NV1-based Diamond Edge Swaaye, CC-By-SA 3.0 |
That is a long way from Curtis Priem's kitchen table, a $2.5M A-round from Sutter Hill and Sequoia, and the NV1.
I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm doing in Digital Preservation.
NV1-based Diamond Edge Swaaye, CC-By-SA 3.0 |
Source |
the difference between where we're heading and where we'd need to be to achieve the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. It makes for some pretty grim reading. Given last year's greenhouse gas emissions, we can afford fewer than four similar years before we would exceed the total emissions compatible with limiting the planet's warming to 1.5° C above pre-industrial conditions.
...
The report ascribes this situation to two distinct emissions gaps: between the goals of the Paris Agreement and what countries have pledged to do and between their pledges and the policies they've actually put in place.
Source |
The leading source for estimating Bitcoin's electricity consumption is the Cambridge Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, whose current central estimate is 117TWh/year.and their rhetoric:
Adjusting Christian Stoll et al's 2018 estimate of Bitcoin's carbon footprint to the current CBECI estimate gives a range of about 50.4 to 125.7 MtCO2/yr for Bitcoin's opex emissions, or between Portugal and Myanmar.
Cryptocurrencies assume that society is committed to this waste of energy and hardware forever. Their response is frantic greenwashing, such as claiming that because Bitcoin mining allows an obsolete, uncompetitive coal-burning plant near St. Louis to continue burning coal it is somehow good for the environment.
But, they argue, mining can use renewable energy. First, at present it doesn't. For example, Luxxfolio implemented their commitment to 100% renewable energy by buying 15 megawatts of coal-fired power from the Navajo Nation!.
Second, even if it were true that cryptocurrencies ran on renewable power, the idea that it is OK for speculation to waste vast amounts of renewable power assumes that doing so doesn't compete with more socially valuable uses for renewables, or indeed for power in general.
Source |
Following existing policies out to the turn of the century would leave us facing over 3° C of warming.
In the name of blatant self-promotion, below the fold I look at how this insight has held up since.
- The income to a participant in a P2P network of this kind should be linear in their contribution of resources to the network.
- The costs a participant incurs by contributing resources to the network will be less than linear in their resource contribution, because of the economies of scale.
- Thus the proportional profit margin a participant obtains will increase with increasing resource contribution.
- Thus the effects described in Brian Arthur's Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy will apply, and the network will be dominated by a few, perhaps just one, large participant.
Source |
Source |
Surprisingly, I'm getting good data from CD-Rs more than 14 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 12 years old. Your mileage may vary.Here are the subsequent annual updates:
it is defined as the process of seeking electoral victory or legislative relief for grievances by helping political actors find and mobilize a sympathetic public, and is designed to create the image of public consensus where there is none. Astroturfing is the use of fake grassroots efforts that primarily focus on influencing public opinion and typically are funded by corporations and political entities to form opinions.
Donald Trump, 2019 |
Who knows, maybe we’ll pay off our $35 trillion dollar [national debt], hand them a little crypto check, right? We’ll hand them a little Bitcoin and wipe away our $35 trillionBelow the fold I discuss the gaslighting the cryptosphere is using in their massive attempt to purchase "regulatory clarity", and what the scale of this investment suggests about the profits they expect to garner if it succeeds.
Source |
SEC vs. Consensys |
The SEC is charging Consensys for unauthorized sales of securities through MetaMask Staking and for failure to register as a broker and a dealer while offering crypto trades and staking services through MetaMask Staking and Swaps. The SEC says that Consensys took $250 million in fees as an unregistered broker.Consensys' defense strategy poses potentially serious problems for the concept of open source, because they are gaslighting about the software that is the basis for the SEC's complaint being open source. Were the court to (a) fall for their gaslighting but (b) agree with the SEC's complaint it could provide a basis for imposing liability on open source developers.
MetaMask is Consensys’ main money maker — a popular browser-based wallet that also lets you stake ETH and buy and sell crypto via decentralized exchanges with “swaps.”
Kanav Kariya |
In many cases, the essential attribute of a crypto token is liquidity: What you want, often, is a token that trades a lot, because your goal for the token is to trade it a lot. Real-world utility, a sensible business model, acceptance in real transactions, etc., are all less important than just trading if you think of crypto as a toy market for traders to play with. If a token trades a lot at a high price, that in itself justifies the price, because that is all that is asked of a token: It doesn’t need to have a good underlying business or cash flows; it just has to trade a lot at a high price.Below the fold I discuss the astonishing story behind this explanation of why wash trading is so rife in cryptocurrencies.
Source |
But decades of being congratulated and indulged for the relentless pursuit of their own self-interest has turned the heads of too many of our successful rich. They really believe that they are different: that they owe little to the society from which they have sprung and in which they trade, that taxes are for little people. We are lucky to have them, and, if anything, owe them a favour.Below the fold I continue the "Old man yells at cloud" theme of recent posts by trying to clarify an aspect of the current Jensen Huang hagiography.
X11R1 on Sun Techfury90 CC0 |
From: rws@mit-bold (Robert W. Scheifler) To: window@athena Subject: window system X Date: 19 June 1984 0907-EDT (Tuesday) I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W. The code seems fairly solid at this point, although there are still some deficiencies to be fixed up. We at LCS have stopped using W, and are now actively building applications on X. Anyone else using W should seriously consider switching. This is not the ultimate window system, but I believe it is a good starting point for experimentation. Right at the moment there is a CLU (and an Argus) interface to X; a C interface is in the works. The three existing applications are a text editor (TED), an Argus I/O interface, and a primitive window manager. There is no documentation yet; anyone crazy enough to volunteer? I may get around to it eventually. Anyone interested in seeing a demo can drop by NE43-531, although you may want to call 3-1945 first. Anyone who wants the code can come by with a tape. Anyone interested in hacking deficiencies, feel free to get in touch.Scheifler was right that it was a "good starting point for experimentation", but it wasn't really a usable window system until version 11 was released on 15th September 1987. I was part of the team that burned the midnight oil at MIT to get that release out, but my involvement started in late 1985.
Source |
The largest major platform shutdown in recent memory is the closure of the digital stores for the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U platforms. Nintendo shut down the 3DS and Wii U eShops on March 27, 2023, resulting in the removal of 2,413 digital titles. Although many of these are likely available on other platforms, Video Games Chronicle estimates that over 1,000 of those games were exclusive to those platforms’ digital stores and are no longer available in any form, including first-party Nintendo titles like Dr. Luigi, Dillon’s Rolling Western, Mario & Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move, and Pokémon Rumble U. The closures also affected around 500 historical games reissued by Nintendo through their Virtual Console storefronts, over 300 of which are believed not available on any other platform or service.Below the fold I discuss recent developments in this area.
Anton, 24, and James Peraire-Bueno, 28, were arrested Tuesday, charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Each brother faces "a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each count," the DOJ said.Below the fold I look into the details of the exploit as alleged in the indictment, and what it suggests about the evolution of Ethereum.
The alleged scheme was launched in December 2022 by the brothers, who studied at MIT, after months of planning, the indictment said. The pair seemingly relied on their "specialized skills" and expertise in crypto trading to fraudulently gain access to "pending private transactions" on the blockchain, then "used that access to alter certain transactions and obtain their victims’ cryptocurrency," the DOJ said
In the image below, the vertical blue lines indicate the previous three halvings (2012-11-28, 2016-7-9, and 2020-5-11). Note how the price has jumped significantly after each halving.The most recent halvening happened on Friday, April 19th. It was eagerly awaited so, six weeks later, it is time to go below the fold and look at the effects.
Source
Mining Pools 5/17/24 |
when I look at Bitcoin today, I do not see a central third party whose efforts are a key determining factor in the enterprise. The network on which Bitcoin functions is operational and appears to have been decentralized for some time, perhaps from inception.Below the fold, thanks to a tip from Molly White, I look at recent research suggesting that there is in fact a "central third party" coordinating the enterprise of Bitcoin mining.
...
Over time, there may be other sufficiently decentralized networks and systems
Source |
we collected a random sample of just under 1 million webpages from the archives of Common Crawl, an internet archive service that periodically collects snapshots of the internet as it exists at different points in time. We sampled pages collected by Common Crawl each year from 2013 through 2023 (approximately 90,000 pages per year) and checked to see if those pages still exist today.Their results are not surprising, but there are a number of surprising things about their report. Below the fold, I explain.
We found that 25% of all the pages we collected from 2013 through 2023 were no longer accessible as of October 2023. This figure is the sum of two different types of broken pages: 16% of pages are individually inaccessible but come from an otherwise functional root-level domain; the other 9% are inaccessible because their entire root domain is no longer functional.
Source |
"If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company."Elon Musk, 24th April 2024
Source |
Source |
It seems the driver thought that it was OK to drive home with a blood alcohol level of 0.26 because he believed Musk's hype that Fake Self Driving would handle it despite having to repeatedly override it on the way out.Now, the team's Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani are out with In 2018 crash, Tesla’s Autopilot just followed the lane lines. Below the fold I look into what it reveals about Autopilot.
Source |
@tzedonn |
There is a surprising amount of respect for people who appear to know nothing about the industry. They’re known as the “left curves.”Below the fold I look at the left side of the curve
The nickname comes from a popular meme in crypto that shows a bell curve with investors on the left who know nothing, or very little, and those in the fat middle of the curve who know something about crypto. On the right are investors who seemingly know everything.
Through blockchain addresses used by ‘‘pig butchering’’ victims, we trace crypto flows and uncover methods commonly used by scammers to obfuscate their activities, including multiple transactions, swapping between cryptocurrencies through DeFi smart contracts, and bridging across blockchains. The perpetrators interact freely with major crypto exchanges, sending over 104,000 small potential inducement payments to build trust with victims. Funds exit the crypto network in large quantities, mostly in Tether, through less transparent but large exchanges—Binance, Huobi, and OKX. These criminal enterprises pay approximately 87 basis points in transaction fees and appear to have recently moved at least $75.3 billion into suspicious exchange deposit accounts, including $15.2 billion from exchanges commonly used by U.S. investors. Our findings highlight how the ‘‘reputable’’ crypto industry provides the common gateways and exit points for massive amounts of criminal capital flows. We hope these findings will help shed light on and ultimately stop these heinous crimes.
Griffin & Wei Fig. 9 |
Source |
we increase the capacity of [optical data storage] to the petabit level by extending the planar recording architecture to three dimensions with hundreds of layers, meanwhile breaking the optical diffraction limit barrier of the recorded spots. We develop an optical recording medium based on a photoresist film doped with aggregation-induced emission dye, which can be optically stimulated by femtosecond laser beams. This film is highly transparent and uniform, and the aggregation-induced emission phenomenon provides the storage mechanism. It can also be inhibited by another deactivating beam, resulting in a recording spot with a super-resolution scale. This technology makes it possible to achieve exabit-level storage by stacking nanoscale disks into arrays, which is essential in big data centres with limited space.Below the fold I discuss this technology.
Exabytes | Revenue | $/GB | |
---|---|---|---|
Flash | 120 | $38.7B | $0.320 |
Hard Disk | 693 | $26.8B | $0.039 |
LTO Tape | 40 | $0.65B | $0.016 |
Source |
"Vicky" |
I showed my phone to my friend and explained that I was stringing Vicky along because I’d heard about a new kind of investment fraud that often started with a random text message. I had a hunch that this was why “Vicky” was texting me. The scam was called “pig butchering” because the scammers liked to build up the victim’s confidence with a pretend romantic relationship and made-up investment gains before stealing all their money in one fell swoop—like how hogs are fattened up before their slaughter.This is a romance- and cryptocurrency-enabled version of the "Wee Forest Folk" scam we described in our 2003 SOSP paper.
The Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project will develop enabling technologies for an integrated “virtual” library to provide an array of new services and uniform access to networked information collections. The Integrated Digital Library will create a shared environment linking everything from personal information collections, to collections of conventional libraries, to large data collections shared by scientists.Stanford librarians Vicky Reich and Rebecca Wesley provided the "library" input for the research.
Wayback Machine, 11/11/98 |
Jeremykemp CC BY-SA 3.0, Link |
USDT "market cap" |
BTC "price" |