that's nuts

from the way I understood it (which is clearly dated, i.e. I missed the memo that offshore CNY trades with the CNH ticker symbol ), CNH is traded exclusively in Hong Kong through banks the Chinese Central Bank can control. This arrangement allows controlled movement of capital in/out, and provides an FX fig leaf to allow the Chinese gov to claim that CNY is available on markets to foreigners, but that CNH trading is still puppeteered by Beijing to prevent divergence from the official CNY rates (which are essentially entirely notional, CNY trades only 1:1 against CNH).

By allowing CNH to be used to back a stablecoin... it seems like that would risk the marketplace finding a real price for CNH against other currencies, exposing the 1:1 peg between on/off shore yuan. So if they want to continue to control capital flight and ultimately the yuan's value, relinquishing control of the CNH market is the wrong way to do that.

But the details are important of course, such a small CNHT supply makes for an illiquid market that cannot have a significant effect on CNH overall. Still, it's loosening the policy, and that leads in only one direction IMO.

I'm leaning towards this interpretation... (so you might be wasting your time listening to me guessing, in other words)

Cryptocurrencies are an intelligence agencies power-grab. Whether they were satoshi or not isn't relevant, they will have been watching/participating in the early cypherpunk movement in the 90's, were almost certainly mining BTC early on and very likely still behind many mining operations and, assuming this is a power grab, they're actually working towards making cryptocurrencies strong, not weakened with backdoors. The reasoning is pretty simple: it's been long speculated that cryptography and computer science could be used to develop currencies like Bitcoin, and the intelligence agencies are world experts in both, cryptography especially. If it can be done, trying to hold back the tide is a waste of time, better to either win the race, or failing that, ride the waves.

The financial industry (and especially the IMF & central banks) are probably highly suspicious of the intelligence agencies right now, assuming I am correct. But what could they do? It all comes down to who is best placed with the big 3 military powers, intelligence or the banks (UK/France etc don't count, or are essentially part of the US military). The intelligence people could conceivably have the upper hand there, either through loyalty or blackmail material. And if I was in the military command, I think I'd choose the scientists and psychologists over the a bunch of crafty bean-counters.


So how could such a powerplay affect stablecoins? Intelligence agencies infiltrate everywhere, that's their job. Playing the right games to keep stablecoins running should be pretty easy, simply tell high-ups at banks and financial regulators that you're setting up an operation to catch some big fish etc etc, just keep coming up with new bullshit until it stops working, then come up with a completely new angle How do you think the crypto exchanges have stayed open so long, when it's functionally equivalent to the banks watching their own suicide in slow-motion? The banks like a bit of fair and honest competition, right?



they're doing what?

that would be huge. Without the DPRC giving party approval, that sort thing must be either super difficult or impossible, I am amazed to hear that. Although if Hong Kong banks have kicked Bitfinex out, you've gotta ask yourself exactly who's backing the Cayman Islands. Logically, it's the US, so maybe it is possible that Bitfinex are circumventing Chinese approval, but I somehow doubt it. I think the Chinese gov certainly will need to publicly disapprove of CNY stablecoins, as their public stance otherwise is explicit heavy control of the yuan in every way possible, CNY stablecoins fly in the face of that. But in private, this might (but not in the short term, volumes need to be colossal) be at least one useful scapegoat in the event that currency markets suffer a shock.

compiling from source is great habit to get into, but Tor Browser (or really, Firefox).... I've never tried that, but I get the feeling it takes alot of care. Of course, OS's that compile everything locally in their package manager must do this, so it can't be too hard. Not going to try it any time soon myself, however



I find it embarrassing, and am myself feeling increasingly embarrassed as time goes on.

Most people use computers at the same level a child can teach itself to do, simply by watching and imitating. While these people watch their cat videos, I'm trying to learn basic computer science that (at it's core) hasn't changed much since the 1970's, and people are still using the crappy 1980's sub-par clone (i.e. windows) of the 1970's model.

Meanwhile, others apparently still haven't learned the basic rule number zero of the internet; if it's a popup, don't fucking click anywhere except on the close button, especially if it tells you 'click here or you'll die'. I learned that in the first month or so when the internet was still new. seriously ffs

remember too that e-gold and Liberty Reserve were USD denominated services, hosted in Central American countries that are officially not US states, but in practice are heavily controlled by the US. It was probably within the US gov's control to shut those 2 down very quickly, but they couldn't afford to do so without revealing exactly how much influence they have in Central America. So simply using them to collect user data wasn't such a bad option for a few years, before they could raid them in a more politically expedient manner (apparently sending in the FBI, to a country foreign to the US )

whatever leverage the US can gain over Bitfinex to shut down Tether, it's not going to be quite so easy. The situation in Hong Kong (where it seems pretty likely that Bitfinex holds it's dollar accounts) no doubt complicates things more...

explanations involve understanding the phenomenon you seek to explain, and you're attempting explanation of something you don't get, or have not sufficiently thought through.


When the supply stops inflating (scheduled 120 years from now), only unrecoverable BTC can possibly reduce the supply. Even if deflation is bad, there is no inherent rate of deflation involved in the supply rate ceasing, it's so simple to understand.

You're speculating, wildly, about a future event for which you and I will both probably have long since died. And there are all sorts of way to handle this that don't involve making the same economic mistakes that literally put us all in this position in the first place, so excuse me if I don't patiently walk you through it Mr. "I've been around since 2012 and therefore should already know better".

saying you don't know what you're talking about is not (and wasn't meant as) an insult, it's a fact

no-one has ever made a cryptocurrency with a deflating supply, "demurrage" is the only experiment I'm aware that was ever tried (it wasn't popular)



I'm no expert on austrian economic school, bt if they do say that, it's a massive oversimplification.

are you sure this isn't your massive oversimplifaction? I'm not



Bitcoin has aggressive inflation now

You're arguing for perpetually gentle inflation.


Guess what? Lucky you, if you read about how Bitcoin works (which you appear to have sidestepped ), you will note that Bitcoin's inflation becomes more gentle every 4 years.

So, if gentle inflation is good, you chose the right currency! It gets gentler all the time, gentle FTW

your reasoning is "cos gold does it"

that's great. no really

this is unlikely

money supply (and even money itself) is a simple concept that just isn't easy to grasp. It's not difficult to convince people that an inflating supply is good when they benefit in the short term, even people who can understand the concepts are happy to deceive themselves of the opposite if it means they have some short term gain.

Bitcoin was designed to stop all that, but using precious metals was a similar idea that has now ended up very contentious, and surrounded with stupid stories and questionable pundits. We can expect the same for Bitcoin (arguably, it already happened, made many times worse by Bitcoin being so technical)

if this Walch character wishes to "aspire" to a different limit, it's easy, all he's gotta do is change a single line of code. then convince at least 1 other person to do it too, although he could just sit on his own private version of Bitcoin's blockchain forever, I'm sure that'll work out

don't think I'll be joining him, but I get the argument: early Bitcoin adopters weren't crazy after all, lets all join in, and completely destroy their money's value! Let's use the same economics that got the world into trillions of dollars of debt instead!

there is very likely alot of truth to this

the high ranking military officers in these situations could be engaging in some pretty disgusting corrupt deals between each other. The fact is that genuine all-out war is almost as dangerous to the commanding officers as it is to the ground troops.

Why would the commanders on either side willingly take such risks to their own lives, over a few miles of desert? It would be rather convenient to them to orchestrate some fighting against each other, and to do so in a way that ensures civilians are exposed to the fighting and traumatized. Then, their politicians have got some really compliant and faithful sheep as citizens for a few decades, or if not, some angry kids that willingly offer themselves up as soldiers to continue the fight. As long as the commanders plan the fighting in a way that never moves the battle fronts around in an unpredictable way, their own lives are at minimal risk, and their politician friends will reward them for keeping the racket going

but it would be a real high-wire act nonetheless; you can imagine it's very easy to screw the other side over by making big advances that were not agreed to! And when your opposing commander contacts you saying "WTF?!", just say "well, we've gotta make it look real, keep the soldiers believing, right?"

you need:

• 8GB RAM minimum (really 12GB is the comfortable minimum)
• Intel VT-d or the AMD equivalent (forgot the name)
• Intel SLAT or the AMD equivalent (ditto)

There's a LiveDVD version, so that would test your pc's ability to run Qubes. You can also check the list of compatible computer models (the HCL) on https://qubes-os.org before trying.



Qubes can do this selectively though.

You can run Tor Browser (or any app) in a volatile ("disposable" in Qubes jargon) way, but if you want to run a different browser with cookies stored in it at the same time, that's also possible. Qubes uses Xen to sandbox different apps into separate virtual machines.

And every separate hardware device can be sandboxed to it's own virtual machine. So, attacks that target e.g. your network device cannot be used to compromise the overall OS, just the virtual machine the device runs in. All USB devices are similarly segregated to a VM, that can temporarily re-assign control of any specific USB port to another VM (which could be a disposable VM )

there are alot of different ways to use Qubes OS, as well as alot of new plans to enhance it. It's made for a pretty stable system since I've been a user, and I think the security benefits are what Bitcoin users need (you can keep e.g. hardware wallet very tightly controlled as to what websites are running when it's attached to your pc, or as I do, never attach the hardware wallet to an OS running any browser).

The standard VMs are Debian, Arch and Fedora, in case you're wondering (but any OS can be run in a more limited mode).

I also am very content with Bitcoin's "failure", there must be something wrong with me

sure. what I meant was that small, innocuous tools can make a significant difference in adding more straw to the camel's back but whether that was the last piece of straw before the camel quit is a bit hard to say

did this 3rd party publish a hash of the BIOS image?


Seems to me you are relying on:

• competence of the authors of this unofficial BIOS image
• luck during the flashing process (power surges/cuts are not your friend in these circumstances)
• lack of bugs in the flashing software (flashrom? something devised by this 3rd party developer? flashrom is pretty well tested, I believe, I've used it myself before)

if you cannot check a hash, downloading the file multiple times and checking they're identical is a (flimsy) substitute. if you can contact the 3rd party devlopers, maybe they would provide you with a hash to check the integrity of the image file.

really though, having a separate flashing device and the clips to do it is the only 100% assured way to do this (or as close to 100% as is possible). You can also read and store the contents of the BIOS ROM chip before you flash a different BIOS, which would not strictly keep you within the terms of any equipment warranty, but would render the OEM unable to actually detect that you broke any terms.

it is completely arbitrary though

maybe 1 BTC is a "coin"?

there is no logical reason for that, only arbitrary reasons


1 BTC is shorthand (i.e. an arbitrary reference point to make life for humans easier) for 100 million satoshis. We humans count in tens, because we're somewhat hard-wired to handle powers of 10 after spending 100s of thousands of years counting fingers on our hands...

Computers (or the Bitcoin protocol) do not have fingers. Or hands. And they "count" in on's and off's, it's debatable whether "counting" is at all an accurate description of what computers are even doing (literally, computers do alot of adding. And they can't do anything else; subtraction, multiplication, division, calculating a square root or a logarithm... these are directly impossible using computers. We can give them contrived additions to perform that calculate such mathematics indirectly, but in essence, computers are no more than a carefully designed electric abacus).

And so, when we ask the computer to emit a period (dot) character to the screen after a bitcoin output's value has exceeded 100 million, there is nothing meaningful that's delineating that as a "coin", it's no different than deciding to stop painting the wall immediately before a paintbrush reaches the floor. The computer doesn't "know" it's a decimal place, it only places it there to be rendered to the hardware display because that's how it's been programmed to behave.

The Bitcoin protocol is behaving according to the rules of mathematics & logic, and to the consequences of the protocols algorithms operating on the inputs we provide to the computer (whose values are either random or arbitrary). Any notion of a "coin" is simply humans interpreting these values and processes and their results in a way we prefer, there are countless ways to interpret the results of Bitcoin's protocol in operation that have nothing to do with a "coin" or anything else thus far conceived.

An example would be the Namecoin protocol, which simply adjusts the patterns in the values such that those values can be resolved into IP addesses by the DNS protocol. And both the protocol (and the computer performing this task) is identically unconcerned with the meaning or significance of these values, there is no way for the protocol to determine what meaning we assign to the values as a part of it's operation (perhaps some AI could, but that's not in the Bitcoin protocol). As far as the computer is aware, it's all just a colossal number of addition arithmetic, performed for no apparent purpose at all.

This could work in the long-term, but in the short-term I don't think reality supports this idea well.

Most people will be using their phones as wallets, or at the least they will use phones to send transactions and keep their wallets on paper or dedicated hardware wallets (I expect the majority would use a complete phone wallet)

Both phone OS's and the lite-wallets that run on phones are designed in a pretty anti-privacy way. That would make it easier for the Chinese/HK govs to target HK protestors. In future, more people will use more open phone platforms (like the Librem 5 phone or the Pine Phone) for which security and privacy are under user control (and even then, people really must be quite professional in their computer science knowledge to maintain secuirty/privacy). Until that time (which is realistically months/years away), cash is better.



this I agree with



and this


Maybe a good idea would be if the organisers provide multiple different addresses, with different combinations of parties that can sign. That way those organisers can distribute trust amongst each other in a more shallow formation, making it even harder to detain certain people strategically to cut money off from the people on the ground. And anyone donating can also use that system to avoid giving money to any organiser that seems suspicious or just doesn't behave according to the donators own standards.

For instance, I myself would not fund organisers who are:

• encouraging pro-active violence
• just marching or holding up signs

but I would fund organisers who are:

• doing a more creative street protest that is impossible to forget (that could go viral)
• providing unlicensed, high quality alternatives to government services
• helping protestors (or anyone else) to avoid government employees behaving badly towards them
• succeeding in convincing government employees to switch to their side, publicly

the OS I use does that automatically every time you open a Tor Browser: https://qubes-os.org


It keeps a master copy of the Debian linux OS safely that's never used directly. Then when you want to use Tor Browser, it makes a temporary copy of Debian, and opens Tor Browser inside that. When you quit, the whole temporary copy is deleted, including any malware that it might have got infected with


been running this way for years now, no problems at all

that definitely sounds positive and practical, not as over-idealistic as my first impression.

Plus points seem to be:

• relatively old concept
• even the old implentations were experimentally successful
• less waste
• waste is less hazardous? or only dangerous for a shorter length of time? both?

Negatives are apparently:

• Thorium reactor waste is still radioactive waste
• (non-fissile) uranium needed to seed the reaction

So thorium reactors are still using a fission process, but is it correct to say that chain reactions are not possible? Or at least that they are nothing like as dangerous as the chain-reactions that fissile nuclear material (i.e. the weapons grade plutonium used in atomic weapons) can produce? There certainly seems to be no military applications for some kind of thorium based munitions, or is thorium a part of the detonation process in uranium/plutonium/hydrogen based weapons?

It's certainly interesting to hear that China and India are working on real invocations of thorium reactors, this strongly suggests the tech has potential.

indeed, and no-one is credibly contesting the problems that landfill sites are storing up, or of the effects of toxic chemicals finding their way into ecosystems.

I thought the thorium reactor concept sounded interesting, but it also came across like a pipe-dream too (admittedly after doing only a very small amount of reading up). Although the suggestions I saw (and maybe this might be part of why I judged thorium reactors a little outlandish) included a thorium reactor powering commercial vehicles. If that really were possible (and it sounds like a big if), surely small scale reactors are reasonable?

Although perhaps not; despite deposits being well distributed across the world, I imagine that a thuggish corporate culture (similar to crude oil) could evolve around thorium too. It may be (relatively) safe to store and handle, but you can say the same thing about coal, and the coal supply is massively controlled by corporate behemoths. And despite the relatively abundant deposit distribution, India would apparently became thorium's Saudi Arabia. With the current political trends in India, I'm not too sure about that prospect.



right. Not the sexiest new tech out there, but it's a highly practical (and certainly realistic) avenue for improving the sustainability of reusable energy infrastructure.

only people that don't know much about it say that


Silk road was positive overall, checking out the forums on Silk road was part of what convinced me Bitcoin could work. People were mostly nice folks (although they were alot of them middle-class drug addicts despite that) trying to help each other, it was a real marketplace where trust and information drove the prices, and scammers were handled by regular people, not government regulation. It was clearly messy, but it was clearly also working.


child abuse porn and guns were disallowed. The most popular drugs were marijuana (which is on the verge of losing it's UN-imposed illegal status worldwide), and prescription drugs. That's right, legal drugs were 2nd most popular on the Silk Road (although obviously it's still illegal to sell them without a medical prescription, but that's often true of marijuana too)