.
I was curious about the town, because it’s famous for casinos, scam centers, and Chinese manufacturers.
Interesting, did you take pics? Most living quarters (小区）in China have electrical fences and most windows have been barred. Left over from the 80’s when crime was high. Nowadays the bars prevent pets and children from falling out of the window (plus the cage like construction allows for some extra storage space)
I wrote a quick blog post about my experience and included the photos that I took. I was traveling alone and I knew the area was not safe, so I really didn't take enough photos, but the best one is at the end.
Thank you so much, what a great write up (did you submit it here?). Surprised you took any pictures to be honest. Some great observations! Those barred windows def look familiar. Correction:on a second look, these do not look like the typical chinese square tubing bars!
TBH, that's like whitespace in Python. You can do endless bike shedding about it, but ultimately it's very simple to deal with, and after a few days you never think about it anymore.
Not OP, but a good resource for distributed consensus specifically is Tim Roughgarden's YouTube playlist "Foundations of Blockchains" [0] (hear me out, despite the title - see below). It's 85 videos over 12 lectures, rigorous, very well explained (but assumes some CS fundamentals). Not original work, but gives the conceptual framework and background so that one can read these classic papers in context.
Per-lecture reading lists are on the course page [1]. He also points at Elaine Shi's Foundations of Distributed Consensus and Blockchains [2] and Andrew Lewis-Pye's Consensus in 50 pages [2] as background, though these are more textbooks, not papers.
Remarkably, the first 7 lectures deal with permissioned systems, recapitulating the classic results of consensus in distributed systems (Dolev Strong, FLP impossibility, CAP) - no blockchain in sight. This takes us to the state of the art at the end of the 1990's (with algorithms that can achieve consensus in the presence of byzantine failures, namely Byzantine Paxos and PBFT, though he discusses a modern variant, permissioned Tendermint from 2014).
Lecture 8 stays permissioned and proves consistency and chain quality for the longest-chain rule. Only at Lecture 9, with proof of work, does anything specifically blockchain appear; then L10 block rewards and selfish mining, L11 transaction fee mechanism design; L12 proof-of-stake sybil resistance with the whole litany of attacks possible there.
Very good series in my view, and shows how little technical merit this whole blockchain circus has - nearly all the great properties people tout (reliability, consistency, audibility, availability) can be achieved with good old permissioned tech more efficiently, with pretty instant and deterministic finality.
Anyway, I found the series worth watching for the classical consensus material alone.
Indeed. Even supranational coordination should be possible, given that extinction means extinction for everyone, and your excellent examples show the possibility. But then, here we are, and the FT just reported:
> Donald Trump rejects calls from tech bosses for AI slowdown
> President denounces demands for regulation as existential fears over technology move to the centre of US politics
reply