Physical money has value because we have an economy. If you have a USD, you can come to the US and spend that dollar. Bitcoin doesn't have an economy, it is literally a meme. The only thing you can do with it is trade it for real money.
The value of USD is based on the US economy. The value of Bitcoin is based on people's perception of the value of Bitcoin.
If all programmers decide to be paid in crypto, and you need a programmer, the crypto has the same value as USD ("backed by programmers")
If everyone in your economy decides to be paid in crypto, USD will find itself in a very bad position.
Your economy is now driven by USD, but it's not a law in any way.
“The value of USD is based on US economy” but far from being an expert I suspect that what is behind at then is human perception and trust, you can choose to keep the token USD or token Bitcoin depending what you perceive as being safer or trustworthy, and some people prefer to have eggs in both baskets.
Exactly. Apply Occam's Razor. "the simplest explanation is usually the best one". Gain of function research being done in Wuhan, lab scientists become ill, virus explodes in Wuhan. How much more evidence is needed? Until proven wrong, this is what happened, lab leak.
I think blackmailing someone in the closet is almost always wrong -- I'm sure there's some contrived edge case that could be thought of, but as a whole, it's never okay.
Just because most / all intelligence agencies do something doesn't mean it's okay. It's unambiguously wrong.
A theme of this article is to say that you are reachable from the metaphorical armchair of your residence. And if you are gay, you are within reach. If you have a reason for insurance companies to cut you off, then that is the smell of of leverage.
Israeli intelligence is working around the clock to disrupt the actions of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. There are countless terror factions who's sole purpose is to destroy Israel and execute a second Holocaust. You don't hear about the terror plans which were foiled. You don't have sympathy for Israel because they are winning.
No, they also work for money and would snitch on friends to make money. It’s not like other secret services don’t have similar patterns but they’re unequivocally bad. What comes to mind is Saudi Arabia dissidents info sold for money, iphone security broken, lives destroyed or severed completely and solely for money.
This will backfire as more and more friends turn away and become suspcious of what Israel allows to happen
There is no moral high-ground for Israel. They are the colonizing force and they're committing war crimes and illegal annexing of Palestinian land. They're also blackmailing people for being gay as per the article.
Writing code is a great way to make money in the desert. Israel is essentially an island. Also, warfare in the future is likely to be primarily digital, and Israel has many enemies. Israel will lead the cybersecurity and cyberwarfare industries out of sheer necessity.
I don't think warfare will be primarily digital. Similar things were said about airpower, artillery, and naval power. Ultimately you need boots on the ground. If you rely too much on any one thing the enemy will route around it.
Why invade a country, when you can shut down its infrastructure and force them to surrender? War isn't won by killing, its won by conquering. I also suspect that machines will be so effective at killing, that you won't be able to find soldiers stupid enough to fight them head to head. We have yet to see the full capabilities of a cyber super power.
The problem is you are assuming you can do that. Not everything is connected to the internet, and there are backups. You can probably shutdown power for a couple days (and a couple more weeks to be back up to full power), but you can only pull that trick once or twice before they start taking action. It isn't hard to disconnect internet cables (shut down all internet and force the operators to use personal cell phones...).
Likewise, water processing is mostly pumps. Even better, any competent town has backup generators and they keep a few days of fuel on hand, so even if you get the grid down there is water, and the system can function without internet.
That isn't to say you can't annoy life for everyone. However state collapse won't happen because of that. More likely you firm up the resolve to fight.
That stuff is so distributed and so heterogenous that I just don't think a successful attack of that sort is likely.
Edit: Maybe the most sophisticated attack of that sort was the one against the Iranian nuclear program, and while it was successful it and seems to have set back the program it was hardly a show stopper. It also required pretty specialized knowledge of the controllers used to operate the centrifuges (for enriching the fuel). If you consider the enormous variety of controllers and ways of doing things across different plants I just don't see how it would work to shut down a large fraction of even something like power generation.
That talks about poisoning hundreds of people, which would be a tragedy, but not all that unusual for a war. Hundreds of people dying is hardly going to decide a war.
Edit: My point isn't that cyberattacks can't cause real damage. They can and there are many examples of them doing that already. My point is that they aren't enough to win a war because they are by their nature specialized and restricted in scope.
I said it was hard to develop a nation in the desert, I didn't say it was impossible. Israel is a world leader in agricultural technology [1] precisely because of this problem.
The Palestinians agreed in the Oslo Accords t govern themselves. They don't vote in Israeli elections, and Israelis don't vote in their elections (if they had any).
I've found that this strategy doesn't work over time. My goal isn't, "make the best meal ever tonight", my goal is, "shop, cook, and clean every week in order to have a good home cooked meal every night". Those are two very different challenges, where the latter requires a more pragmatic approach to time and energy management.
Well if you question your beliefs then you can arrive at your first principles, and then you can start questioning things people tell you by ensuring that you understand them as derived from your first principles. That's called thinking for yourself and one benefit of doing so is that when other people tell me I'm not thinking for myself, I know that they're wrong because I know that I have direct access to the truth. People who don't think for themselves rely on others for access to the truth.
The value of USD is based on the US economy. The value of Bitcoin is based on people's perception of the value of Bitcoin.