I've found ChatGPT 4o (the voice one) to be useful, I just need to prompt it first by saying `Whatever you hear in Chinese, say in English, whatever you hear in English, say in Chinese`. It refuses to cooperate if you tell it to be a live translator.
Anyways, it seems to understand context really well, I tried it out with a Chinese person and they said it worked really well.
It even works for Croatian which is awesome as it is a really small language that anything voice-related usually does not work with.
I'm not sure this is absurdity. The point is that no company could possibly have an abusable monopoly on entertainment because A) the sheer variety of things there are to do for entertainment, B) the incredibly low barriers to entry in entertainment, and C) that even if there were some entity that gained control over some significant portion of it, that vast majority of people would just do something, anything else rather than submit to such a monopolist's demands. They might be grumpy about it on some level, but that's hardly rising to the level of consumer harm. You might say there is still the case of some tiny number of incredibly dependent people who would continue playing and paying for certain titles no matter the cost, but that is their decision -- they are not without agency to simply say no, and so even that doesn't rise to the level of consumer harm.
As I mentioned in another comment, what if, after completing this acquisition, MS decided to raise the price of CoD to $100,000 per player per year? Would this really harm consumers? Would people really be forced to sell their homes and kidneys?
Of course not. They'd just play another game, or watch a movie or something.
If someone wants to play video games, they can do it for free on archive.org, and all they need is a web browser.
I closed your website instantly as soon as it played a sound, it's pretty bad it does that. When I try to click on the whitepaper button, the click actually goes to the globe. I am sorry but it's very amateurish.
Anyways, what do you offer that bitcoin doesn't and what do you don't offer that bitcoin does?
I know for a fact that normal people use crypto in Venezuela, albeit through apps and Binance. Their currency is crap and USD was outlawed for a while. I got the info first hand recently when a Venezuelan dev colleague visited my country.
You get to call it stupid, you don't get to cut someone's water or electricity off because you think they have a stupid opinion. Same should go for having the ability to pay for stuff and receive money from people who want to give it to you, as long as what you are doing is not illegal.
They don't have to be sitting there. A startup with a good person running finances will also have short term investments (should not be S&P though). Not sure about all startups in general but in my experience so far, this is what happens.
If sufficiently motivated, take pics with your phone. With a good camera, you could minify a lot of code into a tiny font size, take a photo or multiple photos, and OCR them later.
Or encrypt the whole repo and just send it to a bucket somewhere. I mean there's got to be a lot of ways to do it if you really want to.
I am not the best person to address everything point by point as I am not putting enough thought into it, but perhaps I could point (heh) you in the right direction.
Sure you could let Visa do this (as they and Mastercard handle most online payments now anyways), and it would probably work as well as Visa/Mastercard work now, but for some people that is not good enough.
1. Differentiate clearing (telling you you now have some money) and settlement (you getting the money you "have"). For Visa and Mastercard the latter takes days or more.
2. Permissionless means that you don't need any entity's permission to transact. Visa and Mastercard definitely require permission, and on occassion don't give it for various legal but "immoral" things like porn, Wikileaks, and who knows what in the future.
3. Borderless is kind of similar to permissionless. As soon as you bring in legacy behemoths like Visa into it, this kind of goes away.
4. With decentralization, fees are determined objectively (you pay to get in, and if there is enough demand, regardless of price, blocks are full). A monopolist would charge as much as they could get away with, sometimes even if that means no transactions are being performed.
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I would say that with a Visa(like) company, you definitely lose 2, and 4 will probably have some bullshit involved.
1. This has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. There is literally nothing about a decentralized trustless architecture that makes this happen. You're falling into the common trap that crypto people fall into where they equate criticisms of the current centralized system with 'possibilities of a decentralized system,' when really what they mean is any hypothetical new system could be better than the current one. All else equal, a centralized system will be faster no matter what (i.e. this is a major reason why servers are centralized) and I agree we should be working on better/faster centralized systems.
2. You definitely need the permission of the miner/validators/whoever to transact [0]. You also need to convince them to put your transactions into the block and there is nothing that compels them to do so other than the same economic incentives that motivate Visa. You are again, criticizing the system now and imagining that a decentralized system is better.
2A. To break down the problem a little more clearly for you - Visa's main service (what it makes money doing) is actually fraud protection, since as you must know bank's can very easily settle between each other over other rails. Visa chooses not to process transactions that are at high risk of fraud/illegal activity, because they have regulatory liability. Miners not having regulatory liability isn't a function of decentralized trustless architecture, it's a function of being new. Either blockchain is similar to a wire transfer (something that porn companies still have full access to) or it's similar to Visa and will face the same problems.
3. I suggest you google the countries where it is illegal to use crypto to buy goods/services (governments plan on keeping currency controls intact after all!). The shear number will astound you!
4. Not sure on the monopolist point there, but again, Visa/Mastercard/Amex compete on swipe fees (look at the Costco example!) so I'm not sure what this decentralized point you're making really is.
I don't see them as bragging. The first part of the paragraph is their previous "hard-working" perspective, and later comes understanding of the people they were looking down on.
Anyways, it seems to understand context really well, I tried it out with a Chinese person and they said it worked really well.
It even works for Croatian which is awesome as it is a really small language that anything voice-related usually does not work with.