I'm not so confident RCTs of nutrition are unethical. The data are too damn valuable for society to ignore. Perhaps participants could be informed and willing to partake in the challenge trials, which although these participants might not be reflective of the overall population, we can get a better sense than correlational studies.
Humans are incredible explorers, self-sacrificing for the greater (perceived) good. We should consider continuing our legacy by understanding ourselves better through rigorous science. (And hopefully end the historical legacy of making thousands of other species extinct via our exploration.)
They take minutes to send and pollute the planet as a byproduct of their security and decentralization. Anyways, Monero does not contribute much to pollution at all. I guarantee you that you do far more things that pollute the planet in your daily life than a Monero transaction.
MobileCoin is a farcical alternative to Monero, where a few “trusted” corporate nodes are run and 80% of the coin is premined.
and by send I mean network confirmations + generating zkSNARKs on the client. IMO for a payment network to work, my mom needs to be able to use it and not be frustrated. Venmo barely clears that bar
Mobilecoin (Foundation) is a technological, ethical, and legal tour de force. I recommend you read their FAQ, but, to me anyway, it is obvious why Signal/Moxie needed to create a new coin (tl;dr: It needed to be a private venmo-like experience). To prevent conflicts of interest, a new org was created. Hence Mobilecoin, not SignalCoin. A few highlights:
Technological:
* First Oblivious RAM implementation, "fog", so that transacting parties cannot be revealed
* Their Rust codebase is really nice
* Instant transfers with little computing power (CO2 emissions)
Ethical:
* Moxie and Josh Goldbard hold no MOB, along with the employees. The Mobilecoin foundation has some awesome partners, e.g. the Long Now Foundation.
* Mining is not ethical, it pollutes the planet and is just bad. The only alternative is a "pre-mine" given to an independent org, ie Mobilecoin Foundation
Legal:
* The US's laws are not clear on what is allowable with privacy coins, so Mobilecoin has played it conservatively by saying US residents can't own the coins.
In summary, the critiques of Mobilecoin (in any of its incarnations, foundation, moxie, etc.) are assuming the agents involved have a financial interest in MOB being expensive -- I contend that is not the case. Please show your evidence.
>Let's assume that they integrated with Bitcoin or Litecoin or some "mainstream" CC, would it still be a good idea?
No, not private. Also slow. Also pollutes planet. Monero is close on the privacy front, but takes 3 minutes to send (very stressful). It's possible a coin with the proper attributes could be made on stellar, but that raises questions towards ownership of Lumens (and pumping them) and their stellar reimplementation in Rust is likely more secure.
>Niche coin
nit: MOB has a top 15 market cap with 250m coins in distribution. Though I would hesitate to compare to other cryptocurrencies which are almost entirely scammy, polluting garbage.
> Moxie and Josh Goldbard hold no MOB, along with the employees
Right, the foundation sells the premined crypto-currency at a pumped up price. The foundation pays Goldbard and Moxie for their work. Employees are paid from the VC. No one connected has to hold any of it, nor will they want to after the dump.
Agreed that the foundations and payments need to be transparent. But if they are making, say on the order of a hundred grand a year in payments, wouldn't it behoove them to have a stable or increasing MOB market cap in the long run. IOW, if payments << market cap (currently O(10B)) then pumping and dumping is a disincentived move.
Could you provide a concrete link please? There's a bewildering array of officials looking websites with zero information. And a widely shared white paper (among others linked from Wikipedia) that Josh claims isn't the whitepaper he originally wrote. It's hard to know what's what.
This makes me sad. I have, up until now, been happy with Signal, but with this foray into cryptocoins, I now put it in the general "why do you hate the planet" bucket that all other cryptoshills are in.
It works (FSVO "works") for small levels of transaction, but does not scale to "a substantial fraction of humanity uses it for payment" (low-end, imagine 2.5 billion people trying to make on average 3 economic transactions per day, you'd need to be able to sustain about 80k transactions per second; now note that I low-balled bot the number of economic transactions AND the global population).
As a signal user and even promoter my biggest issue with a new cryptocurrency is that my privacy and security concerns for a chat app are different from my privacy and security concerns for monetary transfers.
I'm not sure why you find Monero's confirmation any more stressful than instant-like blockchains, most wallets will show pending transactions as soon as they enter the mempool.
That's significant in this space, because it implies that he does not benefit directly[0] from speculation on MOB, and so has less incentives to get involved in a pump and dump.
What I would still like to see for more transparency:
- legal commitment from the Signal Foundation that no employee owns any MOB
- disclosure of money transfers between MobileCoin and any Signal Foundation employee
Maybe some of this information could already be extracted given the statuses of the entities involved?
[0]: he benefits indirectly because if MobileCoin stays up, he'll probably stay as a technical advisor
The article says “Marlinspike has served as a paid technical adviser for the project since its inception” in the same paragraph, so I would say the article is quite clear on the financial relationship.
IIRC my thermodynamics classes correctly, the heater would be optimally placed on the hot effluent out of the heat exchanger (HE) going into the house. This is because the COP is improved (similarly to heating the cold side) because the hot side of the HE doesn't need to be as hot to get to the same T, but also the HE doesn't need to move the heat through it, increasing efficiency. (COP decreases with increasing heat flux [Q] in practice.) For well-mixed air in a house (a poor assumption), this is the same as throwing the miners in a closet. I would suggest to the author to move the miners to the hot side the HE going into the house's rooms. Simulation or measurements (over the course of a week, not just instantaneous measurements) would be helpful here .
If I were a HVAC company with WiFi thermostats, I would look into including miners in heating solutions.
>If Waymo is successful, there are potentially massive impacts to the population of the US. Trucking is a major industry.
Certainly, but we don't know if it will be positive or negative. Some studies[0] show increases in human truck driver employment with long-haul being fully automated (plus the work seems nicer).
The source for that article has been deleted. Additionally, the study was performed by Uber, who has an incentive to suggest that automating vehicles is a good thing.
If you have other sources, I'd be happy to take a look.
> - Apparently the soil of Scandinavia is well suited to crops that are high in Vitamin D
IIUC it's the other way around. soil/climate allows for foods low in Vitamin D -> Vitamin D needed from other sources -> evolutionary pressure for getting it from the sun -> less melanin in skin
Humans are incredible explorers, self-sacrificing for the greater (perceived) good. We should consider continuing our legacy by understanding ourselves better through rigorous science. (And hopefully end the historical legacy of making thousands of other species extinct via our exploration.)
I believe the Journal of Controversial Idea (https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/) will explore some of these topics, shortly.