Is there a source on entities running a node are granted access to transaction data? Or is it the logical conclusion of “the node lives on their infrastructure, of course they can access the information in it.”
Not that this is something I’m finding myself in favor of at all, but if there’s a red flag that big sitting in plain sight, I’m against it forever and ever.
What do you mean by transactional? The nodes won't be storing any "private details" just the "public wallet addresses".
I got it from the post in the spoiler below. I was posting from my phone and I see it doesn't mention transaction, which I suppose blockchain wouldn't have in plain text anyway. I still really don't see the benefit of doing blockchain for this. Except maybe (and this is me reaching) in that by doing blockchain it's a way to have the decentrilized node setup without their being a ton of data on User Joe Smith payed Y to Jan Jones.
I can't think of an idea that makes my skin crawl more than "it's like paypal but now facebook has your bank information."
like, my entire epidermis jumped two feet to the left after reading about this.
Additional detail of the project is that you can participate and run nodes(subject of approval). If you run nodes, you get access to the information. Companies have already committed to participating. It's a pretty ingenious move to push for acceptance and say your currency is "supported by X,Y,Z".
Is there a source on entities running a node are granted access to transaction data? Or is it the logical conclusion of “the node lives on their infrastructure, of course they can access the information in it.”
Not that this is something I’m finding myself in favor of at all, but if there’s a red flag that big sitting in plain sight, I’m against it forever and ever.
What do you mean by transactional? The nodes won't be storing any "private details" just the "public wallet addresses".
I got it from the post in the spoiler below. I was posting from my phone and I see it doesn't mention transaction, which I suppose blockchain wouldn't have in plain text anyway. I still really don't see the benefit of doing blockchain for this. Except maybe (and this is me reaching) in that by doing blockchain it's a way to have the decentrilized node setup without their being a ton of data on User Joe Smith payed Y to Jan Jones.
I can't think of an idea that makes my skin crawl more than "it's like paypal but now facebook has your bank information."
like, my entire epidermis jumped two feet to the left after reading about this.
Additional detail of the project is that you can participate and run nodes(subject of approval). If you run nodes, you get access to the information. Companies have already committed to participating. It's a pretty ingenious move to push for acceptance and say your currency is "supported by X,Y,Z".
The 'benefit' to 'doing blockchain' here is that Facebook gets to list "blockchain!!" as a bullet point on their 'cryptocurrency' powerpoint.
As far as I can tell this is basically the PSN wallet. There are no pro-customer aspects unless it's possible to spin a pro-shareholder aspect as somehow pro-customer. This is Facebook. They have never given a shit about individual consumers and they sure as fuck aren't starting now.
The best thing that I can get out of this is that it'll be one of the sectors of the company that'll be easiest to cleave off when someone finally has enough guts to regulate them and break them up.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
Facebucks are gonna be wildly popular with people trying to circumvent regulation and taxation, and nobody else. And the whole system is going to be a worse failure than Google+.
The thing that gets me is that, now that more and more politicians/governments are fighting against the spread of big tech (with some advocating for them to be broken up), this is a terrible time for Facebook to get into money.
Wonderful to see that my initial reaction to this news isn't out of the norm.
This just sounds like a bad idea and one that's very probably going to be abused, to the detriment of regular citizens, as soon as it's implemented.
Developing a world-wide accepted currency that can be used across national borders without doing a currency exchange is something that I can see being really useful for globalization of trade and economy. But this doesn't look like it's a good way to accomplish that at all. For the corporate ownership of the currency alone, if nothing else. Currency needs to remain the purview of nations and be regulated by same, in my opinion.
Is there a source on entities running a node are granted access to transaction data? Or is it the logical conclusion of “the node lives on their infrastructure, of course they can access the information in it.”
Not that this is something I’m finding myself in favor of at all, but if there’s a red flag that big sitting in plain sight, I’m against it forever and ever.
What do you mean by transactional? The nodes won't be storing any "private details" just the "public wallet addresses".
I got it from the post in the spoiler below. I was posting from my phone and I see it doesn't mention transaction, which I suppose blockchain wouldn't have in plain text anyway. I still really don't see the benefit of doing blockchain for this. Except maybe (and this is me reaching) in that by doing blockchain it's a way to have the decentrilized node setup without their being a ton of data on User Joe Smith payed Y to Jan Jones.
I can't think of an idea that makes my skin crawl more than "it's like paypal but now facebook has your bank information."
like, my entire epidermis jumped two feet to the left after reading about this.
Additional detail of the project is that you can participate and run nodes(subject of approval). If you run nodes, you get access to the information. Companies have already committed to participating. It's a pretty ingenious move to push for acceptance and say your currency is "supported by X,Y,Z".
The 'benefit' to 'doing blockchain' here is that Facebook gets to list "blockchain!!" as a bullet point on their 'cryptocurrency' powerpoint.
As far as I can tell this is basically the PSN wallet. There are no pro-customer aspects unless it's possible to spin a pro-shareholder aspect as somehow pro-customer. This is Facebook. They have never given a shit about individual consumers and they sure as fuck aren't starting now.
Yeah, That was a benefit for Libra to use it, the buzzword recognition. Glad to see I wasn't missing something that blockchain was doing here that was an actual reason to use it, outside riding the buzzword wave.
I would use Libra for currency exchange if it ended up being cheaper than any of the other available methods which tend to be quite exploitative and feature hig exchange rates and high and exorbitant transfer fees.
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
So it's basically paypal but with fewer places that will accept it as a form of payment.
I'm sure they'll offer a portal to convert to USD at the point of purchase the way Paypal does. Facebook also has the capacity to do this, and Libra won't require intensive mining to process transactions, meaning that there won't be a computational cost to transmit it like there is with BTC.
“Blockchain and cryptocurrencies have a number of unique properties — they are decentralized, globally accessible, low cost, and safe."
Looking forward to this thing getting hacked in record time.
I predict no more likely than Paypal accounts getting hacked. You won't have a wallet file sitting on your desktop, and there won't be a hackable exchange per se - if someone compromises the database, FB can just roll it back to the previous day, which you can't do with BTC.
I also don't see the potential for crime any more than Paypal, since presumably your wallet is going to be tied to your FB account which is nontrivial to fake (new accounts without bank details attached could be more subject to scrutiny, for instance).
I assume that, if you get banned from FB, all your Zuckerbucks are gone.
I see no way that could ever be exploited by someone unscrupulous. And if it somehow could, thank God Zuckerberg has proven himself such a bastion of transparency and high ethical standards.
I assume that, if you get banned from FB, all your Zuckerbucks are gone.
I see no way that could ever be exploited by someone unscrupulous. And if it somehow could, thank God Zuckerberg has proven himself such a bastion of transparency and high ethical standards.
Oh, and when someone is banned, who gets their remaining ZuckerBucks? Could it be...Facebook?
Don't worry, it (probably) says right in the TOS that they're not actually worth anything, so it's not like you're losing anything of value.
If there's ANY aspect of this that you didn't realize would be awful, it's because you didn't think of that aspect yet.
Edit: I'm morbidly interested to see how that lawsuit will go, though, as a taste of just how fucked the future is. On the one hand, Paypal didn't get away with their argument that, "We're not a bank, so we keep your shit when we ban you," and had to pay out settlements. On the other, Microsoft has gotten away with revoking paid-for funbux on banned accounts because they're not dollars, they're a product. Facebook isn't enumerating your dollars like Paypal, but their funbux are exchangeable both ways with legal tender.
Which is weird because company scrip is an old, old concept.
It's also not true, corporate script is all over cyberpunk literature/games.
It is, but not specifically the RPG Cyberpunk 2020. Kind of a weird quirk of that particular setting / system.
He did also say he read 'a lot of Cyberpunk literature'. But I'll admit I had to think a bit to remember a couple of examples with corporate currency. Though I'm fairly sure Snow Crash was one of them and that and Neuromancer are basically the foundational canon of the genre, so...
Oddly the current state of currency in several major nations is a good deal more dystopian than most cyberpunk makes it out to be. Usually that's one of the few things that are apparently not vulnerable to being hacked by every punk with a few zines in their pocket.
PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
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I ZimbraWorst song, played on ugliest guitarRegistered Userregular
Perhaps we could create some kind of decentralized, distributed ledger that would allow everyone to independently track their finan- nevermind, it'll never work.
Sounds intriguing, but I'm a fan of massive financial fraud. What does your system have to offer me?
Which is weird because company scrip is an old, old concept.
It's also not true, corporate script is all over cyberpunk literature/games.
It is, but not specifically the RPG Cyberpunk 2020. Kind of a weird quirk of that particular setting / system.
He did also say he read 'a lot of Cyberpunk literature'. But I'll admit I had to think a bit to remember a couple of examples with corporate currency. Though I'm fairly sure Snow Crash was one of them and that and Neuromancer are basically the foundational canon of the genre, so...
Oddly the current state of currency in several major nations is a good deal more dystopian than most cyberpunk makes it out to be. Usually that's one of the few things that are apparently not vulnerable to being hacked by every punk with a few zines in their pocket.
In Snow Crash people were using massively devalued US currency. Lots of billion and trillion dollar bills.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
I think the reference in question is to the specific Cyberpunk RPG franchise, not the entire genre.
Which is weird because company scrip is an old, old concept.
It's also not true, corporate script is all over cyberpunk literature/games.
It is, but not specifically the RPG Cyberpunk 2020. Kind of a weird quirk of that particular setting / system.
He did also say he read 'a lot of Cyberpunk literature'. But I'll admit I had to think a bit to remember a couple of examples with corporate currency. Though I'm fairly sure Snow Crash was one of them and that and Neuromancer are basically the foundational canon of the genre, so...
Oddly the current state of currency in several major nations is a good deal more dystopian than most cyberpunk makes it out to be. Usually that's one of the few things that are apparently not vulnerable to being hacked by every punk with a few zines in their pocket.
I feel the need to point out that Snowcrash isn't Cyberpunk foundation. It was written as an homage to cyberpunk weeeell after cyberpunk was an established genre. Hell, Shadowrun already existed before Snowcrash was published.
What is this I don't even.
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
Which is weird because company scrip is an old, old concept.
Scrip absolutely exists in Shadowrun (and I'm pretty sure in Gibson, but it's been a while), it just gets a brief mention and then largely ignored because you are playing as criminals who have very little use for company scrip and as a DM you typically don't want to deal with making your characters find a black-market currency exchange.
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TetraNitroCubaneThe DjinneratorAt the bottom of a bottleRegistered Userregular
edited June 2019
[Redacted on further consideration.]
TetraNitroCubane on
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
There are two things:
Cyberpunk 2020 the tabletop RPG,and its assorted media and lore
Cyberpunk the science fiction sub-genre
It's clear that the reference is to the former, not the latter.
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Descendant XSkyrim is my god now.Outpost 31Registered Userregular
In Snow Crash people were using massively devalued US currency. Lots of billion and trillion dollar bills.
Don't forget Kongbucks! It's the best legal tender.
Descendant X on
Garry: I know you gentlemen have been through a lot, but when you find the time I'd rather not spend the rest of the winter TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!
Snow Crash had people joining corporate entities that were also nation's so they could claim asylum and get super dog cyborgs for personal security.
We're not there yet but by the grace of God, Facebook sure wants to sell you a tree that grows steak for when your cyborg dogs need to recharge but stay happy.
Wait... What?
Now let's wait and see how long until Snow Crash styled merch shows up in my Facebook on sale for zuckerbucks because it tracks eeeeeverythiiiiing.
He said without sarcasm.
dispatch.o on
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I ZimbraWorst song, played on ugliest guitarRegistered Userregular
Eh, movie was cool and all, but i think the written story was better.
Cool dolphin though, should watch the movie after reading it just for the dolphin.
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
Watched best with tongue firmly in cheek. And alcoholic drink of choice in hand.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Eh, movie was cool and all, but i think the written story was better.
Cool dolphin though, should watch the movie after reading it just for the dolphin.
Name a Philip K Dick story where this isn't true.
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
edited June 2019
Remember QuadrigaCX, the exchange that had its owner die with all of the assets locked up on his one computer? Remember how we were conjecturing he just ran off with the money?
Well, we were at least half right; he certainly stole the money:
The latest report from Ernst & Young, which is overseeing the bankruptcy process for Quadriga Fintech Solutions Corp., paints a clearer picture of a Vancouver-based firm that lacked financial reporting and operational controls, run primarily by a founder whose actions ultimately led to its collapse, leaving hundreds of customers owed millions in cash and cryptocurrency.
...
“Quadriga’s operating infrastructure appears to have been significantly flawed from a financial reporting and operational control perspective,” the June 19 report said. “Activities were largely directed by a single individual, Mr. Cotten, and as a result typical segregation of duties and basic internal controls did not appear to exist.”
...
Cotten ran Quadriga mostly from his laptop, and his sudden death in December while travelling in India threw the business into disarray. Speculation has swirled around the firm as a series of peculiar details have filtered out, including that digital storage accounts used by Quadriga to hold Bitcoin for clients were empty for months before Cotten’s death.
There were “significant volumes” of cryptocurrency transferred off the Quadriga platform into competitor exchanges and into personal accounts controlled by Cotten, the report said.
“It appears that user cryptocurrency was traded on these exchanges and in some circumstances used as a security for a margin trading account established by Cotten,” according to the report.
It's almost as if financial reporting laws and other controls around banks were put in for a reason!
I feel like we're not at all being imaginative enough with how horrifying Libra really is, just in terms of being a turning point in the relative power of global corporations to national governments. If Facebook starts transferring its wealth into an unregulated, untraceable international currency that it controls itself, that has the backing of a massive user base that they can push it upon, it removes one of the few ways that governments have of regulating and keeping track of their corporate activities. They effectively unmoor themselves from concerns for national law. This currency, then, with serious financial backing, becomes a direct competitor to fiat currencies in an environment where the tech companies in control of it have a vast amount of influence over the day-to-day functioning of the economy. Facebook will be able to muscle its way past any kind of anti-trust legislation as it becomes effectively impossible to place sanctions on. There's an entirely possible (if extreme) timeline where Libra tanks the value of USD and becomes a dominant currency. In this situation, the government which is supposed to derive its just power from the consent of the governed is superseded by a massively powerful corporate profit-seeking entity that gradually takes over control of its economy, to the point where it even has a monopoly on violent military force (what happens when Facebook buys Lockheed Martin and Blackwater?). This all has to be paired with the fact that these tech companies are going to be on the forefront of initiatives like the development of AI and cybersecurity; Facebook will almost certainly be competitive with the US government for the development of military-grade artificial intelligence, and it already has one of the world's largest stores of collected personal data from people across the globe in what amounts to a massive, completely proprietary, global surveillance system.
This is a darkest timeline, for sure, but we are moving inexorably in this direction.
I feel like we're not at all being imaginative enough with how horrifying Libra really is, just in terms of being a turning point in the relative power of global corporations to national governments. If Facebook starts transferring its wealth into an unregulated, untraceable international currency that it controls itself, that has the backing of a massive user base that they can push it upon, it removes one of the few ways that governments have of regulating and keeping track of their corporate activities. They effectively unmoor themselves from concerns for national law. This currency, then, with serious financial backing, becomes a direct competitor to fiat currencies in an environment where the tech companies in control of it have a vast amount of influence over the day-to-day functioning of the economy. Facebook will be able to muscle its way past any kind of anti-trust legislation as it becomes effectively impossible to place sanctions on. There's an entirely possible (if extreme) timeline where Libra tanks the value of USD and becomes a dominant currency. In this situation, the government which is supposed to derive its just power from the consent of the governed is superseded by a massively powerful corporate profit-seeking entity that gradually takes over control of its economy, to the point where it even has a monopoly on violent military force (what happens when Facebook buys Lockheed Martin and Blackwater?). This all has to be paired with the fact that these tech companies are going to be on the forefront of initiatives like the development of AI and cybersecurity; Facebook will almost certainly be competitive with the US government for the development of military-grade artificial intelligence, and it already has one of the world's largest stores of collected personal data from people across the globe in what amounts to a massive, completely proprietary, global surveillance system.
This is a darkest timeline, for sure, but we are moving inexorably in this direction.
Ok, so this is a line of thought that makes Alex Jones seem like a paragon of sanity.
I feel like we're not at all being imaginative enough with how horrifying Libra really is, just in terms of being a turning point in the relative power of global corporations to national governments. If Facebook starts transferring its wealth into an unregulated, untraceable international currency that it controls itself, that has the backing of a massive user base that they can push it upon, it removes one of the few ways that governments have of regulating and keeping track of their corporate activities. They effectively unmoor themselves from concerns for national law. This currency, then, with serious financial backing, becomes a direct competitor to fiat currencies in an environment where the tech companies in control of it have a vast amount of influence over the day-to-day functioning of the economy. Facebook will be able to muscle its way past any kind of anti-trust legislation as it becomes effectively impossible to place sanctions on. There's an entirely possible (if extreme) timeline where Libra tanks the value of USD and becomes a dominant currency. In this situation, the government which is supposed to derive its just power from the consent of the governed is superseded by a massively powerful corporate profit-seeking entity that gradually takes over control of its economy, to the point where it even has a monopoly on violent military force (what happens when Facebook buys Lockheed Martin and Blackwater?). This all has to be paired with the fact that these tech companies are going to be on the forefront of initiatives like the development of AI and cybersecurity; Facebook will almost certainly be competitive with the US government for the development of military-grade artificial intelligence, and it already has one of the world's largest stores of collected personal data from people across the globe in what amounts to a massive, completely proprietary, global surveillance system.
This is a darkest timeline, for sure, but we are moving inexorably in this direction.
Ok, so this is a line of thought that makes Alex Jones seem like a paragon of sanity.
Posts
I got it from the post in the spoiler below. I was posting from my phone and I see it doesn't mention transaction, which I suppose blockchain wouldn't have in plain text anyway. I still really don't see the benefit of doing blockchain for this. Except maybe (and this is me reaching) in that by doing blockchain it's a way to have the decentrilized node setup without their being a ton of data on User Joe Smith payed Y to Jan Jones.
The 'benefit' to 'doing blockchain' here is that Facebook gets to list "blockchain!!" as a bullet point on their 'cryptocurrency' powerpoint.
As far as I can tell this is basically the PSN wallet. There are no pro-customer aspects unless it's possible to spin a pro-shareholder aspect as somehow pro-customer. This is Facebook. They have never given a shit about individual consumers and they sure as fuck aren't starting now.
The best thing that I can get out of this is that it'll be one of the sectors of the company that'll be easiest to cleave off when someone finally has enough guts to regulate them and break them up.
Which is weird because company scrip is an old, old concept.
It illustrates how thoroughly the concept of scrip was discredited.
This just sounds like a bad idea and one that's very probably going to be abused, to the detriment of regular citizens, as soon as it's implemented.
Developing a world-wide accepted currency that can be used across national borders without doing a currency exchange is something that I can see being really useful for globalization of trade and economy. But this doesn't look like it's a good way to accomplish that at all. For the corporate ownership of the currency alone, if nothing else. Currency needs to remain the purview of nations and be regulated by same, in my opinion.
Yeah, That was a benefit for Libra to use it, the buzzword recognition. Glad to see I wasn't missing something that blockchain was doing here that was an actual reason to use it, outside riding the buzzword wave.
Depends on the cyberpunk setting. I know Shadowrun has corporate money.
I'm sure they'll offer a portal to convert to USD at the point of purchase the way Paypal does. Facebook also has the capacity to do this, and Libra won't require intensive mining to process transactions, meaning that there won't be a computational cost to transmit it like there is with BTC.
I predict no more likely than Paypal accounts getting hacked. You won't have a wallet file sitting on your desktop, and there won't be a hackable exchange per se - if someone compromises the database, FB can just roll it back to the previous day, which you can't do with BTC.
I also don't see the potential for crime any more than Paypal, since presumably your wallet is going to be tied to your FB account which is nontrivial to fake (new accounts without bank details attached could be more subject to scrutiny, for instance).
I run adverts on Facebook, and it gives you the ability to target a wide range of things.
Likes
Page views
Physical devices owned.
Information that someone has bought a similar product before is a goldmine for Facebook to sell as targeting data.
I see no way that could ever be exploited by someone unscrupulous. And if it somehow could, thank God Zuckerberg has proven himself such a bastion of transparency and high ethical standards.
Oh, and when someone is banned, who gets their remaining ZuckerBucks? Could it be...Facebook?
If there's ANY aspect of this that you didn't realize would be awful, it's because you didn't think of that aspect yet.
Edit: I'm morbidly interested to see how that lawsuit will go, though, as a taste of just how fucked the future is. On the one hand, Paypal didn't get away with their argument that, "We're not a bank, so we keep your shit when we ban you," and had to pay out settlements. On the other, Microsoft has gotten away with revoking paid-for funbux on banned accounts because they're not dollars, they're a product. Facebook isn't enumerating your dollars like Paypal, but their funbux are exchangeable both ways with legal tender.
It's also not true, corporate script is all over cyberpunk literature/games.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
It is, but not specifically the RPG Cyberpunk 2020. Kind of a weird quirk of that particular setting / system.
This is what it comes down to. There’s a lot of revenue to make/retain by owning payments in your vertical. Then there’s this:
Banks are shitting themselves in fear over over this.
He did also say he read 'a lot of Cyberpunk literature'. But I'll admit I had to think a bit to remember a couple of examples with corporate currency. Though I'm fairly sure Snow Crash was one of them and that and Neuromancer are basically the foundational canon of the genre, so...
Oddly the current state of currency in several major nations is a good deal more dystopian than most cyberpunk makes it out to be. Usually that's one of the few things that are apparently not vulnerable to being hacked by every punk with a few zines in their pocket.
Sounds intriguing, but I'm a fan of massive financial fraud. What does your system have to offer me?
In Snow Crash people were using massively devalued US currency. Lots of billion and trillion dollar bills.
I feel the need to point out that Snowcrash isn't Cyberpunk foundation. It was written as an homage to cyberpunk weeeell after cyberpunk was an established genre. Hell, Shadowrun already existed before Snowcrash was published.
Scrip absolutely exists in Shadowrun (and I'm pretty sure in Gibson, but it's been a while), it just gets a brief mention and then largely ignored because you are playing as criminals who have very little use for company scrip and as a DM you typically don't want to deal with making your characters find a black-market currency exchange.
It's clear that the reference is to the former, not the latter.
Don't forget Kongbucks! It's the best legal tender.
We're not there yet but by the grace of God, Facebook sure wants to sell you a tree that grows steak for when your cyborg dogs need to recharge but stay happy.
Wait... What?
Now let's wait and see how long until Snow Crash styled merch shows up in my Facebook on sale for zuckerbucks because it tracks eeeeeverythiiiiing.
He said without sarcasm.
You're right, I forgot about that.
Looks like it's time to read Snow Crash again.
Speaking of which, I should probably reread Neuromancer this summer, and finally read Johnny Mnemonic.
I'm just trying to figure out the number of family members I'll have talking to me over the Holidays or next year about this.
Could watch it instead XD
Only if your brain has a capacity larger than 320GB, otherwise you'll get data leakage and need to be fixed by a psychic dolphin and Ice-T.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
Cool dolphin though, should watch the movie after reading it just for the dolphin.
Name a Philip K Dick story where this isn't true.
Well, we were at least half right; he certainly stole the money:
https://business.financialpost.com/technology/blockchain/quadriga-founder-transferred-clients-cryptocurrency-to-his-own-personal-accounts-ernst-young-finds
It's almost as if financial reporting laws and other controls around banks were put in for a reason!
This is a darkest timeline, for sure, but we are moving inexorably in this direction.
Ok, so this is a line of thought that makes Alex Jones seem like a paragon of sanity.
Good start for a cyberpunk novel though.