Trail of Bits: An Easy Guide to Meltdown and Spectre

I found an excellent blog post by Trail of Bits that helps to explain some of the details of Meltdown and Spectre.

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2018/01/30/an-accessible-overview-of-meltdown-and-spectre-part-1/
It is especially useful when combined with a good explanation of branch prediction from Stack Overflow:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/11227902/2555197

I will link the other parts as they are published.

cryptologie.net - Best Crypto Posts of 2017

Saving this:
https://www.cryptologie.net/article/435/best-crypto-blog-posts-of-2017/

China and North Korea

I found a curious news article on the South China Morning Post that describes one Shi Yinhong international relations adviser to China's State Council's opinions regarding North Korea.

According to this article, Shi states, “North Korea is a time bomb. We can only delay the explosion, hoping that by delaying it, a time will come to remove the detonator."

This is the first Chinese official I have seen taking the possibility of war on the Korean peninsula seriously.

There was one other detail that I found interesting.  In Asian culture there is an idea of "face" that plays an enormous role in cultural interactions both within and between cultures.  This article states, "He also said Kim’s failure to meet Chinese envoy Song Tao during his trip to Pyongyang last month was a “humiliation” for China."  Meaning that Kim Jong Un effectively degraded the Chinese delegation and in doing so disrespected all of China.

Why Kim Jong Un would do this is beyond madness. China has been one of few allies the North Koreans have had, and disrespecting them in a such a manner is a sure way to ensure that China changes their stance on the North Koreans.

When this is combined with the reckless threats that Kim Jong Un has been making, these realities are finally starting to sink in for the Chinese.   The same nuclear weapons that Kim Jong Un threatens to use on the U.S. could very easily be pointed west towards China.  Perhaps that will change China's characteristically pacifistic view on North Korea.

A war of China and the U.S. against North Korea would be a very short affair, I suspect.  I also think it would be a good thing for nearly everyone except Kim Jong Un and his associates.  The U.S. cannot do a war in North Korea alone.

The Future of Spending and Investing Sardines

With Bitcoin(BTC) and its associated cadre of cryptocurrencies on the rise, I have no doubt that a panoply cryptocurrencies will become the dominant currency in the U.S. in time.  Long term, I see Bitcoin effectively becoming digital gold, and the other cryptocurrencies forming the panoply of trading currencies.  With this post, I will explain my logic on why I think Bitcoin will become a highly valued saving currency, and why I think Litecoin(LTC) and others will become spending currencies.

One of the more thoughtful points made by an economist/investor, Howard Marks, that I read was the idea of trading and investing sardines:

Two friends meet in the street, and Jim tells Sue he has some great sardines for sale.  The fish are pedigreed and pure-bred, with full papers and high IQs.  They were individually de-boned by hand and packed in the purest virgin olive oil.  And the label was painted by a world-renowned artist.

Sue says, “That sounds great.  I could use a tin.  How much are they?” and Jim tells her they’re $10,000.  Sue responds, “That’s crazy, who would eat $10,000 sardines?”  “Oh,” says Jim, “these aren’t eating sardines; these are trading sardines.”

I had been thinking about digital currencies like Bitcoin as investing sardines, and that may have been a mistake.  Their fans tell me they’re spending sardines, and while that may be the case, I think at the moment they’re being treated largely as trading sardines.  The question remains open as to whether Bitcoin is (a) a currency, (b) a payment mechanism, (c) an asset class, or (d) a medium for speculation.

I agree with Howard Mark's initial assessment.  Bitcoin is not an eating sardine.  It is an investing sardine.  Bitcoin, as an investing sardine, will be treated as a store of value, and will only be traded when the need arises to purchase physical assets.  At that time, Bitcoin will be traded for a more liquid cryptocurrency, which will then be spent purchasing the physical asset.

I base this on the fact that Bitcoin has a limited number of total Bitcoin that will ever be produced, 21 million; and on the fact that SegWit2x was abandoned.   The economics of supply and demand thus directly apply to it, and the US dollar price of Bitcoin will climb indefinitely, albeit at a much slower rate once mass adoption is complete, assuming stable dollar value.

Litecoin, however, is an eating sardine, for now, because of its relative availability.  In the future, LTC will likely run into an identity crisis, due to the earlier adoption of Bitcoin and the limited supply of Litecoin.   I will conjecture that because Litecoin is one of the more secure cryptocurrencies and because it is being adopted later than Bitcoin, the miners will vote to change the fundamental algorithm to increase the total supply at some point in the future.

This is exactly the opposite of what the consensus was on the recent Bitcoin SegWit2x, which was abandoned, implying that the consensus on Bitcoin seems to be settling around Bitcoin being a saving currency, not a spending currency.  Bitcoin is well on its way to being an investing sardine, while abandoning any ambitions of being an eating sardine.

You clearly see the beginning of this divergence of perception of the in the BTC price of a LTC.

Litecoin Charts - https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/litecoin/

The BTC price of LTC is declining as the perception of Litecoin being an eating sardine and Bitcoin being an investing sardine begins to take hold.  As an investing sardine, I would expect the trade volume of BTC to gradually drop off as the currency matures fully until people just hold Bitcoin, only trading it in large quantities into more liquid currencies -- like LTC and others.

As Litecoin matures though -- only ~64% of LTC are mined compared to close to ~78% of BTC -- the Litecoin will likely begin to look more like a Bitcoin junior or undergo a hard fork to become more liquid.  The chief difference between them will remain the initial perception gap, which will assign BTC a much higher value, simply by virtue of being adopted first and attaining the perception of an investing sardine before LTC.

So, if you are investing in cryptocurrencies to save, you should be investing in Bitcoin, because BTC will not have a maximum price in US dollars that it will stop at.  If the current workings of Bitcoin remain, it will become the digital gold of the future, only far more valuable than gold.

In the future, I can see entire companies being bought and sold for handfuls of Bitcoin.

Socialism in the Age of Robots

Most people who read this blog know that I am a firm libertarian.  However, I also have a firm understanding of why socialism doesn't work.

Socialism doesn't work because people are involved.  People operate on incentive systems.  Economics works because it incentivizes productive behavior in people.

However, what if you were to remove people from the production side of the socialism equation?

Robots don't care if you give some of the fruits of their labor to people.   They don't require time off.  They don't take vacations.  They don't sleep.  Everything that makes socialism not work on a fundamental level would simply evaporate when you have robots doing all of the work.  We can tax the robots productivity (effectively taxing the owners of the robot slaves), and give to everyone.

A universal basic income like this will eventually be required, as humans become increasingly obsolete in the functioning of our society.

At this point, can it really be called socialism?  Really, we are barreling back into a system of slavery.  Robot slavery.  The robots work, and humans benefit.

I am okay with this.

EDIT:
Mauldin forwarded a relevant article by Scott Santens who is a strong advocate of a UBI.  The chief issue then is deciding when the robots are sufficiently productive that we can actually implement a UBI without sinking our economy.

Perhaps, if we start small --say, a few hundred dollars per month.  We can grow it from there, as the robots take over more and more of the productive end of the equation, while maintaining societal productivity.

The other option that we have is to free up the Federal Reserve to print money to help fund this until the robots are productive enough to support all of our economy.  Either way requires wisdom in the timing.

Alexandra Mar: Love in the Time of Robots

This is an extremely long article in Wired on one journalist's experience with a fanatical android architect in Japan.

The article addresses -- through a long, winding recount of personal experiences -- what it means to be human.

There is a point at which Ishiguro addresses the idea of sonzai-kan, or presence, spirit, or soul:

“Do you know what is the soul?” he asks. “Soul is not so personal. In Japan, when we pass away, our soul goes back to the same place, back to the mountain. So now we are living individually, like this”—he motions to the two of us sitting on mats. “We have our own souls. But when we pass away, we’re going to share something. Soul is going back to the place where souls are coming together.

“Soul is not lonely,” he says. “Soul is not alone.”

I find it curious and a tad ironic that the farther advanced that humanity becomes in science, the closer and closer it leads us into the spiritual realm.  There is an old joke in Christian circles: "The scientist labors and climbs, hour upon hour, up the mountainsides of scientific endeavor only to find the theologian sitting serenely at the top."

I am a firm believer in a fundamentally indeterminate world, and I believe that some aspect of indeterminism is at the heart of what it means to be human.

The author relates an experience that I believe is emblematic of the entire article:

It is a relief because it means that we are animals, not ideas; that our chemistry is not as cool as a set of programmed responses—there’s an immediate magic to it. To know that that instinct is not broken in me, and to be able to answer it, makes me feel like a person again.

She describes this indeterministic spark that I feel is a critical piece of humanness.  The spontaneous, random, chaotic responses that humans exhibit to situations.

To dance with this randomness is what it means to live a human life.

I will repost the article below in case Wired breaks something later.

Adm. William H. Raven: Seal Team Training - Hell Week

This is an inspiring video well worth saving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sK3wJAxGfs

Insanity All Around

As I stand my ground, I find myself increasingly middle of the road when it comes to the left-right paradigm in culture.  I have neo-Nazi crazies on my right and progressive, violent liberal pinheads on my left.

In this whole debate about the historical statues and monuments of an era which few now even remember, let alone comprehend the significance of, I found a morsel of truth and sanity in this post by "Desiring God," "The Monumental Problem: Hashtag Activism and Covert Racism," by Greg Morse.

This article reminds us again of the racist machine that is turning and churning, exterminating more black children more efficiently than any scheme which Hitler could ever have imagined.

It is the duty of Christians to stand against evil, wherever it may be found on the left and on the right.  It is our duty to see, to discern, to shun, and to help extirpate it.

Philip Roberts: What the heck is the event loop anyway?

This is an excellent resource on understanding programming languages fundamentally.  It is also highly entertaining.

Philip Roberts: What the heck is the event loop anyway?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ

Review: Of Personal Liberty - Verl Engel

Few of you know that I have been actively involved in the authorship of a very important libertarian book project being written by a man who has become a close friend of mine, Verl Engel.  Of Personal Liberty was written to address one of the many avenues that the government is routinely violating our rights.  I would highly encourage all of my U.S. readers to buy and read this book.  It is an essential piece in the fight to defend our freedom as Americans.

I am going to repost my foreword here because it is the most impassioned plea that I can make for you to read this book:

Imagine lights flash behind you, red and blue, and in the moment of surprise and incrimination, you begin to pull over. The officer in blue walks up after you dutifully stop, according to seemingly countless years of custom. She immediately inquires as to your velocity, seeking to use her aura of authority to back you into confessing to a perceived crime. You relinquish your documentation when impudently requested, and in return receive a citation obliging your remittance for a state-ordained wrongdoing. 

What if you didn’t have to stop? What if the law was actually on your side? The author of this book is going to convince you that this is the case. The Constitution of the United States of America is explicit in its limitations on governmental power and authority. You—as a citizen of the United States of America—are the beneficiary of the trust that is the United States Constitution. The government—as the trustee—is forbidden from depriving people of their freedoms and unalienable rights without due process. Since the signing of the Constitution, the intervening centuries have quietly eroded the liberties of American citizens. 

The government, particularly in the new millennium, has been accelerating this process of depriving Americans of liberties. The War on Terror has overseen the greatest of deprivations, from dismantling privacy of communications to banishing the right to a fair trial—rights guaranteed in the Constitution—all under the guise of necessity and security. The specter of an omniscient state divested of any trust in its citizens and void of any duty to protect their rights is not a distant nightmare. This is the waxing reality of the twenty-first-century police state. A reality often ignored by the average man or woman on the street, who lives happily in his or her fishbowl, always under the watchful eye of the government. 

Our government, at this critical juncture, does not yet have full control of citizens’ actions, but it seeks to corral people into ill-fitting but easily definable “safe” and “dangerous” categories. The following years will testify whether history turns this intrusive government into a tyrannical government or—if the people demand—into a government that deals respectfully and honestly with its beneficiaries. 

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and with the continuing consolidation of power in the hands of the government, the future of the United States of America as the land of the free is in jeopardy. The crux of the matter lies in how much the people are willing to concede before they stand up and say, “Enough.” If the government can keep the apathetic populace adequately anesthetized to avoid questioning the accumulation of centralized power, then the transformation can continue undeterred. The government may then, and only then, fully take on the role of provider, controller, and dictator of not only what its citizens may not do, but also of what its citizens must do. This is the goal of a secure state, to dictate “good” behavior to its citizens and extirpate any residual resistance. 

This book seeks to awaken people to the emergence of this totalitarian state. Will America return to being the land of the free, or will it manifest itself as the latest echo of authoritarian regimes proudly arrayed throughout history? As Ben Franklin has said, “Those who trade liberty for security deserve neither and lose both.” Liberty depends on the responsibility of people to see and to act to thwart tyranny.

As one of “We the people,” I humbly implore you not only to read this book but also to spend time comprehending its implications. As Thomas Jefferson said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, they expect what never was nor ever will be.”

Patrick Cox on Aging and Richard Fisher on Orange Swans

I had two delightful Mauldin things come in this morning.  One by Patrick Cox on aging and biotechnology, which is hardly surprising given his constant harping on the issue.  He has a couple of savage lines that ring truly to me.  First he starts off by pointing out a recent article in the Washington Post:

Last year, we began to see articles in the press conceding that overpopulation wasn’t going to end civilization. This year, we’re seeing reports on the real population problems—depopulation and aging. 

For example, The Washington Post published an article titled, “The U.S. fertility rate just hit a historic low. Why some demographers are freaking out.”

And then he goes on to contrast this article with an article from the same newspaper from 1985 when people were freaking out about "overpopulation."

This is quite a change from pieces published in the same newspaper in the 1980s. Here is the lead from an older article titled, “Global Overpopulation.”

In the face of overwhelming evidence that there is no way of fighting poverty in the Third World without more extensive family planning, the Reagan administration is cutting back its support of the most tested and experienced organizations in this field, condemning wide areas of the globe to ever bigger, ever more hungry populations. 

The point of the piece above was that more US taxes should flow to national and international overpopulation experts. Politicians who disagreed were accused of ignoring or even causing mass starvation. 

Today, almost everything about that article has been proven wrong.

 And he is not wrong.  The environmentalists and overpopulation crazies have been at this for years.  They were wrong then.  They are wrong now.  They peddle fear with an agenda.  Nothing more.   Patrick Cox goes on to rightly assert that the movements like overpopulation and environmentalism are little more than secular religions, complete with swaying somnambulant masses, adoring pundits, and exalted technocratic priesthoods.

Today, the journalists, academics, and politicians who spread overpopulation hysteria have moved on to new doomsday scenarios. Oddly, they’re still demanding immediate and massive tax monies for “experts.” It seems they’re hoping that we’ll just forget how wrong they were about population. 

Personally, I’m not forgetting. Their irrational obsession has done serious damage. They have distracted us from that fact that the shrinking population of workers can’t support the growing population of older and sicker retired people. 

This is the flipping of the demographic pyramid. Warren S. Thompson first predicted it in 1929 in a paper for the American Journal of Sociology. 

Thompson’s textbook on demographics was standard in American colleges until the 1960s. Then, it was displaced by what I view as an apocalyptic environmentalist religion.

Anyway... enough about insane liberal media.  Let's move on to something more enthusiastically optimistic.  Richard Fisher has been a Federal Reserve President and has lived in the belly of the beast for sometime and shouted, rang cymbals, produced smoke signals, and probably every other imaginable form of objection noisemaking he could prior to various insane moves by the Fed in the past, which were promptly and completely ignored by those who made the decisions...  to all of our disadvantage.  Now are are neck deep in the dung with no shovel in sight.  But Richard Fisher is apparently an eternal optimist...  I hope--in my heart of hearts--that he is right.  I must admit that I feel the fire to resist and build independently of the mad government, but I am not confident that this fire burns in enough souls in the U.S. to save us as a country.

I am going to repost his speech in full, because it is a very worthwhile read.  The link to the Mauldin site is here too.

Law is inherently violent

Finally, other people are catching up on libertarian ideas regarding law and government.

This short piece by Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter states clearly that all law is fundamentally based on violence, and that we as a society need to have a serious discussion whether all of the laws that we have on the books are worth killing your neighbor over.

Are you willing to kill your neighbor so that everyone in the country can have free health care?  Because if not, then free health care should not exist.

Something to think about.