It's always very amusing how all of the blockchain companies wax lyrical about all of the huge supposed benefits of blockchains and how every industry and company is missing out by not adopting them and should definitely run a hyperledger private blockchain buzzword whatever.
And then, even when faced with implementing a huge, audit critical, distributed append-only store, the thing they tell us blockchains are so useful for, they just use normal database tech like the rest if us. With one centralized infrastructure where most of the transactions in the network actually take place. Who's tech stack looks suspiciously like every other financial institution.
I'm so glad we're ignoring 100 years of securities law to let all of this incredible innovation happen.
Binance is not a blockchain company. It is a centealized exchange. Nothing is happening on-chain unless getting coins from or to the exchange. And this has nothing tondo with them then.
> And then, even when faced with implementing a huge, audit critical, distributed append-only store, the thing they tell us blockchains are so useful for, they just use normal database tech like the rest if us. With one centralized infrastructure where most of the transactions in the network actually take place. Who's tech stack looks suspiciously like every other financial institution.
Right but surely you must understand that the blockchain transactions are already stored in the blockchain, and what this is about is logs that might be useful for debugging purposes, and as such would be more verbose than what's required and also could contain sensitive information?
Apart from that isn't it obvious that the performance requirement would make this unrealistic, with no added benefits, whatsoever.
>I'm so glad we're ignoring 100 years of securities law to let all of this incredible innovation happen.
Storing all these logs on a blockchain might very well (apart from being totally asinine) breach privacy regulations as well, as it might very well store sensitive data?
Yes, I understand why blockchains are bad, have no benefits, terrible performance and are a privacy nightmare. Thanks for explaining it in more detail. And binance understands it too, that's why they're not using it (not even a private one!) despite all of their talk about how it's a revolutionary technology.
Yes, this. linux sucks in a lot of ways. But it sucks for boring reasons I can deal with, like lack of resources, incompetence or even just ideas I disagree with. You know, just the every day inevitabilites that come with interacting with other human beings, even when they're doing their best.
But what is infinitely worse than that is, on top of all of those things still happening, also having a random chance of waking up every morning to discover that someone has very deliberately, specifically decided to make my life worse, not out of personal conviction, but because it makes a line go up somewhere in a board room on the other side of the world. That I can not deal with.
You mean like how Outlook injects an ad into nearly every email I receive encouraging me to use Copilot for sales even though I'm not in sales and think Copilot is, in classic Microsoft form, buggy, bloated, and nearly unusable beta software that they're plaguing on their customers and charging them for the privilege?
It doesn't matter if they're a minority if moderation just lets them use HN as a megaphone and post hundreds of comments before any sort of reaction.
Or in terms of a tired metaphor: If you refuse to weed out your bad apples, you can't really complain when people stop taking your fruit shipments because they keep spoiling their bunches :)
And the fact that the fine is actually quite small when you consider large-scale, blatant, intentional disregard for the regulation as well as collusion with a corrupt regulator.
> The book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds was written in 1841
It feels worth noting that this book, as well as the wider idea of an abstract idea of crowd-induced mania in general it reinforces, is pseudoscientific with little credible evidence to support it.
It's origins lie much more in the political motivations and historical context of the authors: It is no coincidence that this book was written by a wealthy scotsman against the backdrop of the idea was first floated by an aristocrat during the upheavals and riots surrounding the introduction of capitalism, and that the idea was initially proposed by an aristocrat during the french revolution. They were both times where it was extraordinarily convenient to be able to dismiss engaging with the things the crowd was being driven by.
I'd urge against making the same mistake today. To me, it is impossible to separate the web3 mania from the historical context it happened in: Like 2008, it is a time of job insecurity, financial anxiety and distrust in systems with governments doing little to help. They are prime times for wishful thinking and people who want to take advantage of it.
I wonder if they checked this with the compliance department regarding their obligations to delete data under GDPR. I hope their Data Protection Officers have the time to respond to all of the thousands of relevant manual email requests and delete all of the data in a timely manner, if people are made aware they are legally required to honor those.
It is personal data regardless of how it is used. The only question is if that use of personal data is permissive.
Using it for user analytics, which is neither required to run the service, nor in the users interest, nor reasonably expected by the user, is almost definitly illegitimate use.
The definition of personal data under the GDPR is anything that can be used to uniquely identify a natural person (with sufficiently high probability). Both cookies and date-modified meet that definition identically, as do IP addresses.
That doesn't mean you can't use it at all. It just places strong restrictions on what purpodes you can use it for. The important point is just that those restrictions are the same under GDPR for all of these technologies. It doesn't matter how you uniquely identify users, what matters is what you do with that information.
They don't assign a unique date-modified to each user. They assign everyone the same date modified on their first visit of the day. I don't accept that this could be used to uniquely identify a natural person.
You may be able to look at the headers and see that a certain user made the most requests that day. That still tells you nothing about their identity.
Nothing in the technique described here allows to identify an individual directly or indirectly because 'identifiers' are not unique and really no different than standard 'last-modified' dates. Even if they were unique further data would have to be collected in order to be able to identify individuals and turn everything into personal data.
What the technique may fall foul of, though, are cookie laws.
I don't have any inside information, but as I understand it's basically just a spending commitment. The online auctions still take place, however the purchaser will gain some sort of bonus for agreeing to a certain amount of spending over the next year.
The deals seem to be rather secretive, but from what I can tell bonuses can be anything from a straightforward discount, to a guaranteed amount of impressions for some campaign, to things like guaranteeing that the client will win a certain percentage of auctions above some price.
