Instead of being regulated and utilized so it's a useful technology it's just become a giant faux-economy.

Exchanges, news, prices, altcoins. It never seems to end. Every coin is just feeding into bitcoin for profit. It wouldn't be so bad if there were limited hours for trading but of course because of how the blockchain works it is a 24/7 economy.

Hey, who says America is in decline? The U.S. is still more awesome than the rest of the world at making at least one thing. And that thing is income inequality.

A new paper by economists Facundo Alvaredo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez lays out just how much better at making inequality the U.S. is than everybody else and tries to explain how it got that way.

Since the 1970s, the top 1 percent of earners in the U.S. has roughly doubled its share of the total American income pie to nearly 20 percent from about 10 percent, according to the paper. This gain is easily the biggest among other developed countries, the researchers note. You can see this in the chart below, taken from the paper, which maps the income gains of the top 1 percent in several countries against the massive tax breaks most of them have gotten in the past several decades. (Story continues after chart.)



The higher the dot, the more income inequality has grown in that country. See the red dot waaaay up in the left-hand corner, far away from everybody else? That is the United States, where the top earners have made more while getting their taxes slashed by over 40 percent.

This echoes an OECD study from earlier this year that found the U.S. had the highest income inequality in the developed world. It followed only Chile, Mexico and Turkey among all nations.

So how did America get so darn great at ratcheting open the chasm between the haves and have-nots? Thank the dynamic duo of Wall Street and Washington, which have been working so well together for the past few decades to make laws that favor banks. Turns out this Axis Of Making It Rain has also been making laws that favor the exorbitantly wealthy. Win-win. Unless you are poor, in which case: Sorry, be born to richer parents next time, maybe?

One thing you’ll notice in this chart is that, typically, the bigger the tax cuts given to the 1 percent (the horizontal scale on the chart), the bigger the income inequality. This is consistent with other studies that have shown the tax code has a big effect on income distribution. That’s one way Washington has boosted inequality: By slashing taxes on the rich, for freedom and growth and trickling down on the poor. Unfortunately, the paper points out, contrary to what you will hear from conservatives, lower tax rates on the wealthy offer no obvious benefits to growth, or to the poor.

One other thing you’ll notice from the chart is that the United Kingdom has slashed taxes on the top 1 percent almost as aggressively the U.S. has, and yet the share of income going to the top 1 percent is not nearly as big. So there’s something else going on here besides just tax breaks.

That something is Wall Street, more or less, as Matthew O’Brien of The Atlantic points out. The same politicians that have busily been slashing taxes on the wealthy have also been loosening fetters on banking, allowing the financial sector to swell to bloated size and mop up ever-more income while contributing ever-less back to the economy. Again, this is consistent with other studies that have attributed much of the rise in in inequality to the pay being sucked up by bankers and overpaid CEOs.

At the same time, U.S. lawmakers have also made it easier and more tax-friendly for the wealthy to pile up more capital gains on their investments. As O’Brien puts it, “The top 1 percent leveraged itself to the market, and haven’t looked back.”

One nifty benefit to having nine metric craptons of money is that you can use it to buy politicians to help you craft the laws you like, particularly those that will help you end up with 10 metric craptons of money. The poor and middle class, meanwhile, just get ever more discouraged about the political system and stop bothering to fight it, increasingly turning the whole process over to the wealthy and the politicians they own, according to a recent paper by Frederick Solt at Southern Illinois University. Sound familiar?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/15/income-inequality-wall-street_n_3762422.html

So anyone can explain me the advantages over like lets say a mysql database?

Else i would just say: lol what?

You do know that bitcoins are open source right? That's the opposite of patenting something. Go patent the internet you flippin hurpadurp. This thread is a waste of precious computing power.

Wow! I love this blockchain adoption for real life!
I think there is also another news:

Have to believe Satoshi is dead. If he were still alive he would have patented blockchain technology a long time ago.

The blockchain is a technology for all. No patent no copyright it's a technology for humanity.

We are all Satoshi

What links flowers, mandarin oranges, and pineapples? They’re all neatly recorded on Maersk’s new digital shipping ledger.

Moving millions of gigantic metal boxes around the world is hard work—but circumnavigating the associated paperwork can be even harder. So the world’s largest shipping company has been trialing how it can make use of the digital technology behind the world’s most notorious cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, to make it a little easier.

Bitcoin is built on what's called the blockchain: a digital ledger where each line is recorded based on the previous one using cryptographic techniques, making it almost impossible to modify at a later date. The ledger isn’t stored centrally, and multiple parties can agree by consensus that the details contained within it are accurate—which means that it's in everyone's interest to keep it so. That makes it perfect for recording financial transactions, but also doing plenty else, too.

The shipping company Maersk has now announced that it has been working with IBM to use the blockchain to keep track of shipments as they’re hauled across the seas. This isn’t the company keeping track of the metal boxes themselves, but rather their contents. The company claims that a single container being hauled from East Africa to Europe might require paperwork to be dealt with by as many as 30 different people, spread across 200 or more interactions.

So with IBM it’s built a tool based on blockchain that allows every participant in a supply chain to see the progress of a shipment, including where the container is and the status of its documents. The hope: shippers reduce the weight of paperwork that needs to be done, while customs officials and clients can see where goods are at all times. So far, shipments of flowers from Kenya, mandarin oranges from California, and pineapples from Colombia have all been tracked using the tool as they flowed into the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

Maersk isn’t alone in using the blockchain to keep track of stuff. As the New York Times points out in a long piece describing IBM’s foray into blockchain, Big Blue is working with 400 different organizations to apply the technology to different situations. That includes Wal-Mart, which announced last year that it was using blockchain to record and log the origins of produce in order to improve health and safety standards.

IBM is clearly looking to assert its control as a blockchain force to be reckoned with, but others will snap at its heels. Microsoft is already working on the technology, and its open nature means that it’s already being used by smaller upstarts to do everything from build cryptocurrencies for the world of corporate finance to make a more private Internet. One thing is clear: there's certainly more to blockchain than Bitcoin.

I'm liking the main card more now that I watched the weigh ins.  And I didn't realize that Jacare Souza is fighting so soon.  Does anyone know why?

I am still not sure how come they came to a conclusion that the bank has helped terrorist and drug cartels,the article really does not give any details and i hope this is a leaked information from the senate subcommittee and unless and until they present these information in the hearing you can only speculate what the real thing is,it is a common fact that there might be some cases but i am not sure whether the bank will support those cause even after knowing it is helping the terrorist.

Are you sure that the vault7 releases are the same as those dumps from the shadowbrokers?
I really think they're 2 seperate things, nothing seems to indicate that they're linked when you look it up.  

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/theyre-back-the-shadow-brokers-release-more-alleged-exploits
https://bit.no.com:43110/theshadowbrokers.bit/post/messagefinale/

Are they just releasing it for free now? I thought they were selling this info to the highest bidder?
I've been out of the loop for a while, would be interesting to know more about this. Where can I find their announcements?

FOR EIGHT MONTHS, the hacker group known as Shadow Brokers has trickled out an intermittent drip of highly classified NSA data. Now, just when it seemed like that trove of secrets might be exhausted, the group has spilled a new batch. The latest dump appears to show that the NSA has penetrated deep into the finance infrastructure of the Middle East—a revelation that could create new scandals for the world’s most well-resourced spy agency.

Friday morning, the Shadow Brokers published documents that—if legitimate—show just how thoroughly US intelligence has compromised elements of the global banking system. The new leak includes evidence that the NSA hacked into EastNets, a Dubai-based firm that oversees payments in the global SWIFT transaction system for dozens of client banks and other firms, particularly in the Middle East. The leak includes detailed lists of hacked or potentially targeted computers, including those belonging to firms in Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Syria, Yemen, and the Palestinian territories. Also included in the data dump, as in previous Shadow Brokers releases, are a load of fresh hacking tools, this time targeting a slew of Windows versions.

“Oh you thought that was it?” the hacker group wrote in a typically grammar-challenged statement accompanying their leak. There was speculation prior to this morning’s release that the group had finally published its full set of stolen documents, after a seemingly failed attempt to auction them for bitcoins. “Too bad nobody deciding to be paying theshadowbrokers for just to shutup and going away.”

SWIFT Action
The transaction protocol SWIFT has been increasingly targeted by hackers seeking to redirect millions of dollars from banks around the world, with recent efforts in India, Ecuador, and Bangladesh. Security researchers have even pointed to clues that a $81 million Bangladesh bank theft via SWIFT may have been the work of the North Korean government. But the Shadow Brokers’ latest leak offers new evidence that the NSA has also compromised SWIFT, albeit most likely for silent espionage rather than wholesale larceny.

EastNets has denied that it was hacked, writing on its Twitter account that there’s “no credibility to the online claim of a compromise of EastNets customer information on its SWIFT service bureau.” But the Shadow Brokers’ leak seems to suggest otherwise: One spreadsheet in the release, for instance, lists computers by IP address, along with corresponding firms in the finance industry and beyond, including the Qatar First Investment Bank, Arab Petroleum Investments Corporation Bahrain, Dubai Gold and Commodities Exchange, Tadhamon International Islamic Bank, Noor Islamic Bank, Kuwait Petroleum Company, Qatar Telecom and others. A “legend” at the top of the spreadsheet notes that the 16 highlighted IP addresses mean, “box has been implanted and we are collecting.” That NSA jargon translates to a computer being successfully infected with its spyware.1

Those IP addresses don’t actually correspond to the client’s computers, says Dubai-based security researcher Matt Suiche, but rather to computers servicing those clients at EastNets, which is one of 120 “service bureaus” that form a portion of the SWIFT network and make transactions on behalf of customers. “This is the equivalent of hacking all the banks in the region without having to hack them individually,” says Suiche, founder of UAE-based incident response and forensics startup Comae Technologies. “You have access to all their transactions.”

Blowback
While the Shadow Brokers’ releases have already included NSA exploits, today’s leak is the first indication of targets of that sophisticated hacking in the global banking system. Unlike previous known hacks of the SWIFT financial network, nothing in the leaked documents suggests that the NSA used its access to EastNets or BCG’s SWIFT systems to actual alter transactions or steal funds. Instead, stealthily tracking the transactions within that network may have given the agency visibility into money flows within the region—including to potential terrorist, extremist, or insurgent groups.

If that sort of finance-focused espionage was in fact the NSA’s goal, it would hardly deviate from the agency’s core mission. But Suiche points out that confirmation of the operation would nonetheless lead to blowback for the NSA and the US government—particularly given that many of the listed targets are in US-friendly countries like Dubai and Qatar. “A big shitstorm is to come,” says Suiche. “You can expect the leadership of key organizations like banks and governments are going to be quite irritated, and they’re going to react.”

Beyond EastNets alone, Suiche points to references in the files to targeting the Panama-based firm Business Computer Group or BCG, although it’s not clear if the firm was actually compromised. Beyond its Twitter statement, EastNets didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment. WIRED also reached out to BCG and the NSA, but didn’t get a response.

Windows to the World
SWIFT aside, the leak also contains a cornucopia of NSA hacking tools or “exploits,” including what appear to be previously secret techniques for hacking PCs and servers running Windows. Matthew Hickey, the founder of the security firm Hacker House, analyzed the collection and believes there are more than 20 distinct exploits in the leak, about 15 of which are included in an automated hacking “framework” tool called FuzzBunch.

The attacks seem to target every recent version of Windows other than Windows 10, and several allow a remote hacker to gain the full ability to run their own code on a target machine. “There are exploits here that are quite likely zero days that will let you hack into any number of servers on the internet,” says Hickey. “This is as big as it gets. It’s internet God mode.”

In a statement to WIRED, a Microsoft spokeperson wrote only, “We are reviewing the report and will take the necessary actions to protect our customers.” If the released code does turn out include zero days, though, that would potentially leave millions of Windows users exposed until the company can pull together patches and release them to users.1

The Shadow Brokers, meanwhile, hinted in their release that they’re not done creating trouble for the NSA yet. “Maybe if all suviving [sic] WWIII theshadowbrokers be seeing you next week,” the group’s message concludes. “Who knows what we having next time?”

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/major-leak-suggests-nsa-deep-middle-east-banking-system/