This doesn't read as batshit as Project 2025. The 4 memos they've posted are:
IMO only the fourth one is somewhat questionable
Certainly cheaper and faster than Western Union, but yeah it's horribly slow by modern blockchain standards
The whole point of crypto is you don't need to hold it on an exchange. And there are other real reasons to use crypto today such as cheap & fast international settlement, protecting your assets from authoritarian governments.
I agree there's lots of speculation, and I'm not someone who believes it's likely to replace the dollar, but it's also clear there are legitimate uses
I agree. I think if Bitcoin falls it will be because development has completely ossified and is unable to react to problems. If quantum computing ever gets going, it will completely break Bitcoin's security model, and they don't seem to have the social coordination to respond to this kind of threat like other blockchains do
I think there are people who genuinely think it has value. It's very popular in places like Argentina, Venezuela and Turkey where the local currency inflates so rapidly people cannot save money. To those people, its value is that it holds value better than their local currency.
There is also a lot of speculation in the space, which makes it very tough to determine how much actual value accrual there is
In Canada it's a politically successful strategy to agitate the suburbs
This is true and depressing. But "the gov't will probably undo this" does not mean we shouldn't try
The way that London has done a congestion tax, by law, all the funds raised from it go towards improving public transit. It has been an enormous success there! The transit is much better, the city is less polluted, and if you do choose to drive in the city, you have less traffic to deal with.
I'm sure you can find a niche of people who are worse off in this situation, but Londoners overall are very supportive of it given the fact it has been in place for 22 years now without a gov't repealing it.
He didn't sell most of the drugs, he just provided a platform that allowed anyone to sell anything anonymously. Drug dealers used it because it was useful to them.
Drug dealers use private messaging apps like Signal as well. Should Signal be held responsible for drug deals facilitated by their app? (I know it's not a perfect analogy, what he made was more blatant, but it's an important distinction to make)
This is a very hard problem to solve, and people have tried.
Let's say you do as you said: hash the data (screenshot, date, etc) and upload it to a trusted server. Nothing can stop me from generating fake data, hashing that and uploading it instead.
Ok, so maybe you decide to add a cryptographic signature to prove that it was the web browser that made this hash, not an unauthorized one. That might work for a while, but the private key needs to be shipped with the browser software, so a sophisticated person could extract that key and then generate fake data. Especially is the browser is open source (like most are).
Alright, what about if we add a special chip on the device that is hard to tamper with and keep the private key on there and do all the signing on that chip. Those do exist somewhat already, but hackers have found ways to break them.
Ok then you move everything to the cloud. Have the entire web browser running on a cloud machine by a trusted authority. Maybe then you can do what you're discussing, but you've also entered a privacy nightmare where everything you're doing can be monitored in real time.
What would be a better situation (and where I think we're going eventually with Gen-AI) would be to put the responsibility on the website publisher to provide cryptographic proof of their content. For example, the NYTimes could create a digital signature of a photo and publish it on a blockchain or other trusted tamper-proof ledger as they publish the photo. Then anyone can verify that the photo is from the NYTimes and the date it was created.
Picking words at random from a dictionary would not be very compute intensive, the content doesn't need to be sensical
I learned the basics of CS from this course online 7 years ago and it lead to a great career as a software dev. Hat's off to the whole CS50 team for creating such an incredible resource and making it available for free!