Source You may have seen a Bitcoin Teller Machine (BTM) and wondered who would use one and and why. I have, there is one in our local Safeway. Elijah Nicholson-Messmer and Ella Ceron look into BTMs in Bitcoin ATMs Flood Black, Latino Areas, Charging Fees up to 22%. The headline s … | Continue reading
The previous post in this series, Elon Musk: Threat or Menace Part 3, was based on the impressively detailed reporting from a team at the Washington Post on the crash that killed Jeremy Banner in The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash. The team's subsequent equally … | Continue reading
Below the fold is the text of a talk I gave to Berkeley's Information Systems Seminar exploring the history of attempts to build decentralized systems and why so many of them end up centralized. As usual, you don't need to take notes. The text of my talk with links to the sources … | Continue reading
Source Below the fold is the story of how I got a full-time Internet connection at my apartment 32 years ago next month, and the incredible success of my first ISP. The reason I'm now able to tell this story is that Tom Jennings, the moving spirit behind the ISP has two posts des … | Continue reading
@tzedonn Muyao Shen explains the concept of the Left Curve in The Big Winners of This Crypto Bull Market Are the `Left Curves’: There is a surprising amount of respect for people who appear to know nothing about the industry. They’re known as the “left curves.” The nickname comes … | Continue reading
Thankfully, pig butchering scams are getting attention. Three weeks after I posted Tracing The Pig Butchers, John M. Griffin and Kevin Mei posted How Do Crypto Flows Finance Slavery? The Economics of Pig Butchering: Through blockchain addresses used by ‘‘pig butchering’’ victims, … | Continue reading
Source Sabine Hossenfelder does the good Dr. Pangloss proud in her report on A 3D nanoscale optical disk memory with petabit capacity by Miao Zhao et al. Their abstract claims that: we increase the capacity of [optical data storage] to the petabit level by extending the planar re … | Continue reading
2016 Media Shipments Exabytes Revenue $/GB Flash 120 $38.7B $0.320 Hard Disk 693 $26.8B $0.039 LTO Tape 40 $0.65B $0.016 Six years ago I wrote Archival Media: Not a Good Business and included this table. The argument went as follows: The value that can be extracted from data deca … | Continue reading
Source Apart from getting started in the midst of one of Silicon Valley's regular downturns, another great thing about the beginnings of Nvidia was that instead of insisting on the "minimum viable product" our VCs, Sutter Hill and Sequoia, gave us the time to develop a real archi … | Continue reading
Source Apart from getting started in the midst of one of Silicon Valley's regular downturns, another great thing about the beginnings of Nvidia was that instead of insisting on the "minimum viable product" our VCs, Sutter Hill and Sequoia, gave us the time to develop a real archi … | Continue reading
In early December 2022 when I wrote skeptically about the economics of Bitcoin mining in Foolish Lenders the Bitcoin "price" was around $17K. It has now climbed 153% to around $43K and, below the fold, I am still posting skeptically about the economics of mining. Source The first … | Continue reading
"Vicky" Chapter 18 of Zeke Faux's Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall is entitled "Pig Butchering". It starts when he receives a supposed wrong-number text from a "Vicky": I showed my phone to my friend and explained that I was stringing Vicky along becaus … | Continue reading
The Stanford Digital Library Project stated its goal thus: 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 Integ … | Continue reading
I apologize for the delay in posting but, as you will see, the post I was working on grew rather long. It seems obvious that doing crimes and writing the receipts to an immutable public ledger is risky, but many criminals have been convinced that there is no risk because cryptocu … | Continue reading
You know how backups work great until you really need them? Below the fold, a lesson learned from my recent example of this phenomenon. A long time ago I was feeling rich, so I spent nearly $2000 on one of the first-generation Mac Airs. This led to me travelling with a laptop I c … | Continue reading
Jeremykemp CC BY-SA 3.0, Link This is the famous Gartner hype cycle and it certianly appears that autonomous vehicles are currently in the Trough of Disillusionment. Whether they will eventually soar up to the Plateau of Productivity is unknown, but for now it is clear even to pr … | Continue reading
USDT "market cap" The good news for Tether is shown in this graph, with two huge surges in "market cap" this year. One of about $15B early in the year, and another of about $6B recently. It looks like the euphoria over the prospect of spot Bitcoin ETFs has solved the Greater Fool … | Continue reading
Source This isn't America's Finest News Source, it is this morning's Crypto page from Bloomberg. I couldn't resist posting it. | Continue reading
Source In Part 1 I applied basic arithmetic to the logistics of Elon Musk's claimed plans for colonizing Mars in 2050 to show they were implausible. Below the fold I continue, first by discussing Maciej Cegłowski's equally basic dissection of NASA's economically implausible plans … | Continue reading
The attitude of the crypto-bros and tech more generally is that they are going to make so much money that paying for whatever resource they need to make it will be a drop in the ocean. Amd that externalities such as carbom emissions are someone else's problem. I discussed Proof-o … | Continue reading
Source CC-BY-SA-4.0 Anything Elon Musk says must be treated skeptically. This is particularly true of anything involving timescales (see Tesla robotaxis). And it is even more true of Musk's plans for visiting and eventually colonizing Mars. Below the fold in part 1 of this two-pa … | Continue reading
A major theme of this blog since 2014's Economies of Scale in Peer-to-Peer Networks has been that decentralized systems aren't, because economic forces overwhelm the technologies of decentralization. Last year I noted that this rule applied to Decentralized Finance (DeFi) in Shad … | Continue reading
Source The SEC has a long history of refusing to approve spot Bitcoin ETFs, on the reasonable basis that the Bitcoin market was heavily manipulated. Crypto-skeptics like Bitfinex'ed and Davd Gerard have been pointing out obvious instances of manipulation for many years, and there … | Continue reading
Yesterday, at the DigiPres conference, Vicky Reich and I were awarded a "Sustainability Excellence Award" by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. This is a tribute to the sustained hard work of the entire LOCKSS team over more than a quarter-century. Below the fold are the … | Continue reading
Tether has been one of the major mysteries of the cryptosphere for a long time. It has never been audited, and has been described as being "practically quilted out of red flags". Matt Levine says "I feel like eventually Tether is going to be an incredibly interesting story, but I … | Continue reading
Source The New York Times team of Tripp Mickle, Cade Metz and Yiwen Lu have been covering San Francisco's experiment with robotaxis from Waymo and Cruise for some time. Their latest report is G.M.’s Cruise Moved Fast in the Driverless Race. It Got Ugly., and it is a doozy. Leavin … | Continue reading
Source The New York Times team of Tripp Mickle, Cade Metz and Yiwen Lu have been covering San Francisco's experiment with robotaxis from Waymo and Cruise for some time. Their latest report is G.M.’s Cruise Moved Fast in the Driverless Race. It Got Ugly., and it is a doozy. Leavin … | Continue reading
This post celebrates my weird old car's 30thbirthday. It is a Mazda RX-7 dated November 1993, carrying the California license RX7 DSHR. I bought it new and in the almost 30 years since have driven it for nearly 140K miles. Unusually for an RX-7 this old, it is almost completely s … | Continue reading
Regulation works by assigning liability for actions to specific actors. The whole idea of decentralization is that by diffusing responsibility among a large number of participants the system could evade regulation. Each participant would bear such a small part of the responsibili … | Continue reading
Source What caught my eye in Olga Kharif's Crypto Delistings From Exchanges Are Already Running at a Record Pace This Year was this: Trading volume on most exchanges has plummeted in the past year, even as the number of coins has continued to multiply, with more than 1.8 million … | Continue reading
Source I started writing about the danger to innocent road users, pedestrians and first responders caused by Elon Musk lying about the capabilities of his buggy Level 2 driver assistance technologies (Autopilot and FullFake Self Driving) two-and-a-half years ago and followed up w … | Continue reading
In Not "Sufficiently Decentralized I explained how the SEC's William Hinman kneecapped his agency's ability to regulate Bitcoin and Ethereum, handing the baton to the CFTC. Matt Levine explains the result: The regulatory situation in the US is that there are exchange-traded funds … | Continue reading
Mining power 25 June 2018 Perhaps the most consequential result of the tsunami of Blockchain Gaslighting ocurred on 14th June 2018 when William Hinman, the Director of the SEC's Division of Corporate Finance gave a speech to the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit: Crypto entitled D … | Continue reading
Five years ago I posted Optical Media Durability and discovered: 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. Four years ago I repeated the mind-numbing process of feeding 45 disks through the r … | Continue reading
Although the first Non-Fungible Token was minted in 2014, it wasn't until Cryptokitties bought the Ethereum blockchain to its knees in Dec... | Continue reading
A major reason that cryptocurrencies have become such a problem is that mainstream journalists normally just regurgitate the hype they are f... | Continue reading
I was asked to make a brief contribution to discussion of the President's Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Ass... | Continue reading
The February 8 th arrest of Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, accused of laundering the proceeds of the August 2016 theft of nearly 120... | Continue reading
I was asked at short notice to fill in for a speaker in Stanford's EE380 course who had to cancel. Below the fold is a hastily updated vers... | Continue reading
I was asked at short notice to fill in for a speaker in Stanford's EE380 course who had to cancel. Below the fold is a hastily updated vers... | Continue reading
Back in April I wrote Cryptocurrency's Carbon Footprint about the catastrophic carbon emissions of Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies such as B... | Continue reading
I spent two decades working on the problem of preserving digital documents, especially those published on the Web, in the LOCKSS Program . S... | Continue reading
On the evening of July 2 nd the REvil ransomware gang exploited a 0-day vulnerability to launch a supply chain attack on customers of Kase... | Continue reading
Thomas Claiburn's FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof discusses two ... | Continue reading
This is the website of DeFi100, a "decentralized finance" system running on the Binance Smart Chain, after the promoters pulled a $32M exit... | Continue reading
This is the website of DeFi100, a "decentralized finance" system running on the Binance Smart Chain, after the promoters pulled a $32M exit... | Continue reading
The Internet Archive is a remarkable institution, which has become increasingly important during the pandemic. It has been for many years ... | Continue reading
The invaluable statistics published by Backblaze show that, despite being built from technologies close to the physical limits ( Heat-Assis... | Continue reading