That’s assuming people purchase assets that increase in value over time. And that most people are fiscally responsible and manage their debt properly. Which isn’t the case for probably 90%+ of Americans.

It’s very easily to live a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle (even in higher incomes, people adapt to expensive lifestyles very quickly) and spend a lot of money on vacations, cars, eating out etc... and only consider your living costs as a passive constant that you pay no attention to. I imagine most people think of spending and budget allocation in this way, so for them having a mortgage makes more sense.

Rather if you think of every purchase in terms of your total net worth and you spend a significant amount of your income towards saving, investments, and assets that don’t depreciate, then sure, maybe renting is your better option.

OTOH it can also be argued that fiscally irresponsible people should not be taking on mortgages as they are the more likely to end up with a foreclosure.

I’m pretty sure if Arizona’s lawmakers understood the underlying nature of machine learning and autonomous driving, they wouldn’t allow self driving cars to operate.

I don’t care how good your models and data are, until you’re able to write an algorithm that can fully handle and learn from a situation it was completely unprepared for, it will always encounter edge cases like this.

This is what happens when we have a society of people saying AI is already here, people like Elon Musk saying AI is a “significant threat” despite "AI" being essentially a black box statistical model in it's current form. From what I’ve seen, the general public thinks we’re 20+ years of AI than we really are.

You need general AI before AI can drive a car, full stop. Otherwise, you need to isolate roads from other human drivers pedestrians, and cyclists. It just won’t be reasonably safe until then.

>You need general AI before AI can drive a car

1.3 million people died in the USA from car crashes in 2017. An additional 20-50 million are injured. You don't need to be perfect, you just need to be better than the baseline.

That said, and to be fair to your feelings, Uber certainly is not better. This is a fact I'm sure lawmakers in Arizona are discussing right now.

So in the dystopian future of Chinese bank account/citizen social points and even present-day American Fed/Bank collusion, you are continuously supportive of centralization? And now you claim the experiment has been "worth playing out" while Bitcoin has experienced the most adoption it's ever had within the last few months? What?????? Please tell me you are joking.

Also, what incentive do governments have to keep people paying their taxes and using their own fiat that corporations seem to be able to control and play with hundreds of billions on their own accord and on separate rules. What about privacy, with the government having easy access to every financial institution I encounter and every transaction I make, why should I agree to that?

I want the government to raise taxes, because I want it to do a lot of useful things for society that it can't otherwise do. That's what government is for.

And I want it to be very hard to dodge taxes, so everybody pays their share. If that means less privacy, so be it.

Pretty much all the early adopters who sought to use bitcoin as a currency have backed out because transactions aren’t confirmed for days, in which the price swings wildly, or transaction costs are insane, or some combination of both.

And what about privacy? At least with banks you have some. Or with cash you have the ultimate privacy. With Bitcoin every transaction is public and permanent. You’ve got to convert to dollars at some point, because bitcoin is no longer really transactable itself, and once you do your entire spending history is now available to the big bad government.

@rjromero, it doesn't hurt to be courteous and respectful to people. The crypto community has a very bad reputation for obvious reasons and it really is not pleasant.

Opinions are irrelevant. People will store the value they generate by working in any medium that offers them the most security and long-term increase of value over time. If a cryptocurrency is more secure, convenient, and less deflationary than someone's local fiat counterpart, why would they not store most of their value in it? If we go through 20 years of seeing Bitcoin outperform the inflation of a dollar, no hijackings of the blockchain, no breaking of SHA or ECDSA, why would I not store a majority of my value in it?

The odds we encounter aliens are remarkably low, but what are the odds we encounter aliens with a similar evolution pattern, that is, reproductive-driven intelligence and similar somatic senses?

We could stumble upon some weird aseuxal amoeba type beings who don't even have a personal ego or concept of private property, they just float around on organic ships and communicate through flows of slimy alien-goo. Whew, what a bummer would that be.

ET finally shows up and it turns out they're Marxists, that is really going to upset quite few people.

So you can not start running any code session on the SGX at ALL without this Remote Attestation call to Intel? That seems silly, considering the SGX has two 128 bit keys on board (one known to Intel, and one known only to the SGX).

Oh, it's not quite that bad. You can run SGX code and work with encrypted data, including generating attestation messages. It's just that there's no way to verify those attestation messages yourself; you have to ask Intel to do it.

It's also worth noting that SGX can run in two modes. There's "debug mode", which provides absolutely no security because a debugger has complete access to the state of the enclave. And then there's "release mode", which requires a key that you can only obtain by signing a commercial agreement and NDA with Intel.

Why the hell would Intel require an NDA to give you the private key?

That's shady af.

It's not actually an NDA (I've signed it). You have to agree to not use SGX to make un-debuggable malware.

Anyone have any links to read more about SGX? What's stopping someone from intercepting everything going down their and just doing the operations on their own while watching?

There is a series here: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-software-gua...

Also, Intel have been pushing something called Sawtooth for about a year now: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/intel-develops-sawtooth...

Essentially, the CPU has a private key. Using the corresponding public key you can send code to the CPU to execute and the CPU prevents even the OS from looking at the decrypted code. You can also check the signature of the CPU against a public Intel key to verify it is indeed an Intel CPU you are sending code to.

Ah I see. I'm seeing that you have 2 128-bit private keys on the enclave, one known to Intel and what that is not.

Can you not use the one not known to intel to do your own code signing against another client with ECDH? Why does it seem like they are pushing this "Intel Attestation" service? Wouldn't that cause Intel servers to be a single POF incase they aren't around to give a proper reply for the attestation request? (Imagine 100,000 nodes on the network all running smart contracts, or perhaps 10 years down the line they discontinue the service.)

IAS isn't technically a requirement of SGX. But if you want the ability to revoke hardware that is found to be compromised, someone needs to have that list and check against it.

I believe the plan is for IAS to be optional in future. It might already be, but then you have to implement the signature checking logic yourself. EPID is quite a complex signature scheme and you'd also need to find out from Intel which microcode/platform versions are revoked, etc. So IAS is more of a convenience than anything else.

I can’t believe people really care that much about seeing ads for pet food after Googling for the vet that they would let something like this run constantly in the background. Absolutely unfathomable to me.

Isn’t this just Proof of Stake?

No. This is something entirely different entirely.

Mining a cryptocurrency goes something like this: spend a ton of money investing in a state of the art server farm, hook server farm up to mining pool to earn Bitcoin, withdraw Bitcoin for money, spend money to upgrade your now obsolete server farm.

In addition to being needlessly inefficient, server farms are causing significant harms to the environment in ways that traditional currency does not, and is causing increases in electronics and electricity prices due to their high demand.

Proof-of-Stake is a way to solve this. Instead of computing power determining who creates the blocks (and earns the transaction fees/block rewards), and instead of miners spending Bitcoin to make Bitcoin, miners put their cyrptocurrency in a form of a lottery, with the winner writing the block without using any computing power. The result is the same, but much more efficient and without the environmental cons. It also may make the network more secure, since an attacker would need 51% of the wealth in the network in order to compromise it. And even if someone gained 51%, they would not attack the network because they have the most value to lose.

This article is also about using a lottery, but for a very different purpose. Microtransactions are difficult with current solutions, because vendors like PayPal, Visa, and Cryptocurrencies usually institute minimum fees. This system get around this system through the use of a lottery. As an example, instead of paying $1 to 10 different sites (say in a pay-per-view of newspaper articles), you pay with a reverse lottery ticket. This lottery ticket has a one in ten chance of winning, and if it does you have to pay $10. The resulting payment is the same, but all your payments are in large sums so that transaction fees are taken care of. If the newspaper receives 10 reverse lottery tickets, they will receive equivalent profits to charging each customer $1. Therefore, the customers pay the same and the sellers receive the same, but without transaction fees eating up nearly as large a percentage of the transaction that a micro transaction would.

Both systems use a lottery powered by blockchain randomness, but the similarities end there. The purposes and the meaning of the lotteries are completely different. In the case of the latter, it is actually a lottery you don't want to win.

Absolutely, this new generation of kids don't want to pay for anything on the App Store. Maybe the generation of ~5 or so years ago that had a stockpile of iTunes Gift Cards from Christmas did so, but the attitude towards paid applications seems very different now, at least from what I've seen with my younger cousins.

Till they discover they can earn gift cards for app stores through Google Opinion Rewards and buy any app they want. To be fair I know a handful of adults that do this.

The more people that do surveys like Google Opinion Rewards, the less frequently each person will receive surveys and the payouts will decrease. It's nowhere close to that but the Google Play Store also isn't close to the App Store for me at least. I have like $50 from doing surveys but there were barely any apps I wanted or want on Android.