The supreme court of Norway just denied an appeal from a bank on a similar case in Norway. The person had been phished over a telephone call, and gave away passwords and 2fa token to what they believed was a bank employee.
In Turkey, 2FA tokens for banks generated by app or sent by SMS all contain a message about never giving the token or your password to a bank employee...
so if Norwegian banks did the same as Turkish banks, the customer is now fully liable for doing the exact opposite of what they've been explicitly told never to do by the warning clause accompanying each 2FA message
Not how the law works here - you're always liable in either case, but it is hoped that the message might prevent some cases of fraud.
It's difficult to secure people against social engineering...
A common argument from climate change deniers is that the planet was warmer before and things were fine then. So I guess the comment plays into that, as the changes we are facing might not be new for Earth, but they are new for a Earth with humans.
Having a more accurate image of what is happening is important. I think many people imagine the planet becoming an inhabitable desert, all life dying and oceans boiling off. This is a wrong image and causes unnecessary pain and anxiety. I know a young person who killed themselves because of climate anxiety.
I'm optimistic that humans and most animals could adapt into a warmer planet.
That is the point of the comment. No matter how bad it gets, biological creatures will adapt as they always have while lots of existing species will become extinct; none of this is new. The question is can people adapt and remain what we think of as people in what we think of as our civilization. Given the current horrific weather (droughts/floods/heat/cold/storms/fires etc) how will humanity adapt without seriously changing what we think of as life. Perhaps we can live underground, or all move to the poles, or try a new planet somewhere. But if weather continues to get worse and worse eventually fewer and fewer people will survive, and we might become like the majority of species that no longer exist.
To some degree you can trust them, as data request to Signal have been through the court systems which is public. You can actually look up and see what data they have turned over after receiving court orders to do so.
Would a secret CIA subsidiary hand over data for a routine civilian court request? If anything not doing so would make their covert surveillance tool even more trustworthy and effective.
That's my point, if Signal were a CIA front with some kind of secret backdoor, it would probably not reveal that in response to a request from a Central District of California grand jury.
There are services that offer bots that increases your listening count on Spotify. People with dirty money create a bunch of artists and songs on Spotify, and use the services to increase the listening count. Spotify pay out royalties based on those numbers. So they pay the service with dirty money, and get clean money from Spotify
Another important aspect of suitability is the building time for new ships, in most cases you will only be able to fight the current war with the ships that you already have or are currently under construction. So having ships survive is important, and it is why so many of the WW1/2 navies were so afraid of using them.
As I painfully experienced recently, browsers on desktop ignores host file with DoH enabled. Had to create a separate browser profile to get this to work with DoH and other privacy/security settings to work
To the user, this is transparent (for some cards anyway, eg Binance), so its effectively the same thing. Yes, I'm not actually sending the merchant crypto, but what does it matter? I am using my crypto balance to buy things, the fact that the merchant isn't receiving crypto is an implementation detail. Conceptually, it could be a choice left up to them.
The question was if anyone is using cryptocurrencies for legitimate purposes and I was saying that I am using cryptocurrencies to buy things, I didn't say that the people I'm buying things from are receiving the cryptocurrencies and to me it makes little difference if they are or aren't, I have a crypto balance that I use to buy things.
> Yes, I'm not actually sending the merchant crypto, but what does it matter?
In the context of the question, it matters a lot. You're not using it as tendered currency.
The question was who is buying things legitimately with crypto, and your Binance card isn't that. You're buying things legitimately with that card... ...with real currency.
Why merchants prefer real currency to crypto is left as an exercise for the reader.
The question was: "Anybody actually uses crypto for legal goods and services?"
I am using crypto to buy suff, how it is facilitated under the hood is an implementation detail and none of my concern. I am using and spending cryptocurrencies to buy things. My balance on the card is currently primarily USDT (and some ETH). Not dollars, not pounds, not euro: a cryptocurrency. The fact that technically they sell that USDT to fiat when I make a purchase is transparent to me and not something I have to care about.
The question was if anybody was using cryptocurrencies to buy stuff. Well, I am. When I buy stuff, my crypto balance goes down and I get the purchased item. What happens outside that is invisible to me. From what I see on my end, I am spending crypto.
If I used a US credit card to buy something from a European store with prices in euro, am I spending USD from my USD balance or am I spending euro? From my perspective, I would say that I’m spending USD, even though the bank is exchanging it to euro under the hood and sending the merchant euro. How is it any different with crypto in my case?
Again, you're not buying stuff with cryptocurrencies, anymore than the heroin dealer is buying things with heroin. You're both converting your asset to a fiat currency, and then buying things with that.
It's a simple distinction.
Okay, less emotive comparison - you hold gold as a store of value. You liquidate some for US dollars, and then use those to purchase goods and services.
Again, did you buy those goods and services with gold, or with US dollars?
It's even worse than this, because they don't even have gold (or bitcoins in this case), what they have is an IOU for bitcoins on a bank account (at Binance): this is fiat bitcoin and it has even lower guarantee than fiat dollar, since Binance is far more regulated than a regular bank.
I can at least easily/cheaply convert and withdraw it as one of many cryptocurrencies. Of course, if Binance went away or otherwise restricted withdrawals, then I wouldn't have access to it, but that's the price you pay for the convenience and features of a centralized exchange.
Some of the newfangled DeFi cryptocurrencies try to get around this, but of course they can't offer a visa card.
As with all things, its a trade-off. For me, Binance is a better trade-off than my bank, for the things I use Binance for. I also don't exclusively use Binance and I do keep some of my crypto in my own wallets, separately from the centralized exchanges.
Go back to my scenario: when you use a US credit card, denominated in USD, to buy something from a European merchant, whose prices are in Euro and who receives Euro from the purchase made, are you buying the goods in USD (the currency that your account contains) or in Euro (the currency the merchant receives)?
From the perspective of the customer, you only ever see the dollars: that's what your account contains and that's what the number that goes down in exchange for the goods. Yes, behind the scenes, your bank turns that into Euro (liquidates the gold for you, in your example) and sends the Euro to the merchant, so as far as the merchant is concerned, the transaction is in Euro, but from the customers perspective, everything happened in USD.
I'm not arguing that you're not correct, that you are technically buying goods in Euro, what I'm saying is that from the customers perspective it may as well be in USD.
For the cryptocurrencies, of course I'm technically buying in USD, on-demand liquidating the cryptocurrencies to USD in the process, but from the customer experience, I may as well be transacting cryptocurrencies and I am spending my cryptocurrencies (via a transparent exchange behind the scenes) to make the purchase, just like a USD card holder spends their USD (via a transparent exchange behind the scenes) to make their Euro purchase and just how you would liquidate your gold (assuming there was a "gold" visa card where the bank handled the liquidation for you transparently behind the scenes) to make a USD purchase.
From my perspective, when I use the Binance card, I am using my crypto to buy something. How that works isn't relevant to me. I don't see the USD[1], I see my crypto balance go down and I get the purchased item. For all intents and purposes, I am using crypto to buy things. If I didn't have the crypto, I wouldn't be able to buy things with that card.
What the customer sees matters, since the money in a non-gold-backed account is just a number anyway, you're not really "spending" anything. But from the customers perspective, the number represents the USD (or whatever) that's in their account. When they make that number go down, that's what they're spending. If the bank decides that for some reason its more efficient to convert the money to GBP first, then to Euro and then back to USD, good for them, it doesn't affect the customer. Its an "implementation detail".
Or another scenario: What if I use a USD card to make a Euro purchase, but the merchants account is in GBP? (A UK-based business with an EU-localized store, perhaps) I am buying in USD, the actual purchase transaction happened in Euro and the merchant only ever sees GBP. You seem to be arguing that only the middle bit, the Euro transaction, matters. I'm saying which part matters depends on the observer: for me, the USD part is what matters, for the bank the Euro part might be the most important and for the merchant its the GBP part. For all intents and purposes, I spent USD, the merchant received GBP, but the bank processed Euro. The dictionary says "spend" means "to use up" or to "pay out" (and pay is to give), I'm using up the USD in this example.
[1] I mean, technically I do: the merchant quotes their price in USD and Binance does of course let you see the USD equivalent balance of your cryptocurrencies
That wasn’t the scenario though, I picked the scenario because it’s similar to my use of cryptocurrencies: where your credit card is in a different currency to your purchase, while the card issuer does the conversion behind the scenes. Just like is happening when I buy something with a Binance card. So what currency a seller must accept is unrelated.
And if Pfizer fucked up the covid-19 vaccine, one of 20 other alternatives would gladly inform the public and remove a competitor from the market. That's the great thing about having so many alternatives for the covid-19 vaccine, all of them can gain an advantage by pointing out that a competitor's vaccine does not work.
Actually the long term risk of the covid-19 vaccines is well understood. You will not get a side effect from the vaccines in a year from now. For all of the vaccines created for any disease, the longest recorded period between taking the vaccine and side effects presenting is 6 weeks. 3.1 billion people are fully vaccinated for covid-19, many of them have been for longer than 6 weeks.
In Norway, some children developed narcolepsy after being vaccinated with Pandemrix. The average time from vaccine (or influensa) until developing narcolepsy was 8 months.
> You will not get a side effect from the vaccines in a year from now
There are possible severe negative effects due to vaccination, even if there are zero medical side effects. Herd vulnerability could cause widespread harm - there is a monoculture of immune responses and monocultures have vulnerabilities. I agree it's unlikely to have severe long term downsides, and the short-term gains are very significant. Note that I'm mostly pro vaccination.
The technology is not brand new. It has been used in labs for decades. This is just the first time it has been used in a drug for humans. All traces of the vaccine leave your body within days of receiving the shot.
https://www.domstol.no/globalassets/upload/hret/avgjorelser/...