If we stage a nation-wide boycot of Amazon, Walmart.com, and a few other big retailers (and stop using Google, Bing et al) I can almost guarantee it that they will move mountains to bring back net neutrality. You have to get the big corporations a profit motive to get anything done in this country.
If they start losing money they will have a much stronger motivation to act. I feel like they say they are for it but they are not spending considerable resources (they should be) to stand up to the FCC.
I think the rate of technological change will force the SEC regulatory system to adopt an RFC process open to the public (bypassing Congress), similar to IETF, and I think Direct Democracy is an inevitable outcome of such disruption.
That's a really strong statement. RFC structured this way because they needed people to contribute whereas SEC and Congress don't want people involvement.
In a sense, almost everything you do with your money is 'gambling', spending it one way or another in the hope that the benefits of that decision outweigh the drawbacks (but without being 100% certain of that). Certainly, insurance, having a mortgage, and a pension scheme are also forms of 'legal gambling'.
At least traditional modern financial instruments still have some connection to an underlying real-world market, even if they are 10 layers of financial abstraction removed from reality. They can also always sort of justify it by saying that it provides liquidity and so on.
Harder to justify what the point of Bitcoin financial instruments is though, since it can't really be used for much at all in its current state. Maybe if it stabilized and became a proper store of value (whether the incentives to keep a cryptocurrency stable are even there remains another question), but now it's just so hype driven.
I guess ultimately 'the point' of it all it doesn't matter, people can trade in imaginary goods no problem. Still exposes the strangeness of modern financial markets.
The same will hold for Bitcoin almost surely. The fraction of transactions that are speculation and the fraction of holdings that are speculations are very different things. Most stock market transactions are speculation but they don't hold capital for very long. But most stock holdings are not speculation, they're just boring holdings of assets by pension funds, retail investors, etc.
> That's pretty much what people use stock market for anyway
That's what I used to think until I began to understand (through Mr Money Mustache posts) that lots of people with large amounts of money invest (i.e. buy-and-hold) in the stock market because, despite the annual ups and downs, it has historical net annual gains of 7-10% over the last hundred years...
> Investors try to build something while speculators just try to make money, no matter the cost to anybody else.
Based on your definition, what would you call Carl Icahn then?
I tend to agree with John Bogle's definition that both types of people are in it for the money, the only fundamental difference is the time horizon either is willing to wait to reap the returns from their investment.
The main difference between investment and speculation lies in the time horizon. Investment is concerned with capturing returns on the long-run with lower risk, while speculation is concerned with achieving returns over a short period of time. Bogle believes this is an important analysis to be taken into account as short-term, risky investments have been flooding the financial markets.
> Anybody that holds an financial instrument for less than five years (my definition) is a speculator.
So you think for instance that someone who puts all their income into a savings account, taking from it during the month to pay their expenses, is a speculator?
There are uses for short-term financial instruments other than speculation, for instance protecting the principal from inflation.
I'd argue that some investors - the angel / startup investors - are gamblers, they place their bets on 100 startups and bet that one of them will be the next Facebook and eventually either sell for billions, or go to the stock market itself to get billions.
The more traditional investor gets a stake in a company and due to that stake gets a say in the running of the company, thus having an influence on its future and growth (or decline). Less of a gamble there, it becomes part of their own responsibility then.
It's a shame that there isn't a common word in English to distinguish between positive-expected-value gambling and negative-expected-value gambling. They are fundamentally different pursuits.
It's going to be heavily dependent on what you're doing. WASM can be as fast as native code but is more likely to be 1/2 the speed of native on realistic benchmarks. However, the overhead of moving between WASM and JS is quite large so in practical use your WASM version might be slower than a pure JS version. WASM vs JS benchmarks I've seen show WASM anywhere from 40x faster than pure JS to 10x slower than pure JS, due to this overhead.
If you're doing a large amount of CPU intensive work that can be isolated from the rest of the code that is an ideal scenario for WASM. You have the translation overhead of JS->WASM once, then do the computation, then WASM->JS once to get the result. A small function or code that needs to call back into JS (for DOM access, to query some state in your app, etc) is going to have a lot of those translations so won't see much or any benefit.
Also like I said removal of net neutrality regulations means ISPs esp big ones can kill Bitcoin by blocking the default port used by the Bitcoin client and ISPs can more than just blocking a certain port. ISPs can identify and block all P2P traffic (anything that is not being sent or received to/from an approved central service) and do it in the name of protecting MPAA member revenue or whatever blanket execuse like killing off encrypted p2p communication like Signal et al)
Sure, but closing the default port limits the tech to people with the interest and technical knowledge to proxy it in such a way. ISPs could also do DPI or timing analysis to id the stream and slow or block it. It was tried successfully (by Comcast) on bittorrent in the the early 00's and is one of the things that triggered the whole Title II fight in the first place.
>It was tried successfully (by Comcast) on bittorrent in the the early 00's and is one of the things that triggered the whole Title II fight in the first place.
torrents are hard to hide because no matter how much encryption/obfuscation you do, you can't hide gigabytes of data being transferred between residential IPs, using random ports. bitcoin uses megabytes of data per hour, which means it's much easier to use stenography to hide it.
Here to all the folks who are A) not legal scholars but pretending to be from their mom's basement and B) unable to reason about the implications but still assert their opinions, there are a ton of references to this issue. Here is one:
Net neutrality rules are about source/destination of traffic, not the type. ISPs are allowed to discriminate for/against traffic based on the type of traffic and it would be terrible to prevent them from implementing those kinds of QoS rules.
If we're going to defend net neutrality, we should at least understand what we're fighting for. And it's decidedly not to allow BitTorrent traffic to make real-time protocols like VOIP unreliable. It's about not letting ISPs favor one service over its competitors. And it's about making sure that an indie developer can send traffic to internet users just as fast as Google can.
Discussions on technically-informed sites like this one should get the details of net neutrality correct.
Going with your "source/destination" definition, one Bitcoin/Signal user is source and the other is destination. They can require traffic to be exclusively between user and approved service provider, can't they?
If they prioritize traffic to/from one Bitcoin endpoint over another, that falls under net neutrality. If they prioritize non-Bitcoin traffic over all Bitcoin traffic, that doesn't.
Last mile includes my last mile and your last mile and cannot see why blocking P2P traffic would not be part of the definition of last mile. Each user would be limited to a set of approved centralized services. No user to user routing.
Only user to approved service and approved service to user.
Because net neutrality applies only to how the bits flow over the physical wiring (and radio signals) of the last mile. NOT the backbone. That's what it's about. Backbone operators can and do have peering contracts and give priority to some companies and not others.
ISPs can block all P2P traffic (bits flowing between residential IPs) and removal of Net Neutrality regulations will embolden them to do so, but it's also about the trend toward ISPs being giving the green light to do whatever they want, with eventually no regulation whatsoever.
Also like I said removal of net neutrality regulations means ISPs esp big ones can kill Bitcoin by blocking the default port used by the Bitcoin client and ISPs can more than just blocking a certain port. ISPs can identify and block all P2P traffic (anything that is not being sent or received to/from an approved central service) and do it in the name of protecting MPAA member revenue or whatever blanket execuse like killing off encrypted p2p communication like Signal et al)
