That's misleading. If you factor in mining rewards, Bitcoin has much higher fees per transaction. A total of $18,000,000 more per day spent on validating Bitcoin transactions than what that website claims.
In the case of Bitcoin, mining rewards decline geometrically, at a rate of 50% every 4 years. Mining fees are what any cryptocurrency with an inflation rate that rapidly declines to zero/close-to-zero depends on for security on any appreciable time scale.
That's why I said that Ethereum's long-term security prospects are better. Its mining fees have exceeded Bitcoin's and with the multi-pronged efforts to further scale Ethereum - that are vastly more promising than Bitcoin's - there is a high likelihood of these fees further increasing their gap with Bitcoin's.
From the FAQ, it seems like this is not as invasive as fingerprints:
"We selected palm recognition for a few important reasons. One reason was that palm recognition is considered more private than some biometric alternatives because you can’t determine a person’s identity by looking at an image of their palm."
If that is understood to mean palm prints are less invasive than fingerprints, then it also means palm prints are less good at correctly identifying users.
I read that part of their statement as a comparison of data privacy (not invasiveness) with face recognition. I think the contactless part was about invasiveness.
>If that is understood to mean palm prints are less invasive than fingerprints, then it also means palm prints are less good at correctly identifying users.
Not necessarily. Purely guessing here, but I think it is also partially guided by the idea that you leave your full fingerprints on objects quite often, no matter where you go. Touched something? You got a fingerprint left there.
With palm, how often do you press your full palm flat against something? And when you do it, it also gets rid of the natural curving of the palm that those air sensors detect (I assume). I can only think of door handles, but a lot of people don't use the full hand, and I think even out of those that do, they don't make full contact with the entirety of the door handle surface and their palm.
If that was their guiding idea, then it is possible to be just as good at correctly identifying users, while also being less invasive in terms of privacy. Also, with fingerprints, there are already plenty of databases that have it, like, if you ever applied for TSA Precheck or if you had to get those prints taken for immigration paperwork or for passport or whatever. But there is no giant existing database of your palm 3D scans. And, as opposed to face scan, you cannot be identified by someone just looking at that scan and then encountering you on the street.
Same as face recognition in that regard. It's just that humans are evolved to do wetware-accelerated face recognition very well. And not hand palm recognition. But for computers its all the same
"Aug. 30, 2015 8:54 am ET - The recent market rout caught some star Wall Street traders by surprise. But not a hedge-fund firm affiliated with “The Black Swan” author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which gained more than $1 billion on a strategy that seeks to profit from extreme events in financial markets."
The Universa figure is extremely misleading, and it's either some appalling marketing job or appalling journalism.
Universa is not a traditional fund, it is a so called "premium spend" structure. With a traditional fund, you give them money, and they try to make some profits. At a later time, you can retrieve the profits and original investment.
With Universa, you give them money as you would to an insurer, that is, you cannot back that original investment back, you only get the profits they make on it. It is literally insurance premium.
This is a very important distinction because when returns are traditionally quoted, they are not based on the premium the fund spent buying financial instrument, but the total capital invested. In the case of Universa, their assumption is that you'll spend 3% of your capital with them as insurance premium. It is therefore much more clear to quote the returns based on the capital insured, which results in a much more modest (although still great) 120%
Social class divisions. Vaping is seen as lower class. Coffee has always been a white collar stimulant. Weed is becoming more upscale and thus more accepted. Meth and crack are for poor white and black people. Cocaine is for bankers and trendsetters so it tends to have lighter sentences and lenient enforcement. Alcohol depends on the form it takes, wine vs four loko.
One is unavoidable if you want to fly, the other is security theatre. It's reasonable to complain about policies which are ineffective even if the harm is small relative to other sources of radiation.
It's reasonable to complain about security theatre from the standpoint that it is security theatre. It is not reasonable to complain about a policy for from the standpoint that it causes physical harm if the level of "harm" inflicted is orders of magnitude smaller than other aspects of the same activity.
This is not a what-about-ism, because the very act of flying (which is what border security policies are strictly related to) causes "more harm" in this specific context than the policy itself.
The harm caused by flying itself is also incredibly insignificant, but if someone is going to argue that scanner's radiation is the reason people are getting sick then they must agree that the radiation from the act of flying itself is a much larger issue (and discussing scanner radiation would make no significant difference to whatever harm they think the radiation is doing).
~0.9 μSv concentrated in on the surface of the skin is a much higher cancer risk than that same radiation spread over the body. A traveler that goes through these things 200 times a year for short flights really does have a significant increased risk of cancer. Even if they are slightly under the 250 μSv full body dose limits at 180 μSv due to that concented exposure.
> A traveler that goes through these things 200 times a year for short flights really does have a significant increased risk of cancer.
You are describing someone who travels on a plane four days a week, every week, and never takes vacation days. This person also must be checked using the full-body scanner on every single one of their trips (because the magnetic walk-through arches don't use x-rays and thus doesn't have any radiation to speak of -- they use magnets). I think it is more than fair to say that your example is ludicrously cherry-picked -- even if enough people traveled that often to be important enough to bring up in this discussion (the only example I can think of is airplane staff and crew) they almost certainly would not go through a full-body scanner every time they fly.
There was also a study in 2013[1] (which tested the actual scanners in LAX rather than some mocked up scanners), and it claims that a full-body scan only imparts ~11 nSv -- which is almost two orders of magnitude smaller than your ~0.9 μSv figure. I'm not sure which is correct, but I do have a source for my figure.
> Again though it's not a question of full body does as this is highly concentrated radiation exposure onto high risk tissues.
I think you're missing my point on full-body scanners. As far as I'm aware (at least whenever I've traveled internationally), only a small number of passengers any given day will go through a full-body scanner. Most passengers just go through a regular magnetic scanner which doesn't have any radiation (and for domestic flights in Australia there isn't even the option of a full-body scanner). The point being that even if someone travels four times a week (200 times a year) they still won't go through a full-body scanner (and thus won't be exposed to the radiation from such a scanner) anywhere close to 200 times a year.
This is dependent on airport and timing. As initially developed in the US everyone at some airports where going through those scanners. But, various policies and types of scanners have been developed.
Under the current system few people are going to get cancer. But, in the past people where calling systems that where dangerous safe.
I'm sure people get rejected from precheck. I doubt that people rejected from precheck would take up a job where they have to travel on a plane four times a week on average (or rather, they travel enough that they go through a full-body scanner four times a week).
