from the Oops,-the-honest-people-are-in-a-minority-again dept.
A malicious miner successfully executed a double spend attack on the Bitcoin Gold network last week, making BTG at least the third altcoin to succumb to a network attack during that timespan.
[...] To execute the attack, the miner acquired at least 51 percent of the network's total hashpower, which provided them with temporary control of the blockchain. Obtaining this much hashpower is incredibly expensive — even on a smaller network like bitcoin gold — but it can be monetized by using it in tandem with a double spend attack.
After gaining control of the network, the attacker began depositing BTG at cryptocurrency exchanges while also attempting to send those same coins to a wallet under their control. Ordinarily, the blockchain would resolve this by including only the first transaction in the block, but the attacker was able to reverse transactions since they had majority control of the network.
Consequently, they were able to deposit funds on exchanges and quickly withdraw them again, after which they reversed the initial transaction so that they could send the coins they had originally deposited to another wallet.
A bitcoin gold address implicated in the attack has received more than 388,200 BTG since May 16 (mostly from transactions it sent to itself). Assuming all of those transactions were associated with the double spend exploit, the attacker could have stolen as much as $18.6 million worth of funds from exchanges.
The last transaction was sent on May 18, but the attacker could theoretically attempt to resume it if they still have access to enough hashpower to gain control of the blockchain.
Bitcoin gold's developers advised exchanges to address the attack by increasing the number of confirmations required before they credit deposits to customer accounts. Blockchain data indicates that the attacker successfully reversed transactions as far back as 22 blocks, leading developers to advise raising confirmation requirements to 50 blocks.
Bitcoin Gold appears to use a standard ~10 min block rate so the new recommendation is for exchanges to hold funds for ~8 hours before clearing them.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @04:02PM (2 children)
But as is so often the case with video games, first impressions are everything. What might have seemed like Star Wars corpse-fucking was really meant as a fun joke for fans to get in on. On top of the outsize reaction to the dance mode, the game’s other qualities were overlooked. Harlin pointed to the orchestral score created by Gordy Haab and Kyle Newmaster: “They wrote an amazing score for that game and it’s brilliant … but it gets zero attention because people just want to point at ‘I’m Han Solo’ instead.” (I am admittedly one of those people.)
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @04:36PM (1 child)
If this is the spam person thanks for branching out into new topics.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday May 24 2018, @04:42PM
This happened to me a couple times: my post was on-topic but got published in the wrong story.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 24 2018, @04:36PM (30 children)
I only recently became aware of how Ripple operates [ripple.com].
There are pluses and minuses to Ripple's curated list of trusted validators approach.
I think Bitcoin Gold just demonstrated a minus of trusting the collective network to operate more than 50% honestly because it's just so damn expensive to gain majority share.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @05:01PM (2 children)
Each individual's personal risk profile can be used to determine how one uses the network.
These exchanges lost, because they were risk taking rather than risk averse.
On a decentralized PoW blockchain Just wait longer for exponentially stronger statistical guarantees.
All this proved is that, as usual, nobody in a position of power actually knows what he's doing.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Friday May 25 2018, @01:31AM (1 child)
If anyone actually would, he/she would immediately stop doing anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @05:54PM
The word "he" Is masculine only in the sense that it is not necessarily feminine.
Sometimes, it's necessary to distinguish special, exotic, or cherished objects, such as boats or women. In that case, the word "she" is used.
It's redundant to say "he/she". Just say "he".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snow on Thursday May 24 2018, @05:48PM (20 children)
Ripple instamined the vast majority of XRP and assigned them to themselves.
Ripple's central authorities are also a liability because a government could knock down their door and shut the entire network down.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 24 2018, @06:11PM (9 children)
I totally agree on both points, however... I do like the basic premises behind Ripple - web-of-trust over proof-of-work.
I think where they are missing the point is that they are holding on too tight. If (big if) they could provide some incentive-rewards for running validator nodes, speed development of a larger trusted core of validators, and of course burn the hell out of bad actors, I think they'd have something worth using. Of course, there's always the problem that your trusted core of validators gets pwned by some party that just wants to screw the system over (Warren Buffet's buddies?), but that could be what's happening in Bitcoin Gold right now, too.
They have some interesting ideas about operating as an exchange platform, but at the end of the day they still publish their XRP and it tracks BTC nearly 1:1, the open market never ceases to amaze me in how deep it does not look when determining value.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @06:37PM (8 children)
... layer.
Yes, you're right: There is a lot more trust in the world than zero, and that trust can be exploited for mutual profit.
However, Bitcoin is a more fundamental system the that; it works not only when there is zero trust, but also in the face of active attackers.
So, build your trust into a higher-level protocol, but use Bitcoin to take snapshots of the state of your trustworthy world, or use Bitcoin to escape potential attacks when trustworthiness becomes uncertain.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 24 2018, @07:23PM (7 children)
Does it, really? You're trusting more than 50% of the hashing power to play fairly. I believe there's not really a way to increase that ratio in your "trust free zone," either: say you require 80% agreement, well - now an attacker only needs to gain 21% control to shut down processing.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @10:19PM (6 children)
Firstly, having a hashing majority simply allows one, at great cost, to make a limited set of mild manipulations for a limited time (people start noticing), such as toppling a handful of the top blocks, slowing down the processing of particular transactions, etc. Meanwhile, each new block secures ever more the blocks on which it is built, which is still a service, and is one reason why Bitcoin would probably serve best as a settlement layer.
Secondly, if there's enough aggravation, it could be incentive to whip up support among fair players (or just opponents of the attacker, such as one government against another) to fund competing minors. There's a huge incentive to keep an attacker from ruining the value that has been poured into growing the system.
Secondly, nobody really has to put up with it; if there's enough aggravation, both miners and non-miners could agree on new rules that disadvantages the bad actor, which might be enough to render such an attack too expensive to keep repeating; this need not be too invasive, either, as a soft fork could allow people to begin transacting with a different PoW algorithm, essentially transitioning to a side chain where the bad actor must once again foot the bill of building up a majority hashing rate.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Justin Case on Thursday May 24 2018, @10:48PM
Hell yeah I'd fund that! And them with whips even!!! I'm assuming because it's all blockchain the feds will never bust me since I'll be invisible.
Let's keep it tasteful, though. No minors under 12. That's just creepy. Especially if they're wrestling naked in a giant vat of olive oil.
Oh, you meant "miners"?
See, sometimes literacy does matter.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 25 2018, @03:11PM (4 children)
So, the bad actor has forced manual intervention (I know, ethereum does this all the time), and changing everybody else's hashing gear to run away from them.
Except, what's to stop this bad actor from adapting their hashing gear over onto the new fork and doing it all over again?
I think some of what is going on with Bitcoin Gold and the other exploited coins is that there's so much compatibility between competing miner networks that somebody has built up a powerful hashing pool and is jumping from one relatively little network to the next, thrashing them and then moving on. This does not bode well for the whole theory of a distributed multi-layered Proof Of Work system, since each independent honest miner network will have to be bigger (more expensive) than the largest malicious network out there.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @05:56PM
People can still use the old rules.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 27 2018, @12:57AM (2 children)
The lack of profitability?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 27 2018, @02:22AM (1 child)
I'm just going to throw out a guess here that $18M in the space of less than a day was a profitable day for the attacker.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 27 2018, @04:20AM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 24 2018, @06:58PM (9 children)
Holy F! - I just found this nugget:
That's out of a 100B total pool, so they're floating themselves 1B XRP per month for 8+ years... and yet it continues to track BTC at a fixed ratio.
Shenanigans.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 25 2018, @02:26AM (8 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 25 2018, @11:55AM (7 children)
Exactly: Shenanigans. Illegal shenanigans if that's what they're doing: https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2018/bitcoin-criminal-probe-regulation/ [pymnts.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 25 2018, @12:00PM (6 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 25 2018, @01:13PM (5 children)
From the linked article: spoofing and wash trading are illegal.
If individuals or groups are trading XRP with themselves in order to manipulate the market price up or down, that's wash trading, and illegal.
Like most bad laws it's difficult to prove: intent or collusion or manipulation of market price, but that doesn't change the illegal status, and in every market manipulation there are damaged parties who either paid more or received less than they would have without the manipulation (or, as you say: muscling).
What really makes it illegal is somebody's willingness to pursue it in a court of law coupled with a victory - then it becomes case law, of which there is quite a bit existing for wash trading. The legal system in its current form isn't one I love, but it is the one we have.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 26 2018, @03:26AM (4 children)
And that has what to do with the managers of the currency?
Except when it's not illegal. For example, stock buybacks aren't illegal.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 26 2018, @11:59AM (3 children)
Unless you've sold stock to a colluding party, and then buy it back in a short time frame, that becomes an illegal wash.
What's colluding? What's short? Yeah, the law sucks, but it's the law.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 26 2018, @09:29PM (2 children)
So not always illegal as I already noted.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 26 2018, @09:54PM (1 child)
And f-ing hard to prove in court, which is why all the chat room pump and dumps of the 2000 dot-com bust got away with their shenanigans.
Illegal if you can bring a case and make it stick. Cybercurrency traders are an order of magnitude bolder than the chat roomers from ~20 years ago, I'm sure there's available records all over the internet that would make a case for wash sales and even spoofing (I think one guy is actually using Spoofer as his pseudonym...) Now, does anybody care enough to bring the case? We will see.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 27 2018, @12:55AM
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @05:57PM
why would you investigate a bankster coin like ripple? just how dumb are you?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 24 2018, @08:36PM (2 children)
I read the ripple spec a while back, and it seems a lot like hashgraph, which is presently just a platform for performing consensus-based algorithms, which hasn't been wrapped up into a cryptocurrency yet. Both aim for efficiency, which is comms limited, rather than proof-of-work, which is CPU limited.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 24 2018, @08:54PM (1 child)
You might want to take a look at ripple today... it's still not what I would call "off the ground", but they have managed to put out a cryptocurrency XRP which has been tracking BTC pretty much 1:1 for about a year now, why that valuation has been tracking I cannot begin to fathom beyond: crypto investors are idiot-greed-sheep.
https://developers.ripple.com/become-an-xrp-ledger-gateway.html#trading-on-ripple [ripple.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 24 2018, @09:38PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday May 24 2018, @10:10PM (1 child)
The primary difference to my eyes being: If you have a network that you can trust (by whatever mechanism you define as trustworthy), you can trust the network. What keeps that from being a tautology is that cryptocurrency (and other cryptomining operations) are supposed to work in an environment where trust is unnecessary or unavailable. "Supposed to be" because we've always been told that getting 51% of a network's mining is infeasible. That just got dunked on in this particular network.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:15PM
My thoughts are that someone that managed to get 51% of the network, should be easy enough to track down and slap cuffs on.
I always figured that was the ultimate safety against the 51% attack.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday May 24 2018, @04:40PM (4 children)
Just five individuals control 30% of BitCoin's hash rate.
This commenced when the Godless Commies built lots of coal-fired power plants so as to promote the economic development of rural communities. The hoped-for development didn't work out so China was possessed of vast quantities of idle generating capacity.
All it really takes to Mine The Wealth Of Croseus is to purchase one single rig then bootstrap. One's income growth is not quite geometric because the difficulty factor of most cryptos increases with time so as to maintain a constant rate of newly-mined blocks as technology advances and so hash rate increases.
In the case of BitCoin that rate is roughly one block each ten minutes.
(Strictly speaking, the difficulty is actually _decreasing_ but the effort required to solve a block increases as that solution requires a hash of the header to be less than the value of the block's difficulty field.)
We now have the problem that Bitmain makes the very fastest and most energy efficient ASIC rigs. It also operates Antpool which quite likely has the highest hash rate of all the world's pools.
I myself am bootstrapping but I have better ways to
spank the monkeyspend my time than stressing over electric bills and the depreciation of industrial air conditioners. My plan is to fill one full rack with Antiminers and power supplies. That would at last free me from selling mybodylabor to The Man and so grant my freedom to focus onhookers and blowmy music and my writing.I have come to regard music and writing as my life's work as I have come to understand that no code I could ever hope to write would
ever shipoutlive me.Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Thursday May 24 2018, @06:04PM (3 children)
If you think you can make money mining coins in North America, you had better have a line on some unusually cheap electricity. Plus you've got to buy those racks of ASICs, and amortize those over their expected lifetime. You're competing against people who get their electricity nearly for free, and buy ASICs by the job lot. I think you need to do your math again.
The Bitcoin Gold heist shows the primary weakness of proof-of-work currencies. There are other approaches. Ripple's approved validators fits its goal of serving primarily as a currency for interbank settlements. For other currencies, I would think proof-of-stake to be a good option: you still have the danger of a 51% attack, but someone has to own 51% of the currency, which seems unlikely for a currency with any sort of worthwhile value, and also isn't something that can change very quickly.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Touché) by fakefuck39 on Thursday May 24 2018, @11:26PM (2 children)
bought an new s9 from amazon with a 1600W 120V PSU, $3500. In the winter it's in the basement. In the summer it's on the top floor on a shelf near the ceiling, blowing out the dryer vent. electricity is $60/month. Gas heating runs about half the price of electric here, so when its cold I waste $30 a month. In the summer, its sucking in and blowing out the warmest air in the house, which makes more cold air come up from the basement where I crack a window a tiny bit. Zero extra money spent as the AC now runs less. The negative is the basement isn't freezing cold anymore and the whole house is the same temp. Oh - that's not a negative. When it's warmTurned it on, joined a pool, hooked up a wallet, just left it running.
It mined about a bitcoin and a half in a year. Real electric cost $60/month, effective cost $30/month 5 months of the year.
Yeah buddy, you've really got it all figured out, just not 2nd grade arithmetic. Tell us more of your thoughts please - I do always love to listen to someone with minimal knowledge and maximum opinion.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 25 2018, @01:30AM (1 child)
Serious question: have you even cashed out the $4K this thing has cost you yet, or will you HODL to the Mun?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Friday May 25 2018, @08:39AM
Serious answer - I have not. I have used it though, when it was between 10-20k - I only use it when it jumps high. I have about total of about $120k in bitcoin at the current price. In addition, here is some interesting stuff: I've been to about 50-60 countries and lived for extended periods in several. Here's some random stuff I ran across in the world: Las Vegas - you can pay for cabs and bars and hotels with bitcoin. I was surprised. Bavaria - their version of grubhub accepts bitcoin. Tokyo - I could officially pay government fees with bitcoin although I didn't. Paid 2 months rent in Dubai with bitcoin. So that's my experience, and why I don't cash it in.
This has nothing to do with mining it though, and the person to whom I responded is clearly one of those annoying unhappy people who just talk shit for the sake of getting attention, all while making himself look like an idiot clown. Those miners have paid for themselves in the bitcoin I used to pay for things - a long time ago. I could lose money on mining in theory if the .1 bitcoin I get per month drops below the price of the tiny amount of electricity it burns.
I don't read bitcoin news, I don't read about its development, I don't visit sites where people talk bitcoin. Got a real job, long career, and ain't got time for that shit.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Thursday May 24 2018, @04:44PM (4 children)
> the miner acquired at least 51 percent of the network's total hashpower
Well .. there's your problem.
What can you do about that? Make it an 80% decision, hoping that the same people who can summon 51% somehow can't get to 80%?
It's a normal cryptocurrency issue. How about you tell us how that major achievement happened, dear TFA ?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 24 2018, @04:52PM (2 children)
I'd say it's a normal Proof Of Work cryptocurrency issue. As for how: isn't that rather obvious? The attackers' combined efforts hashed faster than everyone else put together.
As unsuccessful as it has been at gaining popular adoption for securing e-mail and similar communications, I've long thought that a Web-of-Trust type solution seems appropriate here. As I mentioned above, it looks like Ripple is slowly working toward that kind of solution - slowly because they can already process 1500+ transactions per second without having to open up too wide of a web. Do I trust them to successfully implement a wide web of trustable validators? No, no I don't - and I don't like their 100B reserve currency just waiting to be dumped by decision of the validators, either. But I do like the core concepts, especially throwing PoW under the bus.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 24 2018, @05:13PM (1 child)
> The attackers' combined efforts hashed faster than everyone else put together.
Considering that the whole point of PoW is how unlikely that is, by design, it would have been nice to read about actual rates, and how they were achieved.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 24 2018, @05:20PM
I think you can infer the actual rates required from the data here: https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin%20gold/ [bitinfocharts.com]
As for how... yeah, I bet the exchange(s) that got hit with > $18M in double-spend fraud would like to know that, too.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by HyperQuantum on Friday May 25 2018, @11:17AM
Wouldn't this just create a different kind of problem? Anyone who would get more than 20% could then veto any transaction. "That's a nice business you got there... now pay me if you want your transactions to succeed"
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Thursday May 24 2018, @05:09PM (4 children)
I dunno. I think I'll just stick to good old American paper dollar bills.
.. although they are now worth only about half what they were just a few years ago. :(
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 24 2018, @05:24PM
One of the great disappointments of growing old. In the 1980s, the idea of a "six figure salary" was glittering pie-in-the-sky. Then I got one in the 1990s, now kids fresh out of school are starting in my field at $95K+.
Housing seems to have quietly inflated 50% over the last 5 years in my general area, gas is creeping back over $3/gallon... and I still get those good old, reliable 3% annual cost of living raises... woo, f-ing, hoo.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @06:07PM (2 children)
yeah, counterfeit Greenbacks issued by international central banksters as part of a fractional reserve banking system. way to go, slave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @06:30PM (1 child)
... in a violently imposed monopoly?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 24 2018, @06:36PM
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon died over 150 years ago, and his ideas still haven't gained traction in more than a tiny sliver of the world. You can keep hoping, though.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Justin Case on Thursday May 24 2018, @05:16PM (10 children)
Proof of work is an evil capitalist idea that is obsolete now that everybody is nice and everything is free.
Why should you have to demonstrate that you did work in order to get money? Everybody should Just Get Money. By magic. From nowhere.
We have the technology to make everybody rich. Except then they would, by definition, be evil capitalists, so we'd have to null out the blockchain and start over. But these things can be solved if we just agree to all love each other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @08:28PM (9 children)
Mildly amusing, but you can't even get the "evil capitalist" part correct so meh.
Oddly enough you are pretty close to the mark as to how things could actually be. Humans want to be useful, if all work was actually necessary and useful we wouldn't have a problem getting people to do the work that keeps humanity's activities running. We could do away with a LOT of bullshit work only necessary to keep the bean counters happy.
Basically our imaginary "money" has become the object of worship and we create entire industries around it that in reality are not necessary. The pursuit of money, and the limitations that "economics" imposes upon human activity is actually one of the more insane aspects of our modern society. It is not easy to switch out of the system, but just because you don't realize the problems and potential solutions doesn't make our Capitalist system "OK". There is a place for free market economics, but it should be much MUCH smaller than it is. Hell, capitalism is the direct cause of the marketing nightmare we live in.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 24 2018, @09:04PM (7 children)
A major obstruction to ending the nightmare is that it is objectively better than most previous nightmares within living memory. So many people "have it better today than ever before" that any efforts at change are resisted and rejected without much consideration.
It's starting to turn around: when my father went to college (late '60s), you could work menial summer jobs like pumping gas and save enough money to pay state University tuition for the whole academic year - if you managed to get a degree, that could leapfrog your income all the way up to a point where a working couple could afford a new house in the suburbs and a couple of new cars. Today the houses are bigger, the cars are fancier, but the ability to bootstrap up from nothing to get them is starting to falter - everything is getting to be out-of-reach if you don't win some sort of lottery (the most common being: born to money.)
If you can stand a sappy chick-flick, Anne Hathaway in Becoming Jane does a nice job of painting the economic picture of late 1700s England. After 175 years of "improving" from that situation, I feel like we're headed back there in a big hurry.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 26 2018, @03:07AM (6 children)
Expensive luxury homes and cars aren't a valid measure of what you should be "reaching" for, much less be "everything" that one could reach for. Maybe you should look into living in a lower cost of living area and just skip that above nonsense?
Why would that happen? You haven't mentioned anything that would turn back the clock 200+ years to the extreme social stratification of then. Funny how we transitioned from the mild troubles mentioned in the first paragraph to this dire threat.
I think there's a simple solution here - don't measure your success that way.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 26 2018, @11:56AM (5 children)
And they are not what "I" reach for... judging by market trends of what is being built and bought, it is what "we" as a nation and even a species are reaching for.
You tell me, what was so dire about the 1700s?
By "my" measure of success, the 1700s have an additional 300 years of future without ecological disaster, they're looking pretty good compared to today.
What's really going to suck is when we get the ecological / overpopulation disaster of 2100 coupled with the economic disparity of the 1700s.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 26 2018, @09:19PM (4 children)
Are you judging by market trends or are you saying shit?
Such as the already mentioned social stratification and dying from curable diseases?
Because the 1700s led to today, they are exactly as bad as today.
Good think we're not heading that way, right?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 26 2018, @09:50PM (3 children)
It's just shit, we all know that housing hasn't grown in square footage per person since the 1940s... no references required.
Making almost as much sense as the first quote above.
If that's what you think, just die happy - like our JW relatives and boomer parents - they'll be dead before the shit hits the fan, so why not deny it and enjoy the ride today. My boomer asshole relatives live on waterfront, but sea level rise doesn't bother them in the least because they're already 70.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 27 2018, @12:53AM (2 children)
And that was relevant how? You still haven't supported your earlier claim. Instead, to the contrary you ignore both that square footage varies hugely in price and that most of the cost of a home in high cost regions is in the land not in the square feet of habitable space on that land.
And yet it's true. A reset to the 1700s means one does this all over, perhaps not being so lucky with respect to dealings with tyranny or existential threats like nuclear or biological warfare.
A rise of a few meters of sea level over a couple of centuries is not even a threat we would notice. It's tiresome going from nebulous threat to nebulous threat without something serious ever happening. In the meantime, we're seeing the greatest elevation of humanity out of poverty and war ever.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 27 2018, @02:25AM (1 child)
You know, it's weird, because you're making sense in your other responses - I was just going to accuse you of being high(er than normal) and out of touch with reality here.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 27 2018, @04:22AM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 26 2018, @02:19AM
Note the very first problem. Casting everything in terms of need than in terms of want and desires, and doing it all strictly from the point of view of Mr. AC. Well, Mr. AC, your continued existence is not necessary to me (and indeed not necessary to the vast majority of humanity). Does that mean we should end it?
If that's true, then we must have a really sane society, right? Let us recall here that doing anything on a scale that supports seven billion people requires a vast amount of resources, energy, and man-power. Economics is the study of any process that lets us survive that.
Let's also talk about the key point of money. Money's purpose is to simplify trade, not to be an object of worship.
The fact that we have yet to come up with anything better is what makes our capitalist system far better than merely "OK". In particular, I think it's counterproductive to propose to end an important component of a capitalist system, like money, without having an adequate replacement in mind. I often find that people who do so, plan to replace the component with a neutered version of the component, such as replacing money with crippled money so that you can't actually use it for much. Or relatively free markets with broken markets that barely work.
Why should it be shrunk? Instead, I think it should be expanded. But then my experiences with free markets have been very positive.
Yea, right. I don't buy that.