Wouldn't the obvious fix be elimination of 1031b exchange, capital gains on all house appreciation, and only allowing 1 active federally backed mortgage at a time (with some consideration for allowing a purchase of a new place & selling the old place).
The land appreciates without development on it. If anything, we want only appreciation from developing. If you don't do something to the property, you shouldn't get a profit from it
I think that’s what they where suggesting, however that’s really expensive and hard to implement. If you simply calculate based on the value of the land then a 200 year old house counts as “new” development etc.
Worse it doesn’t actually help. The incentives are there to develop land it’s only local zoning that prevents it.
Nope. That's called rebroadcast. It's also used to try to "launder" photo manipulations, like compositing. I helped work on some algorithms which could pick up artifacts even after rebroadcast.
I would absolutely not trust pdf not to leak metadata. Although now you risk metadata leak from the printer or scanner, which may or may not affect your threat model.
When a coworker asked me for my recommended method of creating and publicly sharing redacted copies of documents which (in their unredacted forms) contained PII for children, I told them to do this, in no uncertain terms.
> Am I the only one who redacts info, prints it out, then scans it back in?
if you have the source document, redacting from the source (by actually removing and replacing with an appropriate placeholder, not obscuring, the content) and regenerate the static (e.g., PDF) version.
If you are working from print, I think scan and redact by digital replacement (not overlay or otherwise obscure) would be sufficient. Redact->print->scan probably helps somewhat (especially if the scan is low quality) if you are using a bad redaction method to start with, but why do that?
Not if there is a rasterization step in the process. That's essentially what printing and scanning achieves, rasterization, and we can do that without the printer and scanner.
Of course, the artifacts introduced by printing and scanning (especially with contrast turned way up) gives it an air of legitimacy, although these can also be simulated.
If you print to paper and scan you are mostly safe, but if you do a software print to a pdf document you might use a tool that saves the actual content as invisible text or the whole word document as an attachment to the pdf. I would print and scan physically if it was something important. Or just edit the word document to remove the stuff and then print and scan to avoid saving the edit history since I don't know if that will be saved somewhere.
Usually I'm in full control of the software myself so I just output X instead of the secret data.
If the stock market and housing doesn't appreciate then inflation would harm us all. Couldn't the cost of living increase while investment vehicles stay flat caused by rising interest rates.
If he instead started to draw NFTs, and sell it from his KYC account to his dirty wallet, could he still be convicted? What if only one out of every 100 NFTs his dirty wallet purchased was from his KYC account?
Or what if he decided to create his own crypto-currency and it just so happened that his dirty wallet was an early investor of ETH to his fund.
Seems like he could have done more to distance himself.
> Seems like he could have done more to distance himself.
Bitcoin's public ledger makes transactions into prosecution futures.
This is why it's such a poor choice for revolutionaries and funding the marginalized. You leave a permanent indelible public record in posterity that will in the course of time be de-anonymized, automatically, and traced back to you.
Is it illegal to sell your artwork at an auction, and a criminal happens to be the one to buy it? I honestly don't know.
is the onus on an artist or on an "auction house" to vet buyers. If post sale it turns out the money was fraudulent, does the artist need to pay it back?
In crypto terms. You the artist simply put a NFT up for auction at OpenSea. You the scammer happened to purchase the artwork on OpenSea. However KYC is not well enforced, enabling for money laundering between the two wallets.
It's not illegal if it's a coincidence, however, that may reasonably be probable cause for investigation, and if the investigation finds out that it's not that the criminal "just happened" to buy it but that you colluded to do that, that's a felony.
I mean art and other not easily evaluated assets are used for drug trafficking and money laundering.
Auction houses are known to be on the trick -- that is passively mainly/ they don't care and work to "pump" the prices of artwork. But of course law enforcement agencies know about it too.
It shouldn't be illegal: people should be free to buy what they want. But let's not hide behind our noses.
More simply, they might get away with it because, by and large, they're not actually laundering illegal funds, but merely using the exact same tricks to obscure all sorts of socially disreputable but not actually illegal stuff. Of course, there's a real gray area since arguably a lot of disreputable stuff should also be illegal. But by the same token, some people might genuinely want more privacy depending on their circumstances.
> is the onus on an artist or on an "auction house" to vet buyers. If post sale it turns out the money was fraudulent, does the artist need to pay it back?
No. Normally you have to return items that were stolen from someone even if you purchased them without knowing they were stolen. But money is an exception. See:
> If post sale it turns out the money was fraudulent, does the artist need to pay it back?
Maybe? IIRC, if you unknowingly buy stolen property, and they trace it to you, I think you have to surrender it to its rightful owner (without compensation from the police).
I don't think that works with money, though. I can't imagine someone who sold a house to Bernie Madoff would have to give up the proceeds of the sale years later when he is found out to have been running a Ponzi scheme.
In a closely related scenario, if you sell a kilogram of gold to a buyer who pays in counterfeited US currency, then the secret service will seize the $50,000 and you will not be compensated.
Doing business with criminals can bite you, even if you were not participating in a criminal enterprise.
I don’t think thats quite the whole story though. The feds would have no obligation to make you whole but you would almost certainly have a civil cause of action vs the buyer for the full amount, if you could ever collect. So don’t do business with people who can disappear or avoid court judgements.
> Is it illegal to sell your artwork at an auction, and a criminal happens to be the one to buy it? I honestly don't know.
Law on receiving stolen goods is vague, complex, and jurisdiction-dependent. But in some cases, if the money you get paid is "the same" money that was stolen (something that's actually much easier to show with Bitcoin, where every input to every transaction is another transaction's output), and you know about the crime, yes. See People ex Rel. Briggs v. Hanley.
It may depend on the particular country, and jurisdictions on the internet are gray areas... That said, in the US if you are paid with stolen money and then informed of that fact then you are knowingly in possession of stolen money and would have to return it. If you no longer had the money (used it to pay bills, live your life, etc) then it probably gets more complicated.
I get what you're doing here, but that's way too many steps. just because bitcoins ledger is open & transparent doesn't mean there aren't a million other privacy focused coins you could swap into leaving the trail cold.
You can walk in the river instead of trying to cover your tracks.
To be fair there are some cc* that try to address this. Apparently signal was forced to choose the relatively unknown MobileCoin exactly to avoid this problem.
> Seems like he could have done more to distance himself.
On a value system with an inherently public ledger that eventually has to hit a fiat off ramp with KYC/AML requirements? Nah. Everyone has quality opsec until they don't, and the record of your criminal activity is immutable and highly durable.
You can just sell the bitcoin for monero, then sell the monero for btc.
also, as time goes on, the proportion of btc that are "dirty" approaches 1, so these chainalysis strategies become less effective, assuming you aren't stupid enough to do some criminal act then cash out at a kyc exchange the next day from the same wallet
But are there any exchanges that swap btc for monero or eth that don’t have KYC requirements? Seems like it’d need to be off-chain somewhat, unlike uniswap.
Not unless those actors running those non-KYC exchanges are well hidden away from US extradition. Anybody who doesn't have KYC requirements in this space are risking serious prison time. People don't know it yet but the guys running Tether are going to go away for a long time. What they are doing is far worse than Liberty Reserve and Arthur still has 16 year left in his sentencing.
Morgan and Ilya appear to be the original hackers as well so on top of the money laundering sentencing which is around 10~20 years, they now have to deal with the hacking charge which appears to be a separate trial.
Morgan and Ilya aren't the only ones involved and the rest of the guys will eventually appear on DOJ website.
As far as I understand buyer and seller still have exchange information for the transaction to happen. The moment the buyer tries to use the stolen bitcoin he will have the police knocking on his door to find out where he got them from. The seller basically ends up completely at the mercy of the buyers security, with the added bonus that bisq doesn't enforce a completed transaction, so the buyer might just disappear once the goods changed hands without ever paying.
There are plenty that'd swap bitcoin (BTC) for litecoin (LTC) without KYC despite the fact that LTC can now do private transactions via MWEB. As networks integrate private Tx support, breaking the visible chain is going to be getting easier and easier.
"also, as time goes on, the proportion of btc that are "dirty" approaches 1"
I don't follow what you're saying here. Nothing stops something from being dirty multiple times, does it? So nobody might care that it could be traced back to something sketchy 5 years ago, if more immediately it's traced back to last month's crime.
Suppose he deposited it into AlphaBay and then withdrew from AlphaBay, and FBI didn't seize AlphaBay's logs. Where is the criminal immutable durable record now? There is no proof of connection between incoming and outgoing coins. Same principle with mixers.
Zoom charges a $/user/month. Companies pre-covid had video conferencing platforms. Zoom did a lot of shifting of existing spend from business on Webex & Hangouts/Meet to its platform.
Even if Zoom's average usage per paid user goes down post-pandemic, it's revenue will remain constant and could still grow as new employees are hired and new companies switch over.
The strategic threat for Zoom at this point is big players providing a more integrated offering. Microsoft being the best example.
Zoom was easy for corporations to adopt quickly in the pandemic rush, but companies that already had Webex or others didn't switch.
When a player offers cross-sell discounts with other products they offer and as long as the functionality is 80% as good, they will absolutely go with the cheaper vendor.
Zoom needs to diversify to stay competitive five years from now, the Five9 acquisition/merger was Zooms first attempt at trying to figure this out.
Although a better metric might be to look at the thrust to motor power and get an idea of its efficiency relative to traditional rotors. I can put larger blades on the motor and will get more thrust at the same RPM but the motors will have to work harder to push those blades.
Indeed, the screw shape is essentially a large number of rotor blades, welded leading edge to trailing edge. Undoubtedly it produces more thrust for a given RPM, and undoubtedly the efficiency is horrifically bad.
Is the efficiency the number of amps required to gain/maintain a particular rotational speed? So given rotational speed 4k conventional is 50g thrust and DaVinci 75ish g, if conventional costs 10amp then DaVinci would be less efficient if it uses more than 15 amps?
>Is the efficiency the number of amps required to gain/maintain a particular rotational speed?
Thrust, not RPM. Efficiency for any actuator is defined by (work done)/(power in). You could replace the Archimedes screw with a simple axle, and it would be much easier to maintain RPM - however it would move no air no matter how much power you dumped into it, and so would have 0% efficiency.
> So given rotational speed 4k conventional is 50g thrust and DaVinci 75ish g, if conventional costs 10amp then DaVinci would be less efficient if it uses more than 15 amps?
Not quite. Thrust / power for disk-shaped actuators is not a constant ratio, but a curve - an x^(3/2) power law, to be exact. You need exponentially more power to maintain a linear increase in thrust. So while it's correct that thrust/amps[note] describes the efficiency, it's not fair to compare conventional at 50g and DaVinci at 75g.
However I guarantee you if you put the same power into this rotor, you'll get less thrust than if you put it into a regular prop.
[note] Watts, really, but same thing if voltage is held constant
You would likely be interested in pages 5,6 of the paper/proposal. It looks like the "Figure of Merit" (FM) is used to "compare efficiency and performance of aerial screws to conventional rotors." If I read the graphs on page 6 correctly the screw gets in the range of 5-30% of the efficiency of a conventional rotor.
Yep. Traditionally, drones use 2-3 bladed props, each additional prop blade increases thrust per rpm, but increases load by significantly more, hurting actual thrust per watt.
I’d expect a screw to be the degenerate case and probably worse than a conventional many-bladed prop.
In my imagination: Don't rotor blades also profit from air getting "in between" them, so that they have something to push against and thus push upwards? The screw relies on air getting in from the sides, while that air is being pushes outwards by the rotating screw.
The authors did test having a "lip" around the edge of the screw:
It was hypothesized that a down facing lip would prevent air from escaping radially outward from the rotor, but this was proven incorrect. All rotors tested (3,4 and 5 in Figure 2.2) have 1 turn, a pitch of 100 mm (3.94 in), a radius of 76 mm (3 in), and a 1:1 taper ratio.
A downward facing lip showed reduced thrust and an upward facing lip showed negligible impact on thrust in Figure 2.7.
Flow visualization conducted during this trial revealed that air was being ingested radially inward during operation of the no lip and up facing lip aerial screws, and that this flow was disrupted by the down facing lip. These results support the findings of the CFD studies detailed in Chapter 3.
Figure 2.8 indicates that the presence of a lip in either direction increased the power requirement of the rotor. Figure 2.9 shows that the presence of a lip in either direction also reduced the FM of the aerial screw. Therefore, a lip is not a useful design feature at all, and was discarded.
>It would be interesting to understand why load increases more quickly than thrust for increasing blade counts.
The key to this is that, for both ducted fans and props, a larger swept area is more efficient, while # of blades simply changes the torque/rpm ratio with negligible effect on efficiency. Thus, for a given torque, it's always better to drive two longer blades, than 3 shorter ones.
If you enjoy looking at pictures of WW2 fighters, you'll notice that the early planes had 2 bladed props, the midwar ones had 3 bladed props, and right at the end they jump to 4 and 5 blades - the reason being that the better engines got, the more torque they had to dissipate, and you can only make a propeller so big before you hit ground clearance problems. Helicopters, on the other hand, can make their rotors as large as they like - and so they do, and typically only have 2 blades. Only on helicopters like the Chinook, where they made the blades as long as they could feasibly engineer and still had torque to spare, do you see 3.
> Do ducted fans have similar changes in load-to-thrust ratio given an increase in blade count?
Not really. The parameter that describes how many blades are in a ducted fan is known as "solidity", and while it does have minor implications for blade shape the general efficiency is excellent no matter what. It's actually surprisingly insensitive - you can take a ducted fan designed with a 5 bladed rotor and just slap a 7 bladed rotor in there instead, without even redesigning the blades, and provided the power source is equally efficient at a somewhat lower RPM you basically won't be able to measure any difference in performance at all. Ducted fans can turn shaft power into air momentum with about 90% efficiency.
The reason that large swept areas are more efficient than small ones is simple physics and geometry. Energy (the thing you put in) is 1/2 mv^2, while momentum (the thing you get out) is simply mv. So for best efficiency you want to keep v as low as possible. It's better to get your momentum by moving a lot of air slowly, than a little air quickly.
Emerging markets still shown slightly north of 30% YoY ARPU growth. Combine this with a larger user base (7x NA's, 5x EU's) and it remains an important lever, one to potentially outgrow NA's + EU's share of revenue. They in fact, lumped together, earn more than EU, and is not even one doubling of ARPU (proportionally) away of outgrowing NA. If the trends remain in like 5 years AP + RoW will be their core business.
Seems like an imperfect analogy. If you find malware running on your computing systems, it is legal to disable and delete it. But it’s not like the bad guys are physically present within your computer, like in a real life home invasion.
