Not at all. It's good that he's putting $10b into fighting climate change, I'm just saying he shouldn't be grandstanding about it or positioning himself as a valiant eco-warrior, he should instead be addressing how his company contributes to the problem that he personally is purporting to want to solve.

The best way an arsonist can prevent fires is not to put some out, it's to stop setting them in the first place.
The best way for a burglar to reduce theft is not to return some of the stolen goods, but not to steal them originally.

The question of whether or not climate change is real is kind of moot here. I'm not criticising Amazon's carbon footprint, merely highlighting the discrepancy between Bezos' new fund and the activities of his company. At the very least it's an astonishing degree of cognitive dissonance.

Incidentally, batshit gives a great record of historic climate change through variation in nitrogen isotopes.

I don't think you should hold Yoda. You'll draw unwanted attention from the Mandalorian. My advice is to put him down and back away slowly.

It's a good point, but I'm not sure. Do you have evidence of this? As far as I'm aware, study results so far have been mixed. Certainly e-commerce has the potential to be less polluting than bricks and mortar, but equally e-businesses could do a lot more to reduce their carbon footprint than they are doing.

I'm ambivalent about the Bezos Saves the World Fund. It smacks of hubris and grandstanding, and a publicity grab. If he seriously wanted to address climate change, then he could do so a lot more quietly, and start by changing the policies of his own megalithic global empire. Amazon have said they aim to go carbon-neutral by 2040, but that's a long way off and I think it's likely that in 20 years' time when eyes are on them to see if they fulfilled their promise, Bezos will be long gone. Dumping accountability a couple of decades into the future is a favourite trick of politicians, and it might be the same here.

I don't know. At the same time I'm happy he's throwing $10b at it rather than doing nothing. Good stuff and bad stuff, which is why I started the thread. I'd like some more opinion on whether there is a disconnect between what Bezos says he wants and what Amazon are actually doing. How much is a genuine commitment to tackle climate change, and how much is empty posturing?

Equality is achieved when the distinction is not noticed.

If for example a company employs positive discrimination to improve the gender balance of its workforce, then we have not achieved equality. If a company hits its target of 50% male and 50% female employees, and then implements a system to ensure that the balance remains at 50%, then we have not achieved equality. If on the other hand a company has 70% men and 30% women, or vice versa, and no-one even takes gender into consideration when interviewing applicants, that is when equality is achieved.
A lot of countries are on the right path; we have women running multinationals, women running countries, we (generally) have much improved racial and religious tolerance and multi-cultural acceptance, but it's a long road and we are still some way from the end.

Regarding the thread title "Does Equality for Women Reduce the Obligations of Husbands?" - I would say that equality for women means that there are no specific obligations for husbands, because all obligations will be dissociated from gender.

Regarding the point about matriarchal societies - I have often thought that matrilineal succession would have reduced strife in historic societies, as it removes the problem of contested paternity. Much easier (before DNA testing) to prove who is the mother of a child than who is the father!

Believes, or says that he believes?
Certainly he says certain things that make him sound like an idiot, but I would argue that most of his pronouncements of this ilk are made not for the purpose of communicating information, but rather for eliciting a reaction. And undeniably he is good at eliciting a reaction.
I don't like the man, but he is dismissed too easily. He is extraordinarily effective at what he does.

I recently summarised (in another thread) my thoughts on the threat and potential solutions. Please also see the Development & Technical Discussion area for a number of live QC threads.

The biggest vulnerability is address re-use, where a QC can use Shor’s algorithm to break public-key cryptography, including Bitcoin's ECDSA - but there is much more detail at the link I gave.

In addition to threats and solutions, there is the big question of how any solution is implemented. Forking Bitcoin to a quantum-resistant state will not be straightforward. At that time, all coins will have to be moved to new quantum-resistant addresses; any that aren't can be scooped up by a QC running Shor's algorithm. The choices as I see it are to either burn coins that haven't been moved, or else leave them to be stolen by a QC. This is a contentious subject, but one that I think needs to be addressed quickly, and well in advance of such a QC being developed. Some people contend that burning is itself theft, and violates the spirit of bitcoin. There is no easy answer here, and any move to QC resistant cryptography will no doubt be very bumpy indeed.

Everyone will have seen the announcement by the world's richest man that he is donating $10b to fight climate change.

Whilst it's a welcome gesture, it does smell very strongly of virtue signalling. And why does it have to have his name plastered all over it? The "Bezos Earth Fund". This presumably is what he thinks is the most acceptable wording of "Superman Jeff Bezos saves the World".

Perhaps he should just pay taxes instead. Perhaps he should look at how Amazon is contributing to climate change, rather than attempting to dissociate himself from his own business and rise from it like some (renewables-powered) phoenix from the (coal-fired) flames.

Amazon is one of the world's biggest polluters and has absolutely zero interest in preventing climate change, beyond maintaining a facade of ethical concern and accountability purely for PR purposes..

Okay, here are some facts and links:

More than 350 Amazon employees have spoken out about the company's disregard of and contribution to climate change, and its attempts to silence those employees. Comments are here and well worth a read.

Amazon threatens to fire employees who speak about the climate crisis.

Amazon funds climate-denying think tanks, such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Amazon donates to politicians who are climate-change deniers. This includes "68 legislators who have denied climate change — including those who have voted against environmental legislation 100% of the time" (from poynter.org).

Amazon is happy to sell AWS to the oil and gas industries:
"The energy industry should have access to the same technologies as other industries. We will continue to provide cloud services to companies in the energy industry" It continues: "to make their legacy businesses less carbon intensive and help them accelerate development of renewable energy businesses", but there are no numbers here, it's just vague ethical hand waving.
_{https://www.aboutamazon.com/our-company/our-positions}

Amazon was scored at an "F" by the Carbon Disclosure Project, and was "the largest U.S. publicly traded company not to participate"

... although they did admit in 2018 that their carbon footprint is 44 million tonnes, which is roughly 85% of the emissions of Switzerland.

I would say the two points are identity and power.

First, identity. Humans evolved in groups, back from when we were primitive primates, we have lived in tribes, and evolution has led us to value our own tribe over others, through genetic kinship bonds and social bonds. You can't define yourself if there is no 'other' against which to be defined. If there are no groups outside your own, then you have no tribal or cultural identity. We are shaped by those we are not. Members of Tribe A will fight to the death to save a fellow against an attack from Tribe B, because Tribe A is "us" and Tribe B is "they", the outsiders, the opposition. As history progresses, traditions and cultures deepen, and tribal/national identity becomes a greater part of who we are. People can be overcome with emotion just at the sight of a flag, because of the history and identity that it represents. It's a way of externalising the self and establishing common bonds.

Second, power. Big things are more powerful than small things. Nations and blocs have negotiating power that smaller groups and individuals do not. They also have greater security, and the sort of internal efficiencies that come with scaling things up to large numbers, allowing for example hyper-specialised jobs.

... but this identification of self with nation obviously has its downsides. It becomes very easy to scapegoat the 'other'. All UK problems it seems were caused by Europeans. A big chunk of US problems caused by Mexicans. Of course it is all political nonsense and misdirection, but evidence that for all the benefits of nations, there are also downsides, wars and genocide and hatred, all going back to Tribe A vs Tribe B hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago on the savannah.

A week and no-one has replied? This is what happens when I start threads, too

I'll comment on yours first:
1. His "exoneration" was inevitable once the impeachment was formalised. This is indeed big news, despite being entirely expected, due to its implications for western democracy.
2. Trump re-election would not be big news. Sanders winning would be huge, globally, a first successful fight back by the left against the populist demagogues who are shouldering their way to power across the world.
3. Meh. It could go on for decades. I think public interest will reduce to tedium quite quickly.
4. Could happen. US/Russia proxy wars are kind of old hat. It would be more of a shock to see China get involved.

Four of my own below. I'l continue the numbering to avoid confusion

5 - SEC approves a bitcoin ETF. There's got to be a genuine chance of this happening, after they approved the Stone Ridge futures fund a couple of months back.
6 - Iran starts and slowly ramps up attacks against US (and allies') interests. I think this would have started already, were it not for the incident with the missiles and the Ukrainian plane, which has led Iran to lie low for a while. But it would be a mistake to think they'll forget or just go away. They won't.
7 - The world's first war over water. A taste of things to come as climate change takes hold and fresh water becomes a hugely valuable commodity. Tensions have been brewing for years about the Ethiopian dam on the Nile, and its effects on the countries downstream, notably Egypt. We are familiar with conflict over oil; in the future it will be water. Ever wondered why China is so protective of the Tibetan plateau? It's the world's largest non-polar repository of freshwater, and the source of the major rivers. Future conflict with a thirsty India to the south has to be a concern.
8 - Vegetarianism disappears. ... because veganism is becoming huge. For decades, being vegetarian was a big thing, whilst vegans were the weird extremists. Now veganism is pushing towards the mainstream, and vegetarianism is becoming little more than a meaningless half-way point on the road. It's a parallel to modern politics, where extreme right and extreme left own the stage and moderates are no longer relevant.

edit: 2x typo

The basic problem here I think is the different mindset, and the key word is presupposition.

For people who have a religious, faith-based understanding of the world, belief is what comes first and underpins any evidence. If the evidence doesn't fit the belief, it won't be accepted. This is why you'll never be able to convince a religious person of the veracity of an argument by using logic, facts and science - they simply won't accept the tools unless they build on the existing foundation.

I don't think intellect is the most important factor in Trump's presidency. It's not what got him elected, and it's not what has kept him in power since then.
Whatever else you may think of him, the man is a supremely talented demagogue.

It's not just theory; there is now hard evidence, too. Here is photographic proof, the first ever image of quantum entanglement (and violation of the Bell inequality), from the University of Glasgow last July.
_{paper: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaaw2563}



the experiment:

Agreed. Encryption is necessary.

Disagree. QCs can break public key cryptography, but symmetric cryptography is not vulnerable. If good post-quantum cryptographic encryption is in place, there is no threat - or at least no threat beyond what there already is without the QC.


Disagree that you need a QC to defend against quantum attack. You can do so using classical methods, with no need for a quantum computer - use symmetric key post-quantum cryptography such as AES256. An example:

• For standard asymmetric cryptography, a QC running Shor's algorithm absolutely obliterates the difficulty. It takes 2¹²⁸ classical operations to break ECDSA and derive a bitcoin private key from the public key, but only 128³ for a QC running Shor.
• For symmetric cryptography, Grover's algorithm is the best attack. But this only square-roots the difficulty, so for something that takes 2¹²⁸ classical operations, a QC running Grover still takes a huge 2⁶⁴.

You are absolutely correct that QC and QC-proof encryption are entirely separate areas. QC-proof encryption is post-quantum cryptography, which aims to devise and employ cryptographic techniques that are secure because they negate any quantum advantage. Approaches like AES256, where the best quantum attack (Grover algorithm) gives QCs only a very minor advantage. P-QC is classical; in this defence there is no dependency on quantum hardware.

You are also correct that in that post I was describing a different countermeasure, quantum cryptography, which involves employing quantum processes to achieve security. It does irritate me that post-quantum cryptography and quantum cryptography have such similar names, when they are fundamentally different things.

I do think that post-quantum cryptography is what we need in the near future to defend against QC attack. However longer-term I'm not so sure. I believe that post-quantum cryptography can never be as secure as a system that relies on the basic 'unhackability' of an entangled quantum system, such as that being developed by China's QUESS and Micius.

As for whether China stole the technology, I'm not so sure. It's difficult to deny that they are ahead of the rest of the world in quantum cryptography, so whatever base they started from they have advanced by themselves. All new tech, all new science, is built on the successes of predecessors.


That's obviously impressive and potentially concerning. We do need to remember though that the advantages of quantum computers are limited to very specific areas, such as prime factorisation. In other areas they are no better than normal classical computers. Certainly the ability of QCs to break asymmetric cryptography could wreak havoc, but P-QC does offer solid defences, so - and I may be being naive - I think that the abilities of QCs are sometimes overstated, and critical systems can be protected, it's just a case of getting that protection implemented in time.

My position (again I must stress I'm an amateur here) is in line with the experimental evidence. Quantum mechanics does violate Bell inequalities. This means that if there is any 'hidden variable', then it's non-local. But the whole point of these hidden variable theories is to conserve locality, so in this context a non-local hidden variable is irrelevant.

Underlying everything for me is a concern that we have to interpret QM via our human brains, and that this problem is perhaps insurmountable. How can you describe the universe if you, and everything you can interact with, is and always has been a part of that universe? I can't see that a complete and perfect understanding is possible from human perspective. For a start we interpret everything in terms of the framework of our consciousness, space and time. As for wave-particle duality, I certainly don't believe that for example an electron is sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave, that's absurd. I do believe that sometimes it exhibits wave-like properties and sometimes particle-like, but fundamentally I think an electron is something else entirely. Waves and particles are things that the human brain can conceive of, they are part of our model of reality. Electrons though? A thing that has mass but (apparently) absolutely no size? We can model it mathematically, we can convert that maths into a human understanding of reality, but I firmly believe that any underlying truth is and will remain perpetually elusive.

I really want your friend to set up an account on this forum and join the discussion!

It's probably best to start by having a look at wave-particle duality, and from there the Schrodinger equation, and then quantum superposition.

The Schrodinger wave equation fully describes a quantum state. If for example we want to extract position data for the quantum 'particle', we are presented not with a fixed point-like position, but rather with a probability distribution, a sort of smearing, in effect. This does not mean that there is say 60% chance that the particle is at point A, 40% chance it is at point B... because we are talking about a wave function here. The 'particle' is in both places at once, it's not that it's in one but we just don't know which, it is effectively in both but with differing levels of concentration. It is only upon taking a measurement, interacting with the system, that the wave resolves to a point-like particle, and it slots 100% into one of A or B. I'm obviously simplifying in this A-or-B case, but this is superposition; those two classical outcomes are both present in the quantum state.

Classical computers use bits, each bit can be 0 or 1. Quantum computers use qubits, where each qubit is in a superposed state of both outcomes.
So the classical bit is either 0 or 1, whereas the qubit is both, simultaneously. We can then see that whilst classical processing power scales linearly with each new bit, the power in the equivalent quantum system scales exponentially, 2ⁿ.

You might object that the quantum system still resolves into the same number of classical outcomes. And that is true. However here we encounter another key basis of quantum computers: entanglement. Those quantum states can be tied together.

In a 3 bit system, with 8 outcomes {000,001,010,011,100,101,110,111}, the classical computer can only be in one end state. So can the quantum computer. The difference is that the classical computer took one path to get there. The quantum computer, if the qubits are entangled, can take all 8 at once. This is why QCs are so great at problems like prime factorisation, which brings us back to Shor again.

I would say that observation isn't necessarily physically observing, it's any interaction with the environment that can trigger wave function collapse. We also get into a discussion of whether the quantum wave function is a 'real' thing, or merely a mathematical model to describe the underlying reality. Quantum mechanics has some solid maths behind it; the big problem is making sense of what that maths means using our poor human brains, which aren't tremendously well suited to the task. I don't think anyone fully understands QM.

Shor I can. Sorry.

The maths is I think well established and universally accepted. I am by no means an expert, but section 2 of this paper guides you through it.

ECC security is reliant on the effective impossibility of solving the Discrete Logarithm Problem; it being implausibly difficult to reverse elliptic curve point multiplication using "normal" computers.

Shor's algorithm is famous for solving prime factorisation for any given integer. This can be applied to discrete logarithms (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm#Discrete_logarithms), because the algorithm is equivalent to the hidden subgroup problem for finite Abelian groups. I'll not go into it further because as I say I'm no expert and the maths gets beyond me at this point.

Here's the relevant bit from the paper I mentioned above. I'll make a second post shortly answering your second question about how QCs work.

Yes, definitely. The question is when should bitcoin adapt, and that is a balancing act.

Move too late, and people won't have sufficient time to move their coins to quantum-safe addresses.

Move too early, and there will be chaos as a) there isn't a consensus on exactly what is the best quantum-safe cryptography to move to, and b) as QCs are still widely considered a future rather than current threat, the inevitable disagreements about whether or not to burn coins that don't move could erupt into civil war, or if not that then people would at least separate into opposing camps and begin to become entrenched in their opinions.

It's a difficult situation, but I am an amateur with only a superficial understanding of the various possibilities, and fortunately the people who have to make the decisions here are far smarter and more knowledgeable than I am. I may have little faith in politicians, but I have considerably more faith in bitcoin devs.

---

edit:

Thanks for the link, this is exactly what I meant in my last sentence - I am worrying about this now; Theymos was worrying about it at least 4 years ago, and probably since the very beginning.

Yes, this is a big concern. It's a form of zealotry, it's a demand for ideological purity, and that never ends well. It's just not conducive to rational thought.
Kind of strange that burning is stealing, but using a QC to hack someone else's private keys and take their coins isn't.

My bold.

Point 1 - There is a common misconception about quantum processing power. With a classical computer, this scales linearly. With a QC, it scales exponentially with the number of qubits, 2ⁿ. So as you increase processing power:
Classical: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 etc
Quantum: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32
I definitely think that once we have a reliable low qubit QC, then the steps to a powerful QC that can break public-key cryptography may be achieved more rapidly than commonly anticipated. It's a mistake to think in terms of how 'normal' power in computers scales up. Not saying you're doing that at all, it's just a point of which we should all be aware.

Point 2 - It's one option, but I thinking burning the coins that aren't moved to q-safe addresses is preferable. Ideologically it's questionable, sure, but 5m or 6m bitcoins suddenly available to possibly a single bad actor could quite reasonably be considered an existential threat. And it would be outright theft, not a 'reward' for developing a QC. Unless the real owners consent, which of course they don't. Hard fork and a burn seems the sensible option. The question here is: what should happen when the purity of the original vision intersects the problem of basic survival? A safety tweak, or death?