Not really. A lot of people at Google are on Macs. I think it's more that the Chrome team doesn't prioritize Java support, which I think shows their priorities are pretty much in order.
The "well, now that the last 32 bit app on your Mac gets with the times, life's gonna be better" comment shows (a) this wasn't just about Java, and (b) they knew they're way behind the times.
For one, it's far from the "ast 32 bit app" on the Mac.
Second, even some Apple apps took some years to be released as 64 bit after the transition.
Third, it's not like 64 bit apps get some magic cookies and unicorn love. Millions of Mac users used 32bit Chrome just fine and didn't even know about it (being 32bit).
At the moment, the only thing keeping 32 bit frameworks resident on my Mac is Dropbox. I'm sure there's plenty of legacy apps out there, but it looks to me like it's not that common anymore.
I've never understood this logic, especially since you're deciding on the rule for all cars, not just your car. Shouldn't you prefer that the rule be to minimize the number of people harmed, since this is the option which (when taken over all cars) will minimize the likelihood of you being harmed?
Yeah, sure, but now suppose that you're going to decide the rule that everyone's car will follow. Are you still going to choose what amounts to defecting in the prisoner's dilemma?
Put it another way: this is one of those very rare occasion where collective cooperation (a la prisoner's dilemma) is possible. Shouldn't that... be the thing we want?
I would not be deciding that rule for everyone's car. I would provide a checkbox (or what ever way there would be to customize a car's options). I'm a pretty big believer in user settings. I wish more software gave users more options on some of the stuff some random developer thought was best.
The thing is, in the absence of collective action people choose to defect in prisoner's dilemmas. Giving people the option results in everyone defecting. Having it be preset results in everyone cooperating. Everyone cooperating is a better outcome for everyone.
Will autonomous cars prevent me from choosing the radio station or the cabin temperature? No. Why should they prevent me from choosing if I live or die?
Autonomous cars are supposed to be more intelligent, and capable of making better decisions than a human driver, based on access to more information and having more accurate controls. The entire argument about autonomous cars improving safety is predicated on the assumption that human drivers, in general, are simply not capable of driving safely.
You being able to make a decision about the way your autonomous vehicle behaves which could result in a greater risk to other drivers is no different than the risk you present anyway just by having access to a steering wheel, and making the equivalent decision directly. Changing the radio isn't going to kill anybody, but letting you decide the ethics of your car just might. What happens when two cars with conflicting driver-set ethical subroutines come into contact? Do they debate? It doesn't work unless there's a single standard.
An autonomous car is still going to have a finite number of actions it can take. Using the info it gathers on the fly, it will traverse a pre-programmed decision tree to arrive at the action(s) it should take. Being a computer, of course it will do this faster and use a lot more information than a human would. This is going to result in "driving safely."
I'm not saying we should be able to rewrite the code. But a single user option like "Should I sacrifice your life to save another? [Yes/No]" just means the decision tree has another branch point that still leads to the same set of possible actions. It can still make better decisions about driving than the human driver because it still has the access to more information and more accurate controls. Deciding to crash me into a tunnel wall to save a child is not really about "driving safely."
Plus the law has made that choice for you. Sacrificing another life to save your own, intentionally, is second-degree murder (first if answering this question means you planned it in advance).
If you answer yes to this question, aside from being a scumbag, if it does actually lead to an action taken by the car, you could face execution (worst possible case, granted, but there's a minimum prison sentence too).
Plus, this would hardly be the first way for cars to kill you. Brakes can fail, the steering column can fail, the gas tank can fail. All these things are rare, but certainly not impossible, and quite likely to kill or at least injure you.
> Who in their right mind would get inside a car that is programmed to commit suicide in certain "ethical" circumstances?
Maybe you'll find this version more interesting: suppose the car has the opportunity to save a dozen people (who are not themselves at fault) by sacrificing you (or failing to do everything in its power to protect you). Should it?
If no, which seems to be the answer you think is obvious, consider that you are far more likely to find yourself as one of the dozen potential people saved than as the sacrifice, especially since we're deciding on the rule for all autonomous cars, not just yours. So following your logic makes it more likely for you to get killed.
I don't know. This is admittedly not something I know much about, but from poking around a bit, it looks like the Gather-Apply-Scatter model - or any other vertex-centric model - is not well suited to finding cycles of specific length. Compare eg GraphChi's triangle-counting code [1], which specifically notes the difficulties arising from having to maintain and work with large adjacency lists. I don't see a way around that for vertex-centric models.
That said, I haven't actually read your miner, so I don't know what it's doing or if something similar can be done for GAS-based frameworks. If someone who knows more wants to chime in, I'd be delighted to read more about this.
Most time in the miner is spent identifying which edges have an endpoint of degree 1, and thus cannot be part of any cycle. This degree counting sounds like it should be right up the Gather-Apply-Scatter alley...
Regulations are only possible because the technology to "transfer dollars electronically", as you say, requires lots of infrastructure and trust - the entire banking system, basically. If I want to send you a dollar electronically, I can't do so without using the banks. And the banks are both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated to impose regulations, which they can do by limiting access to their transfer-money services.
But access to the technology to transfer bitcoin does not require infrastructure and trust. I can send you a bitcoin without needing a bank or any other large authority. Moreover, I can do so relatively anonymously, and from anywhere in the world. It is therefore much, much harder to impose restrictions on moving bitcoin than moving USD or other non-digital currencies, because there are no large authorities capable of enforcing those restrictions.
(That is, the government can of course pass laws saying I can't send you bitcoin, or limiting the circumstances in which I could. But the most they can do is punish me if they can catch me - they can't actually stop it. Whereas banks do have the power to actually stop me from sending you USD. [Unless I want to do so physically, which is hard to do in quantity or over any distance.])
The answer to basically all of your questions is that to transfer money, you need to move money. This can be basically a promise of money, as with wire transfers, or physical, as you'd do by transporting bullion or cash.
The problem with using a promise to move money is that you have to trust whoever's promising. That works alright if there's a central authority, like a bank, but less well if you don't want to trust the authority, don't have access to the authority, or are unable to comply with the rules of the authority. Also it's kind of a shitty experience, as is. (You wouldn't pay for all of your Amazon purchases with wire transfers, I'd imagine.)
The problem with moving physical money is that it's difficult to do over long distances or en masse.
In order to solve the problems with existing money transfer, then, bitcoin needs to be able to do without a central authority and without using a physical representation of money. Which it accomplishes by allowing you to store money - not just a representation or promise thereof - digitally.
Thanks for your answer. However I still don't fully understand the problem I'm afraid. How is the trust required to move money cross borders different to the trust required to have an account with money at your bank? That acct is just a "promise" of money as well isn't it?
Also, according to your response a domestic money transfer would suffer the same problems but these seem to work just fine (at least much better than international transfers).
Why does a mechanism that works just fine in between bank and customers and generally domestically just break down when country borders are involved?
> Also, according to your response a domestic money transfer would suffer the same problems but these seem to work just fine (at least much better than international transfers).
Certainly they work better, but "just fine" is a much stronger claim and one I'd disagree with. I don't find myself spending money by wire transfer hardly ever, eg, and when I do it is a much larger affair then using cash. See also andrewla's comment here [1].
> Why does a mechanism that works just fine in between bank and customers and generally domestically just break down when country borders are involved?
Because banking systems and the regulations surrounding them are different in different countries, basically, and that adds lots of complications to an already extremely complex system. The bitcoin protocol is not different in different countries.
This is absurd. I spend money by wire transfer all the time. A good 80% or so of my ebay shopping would be wore transfers to merchants in Hong Kong via Paypal. This is a big enough issue in Australia that we've had retailer associations complain about it on occasion. Overseas money transfer is not at all difficult on a consumer level.
> This is absurd. I spend money by wire transfer all the time. A good 80% or so of my ebay shopping would be wore transfers to merchants in Hong Kong via Paypal.
It's worth noting that EFTs (Electronic Funds Transfers) between domestic banks in Australia is nearly always free, and that in your case you're not transferring money overseas at all.
You are transferring money to PayPal Australia, who is then communicating to PayPal Hong Kong that all is well - so that PayPal Hong Kong can pay the merchant. Both entities can transfer to/from local bank accounts because they have explicitly set up B2B interfaces (and met regulations) that allow them to do so.
In this case, PayPal is the bank, and they are a bank seeking to specifically facilitate money transfers between countries. You could not, for example, transfer money to a merchant in (e.g.) Siberia - they wouldn't be able to get that money out of PayPal into their regular bank account, because PayPal has no local presence/connection to the banks there.
The article explicitly notes that PayPal is offering a very similar service. They argue that the open nature of Bitcoin is a competitive advantage to the network in the long run.
From the article: "This would not, of course, be the first global payments network. One obvious comparison is with PayPal. The fundamental advantage a Bitcoin gateway ecosystem has over PayPal is that it’s open".
I can't reply the comment below so I will reply to this one.
XorNot: Please correct me if I am wrong.
USD is not a relevant comparison. What matters here is how money gets moved. When money is transferred within the country, a central bank (Fed Reserve, Bank of England, Reserve Bank of Australia) keeps an account for each local bank. Which means that when 'Alice' of Wells Fargo sends money to 'Bob' at Chase, the central bank actually debits and credits the banks. And then several times a day the banks will settle with each other and net out the differences.
But this is not possible internationally, that means banks must each other have direct bank relationship and have an account with each other. And if 2 banks don't have direct relationship, then they have to go through intermediary banks which they do have a relationship.
Enters Bitcoin, what bitcoin provides is not a reserve currency, what it provides in this context is a global ledger. Instead of the Commonwealth bank of Australia (CBA) needing to have a direct account relationship with Wells Fargo (WF) bank. CBA can just simply send bitcoin to WF.
Internationally banks simply have to be able to acquire sufficient foreign currency holdings. Which is trivially easy because every competent reserve bank on the planet has enormous foreign currency holdings.
But this is all irrelevant to Bitcoin - which is marketed by its advocates a consumer currency, not an international system of exchange between institutions. Institutions have no need nor desire for such a thing - it is a saturated marketplace, with literally thousands of avenues of exchange, of which Bitcoin is a particularly poor one.
Which circles back to my original point: foreign currency transactions are very simple for anyone ranging from consumers to medium or large size businesses, barring tax issues (like not paying a lot of it). Bitcoin does not solve a problem not already solved for centuries by the banking system - this is literally the thing that got it started way back with the Knights Templar.
I have a feeling that international remittance is not as simple acquiring FOREX reserves. Often times you see international transfers from an Australian bank to a US bank taking 4 hops in between over peering banks. The process is complex.
Because unlike domestic transfer where the central bank helps keep a ledger between banks, there is no "global ledger" internationally. So banks have to resort to "correspondant banking" which is why you see so many hops in international transfers.
Bitcoin provides such global ledger. I don't think FOREX is the issue here.
Instead of going through correspondent banking (many hops), 2 banks can simply send bitcoin to each other and immediately net off.
Could you clarify if my understanding is incorrect?
EDIT:
Here is a document on how VISA handles international payments
2.3.3 Clearing and settlement procedures
...
Settlement is not carried out through Base II; Visa merely provides the data to allow settlement to be
carried out. For settlement in US dollars, Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, acts as the settlement
bank. For multicurrency settlement, Chase Manhattan Bank, London, acts as the settlement bank. All
members may hold their own settlement account with any other financial institution, such that all
requests for funds or payments are ultimately settled through the correspondent services of domestic
clearing and settlement systems.
...
Remember that many (most?) recipients of international remittances don't have bank accounts or access to payment cards. Hence why Western Union et al have to maintain extensive agent networks.
The thing to remember is that Visa authorisations are done in near real-time but settlement between issuers, Visa, acquirers and on to merchants is done over the normal banking system, as far as I know.
I don't know enough about Visa's design to comment authoritatively - but my working assumption is payments from issuing to acquiring banks in-country are done net and through visa - i.e. one net payment per issuer into visa and one net payment out to acquirer. e.g. see the last page of this doc: https://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/visa-core-principles...
What isn't obvious to me is what happens in international scenarios - you ask a great question.
Transacting in US dollars accomplishes the same thing, with far less volatility. In fact, transacting in any commonly exchanged currency does (US is the global reserve for this reason - you can exchange US dollars for any currency on the planet - notably Chinese currency - easily).
Moreover, there's no benefit here: dealing with separate Bitcoin services removes any end-user guarantees. If I send money from Australia to England, Paypal Australia has to deal with the Australian government and the British government to obey consumer law. With a Bitcoin exchanger, once the BTC is transferred you're at the mercy of whatever local exchanger you use at the destination.
Paypal wants to stay in both countries, which means there's an end-to-end legal protection for both parties.
The open-nature of Bitcoin is irrelevant. The USD is pretty damn open.
These are good questions. Someone should write a primer on money transfers and cryptocurrencies (someone with better answers than my best guess, included below.)
My hunch is that the trust required to move money is very similar to the trust required to have an account with money at your bank, but the main difference is you pay for that trust in different ways.
If you write a remittance, you trust it will be remotely delivered upon request (ie, immediately). That trust is ensured by an organization that has access to ready capital in many locations (which involves some opportunity cost, Western Union could just be pooling all that money and investing it). You pay for that trust through fees.
When you deposit money at a bank, you trust that they will return it to you at any of their branches at some point in the future. That's a very similar sort of trust. Yet here, you really pay for it by foregoing the opportunity cost of lending your money to strangers. Though they pool your money with the money of others to smooth risk, so they're getting a better return / less risky return from lending than you could get on your own. But you're really paying through the difference between the return you would earn by loaning it out and the interest you earn. You're paying that gap.
Similar problems occur in domestic money transfers, so domestic money transfers still have fees. However, I would expect that establishing trust with international money transfers involves dealing with multiple currencies (possibly some of which are being inflated by a government), magnifying the costs. I would expect the fees would tend to be higher.
(Western Union doesn't suggest this is the case. Sending $1000 instantly seems to bounce between $86 and $95 no matter where I send it, domestic or international. They may be making some money by setting exchange rates, I'm not sure. Also, they sometimes gave me wildly outlier fee quotes, so I'm not sure those are their actual prices, or how stable they are, or if there's not a bug in the website. For comparison, World Bank says remittances average around 8.14%: http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/en )
Bitcoin offers some opportunities to bypass some of the required trust, possibly resulting in drastically lower fees. (You still have to trust the network won't implode though.) That said, I don't want to suggest remittance services are gouging anyone. I have no doubt it's costly to set up an international trust network with cash on hand all around the world. But I think there's an argument to be made that the infrastructure for a cryptocurrency scales a bit more easily than the infrastructure for a Western Union. (On the other hand, ensuring there are buyers and sellers of bitcoin in whatever two cities you're using as endpoints isn't trivial either.)
That World Bank link above talks about the "5x5" goal of reducing remittance fees by 5% (from 10%) over 5 years (beginning in 2010). Work anywhere in the developing world or on development economics and you'll get a sense of how critical remittances are to developing economies (often swamping the impact of foreign aid). It's conceivable that many humanitarian and development goals might be hit if we could use technology to lower barriers to easier money transfers.
You might be interested in the Hawala system[0] of money transfer. It has existed for hundreds of years, and allows efficient international money transfers with no central authority.
Hawala has fascinated me to no end, as essentially an anarchistic peer-to-peer web-of-trust banking system. It has existed for a long time, and keeps functioning even where traditional banking systems have broken down. As cool as Bitcoin is, I have more hope for a system akin to Hawala than some proof-of-work based system. Guerilla banking that depends on having more (computational) power than your enemies isn't too realistic. PGP'd remittances are much more cryptographically robust, and depend just on the one factor that any real monetary system relies on anyway: human trust.
If your money transfer model includes gateways, then trust is involved. You have to trust the gateways (local banks or exchanges) to make the conversion.
The gateways on each end would also want to take a fee.
Add to that the (MASSIVE) cost of compliance globally, and the costs of the model described by Stripe may not be much better than that of existing services (TransferWise, Western Union, etc.).
It's just an absolutely mind-bogglingly large, long, and costly endeavor, and the end results may not be worth it.
> The answer to basically all of your questions is that to transfer money, you need to move money.
Is that true? I everyone around the world is moving money around, then most trades can be covered by not moving any money around, just between people in the same country.
If I want to move $1000 to France, and someone else wants $1000 from France, we just swap money, and two people in France do the same.
What is left is keeping track what everyone has put in, and what they have taken out.
> What is left is keeping track what everyone has put in, and what they have taken out.
And that's exactly what Bitcoin is; a secure digital ledger. It's a way to securely and globally record "person A has 10 BTC, gave person B 5BTC, then person B gave persone C 3 BTC" in a way that doesn't allow person A to simultanously have given those same 5 BTC to person D (who, given the anonymity of the internet, may also be person A).
That's all Bitcoin does; it provides a secure way to record such transactions without having a trusted third party who must trust to increment and decrement the right accounts in the right way.
So is that not an impressive solution - if Alice wants to move 100 USD to France and Bob wants to move 100 USD out of France (let's say both want to buy a new textbook) then one could envisage a peer to peer money transfer system.
A site allows bob and Alice to find each other, agree a shared amount to transfer, agree to which end point they will onwards transfers (hmmm this might be the breakdown point) and then record that in the block chain
I think oddly there is still an enormous amount of trust involved - trust that Alice will complete the final important step of giving the money to Bobs silver haired grandmother or whatever
You can actually achieve the same thing with Coinjoin if all involved parties agree. Instead of a bunch of individual transactions, they collectively generate and sign one.
Well, I'm not going to have a compact answer for you, but to do so you need to develop some kind of self-reference. (Like Godel!) If you like thinking about this sort of thing, Raymond Smullyan has a lot of great writing - I'd recommend eg Forever Undecided or To Mock a Mockingbird for a more informal treatment, or First-Order Logic for a formal one.
