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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’m not 100% deep on the crypto, but my understanding is they use blind signatures (which have been around for a long time) to do their issuing. If you’re unfamiliar, these are kinda like an envelope with a hole cut in it, so you can put a document in it with a hidden unique key, and they can see some info through the hole, and can stamp their signature through the hole to validate that it’s legit without knowing the hidden info.

    Then the user can remove it from the envelope (unblind) and now have a certified valid coin without the issuer knowing which coin is theirs.

    So in the context of an ATM, the ATM wouldn’t “issue” coins, it would be given a request for coins from your wallet, it would certify the validity of that request, and then give your wallet back that certification in such a way that the wallet could unblind it and have the anonymous secret. So ultimately your wallet is the one that’s in charge of producing the unique parts.

    It seems there’s also a system for making sure you don’t produce bad transactions by asking you to generate N, promping you to unwrap a bunch of them to prove there’s nothing weird about them, and then signing one of the remaining ones under the assumption it’s also legit. At least it sounds like it, but I’m even less familiar with that part. But even if you did spoof someone else’s secrets… it doesn’t allow you to steal their money I don’t think… because in order to have your transaction validated in the first place you had to truly give the ATM your money… so you could I guess pay $10 to screw over your friend for $10 because it’ll look like they spent money they didn’t… but you still spent $10… so it’s less like stealing their money and more like paying to throw their wallet off a bridge? You don’t gain anything, but they lose something? Maybe there’s another exploit I don’t know about in the like “renewal” or “refund” or “transfer” protocols that make that more important.

    Anyway, I’m still not a Taler fan, but in this case I think it’s possible to do what they claim. Now, if the bank or ATM or whatever asks for ID or an account to use their services, they could track that you withdrew money, and how much. That’s data they can collect. The anonymous buyer part just means they can’t tie the coin they issued you to a spent deposit they receive later. So they know you got $10 out, and they can assume you probably spent it, but they can’t know what you spent it on.



  • You might actually like Taler, it’s fundamentally different from blockchain based systems, to the point of being a cryptocurrency only in the technical sense, but not having any of the properties people associate with that word culturally.

    Taler doesn’t use any kind of proof of work, and so doesn’t consume excess power or other resources, at least not more than, like, visiting any normal webpage. It’s also not decentralized, and only partially anonymous, so I can acquire money anonymously and no one can trace the money I got to a particular spend, but the only place I can reasonably spend it has to be registered to the centralized issuer and is firmly not anonymous. And the only things they can do with the tokens they receive is redeem them, which means there’s no place for tax evasion because the issuing authority can track every dollar the registered vendors redeem with them. And you can’t really transfer money from random person to person, so there’s no black market opportunity, etc.

    So basically the only thing Taler “protects” is that the buyer’s identity can be anonymous, but any vendor accepting Taler must not be and are highly trackable.

    These are things I actually don’t like about Taler, but we may be on opposite sides of a few issues, which is fair.




  • psycotica0@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    I think at least part of the problem is that Democrats believe in The System. So when someone cheats and whines about fake votes and stuff, they can resist that with faith that the system is working, but when the system willingly chooses the other side they have no choice but to concede that this must just be the Will of the People. And who are they to stand against the system they uphold…


  • I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume what you said was simply confusing, but not wrong.

    So just to be clear if your raid array fails, and you’re using software raid, you can plug all of the disks into a new machine and use it there. But you can’t just take a single disk out of a raid 5 array, for example, and plug it in and use it as a normal USB hard drive that just had some of the files on it, or something. Even if you built the array using soft-raid.


  • I don’t want to sound like I’m just correcting you for the sake of it, but it’s actually important. Mastodon is the most popular right now, but Mastodon actually wasn’t around at the beginning! Before that was StatusNet, and before that was identi.ca and laconi.ca

    So those services already existed, they were the ones built for federation, and so Mastodon was started as another compatible implementation of an existing network protocol. All of that is to say that Mastodon didn’t need to make the right choices at the beginning, and they have already benefitted from this kind of network dynamic! The system has already worked once!



  • I get what you’re saying, but I think the issue with optional memory safety features is that it’s hard to be sure you’re using it in all the places and hard to maintain that when someone can add a new allocation in the future, etc. It’s certainly doable, and maybe some static analysis tools out there can prove it’s all okay.

    Whereas with Rust, it’s built from the ground up to prove exactly that, plus other things like no memory being shared between threads by accident etc. Rust makes it difficult and obvious to do the wrong thing, rather than that being the default.


  • It’s also worth saying that with cars vs transit the incentives flip. With cars I don’t want to make things too far away, but like in my previous comment I have to space things out some, and cars are good at going distances, so it’s not too bad for business to sprawl. Also, because I need parking for everyone, density of my building (like a multi-story building) requires an even greater density of parking. But parking garages are expensive, so it’s easier for me to build a bunch of single story buildings with big surface parking lots.

    On the other hand, with transit and pedestrians distances are much more significant. The goal now is to try and get as many things as possible to where the people already are. In this mode, building up is much more sensible because the more housing or offices or businesses you can put on this plot, the less people will have to walk to get there and the closer they are to prominent transit stops, etc. And if I don’t need parking, then I’m incentivized to put another building right next to this one to try and hit those same people without them taking more than 20 steps.


  • There’s a sense in which cars by their nature produce sprawl. Cars are larger than people, so if I want a building to contain N number of people, I need an empty space nearby that contains 3N of just emptiness waiting for a car, so our buildings can’t be too close together. There needs to be that buffer space between them for their cars.

    Then people have to get to the parking lots, so we need roads. But if I want N people to be able to get here, I need more than that space between our parking lots for enough cars to be able to reach me. Not to mention left turning lanes and big intersections, and of course long stretches to get past the long parking lots.

    So if we don’t have space for that in a city, we either have to knock down a bunch of buildings to make room for these things, it we have to expand outwards into the larger empty space outside the city. Which naturally leads to sprawl.

    It’s amazing to actually do a satellite view of an area, take a screenshot, and then colour in the parts that are actually a building or shop or home, and then colour all the other parts that are road, driveway, parking lot, intersection. It’s this foam which sprawls.



  • I’m not disagreeing with you, but am genuinely curious how “fairness” was counted. I feel we have a thing right now where one side will present a well reasoned, data driven, argument. And the other side will hastily throw together something based on vibes that mostly doesn’t address the issue at all. But out of a sense of fairness our current media feels like it has to present both as though they’re two equally effective tradeoffs when actually one is empty noise.

    So I’d be very curious if this system has a way of preserving true fairness without devolving into false equality in some way. Obviously nothing is perfect, but I’m curious.





  • On most modern distros (like Mint) you can do basically as much with Linux GUIs as you can do in Windows or Mac. So normal users don’t need the terminal. But if you want to do more, if you want the secret sauce, the terminal is there for you.

    But fear not! Basically all of us have some level of autism or ADHD, and the best of us tend to be the most extreme. If anything the terminal was written by autistic nerds for themselves! If you’ll be okay being a bit of a n00b for a bit, I think you’ll find there’s a lot of depth here to obsess over / hyper fixate / hyper focus on.

    There’s a reason people have been “fighting” for, like, 40 years over which terminal text editor is the superior one… The flames of war can run pretty deep, and there’s a lot of opinions.